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Health

You Probably Shouldn’t Superglue Yourself Back Together and Here’s How to Do It

What? I didn't want to spend money on the ER.
Photo: HomeSpotHQ/Flickr

A few years ago, my cousin and I decided to take our four-wheelers to some land not far from his home in Mesquite, Texas, for a late evening ride. The land had become an unofficial but well-known spot for off-roading and four-wheeling, and trucks had dug deep ruts into the mud. That night we dropped down into the river bottom to do donuts and just ride around. When we'd had enough, we drove toward the nearest exit trail. It was steep, wet and cratered with those deep ruts the trucks had made. My bike, in four wheel drive, made it up the trail and out of the river bottom. My cousin was not so lucky.

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He hit a rut and fell off of his four-wheeler, sending him tumbling down the hill. I left my bike at the top and slid down on foot to help him get his bike back on all four wheels. The slope was too steep and wet to climb back up on foot, so I got on the back of his bike and we attempted the ascent again together. As we approached the top, the front end of his bike rose and began to backflip, tossing us backwards. I remember the bike flying over me in slow motion, the engine roaring. I thought I was going to die. If the bike had landed on my head I would've been a sure goner. Instead, it hit my leg as it tumbled back down the hill, end over end.

We didn't get our skulls smashed in, but my cousin, after asking if I was okay, told me he couldn't walk. His leg was clearly broken, and I had to drag him the rest of the way up the hill and then go down and retrieve his bike, which was upside down in the river. I scooped the mud out from between his brake levers and handlebars and then found a different, less dangerous trail to ride his bike back up. When we finally got back to the truck, I suddenly noticed a piercing pain in my lower left leg. I loaded the bikes on the trailer and headed back to my cousin's house, acting as his crutch. All I could think about was how much his wife was going to kill us. He had health insurance, at least, but I didn't.

When I reached the back door of the house, the bright porch light revealed that I was bleeding profusely. There was so much blood on my left leg that my jeans had soaked through and leaked blood onto the right pant leg. I was standing in a puddle of blood in my own boots.  I took my pants and shoes off at the door and went straight to the guest-room shower, trying not to get any mud or blood on the carpet. Once I washed it all off, I could see where the pain was coming from: On my inner lower leg, what looked like a meat mushroom or brains was coming out of a hole. It looked as though muscle tissue had exploded through the puncture wound. I didn't want to spend money at the emergency room. My only option: superglue.

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My cousin had a small tube in his house. First he used his bare fingers to stuff the muscle tissue back into my leg. Then I inserted the nozzle directly into the hole where my leg was open and squirted the glue inside, doing everything I could to stick it all back together. Then we squirted more on top of the wound, trying to match the skin back together. We may not have been completely sober.  I folded up a paper towel, put neosporin on it, and used duct tape to firmly attach it all to the wound. It hurt a lot and I was feeling woozy from all the lost blood.

I slept in the rear of my truck that night so I could elevate my foot on the back of the bench seat. The next morning it looked like somebody had been shot in the back seat, so maybe the wound wasn't all the way sealed. But it was enough to do the trick. I re-dressed it so I wouldn't get an infection and kept it clean with peroxide. A clear, yellow fluid leaked out in the following days. It took several weeks for it to stop leaking anything. Then my leg spit out the superglue that I had pumped in it. I pulled it out like a loose tooth. I never got an infection, and one month later, I ended up with a dime-sized scar. Now, a full three years later, I can touch the scar and feel all the way to the bone because of the missing muscle tissue. I'm guessing that the muscle tissue my cousin stuffed back inside just died anyway.  But the scar is otherwise barely noticeable and doesn't affect my movement or strength. In fact, since then I've taken up long-distance cycling.

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This wasn't my first time using superglue instead of stitches. And though she regrets it now, it was an actual nurse who first tipped me off to the technique. Several years prior to my four-wheeler incident, I was making my bed, and tripped over the bed frame, hitting the skin between my pinky toe and ring toe in a freak accident. It cut me deep down to the bone and I ran to the tub to bleed like a stuck pig. I called a friend, a retired nurse and midwife, and asked her what I could do without seeing a doctor. I had no health insurance then either. "Just use superglue," she'd told me. Sensing my hesitation, she added, "Superglue was actually invented in the battle fields at Vietnam to dress wounds."

