The folks at NAR, the only people I trust for genuine CAT tourniquets, are having a 30% off sale with code NAR2023. That drops a $31.59 tourniquet down to $22.11. But..theyre more than just TQ’s. Sale ends tomorrow. Go check out the page.
Tag Archives: medical
Amplifying the signal: Article – I’m an American spending Thanksgiving as a combat nurse under fire on the frontline in Ukraine
This article was linked to by someone in comments a few posts back. H/T to them for bringing it to my attention. I thought it was worth sharing. Regardless of your stance on this war (or any war), there are objective facts in this story worth noting. Apparently those knockoff tourniquets really do cost lives in the field.
So when I say that it’s worth the extra $ to make sure youre getting the real deal rather than a ‘close enough’ cheaper Chinese copy, it’s not just me.
Read the article, its short and a bit empty but if you Google the gal in the article there’s some interesting stuff about what she’s doing.
In the meantime, the moral of this story is: some stuff is not worth choosing based solely on cost.
Friday of Color – NAR TQ $22.11 after discount
I mentioned it a few posts back, but when it comes to tourniquets you wanna make sure youre getting the real deal. So….:
After using the discount code you’re at $22.11 each. Thats good enough for me to order a handful. This is a prime opportunity to make sure youre getting the real deal from the source and getting it at a better price.
Fake tourniquets
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but if a price on a CAT-style tourniquet seems too good to be true, it probably is. And, unlike many other counterfeit products, getting caught with one of these and having it fail when you need it is, literally, a matter of life and death.
I got a reminder about this in my email today from NAR. If you think about it, t his thing is simply injection moulded plastic and some nylon webbing. That means the barrier to entry for making a knockoff is pretty darn low. As a result, these things are all over Amazon and eBay. Yes, there are other wendors with nigh-impeccable creds selling the genuine product….but I’m just not willing to take the chance that their purchasing agent made a mistake that month and got some knockoffs from Glorious Peoples Plastic Factory No. 55 in Changzhou.
This is one of the very few products that I will not buy, no matter how discounted, from anywhere except NAR. I will spend an extra ten bucks or so to ensure that I’m getting something that actually does what its supposed to do when its supposed to. There are times to shop around and save money but when it comes to things like scuba gear, defense lawyers, parachutes, heart surgeons, and critical life saving equipment, you’d have to be a fool to make cost the deciding discriminatory criteria.
I’ve a bunch of the CAT tourniquets, and every single one of them came straight from NAR. Sometimes NAR will have a sale and I’ll pick up a couple more as gifts or extras, but I never buy them from anywhere else no matter how discounted they are. I would recommend you do the same.
When it’s 3am and youre laid out in the back of a pickup truck speeding to a hospital with a fountain spurting from your leg,probably the last thing youre going to think before passing out from blood loss as you stare at the broken tourniquet windlass won’t be “wow, I’m sure glad I saved that ten bucks.”
Even without TEOTWAWKI, stuff happens. Get a couple tourniquets, practice with them, carry them, and stay safe(r).
Take 5 of these and call me in the morning
A while back, I had to have a tooth pulled. I hate dental stuff and I hate the weirdness of how the geography of my mouth feels so different to my tongue.Anyway, when it was time to check out I asked what they were going to do for painkillers. I was rather looking forward to fortifying my hoard of oxycodone. Nope..they said to take three Advil (ibuprofen) and two Tylenol (acetaminophen) and it would work just fine.
Look, I’ve taken ibuprofen for pain before and I know it does a decent job, but this is for the pain of having a part of my skeletal structure forcibly removed. Im gonna need something with a little more horsepower than a fistful of OTC stuff.
Turns out I was wrong. I’ve had some serious pain since then from other events and injuries and, to my utter surprise, I’ve discovered that for all of it the 3/2 of Advil/Tylenol stomps that stuff down darn near just as good as the hydro. (Thats 200 mg Advil, 500 mg. Tylenol.)
Obviously a steady diet of ibuprofen is not a good idea for anyone’s liver, but we aren’t talking about a steady diet of it here. We’re talking about a temporary, short-term use because I broke a finger, cracked a rib, got an infected suture, shingles, or whatever else fires up the ol’ nerve clusters.
