Minor First Aid

We had a bit of excitement on Saturday night while cooking dinner. Shane was peeling the pumpkin for our soup and sliced open his finger. He called to me in the other room requesting some "minor first aid". When I went into the kitchen blood was gushing from his finger into the kitchen sink and was also on the counter, his shirt, and even his glasses (it had squirted up when he cut it). Using a wash cloth we were able to contain the bleeding and then from our nifty Peace Corps issued First Aid Kit we bandaged it up. It wasn't a large cut but it was deep and in an difficult place going from the tip down to the side of his fingernail. When we put the gauze and waterproof tape on it looked like his finger was wearing a graduation hat. Since we had to tape it over the top but couldn't go too tight it was like a little white mortar board on top of his wrapped finger. Then we had to deal with the blood stained cloth and shirt. Using on of our handy tips from our Peace Corps Jamaica Cookbook we soaked them in cold salt water. Surprisingly enough this worked! Then everything went back to normal and the soup turned out mighty tasty. However, we did ponder why we hadn't received any sort of First Aid Training from the Peace Corps and why we hadn't been given more household solutions like the cold salt water trick. Those are definitely things we felt should have come with training but didn't. My last first aid course was in Fall 2003 and I feel pretty rusty now. I wish we would have brought some more books or other resources for these kind of situations.

-Kaelyn