Minor wound care, prevent the crater

[Mr Doof]

I have a lot of callouses on my feet

In the tropics they macerate and split open.

I have it down to a science how to care for them and keep surfing.

But due to sue culture cannot share.

Ever thought about pumice (stone) on the callouses so they are a little thinner but more pliable?

This way when you go soak the them in water for hours, they won't swell up so unevenly and split (as much?).

As for the sue culture, don't let that stop you from giving advice...that isn't legally binding. Share and let us bask in your brilliance.

PS --> 2surf
Hey, that is healing up. Good work following the doc's orders and your own common sense. We may not get out of here alive, but going down to cancer isn't the way to go (if we have any say in the matter).

 

[schex]

I found this Leukotape tape to be the best at staying on. I would do the proper cleaning, treat and waterproof bandages first but this stuff stays on to hold it all together.

https://www.amazon.com/Leukotape-Corrective-Taping-1-5-Yards/dp/B008FNHF8O/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=leukotape&qid=1665177599&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIzLjA0IiwicXNhIjoiMi43NCIsInFzcCI6IjIuNzgifQ%3D%3D&sr=8-4

 

[sussle]

When I was a teenager, it was pretty common to have friends who had open sores from scrapes resulting
from skate boarding or other mishaps. They were made worse by the effects of saltwater on the raw skin
to heal and some got quite deep. Now that I'm getting more water time I'm finding myself in the same situation.

that's funny, i always had sort of a mythical assumption (meaning zero data) that saltwater helped heal everything. it always seems to shrink my wounds

I have a lot of callouses on my feet

In the tropics they macerate and split open.

I have it down to a science how to care for them and keep surfing.

But due to sue culture cannot share.

hey - i have the same problem! doesn't effect surfing but it periodically disturbs walking greatly.

also split fingers, right at the corner of the nail. hurts like a mofo sometimes - i have been known to fill a surgical glove with moisturizer and sleep that way, to soften the hand and speed the healing.

seems like the trick is to be proactive about controlling the callous build-up and dryness, but skincare just does not pop up on my radar until it hurts and by then, it's usually too late. someday i will learn, but at this point, probably not.

 

[SurfDoc]

Callouses seem neat and strong feet, but your feet are an entry source to the body for infection. Soft, healthy skin is critically important to long term health. Feet should be washed daily and apply creams and/or lotions liberally to keep the skin soft, pliable and with good circulation. Good circulation makes sure nutrients and the immune system are working properly yes even in your paws!

 

[SurfDoc]

As for wound care, traumatic and/or surgical. First is control loss of blood. Then thorough cleansing. Soap and water. Peroxide can help. Depending on depth and area there could be a need to oppose edges (suturing) or provide protection (bandaging). Daily care is essential. Remove crust, re-clean, re-dress. Often that requires keep a wound dry for several days up to weeks depending on wound characteristics. That means no surfing for larger wounds, infected wounds etc. Self-care is great, but if you don't know get expert advice.

 

[sussle]

Callouses seem neat and strong feet, but your feet are an entry source to the body for infection. Soft, healthy skin is critically important to long term health. Feet should be washed daily and apply creams and/or lotions liberally to keep the skin soft, pliable and with good circulation. Good circulation makes sure nutrients and the immune system are working properly yes even in your paws!

i guess i grew up with sort of a cultural/gender bias with regards to moisturizing and skin care in general...we had health class but they talked about things like dental care. at home, it was brush your teeth, clip your nails, wash your ears etc....and then later, i guess there was some shaving advice thrown. but i don't ever recall seeing my dad or my friends use moisturizer or heard it recommended....nor was it pushed in media/advertising aimed at boys/young men. but i can recall, to this day, commercials for soft skin products that were aimed solely at girls/women. i didn't get the message

edit: surfdoc's post reminds me of growing up in the South Inlet in AC....you walked around all summer - from the beach to the store to your house to your friend's house etc - barefoot over chunks of concrete, broken glass, debris, all the rubble of a bombed-out neighborhood. after awhile, you basically had grown callous soles on the bottom of your feet. we used to call it "inlet feet".

 

[Mike_Jones]

.
Take DHEA.

The sex steroid precursor DHEA accelerates cutaneous wound healing via the estrogen receptors - PubMed

Age-related impaired wound healing states lead to substantial morbidity and cost, with treatment in the USA resulting in an expenditure of over $9 billion per annum. Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is a ubiquitous adrenal hormone with immunomodulatory properties whose levels decline significantly...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

.

