Some readers may be offended by the graphic nature this post. Discretion is required.

 

This week the ‘home theatre’ took on new meaning in the School of Applied Neopeasantry’s outdoor kitchen.

It became a site of needlework poetics and self-doctoring after Patrick took a blow from a cricket ball, bowled by Woody.

What a grand opportunity for this grubby neopeasant to practice the craft of self-suturing, and for us to share the story.

Earlier, at the ground where the sport took place, Woody and friend Fab scattered to find plantain (rib wort) as blood spewed forth onto the pitch. This useful, sometimes scruffy common medicine is found in almost all places where wounds commonly take place.

Years before, playing soccer, Zephyr had run to find his old man the same herb after Patrick sustained a head injury that required a number of stitches. Both times, then and now, Patrick masticated the coagulating, antimicrobial leaves in his mouth,

and quelled the blood of the head wound by placing the green mush onto the cut. A medical doctor friend, whom he played soccer with 12 years ago, stitched Patrick on the side of the field, and remarked how well the plantain had stopped the flow of blood. This time, after dabbling with self-suturing a little since the soccer head collision, Patrick felt ready for the next stage of creating the home emergency ward.

Sooted stretched sheep skins gave wall to the surgery, and blood-stained hands and dirt under the fingernails spoke of no violence of purity, often claimed by those who say they want to keep us safe. A sewing needle was fetched and so too the workshop’s old diamond stone to sharpen it by.

Then some modicum of cleanliness followed with the sharpened patchwork needle being dropped in a small dish of Brother Eucalyptus oil.

And the thread on hand, a piece of dental floss, was threaded through the needle and lowered into the oil as well.

So far we had all that we needed for the surgery. A kettle of boiling mountain rain water was poured into a bowl, then some previously boiled, now cooled water added, and then a splash of the cleaning oil.

This made a wash solution for inside the wound and around it.

Courage was mustered by this doctor of poetics, though the natural shock at the cut after the ball struck, was anaesthetic enough not to warrant worry for the procedure. Breath was breathed. Trust was trusted. A stable hand placed the needle. Some more youthful eyes would have been good, but not on offer, so in it went.

Relief! The first stitch holes punctured as though a through line in the series, Collapse of the cult of safetyism.

After puncturing the skin in two places in the middle of the wound, and pulling the threaded needle through, Patrick tied a double knot.

He cut off the remains of the dental floss thread and did the same for another two stitches. “This is fun!” He exclaimed to Meg. “The home theatre of deep adaptation.”

Patrick laboured gently just as he had done countless times sewing up our torn or worn clothes over the years. He was mightily chuffed with himself by the end of the third stitch. Self doctoring (and dentistry) in a time of collapse is more exhilarating than you would think. It’s empowering.

After the stitching was complete, he smeared our garden bee’s honey across the wound, as an external antiseptic and wound healing salve.

The whole procedure took around twenty minutes, and a few hours later (after a deep sleep) the bruising appeared.

48 hours later, after two days of deep rest and goodly sleep – the best medicine life has on offer (which hospitals disallow) – including nine hours of listening to the mass catalogue of woundings and killings in a telling of The Iliad, Patrick’s wound looked like this.

A cricket ball weighs 156 grams and Woody bowls at around 100 km/hr. So effectively this cricket ball is a punch in the face at high velocity. It is the order of things when a son, fairly, beats his dad. Another 48 hours on, the wound looked like this.

The following day was Saturday, and Patrick captained the senior cricket team, scored 60 runs alongside Zeph’s 57 and Woody took a wicket to each contribute to a mighty win. Initially Patrick batted in a helmet (a first for him), but took it off because he couldn’t quite see the ball. On Sunday, day six, he took the stitches out,

which was actually the most difficult bit, and where much of the learning took place.

The dental floss had began to fall apart, and we didn’t want any of it to be left inside in case it caused an infection. Dosing up on zinc, vitamin C, sugar-free food, plantain salve, mineral water pumped from down in the forest, and significant rest assisted Patrick’s immune system, so he could more quickly recover, fight off infection, and get back to the cricket. However, on day six, he was concerned that the poor integrity of the thread could send all the good doctoring backwards.

