Emergency

After class tonight I discovered that one of my students, who left the class coughing, had a really scary time of it trying to catch her breath and had almost called 911. By the time class ended and I found her in the hall with some of her classmates, she'd pretty much recovered from the worst of it, but didn't think she could drive herself home. She was waiting for her husband to come pick her up.

While we talked, she asked me to take her pulse. I'm totally out of practice, but I have had some training!

When I was in high school I took a CPR class. As you can see, I've never filled out the bottom half of the certification card because I've never administered CPR. I did have the chance to come to the aid of two different people who were in obvious distress soon after I took the class (a woman in Mexico who couldn't quite stay conscious and a man at a campground in Utah who seemed to be suffering from heat stroke). But neither of them required mouth-to-mouth or CPR.

Although I kept surprisingly calm as I helped them, I realized that I wasn't going to be cut out for any sort of job in the medical field. The clincher? When the heat stroke victim's wife suggested that we take out his dentures in case he vomited. Yeah. Not my strong suit.