Basic Life Support training report

"The life you can save?" No, that's Peter Singer

About a year ago I decided that maybe I should actually know something about something and signed myself up for Basic Life Support training with my local Red Cross. I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out what it was I wanted to learn and what was feasible given time constraints, which was frustrating at times because it wasn't always easy to tell what information was on offer, and moreover what the end result of learning the course materials would be.

I'm also a bit allergic to professional certifications at this point and the whole space of first aid trainings was reflecting the dysfunctions of that world to me. I was worried I might end up getting "fake" information and not learn much of anything. In the end Red Cross came through; overall I endorse the experience, though there were certainly problems.

"Famine, Affluence, and Morality?" Nope, still Singer

Basic Life Support (BLS) training is fundamentally designed to give you the bare minimum of skills you need to slightly improve the chances that someone experiencing cardiac arrest nearby you survives the experience. There are other pieces, but in comparison they're minor. At the same time, it also isn't anything more than that, which by the Fully General EMH makes sense. (If you could teach people something really useful about medicine in a few hours of study time and one morning class we would all already know it.)

Specifically, I learned:

• A few pieces of information to check to decide that an emergency is happening
• A few habits to perform once you've decided that an emergency is happening
• The physical and logistical skills of performing CPR and using an AED
• That naloxone exists and can be used to prevent opiod overdose
• Probably some other things but I don't remember them a year later even looking at this summary of things you learn in the course

The structure of the training, which cost about $100, was an online course that took me two nights to work through (not trying that hard) and one five hour in-person class on a Saturday morning.

If you've done mandatory training at a large corporation or worked through the training for a certification, you'd recognize the genre of the online course: lots of hokey videos, lots of repetition, extremely targeted at making you remember a few key pieces of information, no attempt to communicate much of a world model or explain why things should be true. Unlike many of its siblings in the genre, though, I thought the course was adequate to its limited scope. The video CPR demonstrations stick in my mind especially as being about as effective pedagogically as you could expect a video explaining CPR to be.

"Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" okay close enough

Unfortunately the in-person class was less satisfying. It was in two parts, starting with a re-hash of the independent study materials, then time with the dummies to practice the physical skills. The repetition of the online course was an aggravating waste of time, and they let us go early, which was doubly annoying (let me keep flailing around on the CPR dummy if I want to! I paid $100 to be here!).

I also did not feel like we were being watched by our instructor closely enough to be corrected if we were performing the techniques incorrectly, which seemed to entirely defeat the point of having an instructor there to instruct. Also, my CPR dummy didn't have working feedback lights, so we basically had to vibe it out(!!). Despite all these shortcomings, we still got to do violence to CPR dummies (and it is quite violent!), which was a lot better than not getting to do that.

I came away feeling much more prepared than I'd felt three days prior, in the way you feel when, having learned something, it seems slightly silly you ever didn't know it. Knowing CPR and how to use an AED is not, by the statistics, very likely to help anyone; even if I'm party to a relatively rare event, the survival rate of adults given CPR outside a hospital is usually cited to be around 11%. I suspect that I now add single digit percentage points to the chances of survival of anyone who might have a heart attack near me. That may not sound like much, but for $100 and ten hours of my time, I actually feel really good about it.

Learn how to give CPR! It's not that hard! And if you're anything like me it will make you feel a little bit more like you're part of the real world.

The kanji of the day is 心

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keyword is HEART.
• Its readings are こころ, ごころ, and シン.

This is one of the highly stylized pictograms that really works for me. It conveys the anatomical heart without being vulgar, and I think pictures of organs are scawy (that should be inside you! if I can see it that means something bad happened!) so this is a big win. And unlike many of the other highly compressed radical forms (looking at you, 灬 🖘 火/FIRE), somehow 忄 (as in, e.g., 快/PLEASANT) is believable to me. Basically 心 is a stone cold classic, 10/10.