Got distracted by first aid
Recently in an elevator I overheard a woman talking about an incident she had witnessed on the train. “There was a woman keeled over, drenched in sweat,” she reported, a little bit excited that something interesting had happened, or maybe I’m projecting. “People called for a doctor, but there wasn’t one, so at the station two women carried her off the train!”
I thought about that woman, the unresponsive one, not the excited one, the rest of the ride, and when I got to my desk I googled, “what to do if a woman is unresponsive and sweating.”
The UK Red Cross (my computer thinks I’m in England) had nothing to say about the sweating, but said if a person is unresponsive, you get them prone and tilt their head back to see if they’re breathing. If they are, then you put them on their side and tilt their head back again. (You’re trying to keep them from choking on their tongue.) Then you call 999 (that’s British for 911). If the person is not breathing, you do chest compressions “at a regular rate until help arrives.”
And that’s it: Check breath, 999, compressions. The rest of the UK Red Cross first aid pages offer equally simple instructions. For most serious maladies (heart attack, poisoning, stroke, asthma attack), the prescribed first aid is to make the person comfortable and the second step is to call 999.
I’ve been present for one medical quasi-emergency that I remember. It was 10 years ago and I was with a group of colleagues at a bar; one of them fell down the stairs, hitting his head and gashing his brow. He insisted he was fine and kept trying to leave, but it was a big gash. I told someone to bring me some napkins and I sat him on the stairs and held the napkins to his cut, talked him down while our boss called 911 and hailed a cab. Once they left, I remember feeling incredible. I had no idea I was good in a crisis, but I was good in a crisis! I was calm, I knew what to do, I knew what to say.
For a long time I’d think back to that night as proof of something powerful about myself. Good in a crisis, my secret skill. And sometimes I’d think: maybe I should go to nursing school.
This wasn’t an entirely out-of-nowhere idea. A few years earlier I’d done some babysitting for a labor and delivery nurse who liked her job so much that it had left an impression. And in high school, I’d volunteered at a hospital and really liked the atmosphere of it, the shared goal of helping patients get better, or at least be comfortable. It’d been a tempting back-of-the-mind idea, but once I knew I was good in a crisis, it moved to the front. So I googled programs and counted credits. I discovered that I would have to take two years of full-time courses just to be able to apply. (I’d taken no science in university.) At the time that seemed impossible, my life already on its trajectory. (I was 25, hilarious.) I moved on.
But I revisit the idea sometimes, a fun what-if. Every astrology reading, enneagram chart, and Myers Briggs personality test always clocks me as a carer, suggests that I should be in a helping profession. And it’d be nice to have some practical skills. But I don’t think it would have been for me, nursing. Sure I’m good at being calm in a crisis, but you know what I’m bad at? Information recall. I only play trivia under duress, but on the occasions when I do, I often think: if I’m this bad at remembering the name of a song I’ve heard about 500 times, how would I possibly remember how many cc’s of whatever to pump into someone’s IV?
I suppose there’s an argument to made for the power of adrenaline in activating one’s memory. I took a self defense a few years ago and the instructor told us that just having practiced the moves a few times meant that, should we ever actually need them, they’d come back to us from wherever they were hidden in the back of our minds. And when I got trained to carry Narcan, the drug that can stop an overdose, the nurse told me the same thing: that the training would kick in if I ever needed it.
I got the Narcan while I was living in San Francisco. I worked in the SOMA district, which has one of the city’s highest densities of homeless people, and the six-block walk from the train to my office could be harrowing. I regularly saw people with needles in their arms, people passed out. One morning I passed a scene with a few EMTs and a person who was no longer alive. And then there were the tents, the refuse, the human shit. My therapist suggested that carrying Narcan would change the way I saw the people on the street, knowing that I could save their lives. So I went to a city agency around the corner and got the drug, got the 10-minute training on how to put together the sprayer and spray it up their nose and then get back, because it instantly caused withdrawal, and people in withdrawal could be angry.
I kept the Narcan in the interior pocket of the leather jacket I wore everyday, and my therapist was right, it did make me walk a little taller. I stopped carrying it when I moved back to New York, but my morning on the UK Red Cross website gave me that same zing of competency. It feels good to know that I have what it takes to help in an emergency, even if it’s just the knowledge that I can be calm in a crisis and competently dial 999.
Watercolor by Matt Davis
Referenced
“Learn first aid,” UK Red Cross