How would you make your thumb stop bleeding?

LOTS of wet tissue paper in layers worked for me when I was home alone and I sliced my thumb. I hope you heal quick. Can you take a cab to some where you can get medical attention? I would ask a nurse to help.

Pressure.

I owe you an open apology. I apologize.

If you pulled your whole thumbnail off, you should get professional medical help.

But yeah I would wrap it in clean moist towels (paper or cloth) and put pressure on it and hold it above my head, and have someone take me to a doctor immediately.

@Zaku I agree with Zaku.

@zaku it wasn’t the whole nail. Just a callus thing that was by my thumb nail, attached to the nail. (I don’t know what it’s called)

Get some gauze, if you have it, and keep pressure on it, and make sure it’s above your heart. You can rest your hands on your head so your arms don’t tire.

It takes a long time for fingers to stop bleeding. Keep it up there for a good 5 minutes.

If you don’t have gauze you can just use tissue. I’m assuming you already cleaned it with soap and water or some sort of antiseptic.

It has stopped bleeding, but thank you all for your responses :) very helpful

You can even lie down and keep your hand high up on your chest if you don’t want to stand or sit.

Edit: I just saw it stopped, but knowing to keep your hand above your heart is good to know anyway. Just in case for a future accident, or to help someone else. Hopefully, you never need to deal with it again.

First, you’re not going to bleed to death or lose consciousness. You’re bleeding a lot because the thumb and fingertips are packed with capillaries in order to feed the extra nerves you have there in order to feel the sensation of touch. So, you will bleed like hell with the smallest injury, but it is not serious. So, you might as well learn a little field expedient medicine and save yourself a couple hundred bucks in a needless trip to the ER.

It would help to have another person to assist you with the following, but it can be done with one hand. It’s possible to do it by yourself.

Supplies:
1) You need a disinfectant. Rubbing alcohol (Isopropyl alcohol), hydrogen peroxide (H202), or an ounce of dad’s hard liquor will do.

2) You need to cut 4 small pieces of cloth out of a larger clean piece. Make sure it is clean. Each square should be about 2 inches by 2 inches.

3) You need a foot or two strip of elastic. Cut it from a clean pair of your little brother’s underwear. Use the rest of the underwear for the 2×2s described above. As they say in Washington, it is much easier and successful to apologize afterwards than ask permission up front. Any strip of clean elastic will do.

4) You need a safety pin and adhesive tape. A pin would be nice, but if you don’t have one, the tape will do.

Directions:
1) Put your thumb under the tap and run cold water over it until the coagulated blood is gone. Pat gently with one of the 2×2s to help clean it. Use cold water, not warm. Cold water will help shut down the capillaries.

2) Then stick your thumb in a shot glass or something similar full of one of the disinfectants listed above. Leave it there for a minute. It will hurt for a few seconds, but not as bad and for as long if it gets infected later.

3) Pour the rest of the disinfectant over one of the other 2×2s. Place the wet 2×2 on the tip of your thumb like a cap, making sure that it covers the cut. Place the dry 2×2 on top of that.

4) Starting at the base of your thumb, stretch the elastic up your thumb and over the tip to other side then make a sharp right turn below the knuckle—you might need someone to hold their finger on the elastic when you make that turn—then spiral it up taughtly, not tightly, to the end of your thumb anchoring the two 2×2s at the top, but not so far as to go over the top. If you go over the top, the bandage will unwind.

5) Then run the spiral back the other way, down the thumb to the base where the thumb just begins to widen at the thumb pad. At the base, you give it a couple of more wraps then across your lower palm, then around your wrist about three times. Use tape or a safety pin to anchor it. Run a strip of tape of some sort from just below the knuckle to over the tip to the other side, then wrap tape around the bottom of that tape strip two or three times just below the knuckle to anchor everything.

*

Voila, you just made your own first homemade compression bandage. Time for some cherry pie and ice cream. You can keep the thumb over your head, or not. The compression will stop the bleeding.

Leave it on for 24 hours. Keep it dry. You can cut a corner off a plastic ziplock bag and tape it over your thumb to keep it from bleeding on your bed tonight, but I really don’t think you will bleed through the bandage.

After 24 hours, gently unwrap it down to the last layer just over the 2×2s at the tip. There might be some coagulated blood there. If you rip off the bandage, you might open the wound again and have to go though this all over again from the beginning. So, you soak the bandage off under the tap, again running cold water. Pat dry with a clean cloth.

Now, stick it in the disinfectant one more time. By this time, you should have gone down and bought some of these at your corner drug store—along with some neosporin and a small packet of 2×2 gauze pads. Pat dry the disenfectant off your thumb with a sterile gauze pad. Apply a thin coat of neosporin to the wound with a Q-tip, then apply the bandage. Do this every morning until the wound is closed and has grown a natural protective cover. Then leave open to air;

The signs and symptoms of infection are redness in the general area around the wound, heat coming from the wound site, and a throbbing ache. If these things remain absent, you are OK. If infection occurs, that’s when you go to the doctor or walk-in clinic, or ER for a shot.

This is good stuff to know. Like just about everyone else, you may have kids some day and may not be near or have the couple of hundred bucks to throw away on a visit to the ER. Every home, camper and boat should have at least a pack of 2×2 gauze pads, 4×4 gauze pads, elasticized gauze wrap and some kind of disinfectant onboard. And medical tape.

I cut myself shaving once and the bleeding wouldn’t stop. A little vaseline did the trick.

A Styptic pencil may have worked but it would hurt like hell and personally I would rather bleed all over the carpet than go through that pain.

Apply direct pressure to the wound. Basic First Aid.

Suck it.

No, seriously. That’s my answer.

And that’s a good answer @filmfann. It does make the bleeding stop.

Let your dog lick it…bleeding stops in a minute.

Wouldn’t that make my dog sick? That doesn’t sound true

@SergeantQueen Wound licking is an instinctive response in humans and many other animals to lick an injury. Dogs, cats, small rodents and primates all lick wounds.[1] Saliva contains tissue factor which promotes the blood clotting mechanism. The enzyme lysozyme is found in many tissues and is known to attack the cell walls of many gram-positive bacteria, aiding in defense against infection. ”