Monday, January 26, 2009

Because Anymommy asked

Before we begin; card #3 in a card a week for a year will be delayed by one day due to one massive migraine headache which hit Monday afternoon and lasted into Monday night and seriously cut into my night time art making time. the final assemblage of the card has been delayed.

As to the lack of pictures I plead the same as above, I promise a wordless post soon to make up for it.

and onto the reason I'm writing this post. Anymommy commented on yesterday's post that she needed more details and now that I think about if, there could be any number of stories from the tag list from yesterday, so if I ever find myself running out of things to Blog about I've got a built in topic list to take from. As the title says Anymommy asked for a few extra details and who am I do decline a request liked that?

Whose life did I save?

This was a funny one to answer because I'd forgotten that I had until I started checking things off the list. I got to Have you saved someones life? and was about to skip over it and then remembered that, um yeah, twice.

My husband, whom I love to pieces but has yet in the 15+ years that I've known him to eat anything slowly; took an abnormally (but not for him) large bite of something and decided to inhale at the same time. Choking ensued.

At that time, I was working in mail order inside the administrative office connected to the warehouse a local art supply company. One of the warehouse staff was sitting on the entry steps with one of my co-workers and fell over and hit his head on the concrete of the parking lot. As the closest person to the door I was the one who called 911. Embarrassingly no one in the company had first aid training so the phone call was drawn out and full of I don't knows and I'm not sure and I didn't see it happens. Needless to say there was a little bit of finger waving and tsk tsking aimed at the company and within a week a first aid course was offered to anyone who wanted to take it. As the maker of the embarrassing 911 call I signed up for the all day Saturday course and learned life saving.

So back to the husband choking, I followed the steps; asked him if he could breath (answer: head shaking and face turning an unflattering shade of puce) I turned him around wrapped my arms around his torso with my hands placed in the proper position below the sternum and simultaneously lifted him off the floor and sent whatever it was that was choking him flying across the room.

Fast forward to a visit to see a friends new house and another friends new baby in Victoria after my daughter turned one. everyone was visiting cooking in the kitchen and Miranda was running around excited and hyper but also hungry. I got her to sit down and eat a little, but she was soon off again with a little apple left in her mouth, as a new bi-ped she was practicing this fairly new activity and running around. Of course the apple gets lodged in her windpipe, of course she starts to get scared of course of course of course.

As I'd recently; and by recently I mean the previous weekend, spent another Saturday brushing up on first aid (this time baby and toddler centric) I was able to once again, see that my baby was turning blue and administer a stomach emptying Heimlich which was followed closely by a trip to the Emerg after she started to bring up every item of food I'd put into her little body over the course of the last two weekds. And then we had a 5 hour wait in the Emerg waiting room to see if she was OK, but of course after five hours with no more tummy purges we conceded defeat against the busy Saturday Night bedlam and headed back to friends house and bed. NOT the best trip ever.

So why would I forget saving the lives of the two most important people in my life? Probably because they were moments when adrenaline kicked in and because I'd been trained I knew what do and there was no panic involved (to clarify by panic I mean the Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God,what do I do kind of panic) The trip to emerge was made to appease the husband who; may all the Gods love and watch over him as much as I do, can be a bit of an alarmist and I agreed because A: she was emptying her tummy of everything she'd eaten over the last day and a half and B: the possibility of making sure that she wasn't internally wounded was not something I could verify enough to calm down the husband. Of course after 5 hours of watching her play and interact with the other waiting room occupants with no appearance of shock or further vomiting we were both OK with leaving without seeing a Dr.

As for which unchecked item I'd most love to check off well all the ones involving travel are right up there, but I've always thought that I'd like to sit on a jury one day....

1 comment:

Mitsy / ArtMind said...

After reading all this, I think I should go out and follow a first aid course. I know so little about it.
Brave woman you are - even if you think your adrenaline made you do this...

Blog Widget by LinkWithin

Total Pageviews

Popular Posts