Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own

Lucky you: A Monday Medical chat, days early.

Today's subject:

The average time for a minor wound to heal is a week to 10 days. If you're also burdened with poor circulation or other health problems, or it's a more severe wound, your healing time goes up to two to six weeks.

With, at minimum, daily dressing changes.

That means your needs just went to from 10-40+ dressings, per wound.

So for an uncomplicated in-and-out penetrating flesh wound (gunshot, etc.), you're looking at perhaps 80 dressings for those changes until it's healed. Maybe more.

This isn't going to cut it.

Nor will even this.

So if you're any kind of serious about long-term care, for one or more people, you're talking buying case quantities of supplies: Gauze dressings in all sizes, bandage rolls, etc., plus skin cleansers, antiseptics, ointments, and antibiotics, in order to properly treat any and all emergencies that are likely to arise.

That's not an aid kit, nor an aid bag. It's more like a medical aid closet.

Let's be honest: you don't have to do that. Or at least, not that much.

Maybe everything will be fine, the ERs will always be open and empty, civilization will continue unhindered, and you can always get everything you need, in quantity, at affordable prices, forever (or at least until you die).

It's not like a looming global economic crisis, a pandemic, riots in the streets, or hurricanes, tornados, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, etc., are ever going to happen either, right?

And maybe they never will. I mean, just look at how wonderful everything is right now!

Then again, they just might be cause for some concern to some folks.

So along with the hardware, and the canned goods - both #10, plus olive drab - that you've loaded up on, you should probably start adding to your collection of medical items, and start thinking in terms of big 100s/500s bottles of tylenol, etc., and box and case quantities of various important items.

And in quantities sufficient to ensure repeat customers can be handled, for some goodly amount of time, if things get annoyingly but predictably bad.

Stored properly, their lifespan is measured in years to decades.

If you're not willing or able to do that, stock up on how-to manuals for Civil War era medicine and nursing. Oh, and one other thing.

Suture self.

Bonus Pro Tip:

While you're up, you might need to know the best way to do proper wound care and dressing changes.

So you might want to add a recent edition of something like this to your survival bookshelf.

About $40. Buy once, cry once. Or get an older but still recent edition, or a used one, and save a few bucks. But get one.