What do you mean alcohol is not for wound cleaning?

 I know, I know, I know, you are tired of hearing about all this new fangled wilderness first aid stuff but I learned so many new things to do and use that I can't wait till someone gets seriously wounded on a camping trip.  Wait, that is not what I mean.  What I mean is that now I feel extremely prepared "if" I ever have a situation in the backwoods that I will know what to do to get everyone one out safe.  One big eye opener we learned about is that for cleaning a wound you are not supposed to use alcohol or alcohol wipes.  You are supposed to use povidone iodine prep, which as you can see in the picture above comes in handy dandy wipes now so you don't have to keep those old nasty jugs of that stuff in your first aid kit.

 I have carried these around in my diabetes pump case for several years now just thinking they were for like major accidents or surgery.  Not that they were for cleaning any wound and that you are supposed to always use these instead of alcohol.  Our instructor went into details on why but from what I can read in my notes is that alcohol like removes oils and stuff but povidone iodine like soap actually cleans the wound.  disclaimer:  I am an accountant and always check with someone who knows a hell of a lot more about medicine than I do before quoting me or my blog like these are scriptures from the bible.  The neat thing that came up about this and why it is on my mind is that my buddy Dustin last Monday was telling us how he cut his finger pretty bad recently and that he learned in his red cross first aid class that he should put povidone iodine on his wound and that was interesting to me because I learned the same thing in my wilderness first aid class.  How funny it is that first aid is taught the same no matter where you learn it and he also did the same thing and replace his alcohol in his first aid kit with povidone iodine just like me.  Now with diabetes we do need to keep alcohol around because it does remove the oils on our skin so if you are like myself and wear a pump the skin needs to be as oil free as possible so the tape sticks best.

 This morning I was out in my garden cutting a few items out that were ripe and needing to be pulled and one of the things that drives my wife crazy but is a game to me is to plant all sorts of different pepper plants and not mark them so I have to wait to see what is what when it produces fruit.  I think the peppers in my hands are sweet cherry peppers but I will find out when I bite into them.  That is how the game goes, sometimes they are sweet peppers and sometimes they are habinero peppers and I am bleeding severely from the mouth afterwards but I must play the game.  One of these days I will learn how to identify all my peppers besides the jalapeno, bell, Cayenne, and chili peppers.  The rest are like playing Russian rulet with your mouth.

Here are my red grapes this year that are so sweet and so good that you can actually pick them from the vine and eat them (well just be sure to not eat the brown recluse spiders that like to live in them).  I am so happy with this years crop but also kind of sad because I was too slow to trim the runners back at the beginning of the season so when I finally did cut them back I lost about half the crop because the vine was already blooming.  I guess gardening is just that way, sometimes you have a huge crop but the produce is not the best and sometimes you have a small crop and the produce is diabetes heavenly good.