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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Better than Stitches, Fast as Light

From time to time in this glamorous life we all get cuts and scrapes. Kitchen, workshop, you know the drill. Left to themselves these insults usually heal, unless they are exposed to bad environments like the gym, public library, Uber car, mass transit or hospital. Bandages help, but do not eliminate the possibility of infection. Being a clean freak living in the age of MRSA I have long been searching for a better solution.

A while back I tried gluing cuts with superglue. It kinda worked but superglue, also known as methyl methacrylate has some drawbacks.

Methacrylate emits acrid fumes when it cures, usually after an unpredictable duration depending on the age of the batch. In large quantities, especially in contact with cotton, it can exotherm resulting in a serious burn, defeating the purpose of using it. After that it is either a too little or too much situation and the resulting "patch" lifts from the skin fairly quickly. The worse thing is that the dermal repair has a scratchy sandpaper, hard plastic, inflexible sort of feeling. After several repairs with superglue, I have rejected it because it just doesn't feel right.

After that I tried a product called New Skin. New skin smells like bitter acetate film stock or dissolving butyl rubber. Even the tiniest drop fills the house with a chemical aroma that takes at least a half an hour to dissipate. 

I have tried drying it with a hair dryer and even a paint stripper set to low and held at a distnace (NOT recommended) but it is a very slow to evaporate solvent. If that were it, I still might use it. But invariably after it sets and I go back to what I was doing, the repair will delaminate as though my body were trying to reject it. And yes I do all the normal skin cleaning, disinfection and drying before hand to insure a durable bond. I recommend Betadine by the way, but I'm not a doctor, I'm an engineer as you might have already figured out.

Yesterday I was lamenting over the delamination of a recent wound to the very same fingers I am using to type this message. I had used New Skin and thought I had a good repair, but after doing the dishes it came off as usual. The puncture wound was small, it never got infected, but because of the density of nerve endings it was painful to work. I can't afford down time.

Then it hit me, I wanted a smooth liquid plastic that I could somehow apply to the wound to make an artificial blister. When it set I wanted it to still be flexible, but thoroughly bound for the 4 to 6 days it would take the skin to heal by exfoliation and whatever little dermacytes do when they are healing.

For Christmas a friend of mine had given me an ultraviolet 5 second plastic repair kit, used to repair eyeglasses and various things around the house. I noticed when using it as recommended for eyeglasses that the cure was extremely fast, usually in 3 seconds. Since this is about the length of my attention span there was a good fit there. Moreover the plastic was very smooth and slightly flexible, yet it bound inextricably to the substrate, which as you by now have guessed, would inevitably be me.

Now Louis Pasteur inoculated himself with cowpox while he was attempting to cure smallpox. I am not so bold, but at this moment of desperation I was just bold enough to place a tiny drop of liquid plastic on my painful puncture wound and illuminate it with the ultraviolet LED that came with the kit.

Much to my surprise, as I shined the light on it, it stung SHARPLY but briefly the same way the New Skin stung. Now the New Skin sting was chemical in nature due to the ester solvent which takes forever to set. In the 5 second repair case I assume that this was due to the instant heat of polymerization. This means one should proceed very cautiously with the UV light, especially on larger wounds, since burning one's wounds is unfashionable at best. I posit it best to hold the UV LED several feet away and approach slowly until one feels the reaction starting. After a pause, I polished with light at close range, which also sterilizes the wound. Do not look directly at UV light since it is hard on the eyes. I could lecture on UV photons but I won't.

Anyway, that was yesterday, the process worked, and it is holding up very well, without that scratchy feeling. I can palpate the repair with my handy opposable thumb but I don't have the urge to pull or pick at the solid plastic bubble of repair. It is me and I am repaired nearly perfectly by 5 second plastic. 




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