Changing Your Medical Gear

Now I'm sure that you've been told you need to change the batteries in your smoke detectors, maybe your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors these days every year. You probably have a date set. Maybe it's your birthday. Maybe it's Valentine's Day. Probably not New Year's, 'cause you got a lot going on during the holidays.

But you've picked a day. Hopefully, if you're watching this video and you're watching Personal Defense Network, you've picked a day to change the batteries in your smoke detectors. Maybe you've also picked a day to change the batteries in any weapon-mounted lights or lasers that you might have attached to your firearms, or the batteries for illuminated reticles in any of your optics. Maybe you do that religiously. You probably change the oil in your car when a light comes on, or maybe you do it, again, on a calendar, maybe every three months, every five months, every six months.

But do you change out your medical gear? Well, a few years ago, I started changing out the medical gear on my range kits and my personal carry kits, like this SFD ankle kit, the Responder, every year. And what I try to do, this is March of 2026 as we get ready to kick off our 14th annual Personal Defense Network training tour, and I have changed out the expendable components, the, the major components that both the packaging and potentially the adhesives and the other factors on the inside of these packages can wear out. And especially with the ankle kit, we really do see these packages take a lot of battering and beating. Obviously, as you're wearing around, they're getting dusty, they're getting dirty.

So these packages, which were just changed out about two weeks ago as I started teaching, my first tour classes for 2026, were changed out. So I've got a new hemostatic agent-impregnated gauze package. I've got new chest seals, and I've got a new package of, compressed gauze here that can be used for packing or to enhance, everything else here to work together to build a compression bandage with this gauze. So packaging is probably the weakest link in any of your emergency medical gear. But you also have to think about the adhesives.

And we're not just talking about bandage adhesives, because we're not talking about Band-Aids in our emergency gunshot response trauma kit. but the adhesive, which is obviously much stronger than a typical Band-Aid on a chest seal, does have a shelf life. Hemostatic agent sometimes also has a shelf life. Now that shelf life's gonna be longer than one year. But one of the advantages you have of cycling things out, even if it's just for the packaging and the gear that you're actually carrying around, is it gives you emergency gear.

If you have a vehicle kit, if you have a kit at work, or you have a kit maybe that you carry around in a backpack when you're in a large event with a lot of people, that kit probably has more than just one of everything. So this is a personal response kit. This is gonna be for me, maybe for an immediate family member. But in a mass casualty event, I'm obviously not gonna be able to help very many people with, with one of everything. So it becomes really important to understand that you can not throw the stuff away, but repurpose it.

Put it in a more protective case. Put it in your home. Put it in your, again, your vehicle inside of a case where it's not gonna be as exposed as it would be in this ankle kit. The other nice thing about cycling through your medical gear is if you have friends, if you have family members that might be around when you're gonna need to use this stuff, maybe you're unconscious, maybe you're otherwise occupied. You had to draw your gun.

You're using your gun to watch a danger area, to watch a door. You're barricaded. Somebody's injured. You're gonna take this off and throw it to them. But remember, with medical gear, it's not just about having the, the conceptual knowledge of how to use it and the practical knowledge of how to apply things, but also the specific knowledge of how this tourniquet works, how these chest seals work.

What does this look like when you open the packaging? Well, while I hope you, if you're carrying it around, have opened up a package of these and actually used them and practiced with them and know what's gonna happen when you tear at the red and open the package up. Maybe the people that you work with or the people that you travel with, or again, even immediate family members, may not have seen what's inside of this. So next year when you cycle everything out, or maybe in a month when you decide to cycle everything out and set your annual changing date, you can open that packaging up. Just sacrifice the one that you've been carrying around.

You haven't needed it. Consider yourself lucky. You're good to go. You were prepared, but you didn't need it. Now open it up and make sure that everyone around you, your family members, your coworkers, people that are in your space regularly that you care about and that you might also need to rely on to help you if you're unconscious but this kit is on your ankle, make sure they're better prepared as well.

So I'm not saying just throw it away. I'm saying change it out and repurpose the old stuff, whether you use it for training, for education, or you just add it to your mass casualty event kit so that you can help more than just yourself.