Friend Of The Blog(tm), Aesop, over at Raconteur Report has a couple posts up that I think are worth going over there and reading. Everyone had their own ideas about what is and is not worth having in terms of medical/firstaid in a crisis (whatever your crisis may look like), but I would give his suggestions and recommendations some weight. He also has a followup post on med texts. Good stuff, kids.
So my doctors appointment was mostly uneventful. They didn’t really tell me anything I couldn’t already guess. (Exercise, lose some poundage, stop eating crap. Real surprise, right? That’ll be $450 please.)
Apparently they are screening for domestic violence or some such. I forgot to mention this gem from the new patient intake process:
Them: “Is there anyone who makes you feel unsafe at home?”
Me: “Well, the last time someone made me feel unsafe in my home, I killed them.”
Them: <pause> “Ok, the doctor will be with you shortly”
I understand that an argument could be made that the doctor needs to look at certain environmental considerations in order to get a full, well-rounded picture of your health. What you do for a living, what your living situation is, etc. You may have a rash on your skin that no one can explain…until the doctor discovers that you work in a plutonium processing plant, at which point the penny drops. So, yes, I can understand some of the questioning. But at the same time, I’m just here for some bloodwork…not to trade life stories with some assistant.
However, some doctor/patient interactions are interesting stories. I had an elderly customer come into the shop once with a beautifully preserved old Smith .32 revolver. I asked the customer, who was a doctor, how he had come into such a lovely and well-preserved pre-war Smith. Turned out his dad was a stereotypical country doctor …taking payment in chickens, that sort of thing…back during the Depression. One day dad and the sheriff had to go quarantine a family. This was back in the day where they would nail a notice of quarantine on the house and everyone would keep away and isolate the residents. So the doctor and the sheriff go up on the porch and start tacking this notice up on the door. A gunshot rings out and the deputy tumbles backwards with a bullet where his beltplate should have been, the bullet coming right through the door the deputy had been tacking the notice onto. The doctor, demonstrating the better part of valor, rockets of the porch and into a ditch by the road. He then runs down the road to a house with a phone and calls the sheriff. Sheriff comes out and they drag the guy out of the house and haul him to jail. As the sheriff is winding things down, he walks up to the doc, tosses him the pistol the bad guy used, and says “Here. Souvenir.” And his dad kept that pistol for the rest of his life and it wound up going to my customer. He had no intention of selling it, but liked telling the story.
I bet that country doctor never asked anyone about their preferred pronouns, what their ‘assigned’ sex at birth was, or if anyone in the house made them feel unsafe. Different, and in some ways better, times.
The year is 7.67% done and so far I have only bought __1__ gun
The folks at NAR, the only people I trust for genuine CAT tourniquets, are having a 30% off sale with code NAR2023. That drops a $31.59 tourniquet down to $22.11. But..theyre more than just TQ’s. Sale ends tomorrow. Go check out the page.
This article was linked to by someone in comments a few posts back. H/T to them for bringing it to my attention. I thought it was worth sharing. Regardless of your stance on this war (or any war), there are objective facts in this story worth noting. Apparently those knockoff tourniquets really do cost lives in the field.
So when I say that it’s worth the extra $ to make sure youre getting the real deal rather than a ‘close enough’ cheaper Chinese copy, it’s not just me.
Read the article, its short and a bit empty but if you Google the gal in the article there’s some interesting stuff about what she’s doing.
In the meantime, the moral of this story is: some stuff is not worth choosing based solely on cost.
I mentioned it a few posts back, but when it comes to tourniquets you wanna make sure youre getting the real deal. So….:
After using the discount code you’re at $22.11 each. Thats good enough for me to order a handful. This is a prime opportunity to make sure youre getting the real deal from the source and getting it at a better price.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but if a price on a CAT-style tourniquet seems too good to be true, it probably is. And, unlike many other counterfeit products, getting caught with one of these and having it fail when you need it is, literally, a matter of life and death.
I got a reminder about this in my email today from NAR. If you think about it, t his thing is simply injection moulded plastic and some nylon webbing. That means the barrier to entry for making a knockoff is pretty darn low. As a result, these things are all over Amazon and eBay. Yes, there are other wendors with nigh-impeccable creds selling the genuine product….but I’m just not willing to take the chance that their purchasing agent made a mistake that month and got some knockoffs from Glorious Peoples Plastic Factory No. 55 in Changzhou.
This is one of the very few products that I will not buy, no matter how discounted, from anywhere except NAR. I will spend an extra ten bucks or so to ensure that I’m getting something that actually does what its supposed to do when its supposed to. There are times to shop around and save money but when it comes to things like scuba gear, defense lawyers, parachutes, heart surgeons, and critical life saving equipment, you’d have to be a fool to make cost the deciding discriminatory criteria.