 

[sdsrfr]

stepped on something sharp enough to puncture the callus on my forefoot this past summer walking to the beach. no idea what it was but definitely went in deeper than the usual sharp rock. never bled.

ignored it for a while but the annoyance of it never went away. eventually started removing the callus to see if something was caught in there like a thorn. every time I open it up, nothing comes out but the sharp sticking sensation goes away for a few days until the callus reforms and closes over the top of the puncture.

every time I dig it out there is a clear puncture hole but nothing noticeable inside nor typical signs of infection.

i guess the trick is to try and keep the hole in my callus open so the actual wound can stay clean?

 

[Bob Dobbalina]

Back to the lime debate:

I got reef cuts on my hip in Tahiti.
A got a ride in from a French doctor.
He said to save the limes for caipirinhas and use peroxide or alcohol, but not bedadine (if I remember correctly).

My roomates still insisted on liming me. It's a peculiar sensation.

 

[One-Off]

Back to the lime debate:

I got reef cuts on my hip in Tahiti.
A got a ride in from a French doctor.
He said to save the limes for caipirinhas and use peroxide or alcohol, but not bedadine (if I remember correctly).

My roomates still insisted on liming me. It's a peculiar sensation.

I lived 3 years in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The standard for treating cuts was- peroxide, betadine, neosporin, in that order.

 

[GromsDad]

Tomorrow will be 20 days since I had a seemingly minor bicycle crash. Biking in the dark I snagged my tire on the edge of a slight transition between surfaces and went down at full speed. Could have been really bad but slid out of it and hopped right up and continued the ride. Knee was stinging a bit but didn't think much of it. Didn't put a hole in my pants or anything. When I got home I had a pretty decent brush burn a little bigger than a quarter on my knee. Over the next couple of days this thing turned cherry red and became very painful. Now here I am on day 19 and just yesterday I feel like it has turned the corner and is finally improving. Tried everything to get this thing to heal. Never had something so silly keep me out of the water for this long. Its right in the worst spot if you're going to put on a wetsuit and bend your knee.

 

[2surf]

I lived 3 years in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The standard for treating cuts was- peroxide, betadine, neosporin, in that order.

Neosporin? I have a draw full of various creams Kaiser dermatologists prescribed to me for wound healing. The only one that seemed to work was Neosporin. When I admitted that I was using it my doctor kinda freaked out. Apparently some people have reported heart issues that were traced to its use so kaiser banned it. Of course my next question was why they have been pushing me to get more Covid shots then?

I’ve also had good results with the long healing process by applying Ammonium Lactate lotion to the healing area. This was recommended by my plastic surgeon who I credited with saving my leg.

 

[oneula]

First there was the self undiagnosed burst appendix
Thought I had a really bad stomach virus they said one more day I would have died
Then the blood poisoning septic shock I got from the mishandling of the initial drain implant procedure
Then waking up in tremendous pain from an unexpected 10 inch slice from my groin to my belly button they did after going in with a scope and realizing they need to clean me up pronto (even morphine didn't help)
4 weeks in the hospital with two tubes in my gut feeding two drain bags
only to go home and have the slice get infected and burst the stitches
the only recourse was to just clean it and wait for it close up on its own (many painful weeks)
the only thing worse was my poor sister having to clean out the pus everyday and redress it.
leave it to Kaiser

otherwise for cuts it's always epson salt/peroxide/iodine baths and topped off with that red mercurachrome stuff you can't find anymore
once as a kid when a morey eel sliced my FU finger in two lengthwise, my dad packed tobacco on it and wrapped it closed with duct tape till I got to the dispensary at barbers. The medic laughed.

sorry for the grossness

 

[VonMeister]

View attachment 144640

Would not bang.

 

[Swallow Tail]

Somebody give me the cliff notes please

I have a small wound on my knee, have had it for many months now, wont fully heal. More of an annoyance than anything. in the water 3-5x a week

 

[$kully]

I had a deep more than superficial wound on the palm of my hand years ago. It was deep enough that fat was pushing out of the incision and I had to stuff it back in. Prob should have gotten stitches but neglected to. It was a point when I was in the water a lot. Like 4-5 days a week and everything I tried bandage wise was failing. I’d get out of the water and it would be completely waterlogged and white around the edges and nasty and red in the middle but from what I recall it was never really painful to angry like it was infected. But it just wasn’t healing. Finally I resorted to superglue and it worked like a charm. Kept the wound from getting waterlogged and let it heal. Surprisingly it’s somehow the cleanest scar on my body. I keloid easily and I have scars even from simple dermatologist mole scrapings. I’ve had other wounds that doctors did beautiful jobs stitching up that still left me with nasty keloids. Not this one, you can barely see it.

 

[Mr Doof]

Somebody give me the cliff notes please

I have a small wound on my knee, have had it for many months now, wont fully heal. More of an annoyance than anything. in the water 3-5x a week

Not infected, right?

