When I became a dad, I started to think seriously about my medical readiness. As a new dad, my life now involved being around young children on a constant basis. And as anyone with kids knows, young kids tend to be accident prone, to say the least.
The idea of an everyday med kit first came to me while out with several other parents who also had young children. One of the kids fell and managed to bite his tongue, which caused a surprising amount of bleeding. I didn’t have any medical equipment with me, and neither did anyone else. The boy’s parents had to find a napkin at a nearby restaurant to stop the bleeding.
After that incident, I decided to put together an everyday family medical kit that I could carry with me wherever I went. I thought through all of the possible things that could go wrong on paper. My mind went to the worst-case scenarios – arterial bleeds, massive hemorrhaging, burns, etc. With so many mass casualty events in the news, I wanted to be prepared for anything. What I quickly found in the real-world is that I had overlooked many important items.
On a walk at the park, my daughter skinned her knee while riding her scooter. Naturally, my wife expected me to take care of the injury since I was carrying the family medical kit. I opened the kit and sorted through each of the items I had hand-picked. There was a tourniquet, hemostatic gauze, chest seals, and trauma shears. But there was not a single large band aid that I could put on my daughter’s skinned knee. I cleaned up the bleeding with some gauze, and we went home to find a large band aid.
It was a major duh moment, and I took it as a learning experience. In my preparations for worst-case injuries, I had skipped right past the most realistic ones. On another occasion my oldest son wandered into a hollowed out tree that was home to a beehive. I didn’t have a drop of ointment for a bee sting in the med kit. It went on like this for several years. Every time a real-world injury arose, I added a new item to the kit.
Sometimes updates to the med kit have been based on learning new information, rather than experiencing a real-life problem. After several years of carrying a CAT tourniquet in my kit, I learned that CAT tourniquets have a relatively low success rate in pediatric use, because of their large circumference. After some searching, I found the SWAT-T tourniquet, which has a high success rate for pediatric use due to its design. Note that I didn’t remove the CAT tourniquet, since my med kit is not only intended for children.
Today, I feel fairly confident with my everyday med kit, but I still look for opportunities to improve it. I carry it with me wherever we go – to the park, the zoo, church, road trips, camping and even on errands. It may seem inconvenient, but the thought of not having it – and needing it – makes it well worth the small hassle of carrying an extra bag.
Thankfully I have not yet had to use a tourniquet or combat gauze, but I keep them in my kit along with the band aids and Advil just in case. I believe that your family medical kit should be well-rounded enough to address a wide range of threats, from the smallest cuts and scrapes that you are most likely to encounter, to life-threatening injuries. You might be surprised how much medical capability you can fit into a relatively small package.
