First Aid
Analog for
Dumbasses

Stop it before you clean it, wrap it, or worry about it

1. Press directly on the wound. Bare hand, cloth, shirt — whatever's closest. Don't go looking for a clean bandage first. Pressure now beats sterile later.
2. Keep pressing. Don't peek every ten seconds to check. If blood soaks through, add more cloth on top of what's there — don't remove the first layer.
3. Elevate the wound above the heart if you can do it without moving something that might be broken.
4. Pack deep wounds with clean cloth or gauze, pressing it into the wound itself, then hold pressure on top.
5. Tourniquet as a last resort for a limb wound that won't stop with pressure — 2 inches above the wound, tight enough to stop the bleeding, and note the time out loud or write it on the person's skin. A tourniquet is a decision, not a first move.

Water first, everything else second

• Run cool (not ice-cold) water over the burn for 10–20 minutes. This is the single most useful thing you can do, and most people stop too early.
• Remove rings, watches, or tight clothing near the burn before swelling starts.
• Cover loosely with a clean, dry cloth. Don't wrap it tight.
• Leave blisters alone. A popped blister is an open wound waiting for infection.

Get real help if: the burn is larger than the person's palm, it's on the face, hands, joints, or genitals, the skin looks white or leathery instead of red, or it was caused by chemicals or electricity.

You don't need to know which one it is to treat it right

• Immobilize the joint above and below the injury — a broken forearm needs the wrist and elbow held still too.
• Splint with anything rigid: a stick, a rolled magazine, a piece of board — padded with cloth, then tied snug (not tight) above and below the injury site.
• R.I.C.E. for sprains and minor injuries: Rest, Ice (or cool water if no ice), Compression with a wrap, Elevation above the heart.
• Check fingers or toes past the injury every so often — if they go cold, numb, or blue-white, the splint's too tight.

The body shutting down circulation to save the core

Watch for: pale, cool, clammy skin, rapid weak pulse, fast shallow breathing, confusion or a blank stare, and extreme thirst.

• Lay the person flat and elevate the legs about 12 inches, unless a leg or spinal injury is suspected.
• Keep them warm — a blanket, coat, or even cardboard between them and the cold ground.
• Keep talking to them, calmly. Reassurance genuinely helps here, not just emotionally — panic worsens shock.

This is the one chapter that's worth practicing, not just reading

Choking, conscious adult: Stand behind them, one fist above the navel, grab it with your other hand, and pull sharply inward and upward. Repeat until the object clears or they go unconscious.

Unresponsive, not breathing normally: Call for help any way you can — yell, send someone, radio, whatever's available. Push hard and fast in the center of the chest, about 2 inches deep, roughly 100–120 pushes a minute — the tempo of a fast, steady beat. Keep going until they respond, someone trained takes over, or you're physically unable to continue.

The body has one thermostat and two ways to break it

Heat exhaustion: heavy sweating, weakness, nausea, headache. Move to shade, remove excess clothing, sip water, cool the skin with a wet cloth.

Heatstroke (an emergency): confusion, hot dry or flushed skin, no sweating, very high body heat. Cool the body aggressively — wet cloths, shade, fanning — while getting real medical help underway.

Hypothermia: uncontrollable shivering that later stops, slurred speech, fumbling hands, confusion. Get them dry, insulated from the ground, and warmed gradually — skin-to-skin or layered blankets, not a hot bath or direct high heat.

Infection is the real threat once the bleeding stops

• Clean with the cleanest water available — boiled and cooled counts. Rinse the wound out, don't just wipe around it.
• Close small, clean cuts with butterfly strips or clean tape if the edges pull together easily.
• Cover with a clean dressing and change it daily, or sooner if it gets wet or dirty.
• Watch for infection: increasing redness, warmth, swelling, red streaking, pus, or fever. That's your sign to get real medical care, not wait it out.

Dehydration and food poisoning put more people down than dramatic injuries do

• Boiling water for one full minute (three minutes at high altitude) kills essentially everything that would make you sick.
• Purification tablets or a few drops of plain unscented bleach (about 8 drops per gallon, let it sit 30 minutes) work when you can't boil.
• When power's out, food safety runs on a clock: a full freezer holds safe temperature about 48 hours unopened; a fridge, about 4 hours. After that, treat perishables as questionable.

A radio that needs no power source is not a myth

It sounds like a trick, but it's basic physics: a long wire antenna picks up radio waves, a tuning coil selects one station's frequency, and a diode strips the audio out of it — enough energy to drive a simple earpiece, no outside power involved at all. People built these at home for a century before batteries were standard in anything.

More practical for most people today: a hand-crank or solar AM/FM radio, often with a built-in flashlight and a NOAA weather-band channel. A minute of cranking buys real listening time, and it's the one device in a blackout guaranteed to still tell you what's happening outside your block.

Radios that don't route through a cell tower

• CB radio needs no license, works vehicle-to-vehicle or base-to-base for a few miles, and was standard equipment in trucks and cars for decades before cell phones existed.
• FRS/GMRS walkie-talkies are the cheap, no-training entry point — fine for a family or neighborhood staying in contact without any network at all.
• Ham radio takes a license (a weekend of study, genuinely not hard) but can reach across town, across the state, or across the world depending on the gear and the atmosphere. It's the one civilian technology built specifically to keep working when everything else goes down — hams are often the first working communication link after major disasters.

The satellites don't fail — your battery does

• Keep a real paper map of your area and any place you travel often — folded in the glovebox, not just bookmarked in an app.
• A basic compass and the ability to read one isn't nostalgia, it's a skill with a shelf life of never expiring.
• The sun rises roughly east and sets roughly west — a stick in the ground and its shadow's movement will get you a rough direction with nothing else at all.

The stuff that was built before "dead battery" was a possibility

• Mechanical wind-up watches and clocks — your Sony clock radio's ancestor. No power, no drift from a dead backup battery, keeps running as long as it's wound.
• Manual can openers — the electric version is a novelty. The hand-crank one has never once needed charging.
• Hand-crank flashlights and radios — thirty seconds of cranking for real minutes of use, no battery to go dead in storage.
• Analog kitchen and meat thermometers — a coiled bimetal strip doing the same job a digital chip does, with nothing to short out.

None of this is about rejecting modern tech — it's about knowing what still works when the modern version doesn't.

If your phone is dead, wet, or lost — what do you actually know?

• Keep a physical list of important phone numbers — family, doctor, insurance, work — somewhere that doesn't need power to read.
• Photocopies or printouts of ID, insurance cards, and medical info, in a folder or a bag, not just a photo on a dead phone.
• Some cash on hand. Card readers and ATMs need power and network too — a wallet flat broke of cash finds that out the hard way during any real outage.

Before electricity, this was the entire chapter

• Matches and a butane lighter, kept dry, are more dependable than any electric arc lighter that needs its own charge.
• Candles and oil lamps put out real usable light for hours per unit, with nothing to recharge.
• Knowing how to build and control a small fire safely is a skill, not a Boy Scout badge — for warmth, light, boiling water, and cooking, all at once.