It Might Be Better Just to Go Ahead and Die

We recently discovered that the CPR certification of all the staff in our home was either expired or about to, so we immediately signed up for training. Lowell and our day staff got in a class and are now current, but our weekend guy and I couldn't make that class (clearly, somebody has to stay at the house and work.) However, the good news about missing the class is that we later found out that we could test out without having to go to the four-hour class. All we had to do was take the open-book test and then go demonstrate on the CPR dummy that we know how to do the process.

So I give the book and the test to Weekend Guy and explain what he needs to do. I also take the test myself over the weekend. When I picked up his test this morning and was heading to turn them in, I realized we had several different answers. So Lowell and I rechecked mine (remember, he's recently taken the class and passed this same test). I had all the answers right. So of the twenty questions in this open-book test, he had missed NINE. Yep, nine. Out of twenty. In an open-book test. Is there even any excuse for that??

We laughed all morning about some of the questions he missed. Many were common sense, some had to be found in the book. Probably though, our favorite question that he missed was this:

If a person is suffering from pain or discomfort in the chest that lasts more than 3 to 5 minutes or that goes away and comes back, this person is most likely having:

A - A heat-related emergency
B - A cold-related emergency
C - A heart attack
D - A seizure

Okay, ready for this??? He answered B - A cold-related emergency. Oh yes, he did.

We are just really hoping that we don't happen to have any "cold-related emergency" when he is around. He might just start CPR. It wouldn't matter if we didn't give consent. He states he would help even if the person was able to say "no". And apparently this CPR would consist of rescue breaths that are four seconds long (go ahead and stop right now and try to breathe out for four seconds, I'll wait). Then he would repeat this breath quickly 3 times. And then the 15 compressions would start. And we are thinking they would be pretty dang hard, because he does think he is restarting the heart by doing this (not just helping the oxygen to circulate). The one positive about this is that he probably wouldn't be performing CPR long. He understands when it's time to stop. He knows that it's not when the Emergency Personel or someone with a AED arrives. It's when the person's condition worsens. And I think we all know there is only one step down from unconscious and not breathing to dead. The good news is that when someone is beating on your chest and breathing into your mouth for 12 solid seconds, it probably wouldn't take too terribly long to for the person to die.

Well, Lowell and Joshua are in the other room clutching their chests, so I'm gonna go turn up the heat!!