Music and Cats

I lean over the life-sized baby doll, compressing her little chest repeatedly with two fingers of my right hand. Thirty compressions in eighteen seconds. I’m counting them out loud. …twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. I lower my head to blow two quick breaths into her mouth and nose, watching to see that her chest rises, then resume compressions. One, two, three, four, five, six…

I’d like to say that I spent last Saturday at the Red Cross learning adult, child and infant CPR purely out of the goodness of my heart, but I can’t. I was there because I had to be.

If you want children, and are unable to have them the old-fashioned way — or some newfangled but still biological way — the state will be involved in the process by which you become a parent. If you choose to adopt from the foster care system, as Paul and I have, the state will hand you a big set of hoops through which to jump before it will entrust you with one of the children who has come into its care. Two of those hoops are certification in Child and Infant CPR and Basic First Aid. While the state can’t require that biological parents learn what to do in case of a medical emergency, it can and does require this training of foster/adoptive parents.

In the morning, we covered the procedures for CPR on adults and children. The mannequins on which we practiced compressions and breathing were life-sized and realistically sculpted (the adult female had breasts!), but the adult and child mannequins consisted of only the head and torso. The absence of a full body, the obvious articulation of the neck to allow for tilting the head, and the presence of five other people kneeling on the floor practicing compressions at the same time all made the process seem unreal.

After a break for lunch, we moved on to infant CPR. For this part of the class, the mannequins were not just head and torso, but full-sized baby dolls with chubby arms and legs. I found it disturbing to watch our teacher carrying several of them around the classroom by their arms. When she handed a mannequin to me, I instinctively cradled it as I’d been taught to do with baby dolls some 40 years ago.

After a short discussion of the few differences in technique for infant CPR, we began practicing on the infant mannequins. By that time, the procedure was familiar; I could feel my muscle memory taking over. Noticing that some people seemed distracted, our teacher commented, “If you ever have to do this for real, it will feel different.”

If I ever have to do this for real… I pictured the bright, beautiful faces of my young nephews and neice, imagined any one of them suddenly still. I felt myself tear up, and I thought, if I ever have to do this for real, I don’t know how I’ll keep from sobbing.

Here’s what I realized: if I ever have to do CPR for real, I may cry, and that won’t matter. What will matter is that I do what I did on Saturday, what the class was training me to do. As the tears welled up in my eyes, I continued pressing the little mannequin’s chest in a steady rhythm. I kept counting compressions. Thirty compressions, then two breaths. Thirty compressions, two more breaths.

Even through tears and terror, I can do that.

To open the advent calendar window for Day 20, click here:

If this were a child you loved, and she stopped breathing or her heart stopped beating, would you know how to keep her brain and other vital organs alive until medical help arrived? Your local chapter of the Red Cross can teach you what to do. The life you save could be your child’s.

For Holidailies

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