Practical, Small EDC Emergency Items

Practical, Small Every Day Carry (EDC) Emergency Items

“Attention all passengers, is there a medical professional on board the aircraft? If you are a medical professional, please press your call light button or come to the aft of the aircraft.”

As a former EMT and sometimes nursing student, I often thought about what I would do if I were ever on board a flight and there was a medical emergency. To be clear, I no longer hold a current EMT-B certification, it lapsed during a time when I had a newborn and some health issues to deal with, and once it’s been more than 2 years, you must retake the class, retest and re-certify.

I will do that at some point but haven’t had the time. I no longer consider myself to be a “medical professional” though I maintain a deep interest in medicine and try to stay current on emergency medicine procedures.

The EDC Plan

Last month, my children and I accompanied my husband on a work trip out of town. As I always do, I packed carefully, rearranging my everyday carry (EDC) items so that I could carry with me the small pouch of emergency related supplies, while removing any prohibited items such as knives. In my efforts to be as prepared as possible, it can be difficult for me to not overthink what all I need to take, so I try to think of the most likely to be needed items without going overboard.

Essentially, what this leaves me with is two small pouches, each roughly palm sized. One is an Adventure Medical Kits “Trauma Pak Pro” which contains a SWAT tourniquet, Quik Clot hemostatic gauze, sterile gauze pads, gloves, alcohol swabs and an assortment of bandages. The Trauma Pak comes prefilled and I augment it with additional bandaids/bandages.

The other pouch is just a small black zipper pouch with molle straps. It contains a Sawyer Mini water filter, water bag, purification tablets, emergency meds, small assortment of OTC meds such as ibuprofen, diarrhea and nausea treatments, emergency food ration tablets, Trioral Oral Electrolyte Rehydration Salts, emergency cash, 2 Mylar emergency blankets, a small flashlight with extra batteries, a small ferro rod, a roll of Leukotape and a small hank of 550 paracord.

Additionally, I usually EDC a small multi tool and a larger knife, but those get removed and put in checked luggage when we fly.

These two items go basically everywhere with me. Lest you think I’m being paranoid, let me assure you that I’ve had occasion to use the contents no less than 4 times in the last year, and that’s not counting just pulling out the flashlight to look for something.

The Flight

So, there I sat, on board a Southwest Airlines flight a little after 10 pm, after an exhausting day wrangling two small children and getting them settled onto the plane. My 2 year old had woken up and I’d let her out of her car seat to snuggle her back to sleep when a flight crew person came over the speaker to request assistance from medical personnel.

I glanced across the aisle at my husband and down at my daughter. I looked around the plane, waiting for someone – ANYONE – to stand up. Nothing. I didn’t feel quite right going back there if someone more qualified or at least current on certification/licensing were present, but I quickly realized, there might not BE anyone else on board and the clock was ticking. I knew flight crews communicate with medical control – a medical team that includes a physician on the ground during emergencies – so, I knew that if it were something I didn’t know how to handle, they would be able to talk me through it.

Several minutes passed with no one volunteering and finally, I handed my daughter to my husband, grabbed my pouches and went to the back of the plane, where I introduced myself as prior EMT- Basic, not currently certified.

The situation was a young female athlete who had collapsed near the aft restrooms. Thankfully after we worked with her a bit, she regained consciousness and we deduced that the cause was most likely dehydration, possible altitude related illness and a known, genetic heart rhythm abnormality.

I asked the crew if they had anything like an electrolyte solution or rehydration salts in their first aid kit. They did not think that they did. From my little zipper pouch, I produced one of the packets of Oral Rehydration Salts that I’d brought along. After clearing with medical control, we got her sipping on a bottle of water with the rehydration salts mixed in and she began feeling better quickly.

Once she was alert and oriented, I gave her another packet to carry with her and explained what it was and how to use it and recommended that she order some and carry with her when she travels. She’d previously experienced something similar that had been determined to be altitude related, and she had been in Denver for a competition that day.

Thankfully, she recovered quickly and was able to walk off the plane on her own, to meet paramedics at the gate.

Post-event analysis

I didn’t perform any miracles that day, I didn’t “save her life” or do anything heroic. I think even if I hadn’t gone back there, she would have been just fine. What I DID hopefully do is provide some comfort and have on hand an EDC item that may have made a big difference in her ability to make it through the rest of the flight ok and leave the aircraft on her own power rather than possibly having needed to divert the flight to land sooner or her needing to be carried off the flight if she weren’t stabilized enough to walk off. She was very thankful and her family was very relieved that she was feeling so much better.

It’s better to be prepared than worry about your image

I’ve been picked on for being “paranoid” for carrying these items with me and I’ve even felt kind of silly at times for insisting that I have them with me. I’m really glad that I had them with me that day and the experience reinforced WHY I carry them.

Is it “overboard” to EDC a tourniquet? The state I live in has the highest mass shooting rate in the nation. There was a shooting at my neighborhood grocery store while I was there. We lived only a few miles from the Aurora theater shooting. Multiple other shooting related incidents have happened in places that I frequently go. I believe that anyone who regularly carries a firearm should also carry with them a tourniquet and a hemostatic clotting agent. Stuff happens and there is no reason to not be prepared for a worst case scenario.

I’ve used the paracord multiple times for things like:

-tying down the hood of my car when the latch malfunctioned and the hood flew up and cracked my windshield while driving on the freeway. Securing it quickly on the side of the road meant being able to safely drive to a place that didn’t have traffic whizzing by at high speeds, to further evaluate what needed to be done.

-a clothesline to hang up clothing to dry while traveling.

-secure things to the roof rack of the car.

-quickly secure my small greenhouse to a bucket of cement during a windstorm.

How I determine what to carry

My rationale for the specific tools in my EDC kit are: 1. What am I most likely to need throughout my day. 2. In an emergency situation, what tools will be necessary to ensure our safety. The contents of my pouch can be used for food, water (including purification) and shelter, fire starting, necessary medications and the means to acquire more food. Additionally, I have the tools to handle the most urgent medical crisis – stop bleeding and establish an airway (know cpr) – and hopefully buy time for EMS to arrive with lifesaving equipment.

The items that I opt to carry with me may not be the most practical for you to carry, but I encourage you to develop some sort of small kit that you can have on hand to help you deal with situations that may arise. It doesn’t have to be extensive but put some thought into what the most frequent things you use are and what things would be most useful in an emergency situation.