Be Prepared: What’s Your First Aid Kit Look Like?

I’m in the midst of a deliberately drawn-out move out of Las Vegas. After a personally devastating 2023, we decided we needed a slower pace, and a lot fewer cars around us. So for now, we’re spending a lot more time at a cabin Southern Utah that we’ve had as a vacation property for more than a decade.

It’s nice—the pace is definitely slower! Things like being an hour away from the nearest grocery store don’t bother me; being an hour away from the nearest well-equipped hospital… that’s another thing. While our local Fire & Rescue does have an ambulance, and they do have trained EMTs, they cover a huge area, and response times aren’t instantaneous.

That’s why I’ve been dusting off my first responder training and putting together a pretty comprehensive set of medical supplies. Frankly, I think everyone could do with more than just some Band-Aids on hand, and everyone could do with a little bit of training—think 30 minutes or so. It’s not a big deal, and it could literally save the life of someone you love.

AED

We have invested in an Automated External Defibrillator, or AED. This is Very Not Cheap, but we’re both in our 50s and a heart attack isn’t something to screw around with. Even by the time we could make it to our community’s management office (which has an AED mounted outside), someone would be dead—it’s a 10-minute drive. These devices make it easy—they talk to you and tell you what to do, have clear diagrams of where to put the two pads, and even run their own check to make sure they’re needed before they start sending the juice. I sincerely hope this is wasted money—but it’s about the same as an annual homeowner’s insurance payment, and we’d never skip that, either.

First Aid

So look… you’ve probably seen first aid kits like this one. I hate them. In an emergency, the last thing you need is to be sorting through a pile of tiny little packets and papers. It is impossible to organize these things, and to many things look alike. Is this the alcohol prep pad, or is it the antihistamine? Don’t mess those up. Where’s the iodine? Why doesn’t this thing have a goddamn tourniquet? FFS, isn’t there a roll of gauze? My kingdom for a roll of gauze!

Deep breath.

So I set out to make a more organized kit. There are a few types of injuries you need to be prepared to handle:

• Blood. Honestly, this is the big one. The human body can last a long time with nearly any type of injury that doesn’t involve being punctured in some fashion. Almost all the time, if you can stop the bleed, you can live until professional help gets there. In fact. Stop the Bleed is the literal name of self-contained kits you can buy—many places that have an AED mounted in a cabinet will also have Stop the Bleed kits.
• Fractures. Only because these are often accompanied by bleeding, and you need to at least stabilize the fracture in order to get the bleeding under control. And we’re talking limb fractures, here—ribs and especially pelvises are the Real Deal injury and there’s not a lot a non-professional can do to stabilize them. Compound pelvis fractures are immediately life-threatening.
• Burns. Usually less urgent, if no less painful, you still want to get these mitigated until professional help can arrive.

What I wanted was really a collection of little self-contained kits I could quickly reach in and grab depending on the situation, without having to rifle through little packets. My plan was to use zipper bags to collect everything for a given scenario, label them with huge colored labels, and then have a plastic bin of additional supplies to use once the immediate response was in place.

Getting Started

I started with this little gem, which is a vac-sealed individual Stop the Bleed kit. It comes with just a few critical pieces of equipment—no sorting through a bin of little packets—and a clear, in-the-moment instruction card. That kit (I bought two) and a video like this is all you need to handle most serious bleeding incidents. Essentially, you’ll learn to use a CAT tourniquet, and to pack a non-limb wound and use pressure stop the bleed until help can arrive. I am also a big fan of QuikClot bandages, which most Stop the Bleed-type kits don’t include.

A note: A very nice thing about Stop the Bleed kits is that good ones will include a Sharpie market. The included tourniquet usually has a little tab where you can write the time the tourniquet was applied; I also write that time on the patient’s forehead. Can’t miss it, and the professionals need to know that time. If you use a QuikClot or similar type of dressing, also write CLOT on the forehead, and try to somehow secure the dressing’s packaging to the patient—stuff it in a pocket so a portion is hanging out, use a roll of gauze to secure it to a non-inured limb, etc. Again, the professionals will benefit greatly be seeing exactly what you’ve used, so they know exactly how to proceed.

