So in this episode I was going to talk about how I had completed the plumbing
and I had fitted one side of the kitchen together but unfortunately on day 2 of
my project this week, it all came to an abrupt halt, as I had a bit of an
incident! I was kneeling down, I had just finished fitting some clips onto a
batten. There was a angle that you would hang a radiator on, now
they're quite sharp, fixed to the wall. I wasn't using any tools, I stood up and
sliced the front of my knee open on one of the angles from the radiator brackets.
So as soon as I realised that the cut was a bit deeper and a bit bigger than
just a scratch and a plaster, and the fact that I knew that I would actually
have to go to hospital. I thought, right, okay I need to dress it because I need
to get in the car and drive myself there and I didn't want blood all over the car.
So I cleansed the wound. I have got a number of saline tubes in
my emergency kit and I cleaned the wound out. I then dried it off, I put a gauze
patch on top of the cut and then I had a roll plaster, wrapped it around the leg
around the back of the knee round, round and round and then I sealed it off with a bit
of sticky plaster, to sort of fix it in place.
I took a number of gauzes that soak up blood with me, just in case
it started leaking in the car. I am off to A&E because I definitely
need stitches. I've patched it up but it's bleeding and you can see right
the way through to this the kneecap, which is lovely! It doesn't really hurt
but it's about a good, one and a half inches to two inch slice, so anyway,
off to QMC. I got into A&E, I signed myself in and a nurse quickly came out
and put a pad on the floor so I could put my foot on it. We laughed and
sort of, because we didn't want to get blood all over the floor and it would
put the other customers off we laughed at. Quite quickly I went in to see a
triage nurse and he indicated that I had patched up quite nicely. I had done
myself a lot of favors by cleaning the wound and patching it up in the way that
I did. He redressed it and verified that yes, I would need stitches, which was done
by different nurse. I went out into the waiting room only a couple of minutes,
this was normally about three or four minutes between each one of these. Now
A&E waiting times can be sort of hours, sometimes like three or four hours
before you get seen but because I think, I think it was because I was leaving
blood everywhere I went, they sort of speeded up the process for me. Now of
course because it is an open wound and because it is a bit gory, I'm going
to give a bit of a warning now. So if you don't like blood, or gore, or needles
going through skin, then look away now and I'll tell you again when it's safe
to look.
So you can look back again now. They re-dressed the wound and they explained
that in about half an hour, an hour the anaesthetic that they had pumped in
around the knee, was going to wear off and the pain would start. So it was
important for me to get some ibuprofen to stop the swelling and some paracetamol
to aid the pain. Well I've got my painkillers and I'm now back to the car
and now I've got to get through this rush hour in Nottingham before it wears
off and I need to get back on my boat. What a day! How to stop doing the plumbing.
I was going really well but still anyway, these things happen but I'm pleased I
had a good first aid kit on board, and I'm pleased I had my car next to the boat.
So I've got to go back in ten days, to a local doctors and to get the
stitches removed and so they can have a look at it, but it'll be fine, it's just a
slice wound, but it's just quite deep and right on the knee, which is a real pain,
but anyway. I also wanted to restock the things that I had used in my first-aid
kit, because you never know when the next incident is going to happen. I'm not
particularly accident-prone, there's some people that go
to A&E or cut themselves every week but, it doesn't happen very often for me. But
when it does happen, it usually does happen on a catastrophic scale, shall
we say but anyway. I got back to the boat as quickly as I could,
I took some paracetamol and I just took it easy and for the last couple of days,
I haven't really done that much. Bending the knee has been a bit difficult
because the skin stretches on the knee but I've let it, I've opened it up, I've
taken the plaster off the top and let it breathe and it's healing quite
nicely. Meanwhile life on the River Soar carried on as normal. When I returned
from the hospital, Molly clearly knew that something had
happened, as she barked at cows on the other side of the water. Now she very
rarely barks, this was unusual for her and showed she knew something wasn't
right. There's probably different levels of first-aid kit that most people have
in their home. There'll be the very, very basic, which will probably be a five-year
out-of-date tube of Savlon, and a box of half used plasters, and that's
probably about it! Then you have like a family kit or a traditional green or red
bag kit, which will have quite a lot of necessities, or like me I have quite an
advanced first aid kit. I always have done, I went around the world backpacking
when I was 20 and I thought it was important because I went on my own, to
have a good first-aid kit. So it stemmed from then. Since then, I have worked for
999, the emergency services, in the British Telecom call centres, so taking
the 999 calls and dealing with those, and then of course whilst working for BBC
News I've been out with many fire engine crews, ambulance crews, police crews and
air ambulance. I was with them for two weeks and I got to see a lot of
different surgical scenarios, where people have impaled
themselves, they've cut themselves and all sorts of different levels. So
I've always kept a good first-aid kit. With my first-aid kit, I have four
main areas. The front pocket has things like scissors, gloves, wipes, antiseptic
wipes, the sorts of things that you would need first of all. The middle larger
pocket, top left has saline solution. They're in tubes, so I can quickly get them
out and flush out either an eye if I've got something in my eye, or flush out a
wound. Clean it, much better to use saline solution than water for example. On the
right hand side of the first-aid kit I have melolin wound dressing, I've got
eye patches. I've got PFA dressings which would go directly on a wound, all
different sizes, from quite small to medium to large. I've also got a an
emergency bandage. At the back of the main section, I have a good first aid
manual. It's from St. Johns Ambulance and it's the tenth edition and it's quite
detailed in all sorts of different areas. In the left pocket I have all of my
sterile bandages and fabric dressing and triangular bandage for arms and that
sort of thing. And then the final pocket is not for me,
final pocket on the right hand side is actually a first aid kit for Molly. You
never know when dogs are going to get injured.