I’ve a bunch of the CAT tourniquets, and every single one of them came straight from NAR. Sometimes NAR will have a sale and I’ll pick up a couple more as gifts or extras, but I never buy them from anywhere else no matter how discounted they are. I would recommend you do the same.
When it’s 3am and youre laid out in the back of a pickup truck speeding to a hospital with a fountain spurting from your leg,probably the last thing youre going to think before passing out from blood loss as you stare at the broken tourniquet windlass won’t be “wow, I’m sure glad I saved that ten bucks.”
Even without TEOTWAWKI, stuff happens. Get a couple tourniquets, practice with them, carry them, and stay safe(r).
A while back, I had to have a tooth pulled. I hate dental stuff and I hate the weirdness of how the geography of my mouth feels so different to my tongue.Anyway, when it was time to check out I asked what they were going to do for painkillers. I was rather looking forward to fortifying my hoard of oxycodone. Nope..they said to take three Advil (ibuprofen) and two Tylenol (acetaminophen) and it would work just fine.
Look, I’ve taken ibuprofen for pain before and I know it does a decent job, but this is for the pain of having a part of my skeletal structure forcibly removed. Im gonna need something with a little more horsepower than a fistful of OTC stuff.
Turns out I was wrong. I’ve had some serious pain since then from other events and injuries and, to my utter surprise, I’ve discovered that for all of it the 3/2 of Advil/Tylenol stomps that stuff down darn near just as good as the hydro. (Thats 200 mg Advil, 500 mg. Tylenol.)
Obviously a steady diet of ibuprofen is not a good idea for anyone’s liver, but we aren’t talking about a steady diet of it here. We’re talking about a temporary, short-term use because I broke a finger, cracked a rib, got an infected suture, shingles, or whatever else fires up the ol’ nerve clusters.
I now carry, always, in my Bag O’ Tricks a couple ‘pocket size’ tubes of Advil and Tylenol specifically for emergencies where serious pain relief is called for and I’m not near my in-home pharmacy. As it turns out, there seems to be a synergistic effect when combining the two.
The more professionally medically astute of you may have known this all along but, hey, its news to me.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but next time you really wanna smack down some strong pain give it a shot. Anytime you can get high-level pain relief without resorting to the prescription-only stuff…thats a win.
ETA: Apparently the Advil folks are offering a combo pill with acetaminophen and ibuprofen together. Two great tastes that taste great together. Brand name is ‘Advil Dual Action‘ with 125 mg ibuprofen and 250 mg. acetaminophen, which means you need to guzzle about four of these to get the 3/2 effect I mentioned earlier. Guess I’ll hit Walgreens and get some to keep in my Bag O’ Tricks.
Remember when things like drug shortages were things that happened in Third World and Soviet satellite countries?
I’m lucky, I suppose, in that I don’t need any particular medication to keep my quality of life where it is. No insulin, no high blood pressure meds, none of that sort of thing. Sure, there are times I eat ibuprofin like M&M’s, but other than that….
And, fortunately, any meds I do want to keep on hand are all over the counter so I can keep a pretty generous supply around. Sure, maybe they lose a bit of efficacy after a few years but so what? Just up the dosage. I’d rather face a cracked rib with five year old Tylenol and Advil than I would without. Drugs that only deliver 85% of their effectiveness is orders of magnitude better than the 0% afforded by not having drugs at all.
Moral of the story: while you’re stacking up the .223 and 9mm, the freeze drieds and AA batteries, the water filters and toilet paper….stock up on the OTC stuff (and first aid as well) because thanks to Brandon we are, apparently, dipping our toes into the warm water of neo-Soviet supply issues.
Good opportunity to get those tourniquets and related gear.
Link to the sales item page: https://www.narescue.com/law-enforcement-appreciation-day-sale.html
Discount code: THANKSLE
Go tear ’em up, boys.
As I mentioned previously, I ordered up some burn jel. Arrived:
The bottle and dressings will go in the big first aid kit, the smaller single use ‘ketchup packets’ will get distributed across the various small first aid kits.
This stuff is awesome for those (somewhat) minor burns. When you’ve got the kind ofburn that gives you an ache right down to the bone, this stuff really seems to put a damper on it. As I’ve mentioned, I once burned my hand so bad that the only way I could sleep was clutching a cold, wet washcloth or a bag of ice. This stuff, though, took the pain away so I could finally sleep.
Good product and I heartily recommend it. Skip a couple lattes today, spend the money at Amazon, and get some of this stuff. Next time you grab the wrong part of your Dutch oven, try to pick up a hot lawnmower by the exhaust, or parboil yourself by opening the wrong end of the lid on your pressure cooker you will be so glad you have this stuff.