one more thing: make sure you're carrying a plastic bag and some tape. sucking chest wounds are easy to come by on the trail and life threatening.
one more thing: make sure you're carrying a plastic bag and some tape. sucking chest wounds are easy to come by on the trail and life threatening.
I just stumbled across this thread and have to wonder...where do yall carry all this...y'all must have some giant saddle bags lol.
my gear lives in a pack not much bigger than my hand. It's a waist pack/fanny pack that I tighten up the buckle on so it doesn't flop around. That bag lives in my backpack along with my camelbak, keys, wallet, cell phone, snacks etc etc. The 4 oz it weighs is more than worth it for me.
Hello Everyone. I never thought about carring a first aid kit but I am never very far out in the 'boonies'. however after a recent spill I did notice that it is impossible to find any kind of nonstick dressing (like a 'telfa' pad) bigger then 2x3 in your local CVS, walgreens or rite aid has any one else noticed this?
Bianchis '87 Sport SX, '90 Proto (2), '91 Boarala 'cross, '93 Project 3, '88 Trofeo, '86 Volpe, '89 Axis, '79 Mixte, '99 Mega Pro XL Ti, '97 Ti Megatube, , '90 something Vento 603, 87 Mondiale for sale, '88 Grizzly sold
Others but still loved,; '80 RIGI, '80 Batavus Professional, '87 Cornelo, '86 Bertoni (sold), '09 Motobecane SS, '98 Hetchins M.O., '09 K2 Mainframe, '9? Univega Rover 304 Sold , '89 Trek 2000, '?? Jane Doe (still on the drawing board)
Having been caught on a backcountry camping trip with nothing but polysporin and bandaids, I have vowed to improve my first aid kit next time.
At the least there will be gauze, tape and something to wash out a wound.
Zero gallons to the mile
bianchi: I'm a fan of telfa, but I have access to them (run supply for my volunteer rescue squad). We have a contract with a medical supply company, they're listed in the yellow pages. I don't know if they sell direct, but it's worth a shot. I havn't found an online retailler yet, but I havn't looked terribly hard.
gravity, friction, physical exhaustion: these are the demons you must slay in order to be a cyclist.
I agree with Paco... Nutnfancy has some great stuff! I have a kit I use on longer motorcycle trips (and it has come in handy once).Originally Posted by Paco97
I have been thinking of putting together one for the bike. Blood stoppers are one of your best things. Woman's thin pads are supposed to be good (not that I've tried them yet... thank goodness!).
Remember (as Nutn would say...) the kit may not be used by you!
I've never seen those up here, where do you get yours? During my catastrophic pannier strap tangle problem yesterday, I got grease all over my hands etc no way to clean it off. Very annoying.
+1 on the swiss army knife.
Ah, I had a bungee wrap around my cassette a while back... first, forget Swiss Army, go to a boating place and get a marlin spike. The spike is handy when chains pop off and get stuck. Good ones also have a very sharp blade as well.
I had the greasy hands... I DID have a towel, but would rather not muck it up, so I wiped my hands down on grass. Took a while, but my hands got decently clean and it sure looked like there wasn't much of any damage to the grass.
I ALSO spent a while looking for the exact kind of trunk bag I wanted to carry on my rack... and found it. Fits it perfectly, vectored on, I can easily fit a sweatshirt AND it has a gusset so I could expand it a few inches more. It's Delta, 28 bucks on Amazon. It's proving to be the smartest bike purchase I've made so far (the bike doesn't count, I've had it for 18 years!).
Oh, there's GOTTA be a rib place in VC, they should have those single wet towlette things. Reminds me II should toss a few in my trunk bag.
1991 Trek 750 Multitrack Hybrid
Auto places like Kragen, Auto Zone etc has them. By the way grass as the above poster mentions works ok but not as good as GoJo; what I do (my hands get greasy on the car, not very much on the bike), I wipe my hands first on the grass then finish up with the GoJo toweletts, with the bike I just use the toweletts.
Last edited by froze; 09-26-09 at 06:55 PM.
rib place? I got the pannier prob sorted out, I wasn't using it nearly correctly, which isn't really my fault, I wasn't shown properly when I bought them and their website doesn't give instructions.
I had to wipe my hand on a concrete thing in the underground parking at school the other day, bike grease.I seriously need to find handi wipes or something to clean my hands.
Spare ribs? Baby backs... rib place! There has gotta be some places you can get moist towelettes in single packs... like this:
http://www.officedepot.com/a/product...:referralID=NA
1991 Trek 750 Multitrack Hybrid
Oh, sorry, vegetarian of 20 years here.
I was thinkin' I rode bikes a lot as a kid/teen, crashed a few times. Never gave one though to carry even so much as a bandaid. Why start now?
Might also want to look at rescue-essentials.com May be more comprehensive than most folks need for the daily ride, but if you equip a home first aid kit, a car kit, and a bike kit at the same time...
