First of, I’d like to talk a little about wound care in general. I think maybe it will help people understand the basics of Kelly’s fuckups a bit more.
The following is just basic wound care 101 adjusted for the non-medical people… The medicals will hopefully protest a little that I oversimplify, but I’m trying to make it easy.
To help a wound heal, you need to stay with just a few basic principles. If you can’t handle the wound and keep it manageable, you need a surgeon or doctor for it. I’m not a doctor. I’m just the grunt of a nurse.
Wounds like to be moist. Not wet, moist. I think this was proven all the way back in 1964, so it always baffles me that you have to keep repeating it. Wounds should not be wet and they should not get to dry out. If you think of a wound as just the body inside out, you should get the idea.
To heal a wound, you need to remove stuff from it. Think of all the nasty yellow and discolored stuff as a splinter or a foreign object in the body. It needs to go.
I have a simple approach for this, that I like to teach: You only need two objects for wound care, if you need more, you need someone who does wounds professionally. The two objects are fibrin dissolvent (Comes in gel or liquid spray form) and a plastic tweezer. Not metal!
Your plastic tweezer is your best friend, because it limits how much force you can apply to the wound. This is important, because with the metal tweezers you can easily damage the wound or the healthy tissue surrounding it. Plastic tweezers will give if you try to pull or pinch too hard, so you can easily see how much force you can apply. If you can pull something out of the wound with your plastic tweezers, it was because it needed to go. If you can’t, you need someone who does it for a living.
I’m firmly against using scissors or scalpels on a wound, if you are not someone who specialize in it. Can you tell?
Your other best friend is fibrin dissolvent gel or spray. Fibrin is a sticky protein film that glues wounds together. By dissolving the fibrin, you can remove the wound cover easily. It needs about ten minutes to work. After this, you should be able to pinch off or pull off the nasty in the wound with your plastic tweezers.
After having cleaned the wound up, you should cover it again to keep dirt from getting into it, and to keep yourself from being bothered by it. How much cover it needs and how it should be done, is according to what is comfortable for you. Other than liking to be moist, wounds are not really that picky. There are so many different wound care materials, but things like carbon, honey and silver is usually more for the patient than the wound itself.
How absorbent the bandage needs to be, depends on the wound. Other than things like post-surgical wounds (Again, you need someone who does this for a living, not the grunt) you should not need to change it more than once a day. Change the bandage if it threatens to bleed or seep through, other than that leave it alone. The body knows what it is doing and you only need to support it by removing the parts it can’t do itself.
One final point is the difference between sterile and clean. I feel like this is misunderstood a lot. Basically, as a rule of thumb, if something needs to be sterile, you need a professional. “Clean” more or less just means to keep the unwanted bacteria out of it. Wounds don’t need to be sterile past surgery. In fact, the skin is heavily dependent on the right bacteria living on it to function. So for most wounds you actually want bacteria on it, as long as it’s the right ones. The good bacteria on your skin outcompetes the bad bacteria, so if you go crazy with disinfectant, you are removing both and giving the bad ones the chance to colonize first. There is a fancy term for those bacteria that are good one place, but can cause problems if they colonize a place they weren’t supposed to go, but I can’t think of it in English. Sorry.
Edit: Pathobiont bacteria. Thank you @
rutinacea max
This is exactly why we have seen Kelly go nuts with disinfectant sometimes. Bitch knows what she is doing. Unfortunately.
Well, that was my attempt to make wound care practical and easy to understand. Anyways…
