If there's one thing you should learn - learn first aid
As a healer, my main purpose is to help or facilitate you to understand the way you work, understand how stresses manifest in your body and to assist your body's natural healing process. As part of my massage education, I was required to have the first aid certificate. For most of us we just think it is a tick in the box and nothing could ever happen where you would need those skills that you learnt in 5 minutes to kick into action.
Yesterday I was attending my friend's birthday lunch and we were sitting at the table having a good yarn over great food and wine when all of a sudden we heard this large commotion coming from the other side of the room. An older woman was making some pretty horrible gasping noises and her daughter was absolutely hysterical thinking that her mother was about to die as the woman kept exclaiming that she couldn't breathe. The daughter started yelling for help and all of us looked over. It's at that moment when things seem to take forever - initially we had no idea what was going on, we were frozen (and by me I mean my bunch of friends, myself and the restaurant staff), and we didn't know what to do. After that my friend stood up to go to the lady to rub her back and then all of a sudden my first aid instincts kicked in as I knew that a simple rub on the back wasn't going to help.
My brain was racing at a miles per hour thinking "how the hell do I do that Heinrich maneuvur again" until the answer that came pretty quickly after that was "Get her to bend over and hit her back hard aiming upwards". At that point I told my friend to step aside and I started hitting the woman's back and telling her to bend over. As soon as I did that she gasped and said "Thankyou" and I knew she was ok. A chef from the kitchen came out then and performed the Heinrich maneuver on her but by then she was fine so it made the woman feel very uncomfortable. After that the woman was just gasping and in a state of stress and I tried to calm her down by rubbing her back, telling her she was ok, telling her to just breathe slowly and calm down and had my hands on her chest sending her some healing energy as well. After a while she calmed down and was so apologetic to all of us whereas our main concern was that she was alright.
As I sat back down at the table with my friends and tried to resume lunch, I noticed that my heart was racing at a million miles per hour. I had just finished reading "Waking the Tiger" by Peter Levine which is about how people deal with trauma and how it is very important after a traumatic event happens to sit with the feeling instead of trying to push it down and forget that it happened. So I spent the next few minutes sitting down, tuning into my heart racing and focusing on my breathing. At that point I was surprised that I had so much adrenaline running through me because when I was assisting the woman, I just felt like a robot - I needed to do this step, that step, keep a calm demeanor because I didn't want my anxiousness to project onto the woman making her worse. Obviously now that the event was over my body was having a delayed reaction to it, so I let it play out and after that I went back to business as usual.
Having read that book, I understood that if I had not paused for those brief few minutes to catch myself and acknowledge how I felt, this event could effect me in the future in ways that I could not even imagine. I find it uncanny about the timing of things how events either happen around the time I'm about to read something in a book explaining that exact event, or I would have just finished reading something and then an event happens where I need to put my learnings into action.
Regardless of that, I am also happy that somehow my body remembered what I had been taught in first aid last year about dealing with someone choking. We may think that we might not remember things that we learnt in a 1 day class on some mundane thing but you can rest assured that that information will surface when it is absolutely required.
It is for this reason that I think everyone needs to learn first aid. If someone is in trouble, I think it is our duty to try to help them out. Screw the whole "but you might get sued if you do something wrong" sort of thing. If I was in the position of having potentially losing my life, I would want someone to jump in and try to help. You will know what to do at the right time, so just trust yourself.
Yesterday I was attending my friend's birthday lunch and we were sitting at the table having a good yarn over great food and wine when all of a sudden we heard this large commotion coming from the other side of the room. An older woman was making some pretty horrible gasping noises and her daughter was absolutely hysterical thinking that her mother was about to die as the woman kept exclaiming that she couldn't breathe. The daughter started yelling for help and all of us looked over. It's at that moment when things seem to take forever - initially we had no idea what was going on, we were frozen (and by me I mean my bunch of friends, myself and the restaurant staff), and we didn't know what to do. After that my friend stood up to go to the lady to rub her back and then all of a sudden my first aid instincts kicked in as I knew that a simple rub on the back wasn't going to help.
My brain was racing at a miles per hour thinking "how the hell do I do that Heinrich maneuvur again" until the answer that came pretty quickly after that was "Get her to bend over and hit her back hard aiming upwards". At that point I told my friend to step aside and I started hitting the woman's back and telling her to bend over. As soon as I did that she gasped and said "Thankyou" and I knew she was ok. A chef from the kitchen came out then and performed the Heinrich maneuver on her but by then she was fine so it made the woman feel very uncomfortable. After that the woman was just gasping and in a state of stress and I tried to calm her down by rubbing her back, telling her she was ok, telling her to just breathe slowly and calm down and had my hands on her chest sending her some healing energy as well. After a while she calmed down and was so apologetic to all of us whereas our main concern was that she was alright.
As I sat back down at the table with my friends and tried to resume lunch, I noticed that my heart was racing at a million miles per hour. I had just finished reading "Waking the Tiger" by Peter Levine which is about how people deal with trauma and how it is very important after a traumatic event happens to sit with the feeling instead of trying to push it down and forget that it happened. So I spent the next few minutes sitting down, tuning into my heart racing and focusing on my breathing. At that point I was surprised that I had so much adrenaline running through me because when I was assisting the woman, I just felt like a robot - I needed to do this step, that step, keep a calm demeanor because I didn't want my anxiousness to project onto the woman making her worse. Obviously now that the event was over my body was having a delayed reaction to it, so I let it play out and after that I went back to business as usual.
Having read that book, I understood that if I had not paused for those brief few minutes to catch myself and acknowledge how I felt, this event could effect me in the future in ways that I could not even imagine. I find it uncanny about the timing of things how events either happen around the time I'm about to read something in a book explaining that exact event, or I would have just finished reading something and then an event happens where I need to put my learnings into action.
Regardless of that, I am also happy that somehow my body remembered what I had been taught in first aid last year about dealing with someone choking. We may think that we might not remember things that we learnt in a 1 day class on some mundane thing but you can rest assured that that information will surface when it is absolutely required.
It is for this reason that I think everyone needs to learn first aid. If someone is in trouble, I think it is our duty to try to help them out. Screw the whole "but you might get sued if you do something wrong" sort of thing. If I was in the position of having potentially losing my life, I would want someone to jump in and try to help. You will know what to do at the right time, so just trust yourself.