I now carry, always, in my Bag O’ Tricks a couple ‘pocket size’ tubes of Advil and Tylenol specifically for emergencies where serious pain relief is called for and I’m not near my in-home pharmacy. As it turns out, there seems to be a synergistic effect when combining the two.
The more professionally medically astute of you may have known this all along but, hey, its news to me.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but next time you really wanna smack down some strong pain give it a shot. Anytime you can get high-level pain relief without resorting to the prescription-only stuff…thats a win.
ETA: Apparently the Advil folks are offering a combo pill with acetaminophen and ibuprofen together. Two great tastes that taste great together. Brand name is ‘Advil Dual Action‘ with 125 mg ibuprofen and 250 mg. acetaminophen, which means you need to guzzle about four of these to get the 3/2 effect I mentioned earlier. Guess I’ll hit Walgreens and get some to keep in my Bag O’ Tricks.
Article – Drug Shortages Approach an All-Time High, Leading to Rationing
Remember when things like drug shortages were things that happened in Third World and Soviet satellite countries?
I’m lucky, I suppose, in that I don’t need any particular medication to keep my quality of life where it is. No insulin, no high blood pressure meds, none of that sort of thing. Sure, there are times I eat ibuprofin like M&M’s, but other than that….
And, fortunately, any meds I do want to keep on hand are all over the counter so I can keep a pretty generous supply around. Sure, maybe they lose a bit of efficacy after a few years but so what? Just up the dosage. I’d rather face a cracked rib with five year old Tylenol and Advil than I would without. Drugs that only deliver 85% of their effectiveness is orders of magnitude better than the 0% afforded by not having drugs at all.
Moral of the story: while you’re stacking up the .223 and 9mm, the freeze drieds and AA batteries, the water filters and toilet paper….stock up on the OTC stuff (and first aid as well) because thanks to Brandon we are, apparently, dipping our toes into the warm water of neo-Soviet supply issues.
Link – LE Appreciation 1 DAY ONLY SALE – North American Rescue
Good opportunity to get those tourniquets and related gear.
Link to the sales item page: https://www.narescue.com/law-enforcement-appreciation-day-sale.html
Discount code: THANKSLE
Go tear ’em up, boys.
Burn jel
As I mentioned previously, I ordered up some burn jel. Arrived:
The bottle and dressings will go in the big first aid kit, the smaller single use ‘ketchup packets’ will get distributed across the various small first aid kits.
This stuff is awesome for those (somewhat) minor burns. When you’ve got the kind ofburn that gives you an ache right down to the bone, this stuff really seems to put a damper on it. As I’ve mentioned, I once burned my hand so bad that the only way I could sleep was clutching a cold, wet washcloth or a bag of ice. This stuff, though, took the pain away so I could finally sleep.
Good product and I heartily recommend it. Skip a couple lattes today, spend the money at Amazon, and get some of this stuff. Next time you grab the wrong part of your Dutch oven, try to pick up a hot lawnmower by the exhaust, or parboil yourself by opening the wrong end of the lid on your pressure cooker you will be so glad you have this stuff.
Vehicle stuff
As I mentioned earlier, one of my regrets is that I didn’t take my FAK with me on my trip to Venus Jr. I was wondering if, in fact, I had in that FAK the items I would have needed for that particular episode…specifically, a non-adhesive dressing of some type, some rolled gauze, and some tape. Turns out, yes, I had all that in there. Cool. But then I figured I better double-check what might be lacking. As it turns out, I seem to have never gotten around to distributing burn jel into that particular kit. So, off to Amazon for Burn Jel…both the ‘ketchup packets’ of the stuff, individual dressings, and a bottle of the stuff. I’ve used this product in the past for some kitchen accidents and it works wonderfully. In fact, I’ve had some burns bad enough to keep me awake at night and this stuff has made it so I can sleep.
This little episode of gear-inspection was also driven by the need for me to review, update, replenish, and re-gear my in-vehicle supplies. In the winter I try to keep a big ol’ Pelican case of winter survival gear in the vehicle ‘just in case’. But, during the summer-ish times there’s not as much need for that much bulk and mass taking up space. Since the summer stuff doesn’t require as much bulky clothing and sleepgear as winter, I use a medium size pack. Its the well-made and highly-recommended SpecOps Brand Recon Ruck. Don’t let that MSRP fool you, they can be had for a lot less. I think I got mine on sale somewhere for around $80..but, that was a while ago. Anyway, the nice thing about it is that it can be used as a non-frame pack (like a Med. ALICE pack) but can also be used in conjunction with an ALICE frame, which are pretty ubiquitous and affordable. Yeah, the ALICE was supplanted by the MOLLE packs but this isn’t for humping the boonies, its for just keeping my gear in one place. Anyway, highly recommend.
