I'm looking to purchase some sutures for my BOB and want to have an assortment of a few of each 1/0 2/0 3/0 4/0 5/0 6/0

I'm weary about purchasing off of Ebay as they may expire soon.

I've done a little googling but haven't come up with much. Can someone point me in the right direction?

I'm not looking for a kit or anything of the like just want to purchase some individual sutures.

Thanks in advance.

PM sent to you Hitman. I think I can help you out.

What he said. I think you can buy skin staplers on Amazon too..yep like $11.00 for the stapler and a staple remover...




I would know about staplers being easier to use on yourself in the field...I gave myself a single suture on my left thumb..one handed. Wished I had a stapler




 

Chinook Medical is my go-to place for medical supplies for my BoB and the like. Here's a link to their page that contains their sutures.

Chinook Medical

Staples = Yes

As said here, sometimes it is better to not close the wound. If you choose to close the wound you better be damn sure you have cleaned it well. You seal in debris or whatever you are more than likely going to get an infection, then you may be in a world of shit. Wound cleansing should be the first skill you learn how to do, then learn how to close a wound.

Expiration dates on sutures are a joke.  Unless they are the dissolving kind, as long as the pack is sealed you are fine.  As with most medical equipment in the USA expiration dates are put on things to insure the pharma companies sales remain strong.

I was told by one of my suppliers that expiration dates on "durable medical supplies" is more to do with how well the packaging can hold up, and guarantee sterility.

I can promise you that first world doctors are using equipment that has been expired for years in third world countries.  My wife sees thousands of dollars in perfectly good equipment leave the hospital regularly to Doctors Without Borders.  Even pacemakers that are expired in this country are perfectly acceptable in other countries.  

How much money do pharmaceutical companies spend on lobbyists each year?  I know I would love to be able to role 100% of my inventory over constantly.

I agree with you that this is why hospitals throw equipment away.  I'm saying that the expiration date printed on the product is ridiculously premature.

Unless your trained on wound care, treatment and then post suture care and removal it's a very bad idea. Unless all the others are met you can easily cause more harm and life threatening infection. Get training before getting the tool. And training isn't some 1 day "tactical medic course". I'm a career firefighter/paramedic with many, many(did I say many?) Course and certs under my belt and more then a decade of experience. Even though I've been trained on it, I don't include any in my stash because the conditions that would require "I do it" rather then go to the ER leaves me other viable options that are faster and actually less risky for the post time. And que  the guy who's gonna now chime in with his talk about closing a arterial artery on himself while holding his AR and wearing his plate carrier all because that's how he was "trained" in that tacticool course

he is correct..case in point. I was reviewing my preps and discovered my skin staplers package seal had de-laminated and was no longer sterile. (Oasis brand made in China) .and this was stored under pretty optimal conditions  Although "sterility"  is much overrated especially in terms of field medicine, wound irrigation and pre suturing site preparation are probably more important in preventing post op infection. Also suturing skills and techniques are not something you can just look at a video of and do, they defiantly take practice and human tissue is surprisingly resilient.

Speaking of sterility, you better have some drapes if you're going to suture or you're just dragging that suture through some nastiness and right into your skin. Another plus for staplers. Realizing that staplers are much more bulky and heavy.

You can but it's tricky and takes practice. The reason I know is that I'm in a small invention group who specializes in surgical items. We were developing a device where approximating two points on tissue that were farther apart than a simple laceration was desired. One of our DOE was using a skin stapler, partially deploying the staple, and hooking one point, bringing it to within proximity of the other point and finishing the staple squeeze.

Can't say I'd recommend the practice unless there's no other recourse.

This link to stapler use might help.

stapler use

Just in case you were wondering, suturing most wounds is not a sterile procedure anyway. Most of the time its "clean".  Having sutured lots o people, critters etc sometimes in barnyard conditions its wound prep that makes the most difference. clean it out and do a proper closure if indicated and watch it afterwards and your ok. ymmv. in a true shtf situation meticulous wound care not suturing is whats going to save you from dying from an infection.

Yep but that's hard for a 6 year old to understand when you're scrubbing the hell out of his boo boo.

So I'm up in the mountains hunting elk when the balloon goes up.  The world goes to hell, cars aren't running, no one has power and within 20 minutes rabid gangs of communist, black, tattooed, biker gang FEMA types are looting burning and enslaving.  No problem, I've prepared for this situation.  Me and the two guys I'm with just have to walk to our bug out location.  We figure it's 1000 miles and we can make it in around a month, 32 days if we get snow, bounding overwatch the whole way.   Because we are high speed-low drag ass-kickers and this is the event we've been waiting for.

