First aid and CPR class, the last chunk of state-mandated classroom time I had to log in order to keep my fantastic and glamorous job. No complaints. The worst I can say is that the class ran an hour and a half over because of crazy stupid first-aid anecdote time. My coworkers are worse than little kids. (-I know someone who broke a bone once! -Me too ! !)And I've about had it with lame acronyms. But the instructor, a longtime nurse, was practical, down-to-earth, and not unnecessarily hung up on sterilization, unlike the freaks at the seminar on infectious disease who insisted every diaper change necessitates three glove changes and five hand-washings. ("How do you hold the baby on the table if you're obsessing over gloves?" I asked, and they looked at me like I was crazy. Well how do you?) This lady said that fussing over gloves and mouth shields and rubbing alcohol when somebody's heart is stopped is a great way to end up with a perfectly sterile dead guy. I liked her a lot.
Death grips on those baby heads, ladies! Everyone else's baby looked like it had been molded out of clay by a middle school student. Out of proportion and blocky. Mine was very detailed, with fingernails and ridged lips and little wisps of hair molded onto its skull. It was wearing a diaper with ballerina teddy bears. This was hard to pound on. At first. Best part: the Czech getting flustered and yelling DE BABY NO BREEDING!
As it turns out, those portable defibrillators that are showing up in a lot of public places are really easy to use. I didn't realize it's impossible to hurt someone with them - it will not give a shock unless necessary. If you can't get a pulse on somebody and you slap the pads on their chest, this supersmart little machine reads what the heart is doing or not doing, acts accordingly, and also tells you what to do by way of pictograms and voice prompts. It says STAND BACK and PREPARING TO SHOCK and CHECK VITAL SIGNS. You can be a moron and still help someone with it. And everything it does is recorded on a little disc inside, which the medics can plug into a computer at the hospital to see exactly what happened to the patient. It's pretty freaking awesome.
Ours comes with a razor, in case of hairy man chests that won't allow the pads to stick. Though, our nurse said, if you have two sets of pads, it's faster just to use one as emergency depilatory - rip off all the hair you can with one set, then use the other pads to shock. "If he's dead, he won't mind, and if he lives, he won't mind."
So I'm not enrolling in nursing school or anything (I knew this long before the snakebite photos were passed around during lunch) but I do like knowing this stuff. It's tempting fate but I will go ahead and say I would like to use this knowledge. I mean I don't and I do. If someone is in danger anyway. I don't think I'd freak out too much to do it properly. That's odd to know. It's pretty cool.
