Practice Packing a Wound

You might've heard people talk about packing a wound in regard to putting a clean gauze or a hemostatic agent impregnated gauze or sponge down into a wound, particularly a gunshot wound that we talk about in the training environment or in the real world self-defense environment, and not known exactly what they were talking about. Even if you do understand what they're talking about, you may never have practiced this packing of a wound. And it's actually something that you should try, and there's a really easy way to do it with a clenched fist. Now what I've got here is some Z-Pak Dressing, this is obviously just some sterile wound packing. This doesn't have any hemostatic agent which can be much more expensive to open up and train with. So I'm just gonna show you the technique here that you can use to pack the wound. Now when we talk about packing a wound, we aren't just simply talking about stuffing a little gauze in there and calling it good. We really want to get as much of this material into the wound as possible and make it as hard as possible inside for blood to get out. When the gauze catches, and the packing material catches the blood, especially if there's a hemostatic agent there, it's gonna promote clotting and actually give you more pressure inside of the wound to keep that blood from leaking out of that vessel, that artery is probably what we're talking about, or any other vessels that are cut up in there. So what I'm simply gonna do is clench my fist down and just start to work this gauze into that clenched fist. I can do that with my finger, I can do it in my thumb. One thing that you'll hear people talk about is packing in all directions, not just stuffing down, always curling to one side or the other, but making sure you're pushing into a lot of different directions. So we're pushing this in. Again, I can pack with the thumb, I can pack with the finger. And my fist is still clenched. I'm still holding this very, very tightly as I push in, trying to fill all the nooks and crannies between my fingers, inside the knuckles, pushing in. And this is something you can see, I'm exerting some effort here, that's really what we wanna do. We want this to be very hard inside of the wound, packing as much material as we can in there. And you can see I'm creating space by hitting different angles, pushing in, in a star pattern or pushing in, in a circular pattern, maybe opposite and then crossing as I'm packing this wound, packing this material down in, again, to stop the blood, to get as much pressure as we can inside so that the blood isn't coming out. Continuing to pack. When it really starts to get hard at the top, and you can see I'm still clenching my fist closed here, not really much movement on the fingers. Now let's take a look, that's pretty good. That's a lot of material packed in there. And obviously we still have some material left. Larger wound, we might be able to get more into it. But as I open up my fist, you're gonna see just how much material was inside of that fully clenched fist. So packing a wound doesn't just mean simply covering up the top and hoping that's good enough and maybe wrapping around or putting a bandage over it. We really wanna stuff as much material as we can into the wound to create that clot, to create the area for the blood to stop coming out of the body, stay in and push against all of those torn and open vessels on the inside of the wound. Practicing to pack of wound is an important part of your emergency trauma response, especially to a gunshot wound.