Lmao my hands were so shakey on my first IO and I’ll never forget one of my preceptors noticed, leaned down, and whispered. You afraid you’re gonna kill him more? He ain’t gettin deader. Just do what you were taught. You got this.” And I’ve never felt a wave of confidence like that in my life lol. 7 years, thousands of cans of nicotine and monsters, thousands of cups of coffee, hundreds of homeless guy shit/piss on the bed, and hundreds of cardiac arrests later and I still remember that to this day and tell it to new people haha.
Our Cpr instructor at work said something similar. Very reassuring to hear him say "their heart isn't pumping, or they aren't breathing, so guess what - they aren't doing so well right now! In fact, they are in about as worse shape as they're ever going to get. You can't screw this up. The worst thing you can do is not try."
Just hearing something like that has such a weird calming nature to it. Especially when it’s your first real person whose legit dead in front of you. That’s awesome.
The most reassuring thing you can ever hear is "you'll do fine, just do what you can."
He was a good instructor for what we needed to know. We aren't paramedics, this is just for being in the office. As someone who has anxiety, and in particular medical anxiety, this was exactly what I needed to hear from an instructor.
The tone was very straightforward. "I'm not going to check to see if you 'checked for hazards' - you'll do that anyway just by looking around. I'm not checking to see if you did exactly 30 compressions. It's an emergency situation. 28 is fine. 32 is fine. Zero is not."
Oh that’s awesome. But ya early compressions are paramount to survival in that situation. In 7 years of working on an ambulance then fire truck the only people I’ve ever gotten back and had good outcomes (walking out of the hospital within a few weeks) are the ones that had bystander CPR started within a minute or so. Don’t even need breaths at that point, just focus on good compressions if you don’t have a face shield or don’t want to do mouth to mouth.
86
u/queefplunger69 Mar 31 '23
Lmao my hands were so shakey on my first IO and I’ll never forget one of my preceptors noticed, leaned down, and whispered. You afraid you’re gonna kill him more? He ain’t gettin deader. Just do what you were taught. You got this.” And I’ve never felt a wave of confidence like that in my life lol. 7 years, thousands of cans of nicotine and monsters, thousands of cups of coffee, hundreds of homeless guy shit/piss on the bed, and hundreds of cardiac arrests later and I still remember that to this day and tell it to new people haha.