Everyday Carry First Aid Kit - 3 Years Later

I made up a few of these basic, low-profile First Aid kits back in 2010. One went into my EDC bag, and has since been restocked and repacked several times. The other went into my wife's purse, where it has remained and been plundered as needed since. It was slightly different than the kit I built for myself and the contents list linked above, but fairly similar - minus some of the larger bandages, super glue, allergy meds, etc.

The kit became part of her daily carry since then, getting moved to different bags and used on a fairly regular basis when out and about. Motivated by finally running out of bandaids, she recently reminded me that it needed to be restocked. Probably a bit of an understatement.

Having spent 3 years in several purses and diaper bags, I thought it was interesting to see what had fared well under the wear-and-tear, what had been used up and what hadn't been needed in 3 years of daily use.

Prepping on $40 a week: Budget IFAK

Contents of an IFAK - clockwise from the top: NPA, TK4 tourniquet in the middle, combat gauze, gloves, H&H gauze
and an Isreali bandage.

Tactical Combat Casualty Care has been pivotal in reducing preventable deaths in combat. A central part of TCCC is the individual first aid kit (IFAK). An IFAK is not a boo boo kit full of bandaids and cough drops. Instead, it contains critical equipment for addressing preventable death from wounds sustained in combat.

For a survivor, having these same supplies and the knowledge on how to use 'em can be a life saver.

You can buy very nice and capable IFAKs, premade and ready to go. But, they will run you around a hundred bucks, outside our budget. Never fear, you can put together a similar kit for within our $40 budget--yep, really.

How? We'll walk you through it - click below!

Tactical Combat Casualty Care Resources

Came across this wealth of training information for the military's Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC program) and had to share. This looks like the complete curriculum used in TCCC training, but I may be wrong. A ton of information here for handling battlefield injuries, including training info for tourniquets, wound packing, sucking chest wounds and other battlefield injuries.

Great resource worth exploring. The documents contain gory battlefield injury photographs, so not for the squeamish!

Check it out right here >

Review: The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook

Based off our recent open thread about skills development, many you are focusing on increasing your medical skills. If that's you, then this book is right up your alley. Blog friends Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy of DoomandBloom.Net recently came out with what is the most comprehensive guide to post-collapse medical concerns that I've ever seen, The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook.

The Handbook is the best effort that I've seen on the subject, covering a huge breadth of issues including stocking medical supplies (including antibiotics and natural remedies), hygiene issues, infections, treating a variety of injuries (includes a primer on suturing, treating fractures), coping with chronic medical conditions, and a variety of other topics like child birth, treating hypo or hyperthermia and more.

I would not go into this book expecting to become a true expert on any one topic--that will take additional study, training and practice. But, with the knowledge contained in this book and some supplies, you will have an excellent foundation for responding to a wide variety of potential post-collapse medical problems.

What's more is that the Doom and Bloom handbook is written by actual medical professionals! Dr. Bones is an actual M.D. with 25 years experience and Nurse Amy is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner. They're avid preppers and exceptionally friendly, outgoing and eager to help the survival/preparedness community.

The handbook is a little bit pricey--$34.99 for a paperback book--but it is also in limited production, probably actually print-on-demand. Costs are a lot higher on this level of production versus say a big 100,000 book print run. It's a hefty 440 pages of info and well worth the asking price, in my opinion. A welcome addition to your survival bookshelf! 

Get The Doom and Bloom Survival Medical Handbook >

Update: Dr. Bones sent over a discount code, just for you guys! It's good for $5 off the cover price. The info:

Purchasers can go to www.createspace.com/3697264 and plug in the code:  XNEN7538
to get the book at the discount price.  This code will be good
until April 6th, and is nowhere else at present.

TEOTWAWKI Antibiotics

The information contained in this post is for educational purposes only. This is not medical advice and should not be taken as such. All medications should be taken under supervision of a doctor. If you are sick, seek professional advice.

Antibiotics are an amazing piece of modern medicine. I would personally be dead without antibiotics, and I'm sure many of you would be too. They've saved the lives of millions - probably billions. And, after TEOTWAWKI, they'll become amongst the most valued remnants of the old world.

Think of it. You get an infected cut or come down with strep throat. You will die without antibiotics and you're probably well aware of it. What would you give for a bottle of the little magical pills? Probably anything.

Unfortunately, you can't just stroll on down to the local big box store and buy a TEOTWAWKI supply of antibiotics. You need a prescription, and doctors usually don't just hand those out to anyone who wants a few bottles of amoxicillin "just in case." So, what to do? Click below to find out!

EDC First Aid Kit

I'll have to admit, I've been a first aid kit slacker for many years. I'm a pretty safe, risk-averse kind of guy--never had any major injuries, broken limbs or even stitches. I play it pretty safe, and as such, don't really find myself in need of first aid supplies fairly often. For a long time, my first aid supplies in my EDC bag were limited to basically a pair of tweezers, a few bandaids, a bottle of hand sanitizer and a mini-bottle of ibuprofen. This simple kit took care of most of what I needed, but I knew it was a "weak" area of my bag

Back in late July, I came across a YouTube video on a small, EDC-type first aid kit by a guy named USNERDOC. This video got me jump-started; a well thought out kit, with contents-list and everything ready to go--pretty easy to dive in and get-r-done.