A Revelation

Then I ran across My Medic, and OMG, do I love these guys. They’ve already done the thing I set out to do. Their kits are based on MODs—they have a Burn MOD, a Bleed MOD, a Fracture MOD, and so on. All color-coded, all sealed, all neatly organized in bags that make every MOD easy to find. Oh My MOD, I love these guys.

Most homes would be fine with their standard MyFAK (My First Aid Kit). Because we’re so isolated, I opted for the large MyFAK, and went with the Pro edition, which includes additional trauma response tools like a patch for a sucking chest wound, an airway device, and so on. When the kit arrived, I contacted their support team and got access to around an hour of training videos on using the kit (don’t use an airway device unless you’ve been trained; you can do more damage than good).

I still have my Stop the Bleed kits—one is in our workshop (hi, power tools) and the other in a central location in the main cabin. But for anything else, I’ll grab MyFAK, unzip it, and grab the MOD I need for the situation at hand. Once I get a basic response in place, I still have a plastic bin full of those self-adhering ACE-type bandages, tons of rolls of gauze, and so on.

The My Medic folks make a lot of different kits for different activities and situations. They all use the same MODs, but like one is designed for bicyclists, so it’s small, light, and focuses on bleeding and fractures for one person. It’s very much worth browsing their website to find a suitable kit (or kits) for however you live your life.

Be Prepared

So… be prepared. First of all, consider passing this article along to the people in your lives, hopefully to get them inspired to be prepared themselves. Consider a twice-annual Family Response Training, where you as a family sit down and review some key first responder training videos. Maybe sacrifice a Stop the Bleed kit so you can open it up and go over each item, practicing how you’d use them. Practice is what lets you respond quickly and appropriately in an actual emergency, when your brain is gibbering like an idiot. Like, is an hour a couple of times a year too much time to spend on the people you love?

A Quick Note

I’ve been asked how I feel about Israeli Battle Dressings, and whether I prefer them over a CAT tourniquet. Thing is, that’s apples and oranges.

A CAT is designed to be an easy, fast way to literally cut off blood flow to a limb. They’re not comfortable to wear, but you crank them down until the bleeding stops. The patient will need rapid professional help afterwards, because over the long term you do risk significant damage to the limb’s tissues—you’ve cut off the blood supply, after all. But you use these things to keep the blood in the torso and uninjured limbs so the whole person doesn’t die.

An IBD is not a tourniquet. You don’t crank them down. They’re designed to be an easy way to quickly apply and maintain pressure to a wound—typically on a limb, but usually not bad enough to need a full tourniquet. Go find a YouTube video on these dressings and you’ll see the difference. Yes, you’re applying pressure, but you’re not cinching all the blood vessels closed. You can, in fact, use an IBD and a CAT together in some circumstances. IBDs work well in conjunction with other techniques, including wound-packing and QuikClot dressings.

I do have a six pack of IBDs in the house, and I know how to use them. We have one we’ve opened that we use in our semiannual first responder refresher training. I would much prefer to use an IBD over a CAT, if it’ll stop the bleeding, because an IBD raises very little risk of follow-on damage. But I still have CATs because there’s a time and place where they’re the right response.

A Few Other Supplies

I have a couple of other things I keep handy.

I keep a box of Euro Sutures because they’re amazing. For small and medium-sized lacerations, they’re great, and they’re easier to install and more stable than the usual butterfly stitches.

For more serious lacerations, I have a pack of zip closures as well. These are awesome—you basically clean around the wound, stick these on, and then kind of ratchet them closed, a bit like plastic cable ties. Once they’re closed, you can swab the wound, apply wound glue (always have a bottle of that around), cover the wound with gauze and apply pressure, etc.

And lots and lots of rolls of gauze.