Remember, generally speaking there are three different types of bleeding. Arterial which
is the worst and the most hard to control. It's under pressure and it gushes. The second
is venous bleeding. It's under negative pressure, it's more like a running or dripping, but
it's usually pretty easy to control as well with direct pressure. And the third type is
capillary. We see these most often in incidences where somebody actually scrapes their arm
which is exactly what happened to this guy. So he was running, he tripped and fell. He
skinned his arm on the pavement trail and now we've got some things to think about.
First things first though, we have to be careful not to get drawn into the immediate visual
of this abrasion. I want to be thinking about other areas of his body first, that might
be actually life-threatening. Like, did he hit his head on the ground, did he hurt his
neck, does he have any fractures. As soon as I've established that he does not feel
or have any pain in areas that could be life threatening, I know this may not be a 911
call, but just how to handle this abrasion. So this is what we're gonna do. The first
thing first is that we're going to actually debride or clean the wound. As you can see,
he's got some dirt in there. He's got a couple rocks. If they're embedded, don't usually
try to pick them out yourself, it's a great amount of discomfort to the victim themselves
and it may be something that the urgent care center or hospital want to do to make sure
they get all of it out. But in this case we're gonna start with running water. Just running
water over the wound, brushing it out a little bit. We got clean gloves on, getting all of
that dirt, cleaning some of the excess blood off. As you can see, there's still a little
bit of dirt in there. We can keep washing it until we feel confident that we've got
it out. You could also use a local drinking fountain if you didn't have bottled water
available. I also thought for this topic, I might touch on practical application as
well as the ideal situation. You're out at the park, you're hanging out, you may have
a couple napkins from the local fast-food restaurant. If that's all you have, you could
use that to dab the wound to stop the immediate bleeding and get it under control. Ideally
though, we have sterile dressings in a first aid kit in the trunk that we can use to kinda
debride the wound and keep the wound clean and dry. Once we believe that that is all
cleaned up and the bleeding's under control, I start thinking about what size bandage I'm
gonna need. If we don't have a bandage, it could probably wait till home. Put on some
triple antibiotic to stop any type of infection from occurring. Leave it open air, have him
be careful with it and you're probably good to go, but let's said we do have Band-Aids
with us. Is it going to be the regular 1 x 3? Not gonna happen, too big of an abrasion
so I took out my 3 x 4 which is a perfect size for this size abrasion. It's a non-adhesive
which means that it was developed so that it didn't stick to the actual tissue itself.
So after I put my triple antibiotic cream, I'm now gonna cover it with my sterile dressing.
To hold that in place, can you hold that for me? I'm gonna rip a couple of pieces of medical
tape. I'm gonna apply one to the top and I'm gonna apply one to the bottom and bingo, we're
all set to get him home and do a little bit better job on the bandaging. Now some couple
points of interest here. You might remember doing like, the peroxide cleanse and things
like that. We're steering away from those as we're finding out that actually peroxide
is a little harsh on tissue. It's better used to take clean water, potable water, clean
out the wound, get it to stop bleeding. Very easy with capillary wounds. Bandage it after
we put triple antibiotic on it and you're ready to get back into action.