Rainbows and First Aid.
Feb. 24th, 2007 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
motodraconisBeen on a 2 day First Aid Refresher Course. Took the test on Friday and I'm now qualified for the next 3 years.
I'm not especially squeamish, but a couple of days of being told in detail some of the horrible things that can happen to the human body, (complete with photographs) can make you squirm a bit.
1) Ever seen a limb amputated? (Er... no, thank god!) Did you know that there ain't that much blood, as the body naturally closes off the blood vessels and the brain compensates by adjusting blood pressure? How do you treat an amputation? Here's a picture of a load of fingers chopped off. Etc.
2) With the increase in the wild rat population, Leptospirosis is starting to become more of a problem. How many of you drink from cans? (Some hands go up.) How many of you drink from beer bottles? (My hand goes up.) Bearing in mind that cans and beer bottles can be stored in cellars, would you want to be drinking from something potentially smeared with rat urine? (Er... no! I don't want to be drinking from something smeared with any urine, diseased, rodent or otherwise. Thank grud for Snopes!)
3) An unconscious and non-breathing casualty won't as such vomit, that requires muscle control. But with all the muscles relaxed some kind of backwash/seepage from the stomach may occur. "My area manager, (blah blah) had to give CPR and mouth to mouth re-suss to a casualty who had a backwash not only of stomach contents but also of bowel contents," (that's poo to you and me... poo came out of the casualty's mouth!) The area manager ended up off work for six months (with some undefined poo-contracted contagion.) Always use a face shield for mouth to mouth!
I'd bought a key-ring based mouth shield yonks ago, (I've been a First Aider for about 7 years(?) or so.) But I accidentally left it in a pocket and it ended up going through the wash and was never quite the same. Thought it a good idea to buy a replacement.
Other gems, not so much squirmy but intriguing included.
4) In some parts of Africa the way they test for potential (untreated) Diabetes is to get patients to piss outside, and then wait...
If you have untreated diabetes, ants will start to go for your wee, and end up crawling all over it, because it's full of sugar. Apparently this is how the Ancient Egyptians first twigged diabetes.
5) If the diabetes gets really bad, the person will smell sweet, as the blood is overloaded with sugar that the body cannot process, (hence some of it is pissed out, some sweated out.) The sugar in the sweat makes the person smell sweet, "like candyfloss." Much as smelling of candy might sound great, if you've reached this stage the next step along is coma. Not recommended. (Come to think of it, my ex* used to smell of sugar, at least in the end months of the relationship. But this may be due to the fact he used to eat idiotically large quantities of sugary shite. Either way, it's probably not a brilliant idea to eat so much sugar the body starts to sweat it out as if it was a toxin.)
6) CPR HAS CHANGED. Time was you had to check the pulse, give so many breaths alternating with so many chest compressions, followed by checking the pulse and breathing again etc etc. But that was too bloody complicated for a stressful situation. Over-complicated in fact!
Now, if you find someone unconscious and not breathing,** you:-
a) If alone, dial for an ambulance immediately. Then get cracking*** on 30 chest compressions followed by 2 breaths in (mouth to mouth) then 30 compressions followed by 2 breaths and keep going until the ambulance arrives and/or a professional can take over. (A good trick if you have a mobile is to dial 999, (or 112, that works for Europe and the UK) put it on speaker and thus can start the chest pumping while waiting to connect/talking to the operator.)
b) If with company, get them to ring for an ambulance, (explaining that the person isn't breathing,) and get them to stick around. You get on with the 30/2 sequence, but as you may need to keep this up for some time, you can ask the bystander to take a turn at the chest compressions...
So, even if you're not a first aider yourself, you could one day find yourself in a situation where you might have to do CPR, especially if the first aider is a little old lady or blokie and likely to collapse from the effort, cos CPR for 20 minutes without a rest ain't no picnic!
If the casualty is a child or not breathing due to drowning, the procedure is slightly different, you'd start with a couple of breaths before chesty pumps, but if you find an unconscious, non breathing adult then the most likely scenario (unless you're a life-guard with a sodden casualty,) is that they've had a heart attack. They are NOT going to spring back into life Baywatch style. You're going to be pumping away until the paramedics arrive. So they've decided that the chesty pumps are the most important thing, 30 at a time, and there's talk that in time they'll phase out the mouth to mouth stuff too. (They would have phased it out already but people got too panicky at the idea of CPR with no mouth to mouth.)
In fact, they reckon that by the time I'm up for my next First Aid refresher course, using a Defibrillator will be standard training, as Defibs are getting so cheap and so easy to use that they could become standard for a workplace of a certain size. So I'll be learning eventually to use a Defib, and that's a whole different story. Cool!****
Not wanting to end on a grim and squeamish note, have some pretty Liverpool rainbows from last Thursday, snapped from my car on the way home from training.
* I know you read my LJ, so you might want to get yourself checked out, or at the very least... piss on an ants nest or summat.
** You'd better be sure they ain't breathing... cos it's no fun for anyone getting mouth to mouth if the casualty can breathe unaided.
*** Literally. You have to press pretty hard, and in the stress, yes you could crack ribs. No, you're not supposed to but hell, if the guy ain't breathing and is technically dead a few cracked ribs is the least of their worries.
**** Learning to use a Defibrillator would be cool; actually being faced with a non-breathing, semi-dead real person would definitely not be cool. I really don't want to ever have to actually be faced with the real prospect of having to do CPR for real on someone, but if it ever does happen, having some vague training seems better than none at all, even if it's brown-trouser time.
