Check Your Priorities
5 min readFrom: John Preppers Medical Supply
We constantly read blogs, forums, books, magazines or anything we can get our hands on regarding preparations. Whether it’s a natural or man-made disaster, prepper’s and survivalists all grasp the major concepts of Food, Water, Shelter and Air. I question if we have them in the correct order. It seems the largest percentage of advertising and articles are on food. Maybe this is because more money can be made in this category. After all, we need at least one year’s supply of food for each person in our family or group. Next we focus on water, then shelter and finally Medical. Oh! I almost forgot about the guns and ammo we need to protect it all and ourselves.
If you apply the rule of three, then we all need to look at our priorities for prepping and more importantly what are we prepping for? Three weeks without food and you die. Three days without water and you die. You need Shelter from extreme elements within about three hours. Cut off Air (Oxygen), which includes your blood that carries the oxygen through your body, and you have three minutes. Yes, that is a pretty small number! If someone is not breathing they only have minutes to live. If you’re wounded in your femoral artery or your aorta, you can bleed out in three minutes. What can be done in three minutes? You will begin to realize how short this really is. PREPARING FOR THIS SHOULD BE YOUR HIGHEST PRIORITY!
It is great to have a full years’ worth of food, chemicals or filters to clean water, and shelter. In order to use any of these items and you first have to live long enough. It will take time before you or someone else will need to use these things. Emergency medical training is the one item that can make the difference. The first thing you need to do is get training. Basic first-aid training could save the life of a family member, friend or even a complete stranger. There are many options for training. There are training courses offered at RedCross.com or MedicalCorps.com, just to name a couple. Secondly, gather the supplies you need. Lastly, you should practice what you’ve learned using the supplies you’ve gathered.
I have had my own experience with this. While working a part time job back in college I was a stock boy at a Farm and Fleet store. We had a customer purchase one of those small 8 HP lawn tractors that it was on top of another tractor on an upper shelf, still in the box, and we could not get the forklift to get it down. We assumed that 6 guys could simply lift this tractor and set it on the ground, but we were soon faced with a huge dilemma. As we tried lifting the tractor down, the back corner slipped and the guy in the middle had the shroud to the grass cutter blade land on his forearm and cut right down to the bone. I had never seen that much blood produced in such a short amount of time. Luckily, through a team effort and a co-worker who was a part-time EMT, he lived. When it happened, everyone reacted quickly. I applied direct pressure to the cut with my hands as we laid him down. Another person applied pressure to the pressure point in his upper arm which is on the inside of the arm between the bicep and triceps muscle. One of my co-workers ran to get the first-aid kit from the break room, which afterwards seemed funny because he did not know what to get and just ripped the whole thing off of the wall. He ran back with not only the first-aid kit but also the dry wall it was bolted to. A fourth person ran up front to get our part-time guy that was the EMT and did two things that I will never forget. First, he took an elastic bandage and used it to cover the cut and put in on as tight as he could get it, which replaced my hands. The second thing he did was to run to his truck while yelling for someone to raise his legs up above his heart. He came back with his First Responder kit from his truck and put the blood pressure cuff on his upper arm to replace the person holding the pressure point. He inflated the cuff to slow down the blood flow, but not completely stop it. He even used a stethoscope to listen for the heartbeat in his arm to make sure it was not too tight. While this was all going on, 911 was called and it took about five minutes for the ambulance to get there – in reality it seemed like an eternity. A more recent story involved my neighbor cutting her hand with a Cutco knife. Her husband quickly grabbed her hand and raised it above her head and used a dish towel for the blood and applied pressure to the cut the entire ride to the ER. Their son drove them not knowing that one month later he would be on the way to the ER to be treated for an accidental knife wound in the back of his leg. Another incident involved a friend of mine using a scalpel to castrate pigs and accidentally stabbed herself in the leg. Someone she knows recently cut himself skinning a deer. The accidents are endless and being prepared for these can be the difference between life and death.
There is a great product available now that we did not have back when my co-worker cut his forearm called the Emergency Bandage (Israeli Bandage). It is a 4 x 4 sterile dressing, elastic bandage and a pressure applicator all in one. Experience tells me the 4 x 4 is a more important bandage size than the 6 x 6. In a combat situation, a bandage with extra mobility pads would allow you to cover a knife or bullet’s entry and exit wounds. The 12 x 9 abdominal bandages are a great extra to have. Watch the videos on how to use the Emergency Bandage and practice. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2_EU1T-o-g&feature=player_embedded
Put your priorities in order: Band-aids, Beans and Bullets. Get training, collect supplies, and practice! If you can’t survive to the point of needing water and food you won’t even need the bullets.
