Vacuuming the Wounded

The Wound VAC is one of those twisted bastards of our time - a primitive device that when cloaked in Madison Avenue packaging becomes a hot new billionaire-making device of dreams.

At its essence, its a sponge and vacuum seal for the human body, consisting of four basic pieces of equipment: 1) a black foam sponge; 2) a piece of bio-occlusive dressing (basically sticky saran-wrap); 3) tubing and 4) a boom-box shaped vacuum appliance.

Meant initially for large gaping wounds of the abdominal sort, the wound VAC may sound like medicine for the home economics set, but the crazy thing it actually works. The sponge gets cut into the rough shape of the wound, and is covered by the bio-occlusive dressing. Cut a hole into the transparent layer over the sponge, slap on a custom-fit sticky tubing conduit, and you're ready for business. Anyone who's ever vacuum-sealed produce or meat knows the satisfaction of the suck - that moment where the smooth bubble of plastic collapses down into a tensely dense shrink wrap. It's a joy akin to the pure pleasure of popping packing bubbles and a crunching a three-hole-puncher. Only this time the thing that's being packaged is a person.

Doctors love wound vacs because the vacuum force literally pulls in the edges of the wound and helps them to heal in half the time they would under normal conditions. Patients love wound vacs because they only have to be changed once every two or three days, rather than the three times a day of more traditional wet to dry dressings.

They hate wound vacs, though, because they have to be cahnged once every two days.

Imagine having a seven inch long, inch wide and half inch deep gash running down the middle of your belly. Imagine having a piece of sponge wedged into that gash for two to three days, until the nascent cells of your scar actually start growing into the pores of the sponge. Now imagine having your doctor come in one day, release the vacuum, and tear the sponge out.

Now, we like to be nice about this process: we give our poor victims morphine. We spray topical anesthetic into their sponge. We soak them with saline to allow them to loosen. But in the end, we _want_ the wounds to bleed a little - it proves that they're healthy. Suggesting once again that at some level surgery is legalized torture.