Gamjams Reviews: Miracle Road-Rash Cures - Betadine & Tegaderm

Note: If you're reading this on my Facebook notes, it's a feed from my blog at http://sigberto.blogspot.com. I'm part of a network of Mid-Atlantic cyclists, called Gamjams, that reviews products and talks about our obsession with bike racing. It just so happened that this week's review was ickier than usual. I'm sure we'll get back to the race reports soon.

Just over a year ago I lost a lot of skin to a nasty skidding accident. My chain jumped into my wheel during a sprint and sent sliding on the road at hains point. Within seconds, I no longer had skin on my entire left butt cheek, most of my bicep, elbow, a patch on my forearm, and knuckles. I had even smaller scrapes by my ribs and on the side of my thigh and calf.

Needless to say, it was one of the most painful few days of my life. The only thing that felt good with road rash all over my left side was not feeling a thing at all, which meant I had to lie down on my right side and not move.

Spending $200 on first-aid products at the pharmacy in two days was salt in the wound. The "oh sh*t" handle in the car became my best friend. Any time we'd take a right turn, my butt cheek would burn.

There's not much you can do to make road rash less painful. All you can do is heal yourself up with time, a lot of patience, and some grinding of your teeth. Like Time Trials, I think some people are just made out for the suffering more than others. I had a pretty bad batch of road rash, and I've seen people with lesser injuries suffer more because it's that painful. Road rash is like getting the slowest lashing ever; you really have to bite down on a wooden dowel for a few days. And then it ends.

Most folks will probably recommend the same thing, but I think that for basic road rash, 3M/Nexcare's Tegaderm (and similar products) are the best. I don't know the generic name for Tegaderm type of products, so I'll use that term generically. They're breathable, stretchy bandages that cover the entire wound directly against the skin.

Nexcare knows that us cyclists love this stuff so much, they even put a cyclist's leg on the cover of the box:


For deeper cuts and scrapes, you'll need some serious first aid, gauze, antibiotic creams, and non-stick pads. For road rash that just scrapes off the top layer of your skin, Tegaderm sort of bandages and antiseptics should do.

The first step to cleaning out your road rash is to disinfect the wound. Road rash can be a friction burn as well as a scrape, so it's tender, but you need to make sure all of the debris from the road is cleaned out of the wound. If you have a loved one with a strong stomach, this might be the perfect time to enlist their nursing services. It's pretty hard to pick sand out of your own butt cheek.

The sharpest pain won't be cleaning the wound. The inevitable sting from hell is from that first moment that you run water through your uncovered flesh. You are forewarned. Showering with road-rash wounds sucks. This is why Tegaderm helps.

Disinfecting the wound is basic. At first, Catherine had me use Betadine because it didn't sting as much. The stuff works, but it's brown and can stain everything including the bathtub and sink. After a while I started liking other types of spray-on alcohol-based disinfectants. A few days after the initial wound was branded onto my body, the relatively brief sting was refreshing.

You don't want to leave your open wounds exposed for too long but I usually let them air-dry for a bit. Covering up the wounds protects them from bacteria, preventing infection, but also promotes skin growth. This is where the bandages come into play.

As I said before, the most painful part of road rash is showering or running water through your wounds. The biggest advantage of tegaderm is that you can shower with the stuff on and they stay put. I would generally leave them on for up to two days (or as long as they looked clean and didn't smell), then shower, and put fresh bandages on after I dried up.

My personal favorite bandages became the large tegaderm bandages that also had gauze on the inside. The first few days of healing up your road rash, the wound is going to have all sorts of blood, gu, and puss coming out of it. It's gross. Normal tegaderm is just an adhesive, so the puss will puddle into the bandage. If the seal of the bandage has a breach of any kind, your clothes are ruined. The tegaderm bandages with gauze soak up the puss well.

Tegaderm supposedly can stay on for a week. If you can pull that off, you have no sense of smell. Your wounds will get a serious case of the funk after two days. That's gross. Change them up.

It's quite likely that your wounds will be pussing so much that normal tegaderm (without gauze) won't work well the first few days. If this happens, go to the pharmacy and get their cheap, huge, house-brand bandages with tons of absorbent material. Use those for the first few days but make sure to use an antiseptic like Neosporin so the gauze doesn't stick to your wound or you'll have to painfully rip it off. After a few days the wound will be less messy and you can move to something more versatile like tegaderm.

The biggest downside to tegaderm-type of products is their price. The bandages are a few bucks each, so you're going to be out some cash. The small and medium sized bandages come in boxes, but the bigger bandages are sold individually and can really hit your wallet hard. I'd hope, like me, though, you'd go to farther lengths to heal up your wounds than you would to repatch a tire.

Of all the blogs I've written, I hope that nobody reading this has to use any of this advice.