Awesome DIY Ice Packs!

AWESOME DIY ICE PACKS!!!

So let's talk ice packs. You WILL need them. They are crucial to your first week. Store bought ice packs are expensive, and if you are going to keep a good rotation, you need at least 6-8.

Prior to surgery I set out to test allll of the different DIY icepacks to see what worked best. It's important to have a ice pack that will retain coldness, be somewhat flexible but also cheap to make (otherwise, just buy the store ones!) Again, so many different ones, so I'll share this cool website so you can see all of the different DIY ideas:

DIY Ice Pack Ideas

I tried each one listed on the website above, and found that hands down, the best ice pack for me was the dish soap. It's firm, but moldable like clay, and retains coldness for hours. I tested all sorts of soap--dollar store brand to Dawn, and found that the best soap was for sure, Dawn.  Once I settled on that, I bought  4 32 fl. oz bottles, which ended up making me 8 ice packs with a some left over.

You can easily use a ziploc bag and double them to prevent leakage, but I found that they still sweat and were "wet" which I didn't like--so I bought two extremely cheap things to fix that problem:

• Empty Icepack bags - I'm sure you can get these on
  
  Amazon, but I actually ordered them from Wish, an overseas online site. They were TEN for $1!! Couldn't beat it!! It took them a few weeks to get here.
• Doggie PeePee Pads - I bought the cheap ones from Dollar Tree.

Putting this all together:

• Using a funnel, I filled each ice pack bag halfway with Dawn soap, making sure to lay them flat in the freezer overnight.  
• Once they were frozen, I wrapped them like a gift with the PeePee pads, making sure the absorbent (white) side of the pad was on the ice pack and the blue side was facing out. That way, if the ice pack sweats, it's absorbed by the PeePee pad!
• This was also great because it also created a thin layer between the ice pack and my skin (I still used a towel, though)

The packs I filled halfway lasted a solid 3-4 hours. The packs that I put a little more in lasted overnight! I paid $2.00 total for the bags, $1.00 for a pack of PeePee pads, and I got the Dawn on sale for $2.79 a bottle, for a grand total of $16.16!  Most good ice packs are between$10-$15 dollars a piece, so I feel that it was totally worth it!

I'll have to remember to take a picture of my own and post it here!