With some scavenging through our medical supplies, I came up with about 1/3 of the kits contents, plus a few items that I decided to add for me--some Claritin allergy meds and some antacids. I picked up another 1/3 after a few trips to various stores. My recommendation on first aid shopping: hit Wal-Mart first. They have a decent selection--better than the drug stores I went to--and good prices. I ordered an aLokSak to throw it all in, and had my FAK 2/3s done. Took it on a week-long trip and hey, it came in pretty handy.

Some of the other items were a bit harder to find and needed to be ordered online. I priced them out from several online dealers and finally went with Rescue Essentials. Their prices and shipping were the best that I could find, plus they throw in some free stuff. Stuff came promptly, no complaints.

Here's the almost completed kit; contents are pretty similar to the original USNERDOC. I still need to get a hemostatic and maybe a few other small things - razor blade, maybe.

Content List

• 6x9 aLoksak
• Tweezers
• Gorilla tape
• 1" adhesive tape
• 10mL syringe
• Ibuprofen - 20 pills
• Super glue - single use tube
• Claritin - 6 pills
• Pepcid - 6 pills
• Peptop Chewable - 6 pills
• Various sizes of bandaids
• Butterfly closures - 6
• Moleskin - 2" x 3"
• Safety pins - 4
• Alcohol pads -10
• Triple Antibiotic ointment - 3
• Hydrocortisone cream -3
• Providone-Iodine ointment - 3
• Gauze pad 3x3 - 2
• Gauze pad 4x4 - 2
• Trauma pad 5x9 - 1
• H and H Compressed gauze

The kit has proved useful several times already, treating everyday stuff and a sliced open finger. The weight is minimal, and it fits perfectly into an out-of-the-way pocket inside my EDC pack. I used leftover supplies to put a similar kit together for my wife, which rides around in her purse.

If you're rolling light on first aid supplies, I highly recommend putting together a decent kit. The supplies--for the most part--are fairly inexpensive. And if you ever need them, you'll be glad to have them around.

May 2012 UPDATE:  I'm moving to two different kits - a "snivel/boo-boo" kit for the minor every day stuff, and a more dedicated blow-out kit. There's a lot of wisdom to keeping this kits separate, and I'm in the process of switching over.

Attack of the Misc!

• Organize your First Aid supplies!: I sliced my finger open pretty badly working on putting a keychain-sized Leatherman back together. The new ones have little Torx screws, but that certainly does not mean they are easy to pull apart and reassemble! About an inch long, pretty deep, bled all over the place (not as bad as Dave Canterbury's cut). Ran to our medicine/first aid closet and found it in total disarray; blood gushing finger + applying pressure with the other hand = not the time you want to search through piles of cold medicine for some gauze. Gave up and ran to my EDC bag, grabbed that first aid kit and patched myself up (yay EDC bag!). In between cleaning up the blood I'd spilled all over the place, I organized the medical supplies and put the first aid stuff into a clearly marked, dedicated bin. If you haven't done this, DO IT. Next time I gash myself open at home, I shouldn't need to plunder my EDC kit for FAK stuff!

• Thoughts on the Colony: I've pretty much given up on this show, but still watch via TiVo and judicious fast forwarding. The producers set the colonists up in situations they can't really win while the colonists obviously don't take security seriously, despite failing miserably every week. All that they've done was put a chain on one of the gates to their area and make a sword/machete. There's no one standing guard, there's no real concern when something bad happens (oh, the model just got kidnapped...that's too bad). These people would be dead and done a dozen times over if the scenario were real. The windmill and biodiesel were pretty cool and inventive, but it's clear that the post-apocalypse tech is what the colonists care about, not their safety and wellbeing. 

 Misc of Interest:

• Essential Gear: Read this a while ago and came across it again, good read: Mercop's 10 Essential Pieces of Gear. "Preparedness is about having in arms reach what you need or the resourcefulness to get it or improvise it with what you have." 
•  Murph passed along this blog about turning your backyard pool into a self-sufficient aquaponics garden, GardenPool.org. Pretty inventive!
• Global Guerrillas: "You can't outlast D2[2nd Depression] by stockpiling canned goods/bottled water, buying gold, or arming yourself to the teeth." More >

Working on First Aid Kits

Have been working on putting together a few level one first aid kits, ala the video I posted a few days ago from USNERDOC. These are smallish kits meant to be put into an EDC bag and cover the routine bumps, scrapes, headaches and so on of real life, with a bit of depth for dealing with more serious injuries. I've been pretty much just EDCing some ibuprofen, tums and a couple of bandaids for as long as I can remember, so this will be a good addition to my kit. I've put together a fairly similar kit for my wife and have enough supplies left over to make a few additional kits to stash in the vehicles.

About half of the supplies I dug up around the house. I went to several stores and found Wal-Mart to have the best selection and price, when compared to the local pharmacies (Walgreen's, CVS, etc.). However, there are quite a few items that are hard to track down, so I still need to order some of the specialty items online and will most likely go through Chinook Medical Gear. I've heard good things about them and they look to have the best prices on most things. I'll post up pics when the kits are complete-ish.

So far, the kit is compact and lightweight. There are a few admin-style pockets where it fits in my CamelBak Urban Assault. As I will be traveling with this kit, I'm making mine airline-friendly, so I'm buying compact size brand name meds (Advil, Tylenol, etc.) and keeping them in their packaging to avoid any potential confusion from the geniuses that work @ TSA.

Have to say, this has been one of the more satisfying and cost-effective prep projects that I've undertaken in a while. Not breaking the bank while increasing my prep'dness at the same time. Nice.