Couple of years ago I had a nasty fall. I was taking a shortcut home from work and cutting across a waste area between a liquor store and a grocery store. Unfortunately for me, the waste area was a hill, lined with limestone boulders, ending in the back alleyway of the grocery store.
I was doing well until I hit some birdseed that someone had spread on the rocks:
Then I went flying. Fortunately, I landed on my hands and knees. Unfortunately, my knee (and most of my weight) landed on a broken liquor bottle. I also sprained my ankle.
I was closer to my job at the hospital than I was to home, and I didn't have a cellphone with me, so I literally limp-crawled all the way back to the back door of the hospital. The copy repair guy was there, he knew me, and when he saw all the blood he ran and got a wheelchair and pushed me right back to the ER where I'd just gotten off work. He got some sort of customer service award for that.
It looked way worse before they cleaned me up, but here you go:
Hands that hit the asphalt, after they dug the rocks out with tweezers (that was fun):
Road rash and hyperextension bruises from the sprained ankle (this was before it swelled up like an inflatable pool toy):
...and my gloriously carved-up knee, sans the chunks of grit and shards of glass that were hanging out of it.
Anyway, my point is that when you have something that's a big bacteria-compromise situation, they want you to keep up the Manual Debriding even after the hospital fun is over. I got sent home with a scrub brush...actual plastic bristles...and was expected to
scrub the mawfugger with superstrong antibacterial soap a couple of times a day.
There is some sort of fundamental self-preservation override you have to achieve to stick a frigging scrub brush in an open wound and scrub "as hard as you can" , per the attending's orders. I nearly puked a couple of times.