I have the supplies…but not an official kit. I suppose I could put it all in a bag/box and call it a kit.
I don’t have a store bought kit because
I have gauze, paper tape, and prescription antibiotics. I even take my own supplies to the dermatologist, just to make it easy.
-D/a
We have various first aid supplies but no specific kit. Our supplies are probably missing several typical “kit” items and we probably have several extra things that most kits wouldn’t have, because my husband is a podiatric surgery resident. Nothing in the car. Back when I had my conversion van I used to keep emergency water in it, and it had a small first aid kit built into a special cabinet, but I sold that years ago.
I have one good one I keep in the truck except when it’s really cold and then it goes in the house. I have a smaller one that I take in my kayak.
I have one that lives in the van pretty much just like this one, and various other bits that live in the house. I’m also part of our local CERT team and the best disaster preparedness sites ever. The First Aid Kit I listed above is for people with some medical training, but it’s good to have the equipment available in case anyone who happens upon you (late night car accident perhaps?) has more training than you.
I have one at home. I also keep a small kit in the baseball bag during QKid’s baseball season and I put a few basics in a ziploc when we go on bicycle rides. The latter was inspired not by an injury, but the time I got an eyeful of bird crap and had nothing to clean up with.
I live about half a mile from the hospital’s emergency entrance so I never bothered. I have hydrogen peroxide, some bandaids, super glue, a tube of Neosporin, and cornstarch, for knife cuts or burns while cooking. It’s a blasé approach, I know, but if those things can’t handle it the ER’s like 2 minutes away.
Each of our vehicles have FA kits, and at home, we’ve got the mini-ER, which I put together after realizing how far our Ren Faire location was from anything.
So far, we’ve not needed anything worse than burn gel, eye wash, abdominal trauma pads, epinephrine, a scalpel and about a billion bandaids. Mercifully, the CPR masks and sutures have gone unused. :eek:
You don’t think you’ll ever need it, but when you need it, you NEED it.
I don’t have one in the car anymore, but I have various stuff around the house, and I assembled a horse first aid kit which lives at the barn and is probably the most extensive; horse-sized bandages could be used to decently stabilize a human limb (would need a couple pieces of wood to stabilize a horse lower leg, since they’re bigger and the horse will probably try to put weight on it) until reaching an ER with actual braces and traction splints.
Most of my bandage material is veterinary grade. I hate the cute little individually wrapped single gauze squares you get at CVS, which are a waste of material and a pain if you need to actually put pressure on a wound. If I needed to actually put pressure on a wound to stop copious bleeding, I’d rather have a big stack of 4x4 gauze, which would take 5 minutes just to unwrap with the weeny CVS stuff. I use Vetrap (stretchy self-sticking stuff) and Elastikon (thick latex-based rolls with super adhesive which I’m actually not allergic to) for when I actually need to support something like a sprained ankle - unlike with an Ace bandage, I can make an ankle wrap that allows very little movement. I am allergic to the adhesive on Band-Aids and most medical tape (glad to see I’m not alone!), so superficial wounds go uncovered and more serious wounds get some sort of circumferential wrap that does not involve adhesive.
Here’s what is in the barn first aid kit, which has pretty much everything except human oral drugs:
I also have 2 carefully hoarded Vicodin from my ankle surgery in case I do something really mind-numbingly stupid.
Gotpasswords: Oh, nothing worse than abdominal trauma pads, epinephrine, and a scalpel, eh? It sounds like you’ve got stories.
BTW, the latest in CPR guidelines for lay people is that doing chest compressions only is more effective than interrupting chest compressions to give rescue breaths. If you have a second person, great, but in cardiac arrest the most important thing is to keep blood circulating to the brain and heart. There is still oxygen in the lungs for some time, and properly done chest compressions will cause some air exchange from moving the chest up and down. If you have a second person, switch every couple minutes, since your compressions will become less effective as you get tired.
Mine are still shrink wrapped and will hopefully stay that way forever. Similarly the fire extinguishers have never been used and hopefully never will be.
I think they are the only things I own that I hope I will never use.
Don’t have a drivers’ license. But I do keep a kit in the kitchen cupboard.
