“Just throw those perfectly good medical supplies away.”

I finished my wound vac therapy on Friday. Thank heavens.

If you’ve never worked with a wound vac before, it’s a device that applies suction over your open wound and helps the tissue and muscles heal from the inside out. Once healing commences, then the patient can move to a different treatment.

During the wound vac procedure, the patient receives a wound vac machine (with a daily rental, yeesh), along with wound vac hoses and tape (which is applied over the wound), and a wound vac canister (which attaches to the wound vac machine and captures the damaged microparticles and damaged tissues and the like). You receive 10 canisters and 10 hoses, which should last for about three weeks, give or take.

I finished up my wound vac usage in two weeks. Now the wound vac company has strict rules regarding returning my wound vac to the company – I have to put the wound vac and the power plug in a plastic box, then wrap the box with a special return-label bag, and call UPS to pick the equipment up.

Okay … but what about my excess supplies? What do I do with the remaining wound dressing packs and wound canisters?

So I called the company to find out.

“Mr. Miller, we cannot accept any medical supplies once they have arrived in your home. We recommend that you throw any excess equipment away.”

Wait, what??

But everything’s still sealed in their little plastic or cellophane wraps. There’s no punctures or stains or moldmarks on anything.

“It doesn’t matter. Our policy is that once it leaves our warehouse and arrives in your possession, then you are to destroy unused supplies. But we do want the wound vac unit returned to us.”

Well, that’s a bit of a kick in the cojones, if you ask me.

See, I was brought up in a culture where we don’t throw away perfectly good items. And I’m not feeling the urge to turn wound vac supplies into art projects, if you sense where I’m going on this.

So I looked around. And after hours of searching and searching and searching …

I found that the hospital I stayed at for my surgery, St. Peter’s, has a wound care and hyperbaric chamber division at the old Albany Memorial Hospital on Northern Boulevard.

One quick phone call later — and the issue was resolved. I can bring my unused equipment to the hospital, where they can provide it for either patients in need, or for medical students for wound vac application practices. Problem solved.

On Friday, I dropped off all the surplus medical accessories at the Albany Memorial location. And I’m good with that.

Trust me. I’m not a wasteful person. And I don’t need things like durable medical equipment aging non-gracefully in our landfills.

That’s just not me.