The only troubling memory I have about my two experiences with superglue is that a weird rushing sensation came over my body as I injected the product into the wound, as if I was pumping chemicals into my bloodstream. I worried that whatever caused the feeling would go to my heart. The sensation passed after a few brief moments.

Another friend of mine, an Austrian emergency care doctor named Laura Thurner, who works as an emergency room doctor at the LKH Leoben hospital in Leoben, Austria, says she often used superglue on patients during her first six months of training. Later, she went on two missions with Doctors Without Borders to Iraq and Sierra Leone, where medical superglue (more on this below) was too expensive for doctors to get, so they used the regular stuff. Military doctors continue to use the stuff in combat zones, she says, and she keeps a bottle for herself at home. "I like it a lot, for example, for facial injuries," she says. Though the risk of scarring is about the same, "you definitely have no punctures from the stitches when you glue it, which you really don't want in your face." She cautions that the wound should not be heavily bleeding or be at an area under tension/traction, like a joint. An injury on the scalp is also not the kind you want to seal back together with superglue, she says, because those are often bigger wounds that are bleeding heavily. Oh, and apparently I wasn't supposed to inject superglue straight into my wound. "It's better to close it as best you can by pulling gently on both ends and to put the glue only on the surface," she says.

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Thurner is not sure why I felt so strange when I first pumped the glue into my wounds. Neither is Dr. Mark Morocco, an emergency-room physician and medical professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. He says superglue is non-toxic, safe and frequently used in hospitals, with the same success rate as stitches. "There isn't really any chemical in there that would cause that flushing reaction," Morocco says, speculating that my reaction was either in my head or caused by the glue working. "It tends to feel warm as it cures," he says.

In the hospital, doctors use an expensive, medical-grade superglue called dermabond. A 2007 New York Times article says that Dermabond is safer than the regular form of superglue, which they claim kills skin cells, though Morocco dismisses that concern. "Probably anything you put on a skin cell in a wound kills some cells, including soap and water," he says. On his personal boat off of Key West, Morocco in fact carries regular superglue. "I don't necessarily medically recommend this, but I carry tape, including good old fashioned duct tape, as well," he says.

He does not advise people without health insurance to turn to superglue so they can save on medical bills (he is an ER doctor after all). "It's always better to go to somebody who knows what they're doing if you have this kind of injury or wound," he says. But should you be five hours away from the nearest hospital and bleeding out of a gaping wound, Morocco gives some advice:

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–If the wound is not coming together on its own, you could get a very ugly scar or an infection if you don't do anything about it. So do anything possible to keep the wound together--apply direct pressure using your hand or a makeshift bandage from your t-shirt. Or, if you happen to have a bottle handy, use superglue.

–The wound must be dry for the superglue to work.  "If it's actively bleeding or it's wet, the superglue is not really going to stick."

–Hold the edges of the wound together in perfect opposition. It's better to have another pair of hands for this if possible. "Get the cut edges perfectly opposed so they look like they did before it was cut."

–Seal the edges back together, and try not to pour glue directly into the wound.

–If you're sloppy and get superglue somewhere on yourself where it wasn't supposed to go, don't panic or tear your skin off. Morocco says he once had a patient who accidentally had squirted superglue onto her eyeball instead of contact solution. With one eye sealed shut, she drove 60 miles from Santa Barbara to UCLA's emergency room. Morocco told her to apply some mineral oil and wait it out—ripping her eye open would have hurt her much worse, he says. She was very angry to hear this. (Though you wouldn't want to put this in your eyeball, the Superglue industry  officially recommends acetone to remove unwanted glue. Found in household products like nail polish remover, acetone is described as superglue's "one weakness.")

No matter how close I am to a hospital or what my insurance situation is, I'm planning to continue using superglue for flesh wounds. We keep a tube in the house at all times. The duct tape is in the truck.

Interviews and research by Amy Martyn.

M. Aaron Martyn owns a small construction company in Texas. He's used to fixing his own injuries. He is not liable for your dumb ass. Follow him on Instagram.