in which I am not a nurse

(Some content warnings: medical issues, broken skin, changing bandages, pain)

My first text of the day: I HATE STARTING MY DAY OFF CHANGING BANDAGES!

Husbeast's road rash is much better than it was, thankfully, and it's healing well. That due in part to the fact that I have changing his bandages every morning since it happened.

And today, I was dozy and forgot until after my shower and I had started my workday and he had to go, "Um, ahem. Bandages?"

And I went pretty much instantly from feeling professional and put together to feeling off balance and overwhelmed. 

Changing his bandage is not technically hard - it's mostly just unwinding one ace bandage, carefully removing the gauze over the scraped skin (which is very slow because the gauze sticks and has to be dampened and then carefully peeled back), gently applying new neosporin ointment and new gauze, and then winding a new ace bandage around his arm. And as his skin has healed, there has been much less associated re-traumatizing the wound with each bandage change.

But here's the thing: I'm not a nurse - and while he's had injuries before, they were usually the kind that involve icing and elevation and pillows, and then later surgical incisions with clear instructions about how to manage them. Having a rough scrape down one forearm is actually pretty new territory for me.

Cleaning the wound immediately after his bike crash was a special kind of Screaming Awfulness, and changing the bandage has been a little dose of daily Screaming Awfulness. And he's not stoic (not that I want him to be or that he should be, to be clear) so he goes into this expecting to scream into a towel and I hate ever time that I screw up and pull at a scab and make him bleed again. We didn't figure out about using water to help the gauze unstick from the scabs until a couple of days ago.

So, now where we previously made the mistake of opening up the wounds by pulling the gauze off fast like a bandaid, I now have the prolonged awfulness of trying to damping the gauze in the areas where it is sticking to the wounds with a clean towel with clean water, then carefully pulling the gauze to see exactly where it sticks, putting more damp towel against the gauze, and trying to carefully pull the gauze back millimeter by millimeter, and repeating this step while he winces and squirms and bites a towel and asks me to go slower and more carefully at every step. It's clearly better for the wound care, but holy fucking hell, I hate this so much more now. 

And, OBVIOUSLY,  I want this to be as painfree for him as possible! I truly want his wound to heal well and to not bother him and to be free of infection!  AND, I hate having to peel that gauze off more than anything else in the world right now. Because I'm hurting him, and I'm trying not to, and it's inevitable that the process *will* hurt and that I can't fix it and I have to keep going and hearing someone you love beg you and criticize you while you try to do something emotionally trying and physically complex at the same time? It's pretty sucky. I really wish I didn't have to do that part. I feel like a failure and it's incredibly frustrating and he ends up comforting ME at the end of hte process, which really makes me feel like a heel. 

So, in short, anyone who is a caretaker - that's a fucking hard job. And the US should put a lot more money in to helping pay for in-home health care, because just this much is HARD and I can't imagine doing this for something more complicated.