EC to the ECU, STAT!

Emergency Contact is really the Emergency Contact now.

She went off for a St John’s First Aid course this week and came back all empowered with the ability to save lives, raise the dead and walk on water… wait, no that wasn’t it. Something like that, anyway.

She avoided some pitfalls that others haven’t. For instance she got 100% in her exam, which my mother didn’t manage. When my mother was asked in her exam “How would you sterilise your hands?” She answered, “Boil them for 10 minutes.” The St John’s people take this sort of thing seriously and that just doesn’t cut the mustard (another way not to sterilise your hands).

She’s a funny little thing my Emergency Contact. She’s not that fond of crowds, question time after lectures, role playing and… well… people really, but she genuinely enjoyed the course. She said to me after day one, “They pulled out the defibrillator and I said, ‘Oh no you don’t! I don’t even drive a manual car, let alone start yelling CLEAR and doing that kind of thing’, but it’s really cool. It talks to you and walks you through what you’ve got to do and doesn't even send the charge to the paddles if it's not required.”

That really is pretty cool.

She also mentioned that if someone is flat-lining on the heart monitor, that's it. They don't even try. There has to be something there blipping away, but that doesn't make for good telly.

I remembered in my course that one of the most complicated bits of advice was where to put your hands to do heart massage. If I remember correctly, you had to take the line from between their eyebrows, line it up with something on the horizon, count three ribs and two nostrils up from the solar plexus, recite the Julian Calendar in reverse and apply one hand-width of pressure with two hands and start massaging. No happy endings. Or at least there weren’t whenever I did it.

So, with this fading in my mind, I asked EC how she’d gone with the heart massage after her second day. She said, “Easy, you just put your hands between their nipples.” Now that is a helluva lot easier than the description I remember carrying around in my head. I bet that some post-Victorian prudishness is behind that awful set of instructions - just so they didn’t have to say the word nipple. I wonder how many people have died or had their sternums cracked because people were embarrassed about saying ‘nipple’, in public.