The only real difference between the winter and summer gear is, as I said, bulky sleeping gear and extra clothing. I don’t carry extra water because SOP is to have a 5-gallon jerry can of the stuff on hand.
I live in one of the more densely populated parts of Montana, so sitting on a road somewhere and not seeing a soul for days at a time is fairly unheard of. However, I don’t plan to never stray from this part of Montana. Sometimes I like to go to gun shows in far and distant lands..like Kalispell, Butte, Helena, Billings, etc. And then there’s a much greater possibility that a vehicle issue might put you in a position to twiddle your thumbs for quite a while. But, between the standard vehicle gear and my Bag O’ Tricks, I like my odds.
And, of course, no matter the season the prevailing wisdom is Stay With The Vehicle. Or Else.
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If you find this entertaining, please consider ….
Bag O’ Tricks – Owie version
The problem with posting about anything you carry around or store is that, no matter what it is, there’s always some moron who says “What if…”. For example, if you say you have enough fuel stored to run your generator for three weeks, they’ll chime in with something brilliant like “But what if the disaster runs four weeks?”. If you said you had fuel for five years they’d come back with “Yeah, but what if the disaster runs six years?”. I genuinely believe that if you said you had enough food to last you fifty years they’d come back with “But what if the disaster lasts 51 years?” and not realize they’re being idiots. It’s because of morons like that I usually don’t bother giving exact quantities of things I keep around. It’s just so irritating, y’know?
Anyway….
From time to time, I mention the Bag O’ Tricks. It’s nothing dramatic, it’s just a bag with a lot of things that would be useful across the board if I get caught somewhere. It’s not a ‘get home’ bag, it’s not a ‘bugout bag’, and it’s not a ‘bailout bag’. It’s just a bag with things that I like to have around in case something unexpected happens. I’ve mentioned it before. Matter of fact, last time I was asked about it the response I gave was very similar to the opening paragraph:
The problem is, no matter what I write, some idiot will chime in with “But what about…”, “You dont need…”, “You should have….”, and that sort of thing. I’ll give you an example… everytime someone posts something about how much food they have it goes like this: “We keep enough stored food for [X] months” and someone says “But what if the disaster goes on for [x+1] months?”. Doesn’t matter how long the timeframe is…if I said I had enough food for twenty five years some idiot will jump in with “But what if the crisis lasts 26 years.” Those kinds of conversations annoy me to no end. So…no junk-on-the-bunk dumpout of the Bag O’ Trick. Just a once in a while thing where I pull something out and mention it.
So, whats in the bag? Well, I’ve touched on a couple things that I keep in there. But, of course, there’s more. Imma pull an item out at random and we’ll see how that goes. :::fishes around in bag:::
Behold:
On the right is the Maxpedition first aid pouch. It’s got QuickClot, compress banadges, rolled gauze, various bandages, tape, pads, non stick pads, burn gel, triple antibiotic, etc, etc. (And by “etc”, that probably covers 90% of “What about…”). These aren’t supposed to be an ‘end of the world’ type of thing…they’re just to let me get myself patched up and functionable until I can get to a more detailed treatment. Woulda come in dang handy a week ago.
On the left is the very nice tourniquet kit from North American Rescue which I’ve posted about before. These kits, as well as the individual tourniquets, come on sale every so often and I really would recommend at least a couple. I also strongly encourage you to pay a little more and buy directly from NAR because the Chinese fakes of these are all over eBay and Amazon. This is not the sort of gear you want to take chances with and try to save $15 by getting one off eBay no matter how honest the seller seems. Don’t do it.
Both of these have MOLLE webbing and straps so I normally just attach them to each other to keep them handy. I do, however, need to get a nice waterproof bag to keep them in since you never know what sort of conditions you’re going to be under when something goes wrong.
But, there you go….one more trick outta the Bag O’ Tricks.