I’m not a fire fighter, nor do I play with matches, but so far, I’ve had to put out three fires that I can remember, and have gone running with extinguishers several other times and not needed them.
Just your garden-variety boo-boos like bee stings, falling off ladders onto piles of naily scrap wood, walking into a running Coleman lantern (that poor fellow wound up with 3rd degree burns to his leg) and perhaps the strangest was someone making soup had something fall off the shelf over the stove and got splashed in the face with hot soup. Bad enough on its own, but flushing the pepper out of his eyes was challenging - after I chased him down, I sat on him and did what I could to wash out his eyes.
No. Now that I think about it, I’m woefully undersupplied. I have a bottle of Bactine spray and a lot of paper towels. And a lot of ibuprofen. That’s it.
The car has blankets, rope, a shovel, and a bag of rock salt. There might be an emergency kit back there. I’m not sure. I would probably be relying on AAA and my cell phone.
We have a kit in the car. We don’t have a first aid kit in the house in the sense of having everything in one bag or box, but we have basic supplies in the medicine cabinet in the master bedroom.
I used to work at a preschool which had carry-along first aid kits for walks and outings. When we had our first aid training, the teacher looked through the kits and made some recommendations. The one that sticks with me is “Get better scissors. The scissors that are packaged with first aid kits always suck!”
No, but I have the majority of the components of one in the bottom drawer of my bathroom cabinet (no large sterile bandages). I also have The Magical Drawer at work: bandaids, two general-usage painkillers, tums-type pills provided by another coworker (who’s also the person who grabs that box most often) and my small scissors; the company-provided first-aid boxes strewn through the buildings have enough bandages to dress up as The Mummy and iodine (no tape). There is a company-doctors’ office in the building, with three doctors: there’s at least one available at any time during working hours (they start coverage early and leave late, to cover people working “off hours”).
We had one in Dad’s car until that day when I noticed the box was rusty, opened it and everything appeared unusable. It was replaced by a box of bandaids kept in the glovebox and replaced periodically (since the box at home gets more use, the new box goes to the car and it moves to the house when the one in the house needs replacing); this is also what I have in my car. Middlebro’s car-kit is bigger… but only because he always carries his swiss-army knife: he has scissors!
I live in a country where you’d be hard-pressed to be more than 60m from the nearest hospital, and if you’re in such a place, you’re in the middle of nowhere: the ambulance won’t get caught in traffic.
house, car AND work, because i’m forever giving myself small cuts and scrapes.
there’s an emergency kit in the trunk of my car as well as an always-working large-cell flashlight.
the one thing i still haven’t done yet is put together an emergency overnight bag. had i gotten that job on the far southside of indianapolis (i live on the far northside!) i would’ve assembled one immediately.
indy isn’t exactly the snow capital of the world, but there have been occasions so far this season where that overnight bag would’ve come in real handy at the nearest motel rather than try to make it home.
I have a small kit in the house, plus various odds and ends in the medicine cabinet. I know I’m short on those wet-wipes since I used them up to treat my own cut finger a few years ago and never replaced them. We live 0.75km from a major hospital, though, in case something gets that serious (and as I type this, an ambulance goes by…!)
We also have a larger kit in each car, which AFAIK have never been used. I was certified for First Aid at some point in the past, but I’m not any more. It’s something I keep meaning to do but never take the time to (or the money…it’s not too expensive, but I am a student…)
I don’t have a ‘kit’ per se, but do have assorted size Band Aids, gauze pads and tape, OTC pain medications (at least two different kinds), antibiotic/pain relieving ointment, decongestant, three different kinds of antihistamines, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, cotton swabs, cotton balls, antihistamine ointment; all of this stuff is in one of two places, and I can put my hands on it pretty easily.
I don’t have anything in the car, really, but I do carry OTC pain relievers, decongestant, antihistamine, and a few Band Aids in my purse. Since my purse is always with me when I’m in the car, it’s almost like a bare-bones FA kit.
I’ve got much more in the house than would fit into a “kit.” Every conceivable kind of first-aid supply I could ever need. But nothing in the car . . . yet.
We have first aid kits at home, in both cars and in the boat.