Well, I've mentioned a couple injuries in my recent blog entries, so I thought I would post an update... First, the crash I had during a training skate that led to the Tegaderm experiment...
At first, I was relatively unimpressed with the Tegaderm. It didn't really seem to be staying in place as well as I thought it should. (I wanted that wound to be hermetically sealed!) Of cours,e part of this was my own fault -- I think the Bactine left a bit of a film on the surrounding healthy skin that prevented the Tegaderm from sticking very well. (Combine that with the hair, and it really didn't stick well at all.) I also had wrapped that leg with a self-adhering bandage (the kind that allegedly only sticks to itself). Well, that stuck just enough to the Tegaderm to make it shift on occasion. So after a couple days, I removed the Tegaderm, cleaned the wound again with soap in the shower, and let it air dry for a good 20 minutes. The Tegaderm stuck much better... This time, I used a foam "pre wrap" (like what someone would use under sports tape to keep it from ripping the hair off when you removed it) to wrap around te leg -- after verifying that it would not stick at all to the tegaderm of course! That worked MUCH better... Although the foam wrap was probably not necessary... After a few days, I stopped using the foam and just had the Tegaderm on there. The extra padding was largely unnecessary by that point. After 10 days it was prtty much healed over with new (very sensitive) skin. I decided to keep the tegaderm on until after Northshore, just in case of a crash (having a tiny bit of protection there.) By then, it was a little annoying because it was itchy... But the Tegaderm is gone now, and I'd say the roadrash is 95% healed.