As great as tissue adhesives are in wound closure, they come with some risk. For instance, liquid adhesives, such as Dermabond, can “run” and contact undesired areas such as eyelid margins. Careful application of tissue adhesives is critical.

How can you minimize the amount of seepage of tissue adhesive to undesired areas?

Trick of the Trade

Create an impermeable tape barrier

I already mentioned this in an earlier post in July, but I now have more experience with this technique. Here are some recent photos of this trick in action.

• Cut out a circle from a transparent tape adhesive. In this case, I used a transparent Tegaderm which can be found with peripheral or central line IV kits.
• Adhere the tape to the patient’s skin primarily along the circular edge to prevent glue seepage under the tape. You don’t need to stick the ENTIRE transparent tape to the patient, unless you want to pull off some eyebrow and eyelid lashes!
• Apply the tissue adhesive glue over the wound while ensuring that the wound edges are closely approximated. Excess glue will run off onto the tape. You only need to wait a few seconds after glue application before peeling the tape off.

This idea was contributed by Dr. Hagop Afarian (UCSF-Fresno).

Thanks also to my Visual Aid Project photographer, Lourdes Adame, who photographed and consented the patient’s father for these photos. Her speaking fluent Spanish made them feel at ease and understand that we were photographing for educational purposes.

Thanks to my new-found Emergency Medicine friend in Turkey, Dr. John Fowler has some useful tips about scalp lacerations.

Often patients with scalp lacerations have clotted blood in their hair. While we can irrigate the wound itself (and unavoidably soaking the patient in cold irrigation fluid), a lot of blood remains stuck in their hair. It would be nice if we could completely wash out the blood. This would further allows us to detect occult scalp lacerations.

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