OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

Way back in 1967 Troy was way over yonder in the Army and I was living with my folks in Whitefish, Montana. Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had just been discovered and my parents, being the kind of people they were, had purchased a Resusci-Annie to be used for training. Because of that, my parents were invited to attend the first class in the valley – before most of the doctors even had the training. Mom let me go in her place.

We met several times and did a sort of pseudo-practice on each other, crawling around on the floor and finding the push-spot on strange chests and pretending to blow air in strange mouths.

For all of us, this new CPR thing was remarkable and it was a heady thing, knowing we could save lives. After the training I kept my eyes open for any poor soul who dropped to the floor from a heart attack. If anyone in a store looked a little suspicious I would follow closely. It didn’t occur to me that before the training I never encountered a single person having a heart attack.

Then one day it happened. I was driving to Kalispell and pulled off to the side of the road was a battered old clunker with a man slumped over the wheel. I screeched to a halt and raced to the car door and pounded the window. He didn’t respond. I jerked it open, the whole time going over the routine in my head.

The stench reached me in seconds, before the guy lifted his head and looked at me through bleary eyes. He was drunker than seven skunks and had puked all over himself. His clothes were filthy, the car was trashed, and he obviously hadn’t visited a shower or bathtub in a long time. Booze and cigarettes and vomit notwithstanding, the guy stunk.

I wandered back to my car, chagrined at the knowledge that even if he had been in a medical crisis there was no way I was going to slap my lips over his.

In case you missed it, a recent Parade Magazine had a marvelous article about the new CPR where you don’t have to do the lip-to-lip thing. Like me, most people were reluctant to do mouth-to-mouth on a collapsed stranger. In an effort to determine if there was a way to encourage CPR, studies were done which proved that chest compressions were enough. There is enough oxygen in the blood that as long as it is kept circulating there’s no need for doing more than compressions. In fact, the studies showed that chances of survival were greater if you didn’t take the time for the breaths.

The key to saving a life is to call 911 and then performing 100 chest compressions a minute and not stopping until help arrives.