In reply to girlymonkey:
A few years ago I helped rescue someone that had fallen almost the entire length of
Cascade (V 5) on
Craig y Rhaeadr, stripping a load of ice screws and falling about 20m past the belay.
He was generally ok apart from a compound fracture to his arm which was bleeding a fair bit. He started to go into shock so we wrapped him in my down jacket which ended up covered in blood. Once MRT turned up, the jacket disappeared off in the chopper to hospital, but a few weeks later it was returned in the post. When the postman handed me the package I noticed that it felt incredibly heavy.
The jacket had been posted with a bottle of whiskey inside. The blood on the jacket hadn't been cleaned and the bottle had smashed in transit, so I now had a blood stained and whiskey soaked down jacket caked in broken glass.
In the washing machine with down wash and then tumble dried with tennis ball it came out serviceable (apart from the blood stains.)
Your jacket will be fine, just find a friend with a tumble drier and a tennis ball, and maybe buy them a bottle of something to cover the hassle and electricity. Just keep the bottle away from the jacket.
Post edited at 15:29