Week 5. Drsg = dressing

Wounds must heal from the inside out, the ruptured skin one's largest organ.

Wound care: to change dressings, carefully loosen the tape around margins. Moisten if dressings stick during removal, then assess and measure the damage, including size, color of tissue present, amount and type of exudate and color. There may be tunnels, undermining, necrosis, awe-inspiring and terrifying geological formations of the flesh, craters and caverns, deep vale all the way to white bone. Irrigate with 0.9% saline, or tears, if you like.

Actually, no crying into open wounds, because maintaining a sterile field is imperative for healing. Never turn your back, either. Pack gauze, cover, tape, box method.

And if the gruesome, bone-in-the-middle wound doesn't kill one, one's GPS might try to kill her by repeatedly sending her back to the same spot, barking, "turn left," (into oncoming traffic), over and over again. She might survive, but the P. sennae butterflies liquified against her windshield sure won't. Good thing they're pests, though the definition of what constitutes a pest is rather subjective, isn't it?

A dozen yellow-winged butterflies will turn a dusty white Prius into a motley chrysalis from which a registered nurse may emerge with her angel wings at some point in the next 1.5-2 years. That, or she keeps driving, sailing along like everything's normal because she doesn't realize she's actually dead, having turned head-on into incoming traffic, just like she was told to do, and carries on anyway, ghost in a shell.



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