Two days in I'm out foraging for food and find myself surrounded by bad guys, stupid because they are easy to spot with their High Points and always chanting "black lives matter".  There has to be a couple dozen of them.  No problem, I brought the 50 round drum for my elk rifle, and everyone knows the bad guys can't shoot for crap.  I mow them down left and right, the last guy is charging me with a rusty machete when the drum runs dry.  I grab my SOG Narwhal Puppy special edition and drive it into his neck.

He got a shot in though and cut my leg off at the knee.  Lucky for me, if it were an inch higher he would have circumcised me.  

My buddies show up shortly thereafter, having heard the shooting.  Thank God one is  a doctor and gets the bleeding stopped.  I tell them to cut off a limb and jamb it into the stub and find me a crutch and I'll limp home.  "No way" says the doctor, "I can reattach your leg and you'll be walking in no time".  The guy is a veterinarian, I saw him sew the head back onto a farmers best laying hen once, bizarre combine accident, the chicken lived a couple of years.  So yeah, lets do this.

The guys set up a make shift field hospital and start boiling water and donning gloves.  The lower leg goes into the boiling water to sterilize it.  Then he pours the boiling water on my leg to clean it up too.  They give me a strip of raw elk's hide to bite down on.  One guy holds the leg in place, the other grabs a packet of sutures, I notice with some satisfaction that the sutures haven't yet expired.  


Now, how long after the sutures are opened do they remain sterile?

Nah, probably just cauterize it.

I have had old one break easy when tying knots.

as soon as you open them and touch them they are no longer sterile.......again they don't need to be sterile unless your doing surgery inside someone....which you aint gonna do once shtf....

+1 for staples. Butterfly's and Dermabond with proper cleaning can work wonders.

There isn't enough difference between those different sizes to matter. Like between 3-0 and 4-0 is personal preference. The ER I used to work in mostly used 3-0. In my office I only keep 4-0. It suits all my needs. I've used 6-0 on an ear lobe repair when working with a plastic surgeon, but for my purposes I don't need anything that fine. Bigger stuff like the 1-0 is harder to get knots to stay.

As TBS said though, suturing is a skill you would need to learn. I have suture but it is mainly for me to use on others. A skin stapler is going to be faster and require less training. If I am cut some where I can only get one hand to, then I am stapling.

What I'm wondering is how the hell you'd tie off a knot one handed.

I've only sewn up pacemaker and port pockets, so my stitching skills are limited to multiple layer uninterrupted running sutures.

But even with one or two layers of 2-0 Vicryl in the deep tissue followed by a layer of 4-0 Vicryl under the surface layer, we still follow up with Derma bond and Steri Strips.

Like others have pointed out, suturing is a skill to be learned and practiced. I've got tons of sutures at home but I'd never attempt to try it on myself or someone else. I'm pretty confident I can make a pressure dressing that would suffice til they got to the ED.

I was talking about staplers. Suturing with one hand would be a challenge.

A few ideas to consider:

Get training on how, why and when to suture.  There is nothing in the field that you should be closing with 1-0 suture of any type, and there's nothing you need to close with suture smaller than 4-0.  

If your going to maintain a few sutures for a disaster situation, get a few 3-0 nylons from amazon on a reverse cutting needle and don't worry about the field repair you're going to attempt being anywhere near sterile.

And to reiterate what others are saying - get a stapler.  It's easier and faster.

There ya go...

Well, it's about this too...

If the package has an expiry date, then better observe it in commercial use, or else!

Thanks for all the comments.

Stapler is a no go due to bulk and weight in the BOB.

I will be getting training on proper use from the appropriate individuals

As far as wound prep / sterilization I have those sorts of things in my BOB as well.

For emergency use 4/0 nylon and vicryl  is really all you need.

In my practice, I would say 3/0, 4/0 and 5/0 nylon as well as 3/0 and 4/0 vicryl would cover 99.9 % of what I do.  That is basically all I have in my first aid kit.

I occasionally use some 5/0 chromic, but it is not very frequent, and chromic actually will decay and become useless over time.

I rarely use staples, but they are simple and fast as well.

If you use a staple gun, you must have a staple remover as well.

Other than securing chest tubes, I have never used 0 or 2/0.

6/0 is incredibly small, and unless you are a plastic surgeon, isn't worth the time.  I use it maybe once or twice a year.