I had a previous Labrador called Sash, and we were just out for a walk and she
obviously trod on some glass or something sharp and she sliced one of
her pads on her foot, clean in half, limping away, when I got her
back to home and I got out my dog first aid kit and we sealed up the
pad, I cleaned it all out and I put a bandage on and it healed up really
nicely. Of course injuries with humans and dogs are
very similar, but the bandages have to be a little bit more robust because dogs
have a habit of wanting to bite them off. So that's in the right hand side. Now, I
also have a small first aid kit for when I go out walking. Really tiny, fits into a
pocket or hangs off a belt. It's got all main essential so, scissors, antiseptic,
melolin dressing, a bandage, a bit of antiseptic cream, some tweezers, plasters,
all sorts of things that you would need if you were out walking across the field
or out in the woods. Nice and simple. If I was out in the middle of nowhere and
this incident occurred, I would have to deal with it myself.
Part of my first-aid kit I do have some sutra stitches, which are basically
very, very sticky, tacky strips. You would, I would wash out the wound, pull
the wound closer together and sutra stitch over the wound and that would
enable me, a bit longer to either move the boat to an area where I could go to
an emergency ward, or to an area where I could get to a road and call a taxi or
get on a bus. It's exactly the same as other stitches but it would just take
longer to heal. All of those sorts of things I do have in my first-aid kit
because you just don't know what's going to happen, with me on my own, I could be
out in the wilderness. I like traveling out & mooring up in rolling countryside,
my mum always takes the mickey out of me, because I say rolling countryside, so
that's for you mum! But I like mooring up in areas where there's no one around,
where there's no vehicles, where it's lovely and quiet.
However those areas, when you have an incident away and you have an emergency,
are a little bit more tricky to deal with. Now, a mobile phone, when you
dial 999, which is the UK emergency number or 112
which is the pan-european emergency number, both of those go
through to the same call centre. I know that because I used to work in that call
centre. Neither has preferential treatment over others, it's a bit of a
myth that if you ring 112, you get through quicker, it doesn't, it goes
through exactly the same. If you looked at your phone and I'm with EE and I
could see there was absolutely no reception, there is a system within the
United Kingdom called 'camped on'. That means whenever you dial 112 or 999, it
will use other services mobile phone reception. So for example, if I had
nothing on EE, I could dial 999 and if there was a neighbouring network
available, for example Vodafone, it would use that service and that's called a
'camped on' service. They can't phone you, you can't phone anyone else but it's
purely there for 112 or 999 emergency calls. Now a couple of years ago, I took
my previous dog Sash for a walk, I was miles and miles and miles away, I like going on
sort of quite rural walks with with the dog.
Sometimes I camp out overnight, get a little Jerry stove and all that sort of
thing. I went for a walk, fell down this bank. It was almost like
sliding down the bank into like a scruff area, where there was some woods
and I thought to myself, as I sat in a bit of a heap at the bottom, I wonder
what would actually happen here if I had broken my leg, or I had broken my femur
or I'd broken my arm, or something quite drastic. I had no mobile phone reception
and it was probably quite likely that there was no other coverage there, so how
on earth would I get out of that scenario? Yes I could drag myself up the
bank but then what do I do? I can't drag myself for miles and miles,
especially if I've got a broken femur or an open wound somewhere and it occurred
to me, what on earth would I do? Exactly the
same scenario if I fell in the engine bay or I fell over something in the boat
or I fell down on the towpath, but miles and miles from anywhere. I have one
final emergency get-out bit of kit, and that is my SPOT.
The device is battery-powered and there are five different buttons on it. You can
enable the GPS tracking and it'll update a Google map of my position at set
intervals. The OK button can be used as a check-in, to say you're about to set off and
here is my map location for example. The custom message button could be for
arrival info. If there was a non life-threatening situation but I needed
help, I can use the help button. I could press this and it could let my contacts
know I needed help and give my exact location via GPS satellite. In the event
of a life-or-death emergency, I can lift the right flap and press the red SOS
button. The GEOS International Emergency Coordination Centre provides my GPS
coordinates and information to local response teams. It's for emergencies only.
But does give me and my family that final peace of mind that I can get help
if nothing else works. I'm not saying you need all or any of the items if you plan
to live afloat. I'm just indicating what I have and why I feel it's important to
be prepared when navigating on my own, in rural locations. All the items I've
discussed are detailed in the description below. So if I have an
accident again, let's hope I don't, but if I do I'm pretty sure I have all my bases
covered. I either have a very good emergency kit, I've got a mobile phone
that can ring or if worst case scenario, I've got my SPOT. So let's hope it
doesn't happen again and let's just crack on with getting the rest of the
episodes out. My knee is fixing up quite nicely, I let it breathe
and it's healing, doesn't really hurt anymore but it has stopped me from
bending over and doing quite as much, but that shouldn't be for too long and
hopefully the next episode will be back to normal.