After the removal was complete and the wound site cleaned, it looked like this.

Then, on day seven of Patrick’s healing, Zeph called us from work. A large pane of glass had fallen and shattered across his arm, cutting it in several places. The nearby Maldon clinic doctor refused to even look under the bandage and told him to go to Bendigo Hospital emergency ward.

Patrick collected him in our friend Bei’s car, spoke with Zeph about potentially home suturing, attempted to get hold of a suture kit from some medical friends, talked about the possibility of laceration to a tendon or a nerve, and then decided it best to head to Bendigo. They arrived at 4pm, got triaged (that ugly word), had the cuts looked at, and then took a seat in that hot, stuffy place.

While waiting Patrick was thinking about our friend who lost a finger in this same emergency ward, due to having to wait seven hours to be looked at. When he was finally seen, the doctor said, oops, we needed to have seen you hours ago to have saved your finger. At the three and a half hour mark Patrick asked Administration Clerk 1 politely whether he could take home a suture kit and do the job himself.
The nurse looked confused and said, “No… I don’t think so, I’d have to ask.”
Patrick responded with a smile, in his wife-beater singlet: “I am a doctor you know.”
“Are you?” she said unsurely.
“Yes, a doctor of literature,” he replied smiling. “I stitched up my own face last Monday.”
She glanced at the wound above his eye.
“Let me look in the system… Oh, your son is next in line, shouldn’t be long now.”
“Thanks nurse, appreciate it.”

They were having fun. Or, at least Patrick was. Then, miraculously, Zeph’s name was called and we were ushered into a fairly dirty little clinic by a lovely Sri Lankan doctor. Patrick asked if he could watch the procedure because, as he said, he loves to learn. The doctor was obliging. Zeph was mightily relieved that at 8pm (the incident having taken place around 1pm) someone was finally going to take a look at his arm and assess whether there was tendon or nerve damage.

By comparison, in the home emergency ward last week Patrick stitched himself up within an hour of his accident. Because of his old man’s keen student-like attention and questioning, the doctor was very accommodating and taught as though giving a workshop. Patrick repaid the favour by schooling her on toxic adjuvants in vaccines and the over-prescribing of them, after she offered Zeph a tetanus shot. Naturally, due to her education in western medicine, adjuvants (the largely untold shadow side of vaccinology) were things she had never heard of. She was refreshingly open to learning. Her first job was to ascertain whether there was glass in the wound and whether a tendon or nerve had been damaged. She washed the wound under a bright light.

She used a syringe of salty water to irrigate out any broken pieces, and then showed her impromptu student how to open the wound and look down into it after flushing away the blood, to search for any white regions. White, Patrick discovered, means nerve or tendon. After the clean out, the lacerations looked quite trivial. It pays to thoroughly investigate the situation first, thought Patrick. “Observe first. That’s what I should have done when I first picked up Zeph,” he later reflected to Meg.

Patrick noted the way the doctor cut away the dead skin, and how she applied the nylon thread and the fishhook needle to suture Zeph’s wounds. As a fellow sewer, Patrick was impressed.

While a makeshift emergency ward suited Patrick’s purposes to self-suture last week, it’s a little different doctoring someone else without the right gear or missing knowledge. However, after last night’s free tutorial, it’s actually all pretty straight forward. Suturing skin is really low-skilled labour, and we have no idea why nurses are not trained to do this work, especially when small regional hospitals and clinics are now refusing to do it. This morning we heard from our medical friends saying they have saved for us some unused suture kits whose expiry date has passed, and instead of burning them as medical waste, and contributing to the great waste pollution stream of the industrial medical complex, they’re going to give them to us.

“I could have done this myself,” said Patrick to Zeph on the late, long drive home last night, “but I’m glad for the extra schooling.” It certainly has been a week of gold in terms of learning for a future with an ever greater reduction of services in regional Australia.

What are your self-doctoring lessons and stories? We’d love to hear how you are responding to the decline of affluence and the real, everyday need to skill up at home to take the pressure off a broken health system, made even more bankrupt by the ridiculous and excessive Covid response.

Onwards and upwards! Thanks for reading all the way and stomaching some of the more gory images.