Smear some Vaseline on it at least once a day, and before and after surfing.

I think that is close enough to the Cliff Note version.

 

[PRCD]

Somebody give me the cliff notes please

I have a small wound on my knee, have had it for many months now, wont fully heal. More of an annoyance than anything. in the water 3-5x a week

The water and friction really seem to make these small wounds take forever to heal. I've got a corn on the bottom of my 2nd metatarsal that I need to sand-off. I kept a NexCare bandage on it for two weeks.

 

[VonMeister]

I had a deep more than superficial wound on the palm of my hand years ago. It was deep enough that fat was pushing out of the incision and I had to stuff it back in. Prob should have gotten stitches but neglected to. It was a point when I was in the water a lot. Like 4-5 days a week and everything I tried bandage wise was failing. I’d get out of the water and it would be completely waterlogged and white around the edges and nasty and red in the middle but from what I recall it was never really painful to angry like it was infected. But it just wasn’t healing. Finally I resorted to superglue and it worked like a charm. Kept the wound from getting waterlogged and let it heal. Surprisingly it’s somehow the cleanest scar on my body. I keloid easily and I have scars even from simple dermatologist mole scrapings. I’ve had other wounds that doctors did beautiful jobs stitching up that still left me with nasty keloids. Not this one, you can barely see it.

Instead of 4-5 baths per week you should just take showers.

 

[Mr J]

2 weeks and one day ago I slammed on my skimboard. I did a water drop on a long steep bank at the open beach where there was a big swell washing up lots of water to create a long runway. The board hit a ridge in the sand and abruptly stopped skimming. I was wearing a shortie and banged my knee. There was a white oval patch about 3cm long just to the right of my patellar tendon where the skin had been lost Within a few minutes it started bleeding and after washing under a tap in beach carpark looked like the skin of a strawberry.

I have borderline low neutrophils which have shown up in blood tests for years, no idea why. Docs never bothered to investigate further or even mention it (until recently). Might explain why scrapes are difficult to heal for me - I seem to get scabs that is not very healthy looking (not all dark). So I was fairly pissed off. I visited this thread and did a search for neosporin - not available in Australia, I don't think any antibiotics are available without prescription.

However, the neosporin website has good links to wound care first aid Tips for Treating & Healing Cuts, Scrapes & Other Wounds | BAND-AID® Brand and after reading what people had to say here about vaseline, jelly and keeping covered I decided to try and follow that.

I started off with just using anti bacterial handwash, the wound ointment (looks like vaseline) and putting a non stick dressing on top of that held in place with tape. The non stick dressing is like a perforated plastic film sandwich around a thin cotton pad. I put copious amounts of that jelly like ointment on - at the edges of the scrape, it won't stick to the wet raw wound. Changed it twice a day, washing off the handwash with a hosepipe outside. In the shower I covered it with a waterproof plaster. About 2 days into the treatment I decided to try the Wound Spray - I stopped for one day after this because it seemed to result in a more stained bandage overnight. Then decided to carry on anyway with it. The instructions say it can be used together with the jelly ointment. Things did seem to be steadily improving day by day.

I didn't stop surfing and I didn't stop skateboarding. I could tell this wasn't helping because I would come back from a session with an increased stain on the bandage (if skating) or waterproof plaster if surfing. The skateboarding wasn't too bad because the scrape was just to the right of my knee tendon and didn't get full compression in a knee slide. I also think the jelly was lubricating the plastic film. I tried changing my kneeslide stepping sequence to land left knee first, but it was all awkward and not conducive to safe bails. I didn't realise that I always land right knee first until this, although the right side plastic cap does always wear more than the left. The answer for surfing was to continue wearing the shortie - that way I didn't have the wetsuit chafing/compressing the skin on my knee. Just before a surf, I would put the Max hold Nexcare waterproof plaster on, then take off and put the would spray, jelly and non stick dressing on after that session. I frequently surf twice in a day, so got thru a lot of plasters. The band aid instructions say that dressings should keep moisture in for better healing, but not be saturated/watertight hence the removal after surf.

The other problem I have is that I always start to get an allergic reaction to waterproof plasters in particular and get blisters. So I minimised this by using an extra large dressing which I shifted around and tried to tape in a different spot every day. When it got smaller alternated between the sensitive xl plaster and the dressing. Even so I got a blister from the Max hold waterproof plaster - which I am now treating! but its only small.

Yesterday after exactly 2 weeks after injury I was able to surf without any plaster - skin completely grown over. Purple and blotchy (pic below taken today), but the skin is there and sudocrem zinc ointment will stick to it completely without sliding off.

Thanks to everyone who posted info here.