Sunday, October 13, 2013

Before First Aid

Blessings Darlings!

Today I saw a FaceBook post from a friend.  He's teaching first aid, and wanted to know what to teach along with that.  This is my reply ....

About a decade ago, my boss collapsed - Atrial Fibrillation. It took 18 minutes for the EMTs to arrive (that's a story for a different time). One of my coworkers was a volunteer firefighter, had spent the past year and a half I'd worked with her claiming how ready she was to deal with anything.

That coworker froze. I, along with a woman from the loan office housed next to ours, did CPR and kept the boss going until the EMTs got there and defib'd her.

Why did the 'trained' person fail, while I could function (even tho' my CPR training had been two decades earlier)? Because in ALL things I didn't procrastinate, instead my habit was to deal with problems as them came up (and try to head them off, of course, but that, too, is a story for a different day. OTOH, my coworker was the youngest child of many, and her siblings would usually step in to 'help' her if she was slow in doing things, or her boyfriend would handle unpleasant things, etc.

Cultivating the habit of handling problems (that you failed to prevent) as they happen, so you don't freeze and act out the habit of putting things off and having others handle them, is to me the most important thing to learn along with the skills involved in first aid.


Frondly, Fern