I also don't carry much of a first aid kit, basically just a couple of bandaids, antiseptic wipes and ointment in those flat little foil pouches like my GoJo towelettes come in. I have the same thoughts you have...been riding since I was a 7 years old and crashed and got hurt and never even worried about a little blood so why start now? Besides anything really serious you can't carry enough stuff to help yourself that's IF you can even help yourself!!
Not a vegan, though tried it for 9 months when I was 35 and could not sustain my energy levels for serious cycling and felt tired most of the time; I (and my wife) even had a friend/professional nutritionist/vegan/fitness/health nut guiding us to make sure we did it correctly. Odd thing was it didn't seem to bother her or my wife. By the way she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 54, another friend followed her advice and she too is now dead of cancer that started as a tumor in her neck, my wife continued most of the stuff she preached (vitamins etc, though won't excercise) except for the no meat thing and she got breast cancer at age 45...so much for living a "healthy" life style. Heck I don't even take vitamins anymore and haven't had a cold in 3 years or the flu in over 6 years and have never had a flu shot in my entire life-I'm 56.
You're still a kid!
I'm sure you can find a source without venturing into a rib place!
I think a kit is partially a "peace of mind" kind of thing. And something that should have a connection to where one lives and rides. Where I ride, there ARE tons of people, so really all I carry is towels, useful for any serious bleeding. Bungees can be repurposed as well. But I'm really never terribly far from ambulance/hospitals. If I rode a lot out in the boonies, I certainly carry more first aid stuff.
1991 Trek 750 Multitrack Hybrid
Dude, sorry about your wife and her friend.
As for myself, I'm comfortable with my place on the food chain.
Back to First Aid basics, it wouldn't hurt anyone to find a Boy Scout manual or the basic Army field manual to have on hand at home and skim occasionally. I'm not one of those guys who think you have to leave the door prepared to treat a GSW every day but there is advice on robust first aid kits to be found at places like edc.com and zombiesquad.com. Just focus on the into from guys who sound like they do this for a living -.e.g., EMS, military and the utah mountain biking referenced above. Stuff like a small, re-rolled bit of duct tape comes in extraordinarily handy (I use the thinner Gorilla tape) as does a smattering of cotton balls, Q tips, superglue and a pair of tweezers pointed enough to remove a tick or splinter.
I didn't become a vegetarian for health reasons, I may end up with kidney disease at some point, and my lack of children means I'm at a higher risk for various female cancers. Not to mention the skin cancer risk, heh.
Sorry about your wife and your friend, froze.
Some kind of sterile eye wash comes in handy. I always carry a small bottle of 'artificial tears' that I've used several times when crud get kicked up by a passing car (or my front tire) and gets past my glasses.
Proper tick removal pliers and a magnifying glass. Something to clean off poison ivy/urushiol.
I acquired a few years ago a Swedish Military first aid kit, a HUGE thing the size of a suitcase. I put a subset in the plastic GI box and case, this thing fits an amazing amount of field dressings, and the triangular wraps, and such. Not that I am concerned with weight but its another item to carry, and I am mostly concerned with Stroke, for which there is no first aid short of a Hospital (I have a colorful medical history, stroke x 4, diastolic insufficiency, and etc.). Maybe I need to begin to worry about Heart attacks too, and buy the mask, but I haven't yet. (An inconvenience, you don't find them in every drug store.)
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room!
This information is YEARS out of date. Tourniquets are the first-line for severe bleeding in the military. The statement of "sacrificing a limb" is nothing but a myth. I'll say it again. Tourniquets are a safe method of hemorrhage control.
How do you think docs perform surgeries on limbs? Oh yeah, with a tourniquet. You can go search and find extensive data (peer-reviewed) articles that show minimal risk of limb loss / function even after 8 hours of tourniquet time.
The sad fact is that the RedCross specifically and most civilian fire/ambulance agencies are hopelessly behind the curve when it comes to addressing issues like this. The military is (literally and figuratively) on the front lines of determining what really works.
Every soldier carries a tourniquet in their kit. They are expected to be able to self-apply in the event of injury. In current operations (OIF / OEF) there have been literally hundreds of tourniquet application. I am not aware of one amputation that has been attributed to the application of a tourniquet.
-Z
Bug repellant? Not exactly first aid, but could be nice to have on hand if you need to stop to fix a flat in a buggy area. I also carry a small tube of sunscreen, for days when I forget to apply it before leaving, and I keep some waterproof matches in my mountain bike kit.
because the life you save will likely not be your own. You're lucky if you've never come across a car accident, a bike crash or someone suffering a heart attack in the park. I keep first aid kits everywhere, because I'm a poop magnet. Even without that attribute, I couldn't live with myself if I came across someone who was hurt and I couldn't do SOMETHING to make it better. In my world, an ambulance is never more than about 15 minutes away, but a lot can go bad in the time, and if I were the one on the ground bleeding, I would want someone to be able to help me. Why bother? Because I care about the people in the world around me enough to keep them alive until an ambulance can come help. I also care enough about crying kids to bandaid their boo-boos and let them keep going and have fun.
gravity, friction, physical exhaustion: these are the demons you must slay in order to be a cyclist.
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