I'm not especially squeamish, but a couple of days of being told in detail some of the horrible things that can happen to the human body, (complete with photographs) can make you squirm a bit.
1) Ever seen a limb amputated? (Er... no, thank god!) Did you know that there ain't that much blood, as the body naturally closes off the blood vessels and the brain compensates by adjusting blood pressure? How do you treat an amputation? Here's a picture of a load of fingers chopped off. Etc.
2) With the increase in the wild rat population, Leptospirosis is starting to become more of a problem. How many of you drink from cans? (Some hands go up.) How many of you drink from beer bottles? (My hand goes up.) Bearing in mind that cans and beer bottles can be stored in cellars, would you want to be drinking from something potentially smeared with rat urine? (Er... no! I don't want to be drinking from something smeared with any urine, diseased, rodent or otherwise. Thank grud for Snopes!)
3) An unconscious and non-breathing casualty won't as such vomit, that requires muscle control. But with all the muscles relaxed some kind of backwash/seepage from the stomach may occur. "My area manager, (blah blah) had to give CPR and mouth to mouth re-suss to a casualty who had a backwash not only of stomach contents but also of bowel contents," (that's poo to you and me... poo came out of the casualty's mouth!) The area manager ended up off work for six months (with some undefined poo-contracted contagion.) Always use a face shield for mouth to mouth!
I'd bought a key-ring based mouth shield yonks ago, (I've been a First Aider for about 7 years(?) or so.) But I accidentally left it in a pocket and it ended up going through the wash and was never quite the same. Thought it a good idea to buy a replacement.
Other gems, not so much squirmy but intriguing included.
4) In some parts of Africa the way they test for potential (untreated) Diabetes is to get patients to piss outside, and then wait...
If you have untreated diabetes, ants will start to go for your wee, and end up crawling all over it, because it's full of sugar. Apparently this is how the Ancient Egyptians first twigged diabetes.
5) If the diabetes gets really bad, the person will smell sweet, as the blood is overloaded with sugar that the body cannot process, (hence some of it is pissed out, some sweated out.) The sugar in the sweat makes the person smell sweet, "like candyfloss." Much as smelling of candy might sound great, if you've reached this stage the next step along is coma. Not recommended. (Come to think of it, my ex* used to smell of sugar, at least in the end months of the relationship. But this may be due to the fact he used to eat idiotically large quantities of sugary shite. Either way, it's probably not a brilliant idea to eat so much sugar the body starts to sweat it out as if it was a toxin.)
6) CPR HAS CHANGED. Time was you had to check the pulse, give so many breaths alternating with so many chest compressions, followed by checking the pulse and breathing again etc etc. But that was too bloody complicated for a stressful situation. Over-complicated in fact!
Now, if you find someone unconscious and not breathing,** you:-
a) If alone, dial for an ambulance immediately. Then get cracking*** on 30 chest compressions followed by 2 breaths in (mouth to mouth) then 30 compressions followed by 2 breaths and keep going until the ambulance arrives and/or a professional can take over. (A good trick if you have a mobile is to dial 999, (or 112, that works for Europe and the UK) put it on speaker and thus can start the chest pumping while waiting to connect/talking to the operator.)
b) If with company, get them to ring for an ambulance, (explaining that the person isn't breathing,) and get them to stick around. You get on with the 30/2 sequence, but as you may need to keep this up for some time, you can ask the bystander to take a turn at the chest compressions...
So, even if you're not a first aider yourself, you could one day find yourself in a situation where you might have to do CPR, especially if the first aider is a little old lady or blokie and likely to collapse from the effort, cos CPR for 20 minutes without a rest ain't no picnic!
If the casualty is a child or not breathing due to drowning, the procedure is slightly different, you'd start with a couple of breaths before chesty pumps, but if you find an unconscious, non breathing adult then the most likely scenario (unless you're a life-guard with a sodden casualty,) is that they've had a heart attack. They are NOT going to spring back into life Baywatch style. You're going to be pumping away until the paramedics arrive. So they've decided that the chesty pumps are the most important thing, 30 at a time, and there's talk that in time they'll phase out the mouth to mouth stuff too. (They would have phased it out already but people got too panicky at the idea of CPR with no mouth to mouth.)
In fact, they reckon that by the time I'm up for my next First Aid refresher course, using a Defibrillator will be standard training, as Defibs are getting so cheap and so easy to use that they could become standard for a workplace of a certain size. So I'll be learning eventually to use a Defib, and that's a whole different story. Cool!****
Not wanting to end on a grim and squeamish note, have some pretty Liverpool rainbows from last Thursday, snapped from my car on the way home from training.
* I know you read my LJ, so you might want to get yourself checked out, or at the very least... piss on an ants nest or summat.
** You'd better be sure they ain't breathing... cos it's no fun for anyone getting mouth to mouth if the casualty can breathe unaided.
*** Literally. You have to press pretty hard, and in the stress, yes you could crack ribs. No, you're not supposed to but hell, if the guy ain't breathing and is technically dead a few cracked ribs is the least of their worries.
**** Learning to use a Defibrillator would be cool; actually being faced with a non-breathing, semi-dead real person would definitely not be cool. I really don't want to ever have to actually be faced with the real prospect of having to do CPR for real on someone, but if it ever does happen, having some vague training seems better than none at all, even if it's brown-trouser time.
