Alright, I know the consensus on this for this forum. You should not normally suture or staple your wounds in the field.
How, I was injured (you can skip this)
I went to Big cypress National Preserve. They have added "amenities" to the camps at Bear Island. They poured a concrete pad and put a picnic table on each site. They added a brick shift house every so often. They also added fire rings. One of my buddies set up his own camp and took a bigger fire ring from another camp. Because it was bigger and the grill section swung out of the way. The problem was that he put the bigger fire ring right up against the smaller ring. With a fire going you could not see the unused ring. His daughter was backing into the fire which had flame up about 6'. I lunged forward to stop her and hit both of my shins on the unused and unseen fire ring. To catch myself from falling into the fire I caught the edge of the used fire ring. Anyway, the girl was stopped with my other hand and is fine. My hand received 2nd degree burns and was immediately iced down. What I thought was a couple of skinned shins was revealed to be a little worse than I thought. I had a laceration on my both shins.
It was the busiest I have ever seen at Bear Island and one of the people that stopped by our camp to visit knew of a nurse that was in a camp a little ways off. She also happened to be a nun and in camouflage. LOL We had already cleaned and bandaged the wound by the time she arrived. She unwrapped it and re-cleaned it and tried to close it with butterfies. She said I needed to go get stitches. she was qualified to stitch the wound but no one had sutures.
Someone else heard the cut was real bad (it wasn't) and called the ranger station. Two rangers responded and one was a trained medic. He also said it needed stitches and that he could have stitched it but had no suture kit. We had lidocaine and 0.9% sodium Chloride injection syringes we were using to irrigate the wound. But, no sutures.
We drove about an hour to the nearest hospital and got sewed up with 8 stitches. took a little over 4 hours to get back to camp.
Would you have let them suture you at camp? Is this an instance where having a suture kit would have made sense?
I put links rather than pictures so as not to gross anyone out.
Unwrapping the first bandage so the nun can access the wound.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y13...s/DSCN0051.jpg
The cut
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y13...s/DSCN0052.jpg
The burn, we already had silver sulfadiazine and bandages.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y13...s/DSCN0053.jpg
Camo nun re-bandages. Right as she was finishing the rangers showed up.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y13...s/DSCN0054.jpg