Are you prepared?

I am a little concerned, Why? Because I was ill prepared.

You see we were not quite in the middle of nowhere but in a spot remote enough that if anything really went wrong we could be in trouble. I was riding with a group of seven people on an epic trail ride which would, if everything went right was going to be a good 60km and 5hrs of riding.

So 20km into the ride one of our riding buddies didn’t come off his bike, but actually scraped his finger on some sandstone while going through a chute. Even though the scrape was small it did manage to take a small chunk of skin off his finger, this led to his finger to start bleeding richly. With me being the only person on the ride with St Johns basic first aid training I decided to have a gander and see what was wrong. My initial thought was that it is broken but that was just the way he was holding it to stop the bleeding which seemed to be getting worse. Luckily the dripping slowed then we washed out it with some water from a bottle. It was bad but at the same time he wasn’t going to bleed to death all we needed to do was wrap it up and we would be on our merry way

I rummaged into my riding pack to grab a few bandaids only to find nothing there, I hadn’t gotten around to putting any in my bag. I asked my fellow riders for a few of theirs only to see the blank looks on their faces as they didn’t have anything either. Not a problem I thought, we has passed a group of riders earlier who had stopped to fix a flat I walked back up the trail to the groupto ask the same question only to get the same response. I felt gutted as the bleeding had started again and the patient was starting to look worried. Between 13 people there was not one bandaid to be seen.

What to do I thought. I pulled everything out of my riding pack, 6 tubes, 5 gels, a bottle of cola,

3 bananas, multitool and a patchkit. Huzzah! I have a brand new never opened packet of glueless patches, and as you could see through the packaging they were a decent size which would cover the wound nicely.

By this time the other guys had rummaged around their pack with one of them finding a small roll of electrical tape, so, McGyver style we put a rubber patch on the wound then secured it with the small amount of tape we had and we were all good to go, well good to get to the fire road exit back to the carpark, which was still a 40 minute ride away.

Crisis averted, well so we thought, we finished the awesome descent and were on the way out to the car along the fireroad when thanks to the still bleeding wound the patch and tape became unstuck. The pace quickened and we got back to the trail head in record time.

Back at the car we grabbed an old T-Shirt tried to clean and wrapped the wound and headed home.

Once back at home we unwrapped the T-shirt, I got out the antiseptic, fresh bandages and band aids while the patient freshly cleaned his wound under some clean running water using some gauze get get rid of any hidden debris. I then made him wince pouring on the antiseptic wrapped a bandage around his finger and secured it all in place with a nice and neat bandage, sweet all good in the hood.

It was then I realised I had opened 3 different first-aid kits on the kitchen bench while looking for the perfect piece of gauze for this injury. Time to make my own portable kit.

I found a large ziplock bag which now includes:

• A dozen bandaids
• half a dozen nonstick gauze pads
• 10cc of saline solution
• an eye pad
• a roll of thin bandage
• 2 triangular bandages.

The total weight of this must not have exceeded 100gm, and now lives in the bottom of my MTB riding pack and will hopefully never see the light of day, the only thing missing as keep forgetting to buy them are some kind of painkillers, neurophen, panadol.

So I guess the motto here is like a good boy scout or Girl guide “Be Prepared”.

I have seen some horrible injuries on social media which have been made less sever by some quick thinking.

If there is anything I have totally overlooked in an emergency first-aid kit let me know.