Possibly gross question about wound care, so details inside.

No, but it probably keeps them from bing cannibals.

Or maybe they are the best person to have when the plane crashes in the Andes, because they’ll know how to debride the wounds and make sure parts are safe to eat.

Following that train of thought,
you would expect butchers and slaughterhouse workers to embrace vegetarianism as a matter of routine.

@stanleybmanly Not really. They stop seeing the animals as anything but a product and a job to get done. I’d bet the level of vegetarianism is quite low.

One of my daughters is an RN, and she loves wound care. She also loves her meat. So no, it doesn’t gross her out. Neither am I.

It might be possible if a person’s wound was brought to the medical professional with a side of mashed potatoes and green beans.

Not in our office. We do a moderate amount of wound care in the legs, and I don’t think anyone is a vegetarian (I don’t eat red-meat, but that preceded my employment in the vein center by a decade).

I think the initial gross-out factor goes away for a clinician and it become a very objective process where you’re monitoring the dimensions of the wound and the stages of healing the process and trying to help the patient recover. Wounds can be really debilitating and life-altering, so they are often struggling with many challenges.

I think it’s probably not that different from a mortician after their 1,000th corpse: It just becomes routine.

Medical professionals laugh at gross stuff. If you want to talk about gross, then you haven’t experienced it until you open up an anaerobic wound culture can after a 24 hour incubation. The first time I did that the smell about knocked me out. An overpowering stench of death! Something like a mixture of feces and rotting flesh. But after 3 days of working with anaerobes it was no big deal. We laughed and made jokes about the smell. Ah there’s nothing like the aroma of anaerobes in the morning. HA!

Oh to be honest, sputum is one microbiology specimen that I never was able to get use to. Always made my skin crawl to work with it.

Well, I’m a layperson, and tending wounds was not on my resume. It is now. My career was cleaning up messy prose, not suppurating lesions.

Thanks for all those vivid responses. Special thanks to @kritiper for an unforgettable image that, who’d have thought, might actually help. As long as I don’t see mashed potatoes . . .

Bonus points to @zenvelo for the practical application.

I’m confused. It cannot possibly be that you volunteered your services and were assigned something requiring such crucial expertise. Are you caring for a loved one? Anyway, whatever the case, your task should rapidly become routine and your appetite return to normal. You’ll get used to it may be a cliche, but it is the truth.

@stanleybmanly: Yes. My husband. Weeping edema. He did not follow doctors’ orders (or listen to my reminders) and ended up with little splits in the skin of his legs that grew, blistered, broke, proliferated, and require extensive, meticulous care.

This is no time to be hanging around clinics, pharmacies, doctors’ offices, or medical supply houses, all of which I’ve done (repeatedly) in the past month, or trying to introduce sterile protocols into an ordinary household. Or having visiting home care nurses come in after visiting God knows where.

The task looks easy to the clinicians because they have supplies of everything right there in a dedicated environment and are spending them freely. It’s already prepped, and someone else will clean up later. They have training and experience. To me they say, “Just do this. It’s not hard.”

It’s a nightmare. We went through this for four months last fall and winter, before cv-19, and thought it was all over, but it isn’t. I have probably 40 different kinds of bandage in my house right now, each representing an effort to cope with changing conditions and none of them cheap. One change of dressing takes up to an hour and a half of intense, stressful focus and leaves me exhausted. And then I’m supposed to cook dinner.

Are you getting better at it?

@Jeruba Has he been to a vein center?

@Jeruba My empathy goes out to you. I have had to care for a major wound before and it is very stressful. I was lucky that it wasn’t during a crisis such as this. I’m sure it’s so very frustrating when he didn’t do what he was supposed to. Sending you some hugs.

@stanleybmanly, not yet. New protocol only as of yesterday. For the preceding 2 weeks I winged it while we persisted in trying to get into the clinic. Present Rx is much more complicated than before, involving a different cleansing routine and then one big bit and numerous little bits of silver alginate secured under a 7×8” bandage with three other wrappings on top of that.

@gorillapaws, yes, he had venous consult after 1st wound clinic appt last Oct. and had bilateral iliac arterial stents installed in Feb. After that things were better for a while. Guess he decided he didn’t really need to elevate legs, walk more, avoid salt, etc.

@anniereborn, thank you. I really appreciate a little sympathy. I can go a long way on a small dose of comfort. This is far from the only draining thing going on, and it’s a bit of a struggle for me at present.

@Jeruba I tend to deal more with the venous issues. I know arterial wounds are also very nasty and can result in gangrene and ultimately amputation. I’m just glad they checked his veins as well. Sometimes venous problems are misdiagnosed as arterial and ignored.

My professional suggestion is to get a nice sized stick and carve “husband-compliance-enforcement-stick” into it. You won’t need to wack him with it, simply making it will communicate all the information he needs.

Best wishes to you both.

@gorillapaws, yes, he had a pretty bad blockage. Post-surg follow-up was March 6th, and you can guess what happened to further consultations after that. Doc said arteries have to be treated first.

I like the carved stick idea. Thanks very much. Wondering what sort of carrot I might pair it with, things being as they are.

Not only do I like meat, but I like sausage. And I know how sausage is made.

I have no problem treating wounds, the sight of blood doesn’t bother me all that much. I still eat red meat, and I eat it rare or sometimes raw.

@RabidWolf Well, you are a wolf, so…

I’m wondering how you well you have adapted to the physical effort involved in dealing with your husband’s leg.

I gross out my family when they see me eating raw meat. Long ago I cooked me a steak, and I cooked it MR and my mom commented as to how good it smelled, and asked for a bite. I cut off a bite and she saw the blood: “OMG, that’s raw, you’re eating raw meat.” I laughed and replied: “Technically it’s MR.” Her face paled. “Ronnie that’s so gross.” She jumped up and went to the bathroom when she came out she had a washcloth and was wiping her mouth.