Ingredients

[bunrab]

Hydrogel, the wonder goo that we are soaking the gauze in to dress my wound, which doctors and nurses all swear is the best thing to happen to healing since sterile saline solution, is made of:
Deionized water, aloe vera gel, glycerin, sorbitol, carbomer 940, triethanolamine, allantoin, methylparaben, disodium EDTA, and imidazolidinyl.

That's right, it's basically aloe vera gel.

I do wonder why the sorbitol is in there; that's one of the so-called alcohol sugars, frequently used as a sweetener in sugar-free candy and gum.

For today's nice hot shower, instead of kitchen plastic wrap and plastic packaging tape to cover the dressing and keep it water-free, I used a purchased waterproof dressing; it works quite nicely. It's a 3M thing, their Nexcare brand, and as it notes on the packaging, it is used in hospitals, where it is called Tegaderm (TM)+ Pad. If one peels off the Nexcare label with all the consumer info, one sees the hospital labelling underneath, including a ruler in centimeters (the one on the consumer label is inches) for measuring the wound. The hospital stuff also includes a description of the product in a great many languages. Transparent Dressing with Absorbent Pad comes out fairly recognizably in most of the Romance languages, and in the Germanic languages, in which group I include the Scandinavian languages other than Finnish. I know people like to think of their own dialect as something unique, but people, those of us with our years of high-school or college German can read half a page of Swedish before realizing that the spelling is just a little bit off, and eventually noting some of the characters such as ø that give away that it's Swedish rather than German. Anyway, I can also read the Greek part of it - not just sound out the letters, because anyone who has enough math and science background pretty much learns the Greek alphabet, but actually READ it - because I can think of cognates for all the words. DiajaneV is easy, for example: diaphanous. The only two lines I can't read are the Japanese one, and the one that I am guessing is Finnish (elfbiter, is it?): Läpinäkyyä haavatyynyllä varustettu haavakalvo. Darned if I can find any cognates at all in that!!

Comments

[guineapiglady.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the sorbitol is in there to bind water in it so that it's unavailable to microorganisms that try to grow in it. (Once again, Food Microbiology turns out to be a useful class!)

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Makes me want to go out and find a class like that!

[miz-geek.livejournal.com]

Sure looks Finnish to me. I've got a t-shirt with a Finnish saying on it that I've been unable to translate. It's very frustrating.

Was there any Hungarian?

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Nope. No Hungarian. English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Japanese, and the probable Finnish. Hmm, now that I think about it, no Dutch, no Russian. I would've expected Russian to be on there.

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

Sure looks Finnish to me. I've got a t-shirt with a Finnish saying on it that I've been unable to translate. It's very frustrating.

And what does it say?

[miz-geek.livejournal.com]

EI OLE HELPPOA OLLA
HOIKKA
KUN ON VARAKAS

Maybe "My parents went to Finland and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"?

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

That's "It's not easy to be slim when you are wealthy". Almost literally.

[miz-geek.livejournal.com]

What an odd t-shirt saying.
:)

[miz-geek.livejournal.com]

And thanks for translating.

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

The only two lines I can't read are the Japanese one, and the one that I am guessing is Finnish (elfbiter, is it?): Läpinäky_v_ä haavatyynyllä varustettu haavakalvo.

Yes; literally "transparent wound membrane with a wound pillow". Note that word order does not remain the same.

Explaining the sentence a bit.

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

Since the words may look complex, I decided pick this etymological nit a bit.

Läpi+näky+vä haava+tyyny+llä varustettu haava+kalvo

läpi = from lävitse, mennä läpi, through something
näky = from näkyä to be seen, in turn from näkeä, to see
(näkyä läpi - something can be seen through something)
+vä (+va) = being something
= "one can see through this object" i.e. it is transparent

haava = wound (originally a blow that could cause a wound, more serious than naarmu, scratch)
tyyny = pillow, in this case, something soft to push against (probably from Swedish dyna)
(haavatyyny - derived medical term)
+llä = in this case, with something (the object mentioned after this - beyond any qualifiers and adjectives - is added with this object). Alone would mean "on something".

varustettu = equipped with (from varustaa, to equip with) Semi-professional emphasis

haava = wound
kalvo = thin surface, membrane
(haavakalvo - derived medical term)

You are free to delete this if it looks irrelevant.

Re: Explaining the sentence a bit.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

No, it's fascinating!! I had guessed that haava meant wound as soon as you gave your very first reply, before I read this one; it's nice to see that my pattern recognition skills are still there.

(I can read a couple of words of Chinese by the same reasoning - one orders enough dishes featuring chicken, gai, that one learns to recognize the glyph for gai. Which is, incidentally, not only Chinese but several of the other Asian languages' word for chicken. Apparently, just as "tea" has only a couple of variations around most of the world - either te' or cha' - chicken is enough of a staple in Asia to be be a short word consistent across most of a continent. There, how was that for an irrelevant follow-up?)