Originally Posted by littlewaywelt
First aid kit.
I keep 2 rolls of 3inch gauze and 6 4x4 pads and 2 quick clot sponges, in a sandwich size ziplock freezer bag. This material can stop an arterial bleed, and in fact, in their testing they had a 100% save rate on cows with severed femoral arteries.
www.zmedica.com or
www.quikclot.com It now comes in sponges rather than just granual form. If you get a really bad bleed, you just jam a couple of the sponges in the wound. They can literally save a life. They're not cheap (about $40 for a package of 6), but they last for years. You can find them at
www.galls.com
...or, you can save the $40 and carry a few sanitary napkins. That's what they taught us to do in wilderness first aid: carry some 1" bandaids, a few sanitary napkins, a few cravats, some duct tape, a roll of 1" athletic tape, and a couple of gloves. Green soap sponges are nice if you can get 'em, great for scrubbing road rash, and children's liquid benadryl in case anybody gets stung by something that causes a reaction. And vitamin I, of course!
I used to ziploc this stuff, but I'm also a whitewater kayaker, and even inside a drybag, a ziploc won't keep things dry. I got a cheap seal-a-meal unit and seal up my "ouch pouch". It includes a couple of ziplocs, one for medical waste and one to hold the unused stuff until I can get home and repackage the kit.