Alright, now let's talk about capillary in the workplace. What you've got here is a classic
road rash type of wound, or rug burn, or they fall and hit the floor. This happened to be
on a sander, but the injury is exactly the same. It's characteristically going to have
this kind of blood droplet that comes out of the capillaries, and is mixed with a cirrus
fluid. What is that? Cirrus fluid is the same fluid that fills the blister of a burn, or
if, you know, if you've ever gotten a rug - a rug burn, it's the kind that oozes that,
it's not blood, it's more like a yellowish kind of, um, liquid. That's the bodies attempt
to heal the wound, and it mixes now with the capillary and bleeding. And so, uh, you can
have this kind of bleeding issue, but it stopped quite easily. The thing here is that we need
to keep it clean. If they fell on dirty surfaces. We might have sand, dirt, rocks, metal shavings,
wood shavings to clean out. If this is embedded, that's a Med center call. Now they need to
get in there and actually numb it, because it's very painful, it's not deep enough to
actually damage most of the nerve endings and so, road rash actually hurts worse than
most other bleeding types. And it's because it's just a braze through that epidermal layer,
and the nerve endings are raw, and they're just over-stimulated. So, we need to be aware
of that while we're treating, um, that kind of road rash, that kind of capillary wound.
But, the major thing to do is wash it with soap and water. Get most of the debris out.
Now, we're going to cover it with a bandage. Again, direct pressure for a little bit, it's
not going to hurt that bad. Again, it's not actively bleeding. So once we actually dab
it off and control most of the bleeding, we're able to now, use an over-the-counter triple
antibiotic. Apply the triple antibiotic on to the wound after it's clean. This is going
to help us defeat any secondary infection that this part of the raw wound may have been
exposed to. We're then going to get another four-by-four bandage, with some tape. We're
going to cover the wound. Can you hold that for me, sir? And then we're going to take
that some of that medical grade tape, and we're going to run a couple strips over the
bandage to hold it in place. And as this begins to heal, and the bleeding is controlled, give
it maybe day or so. This is going to be probably a large band aid. A large band aid can cover
this and they can return to normal activities. We encourage the patient to look for signs
of infection, oozing, it's hurting, it's turning red around it, and becoming puffy in sort,
and actually maybe draining some puss. That needs to be seen at the Med center or the
ER. We don't want this to get so bad that they develop a serious infection that could
actually get absorbed into the blood, cause a blood stream infection, which we call "Septicemia".
We also don't want to take for granted that it could just be an infection that could've
been prevented because we didn't wash it wall or put a triple antibiotic on it. After we
do this, give it 48 to 72 hours, it will begin to crust over, which is the scabbing, and
that's natural. The person should return normal in a couple of weeks, when the scab falls
off, and now it's back to healing scar tissue. Again, capillary bleeding is not necessarily
a life threatening emergency, but the infections that could follow from not taking car of it
while it's healing, is where we run into trouble.