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Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

Anyone need to be rescued?

When you know you are going to be several days travel away from medical help, your first aid kit takes on a whole new meaning.  My brother is a paramedic so he gave us a list of stuff we needed to have.  I ended up buying a paramedic bag to store everything. 

It includes a CPR mask, first aid manuals, a field surgery manual, surgical instruments, various bandages, a couple of Israeli compression bandages, an epi-pen (for serious allergic reactions), burn cream, and this super cool clotting medicine.  This stuff is amazing.  Essentially what it does is filter your own platelets out and hold them against the wound.  In battle field testing, this stuff was 100% effective saving people from femoral artery punctures.  If you want to see it work, you can watch the video.  Warning though, don't watch it if you have a weak stomach.

The other thing we needed was drugs.  Yeah, stop laughing. 

We were told we should have aboard two different types of antibiotics (for different types of infections), some sleeping meds for when we do overnighters and are taking shifts at the helm its important to be able to sleep, topical steroids, and Malaria meds that you take preventatively when in Malaria infested regions.  In addition, we wanted some serious pain killers in case someone broke a leg.  Dave had some leftover pain killers from an oral surgery, and the doctor was nice enough to tell us what the maximum dosage is so we can use those. 

So we are ready for anything.  Well, that's the theory anyway.

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