January 22, 2015 - Take a Baby CPR class

Last night's adventure was the first class that Elizabeth and I have taken to prepare for having a baby.  The Women's Hospital in Greensboro has a fabulous Education Center, which offers a variety of activities to help you and your partner get ready for the addition to your family.  We've already signed up for a few more, and knowing that there is a resource like this right at our fingertips has been a great help to us.

The class was Baby CPR.  I'll refrain from making the jokes I did all week leading up to it...who am I kidding, I can't refrain.  HOW CAN A BABY TEACH CPR?!

Ok, now that's out of my system, I can talk about the class.  We were the first ones there, and got to have our selection of mannequins...which was kinda creepy...

See what I mean? Creepy.

We grabbed a seat and waited as our classmates filed in to the room.  It was a full house, and there were mothers at various stages in their pregnancies. One was due about a week before Elizabeth, and one looked like she was going to pop any day now.  The dads all looked as nervous as I did, so that was a relief.  As one guy I talked to said, "I'm filled with a mix of excitement and abject terror." Yup, just about sums it up.

To start, we learned the process for giving CPR to a child, as well as learning how to assist a child if they are choking.  For the purposes of the class, a child was defined as anyone older than a year that had not reached puberty.  Of course, if you had a larger baby or a smaller child, the skills that you learned could be crossed over between the different age groups.

The video they showed was...ok, I won't go into a movie review here because I know that it's not intended for that.  The "actors" are just trying to show a process, not create a performance.  But the whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking, "This isn't how it would happen."  The people in the video would calmly ask for help and calmly give CPR and calmly call 9-1-1.  I imagine if I ever have to do this, there will be a lot more yelling and crying on my part.

I will say that the video did do a good job of laying out all of the steps if you come across a child that is not responsive.  First, you assess if the scene is safe.  You don't want to start giving CPR in the middle of a street, because being hit by a car won't really help you help the kid.  Second, you tap and talk to the child to see if they will wake up.  If they are unresponsive (they don't wake up, they don't move), then you start yelling for help (I was the best at this in my group, go figure).

 If help comes, assign someone directly to call 9-1-1 and get an AED.  For those that don't know, an AED is an Automated External Defibrillator.  You can find these in most public places now.  They are to be used for children and adults, not for infants, but using them in conjunction with CPR can help maintain life until qualified help arrives.

If you don't make it clear who is doing what, then everyone thinks that the other person is doing it and nothing will get done.  It is important to give clear directions to the people that arrive.  "You, in the blue shirt, call 9-1-1! You, in the red dress, get an AED!"  I'm just hoping people know what an AED is when this happens...

Once help has been called, you need to assess if the child is breathing.  You do this by scanning from the mouth to the stomach slowly, for about 5-10 seconds.  If you do not see any signs that the child is breathing, then it is time for CPR. They've really streamlined CPR from what I remember in Cub Scouts.  Instead of a elaborate dance of chest compressions and breaths, you're supposed to instead focus just on getting the heart to pump blood to the brain and other parts of the body.  To do this, you sing "Stayin' Alive" to yourself...

Seriously, that's what the nice nurse that was giving the class told us. You press hard and fast, and you do this to the beat of the Bee Gees (she also said you could do it to the beat of "Another One Bites the Dust," but that seems a little morbid to me).   The goal is to do this at a rate of 100 presses a minute.  You press down about two inches, and you shoot for the middle of the breast bone above the point where the bottom ribs meet.

You do 30 presses and then move on to giving breaths.  You give breaths by opening up the child's airway.  Hold the forehead back and hold the chin as you place your mouth on the child's mouth.  Plug their nose and breath two 1 second bursts into them.  Watch to make sure that their chest rises, because then you know that you have given breaths correctly. Once you give two successful breaths, go back to chest compressions.

You do five sets of 30 chest compressions and 2 breaths.  If you are by yourself, at this point you call 9-1-1 again and do what they tell you to do.  More often than not, this means that you continue with this process until more qualified help arrives on the scene.

Elizabeth and I each practiced on the mannequin numerous times, going through the whole process and making sure that we had the steps down.  Then we moved on to the infant mannequin.

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

The process was basically the same for the infant as it was for the child.  Instead of using your full hand, however, the nurse said to use two fingers to do chest compressions.  Do the same pressure and the same rate (keep singing "Staying Alive").  When it comes to breaths, make sure to cover both their mouth and their nose with your mouth.  Other than that, repeat the same steps as you did with the child.

We also learned what to do with a choking child and infant, which is really just the Heimlich maneuver.  Make a fist and push it into the child's midsection, you know the drill.  The scary version of this was with the infant mannequin.  Because you can't use a fist (it'd be too big), you have to instead dip the baby upside down and whack it on it's back.  Nugget, you are going to be on a liquid diet until high school...

These are both scary scenarios, and I know that odds are that at one point in his life, Nugget will run the risk of choking or passing out and requiring CPR.  It will be important for me to channel my inner Han Solo and not lose my cool.  I think the Baby CPR class helped me with this.

Or, at the very least, it helped Elizabeth so she can give CPR to us both.


Now, the real question...what class was this for?