Take a Second for First Aid

 You may recall that I was an Activity Days person for  kids aged 8-11 for our congregation back in DC. Well, I may never completely escape it. Mark was asked to be the Activity Days person for boys aged 8-11 for our congregation here in Illinois, and he wanted me to help teach a First Aid lesson to them. Which I did. Okay, mostly Mark did the teaching--because he's good interacting with kids--but I prepared the lessons. Not sure the kids actually enjoyed it (one of them asked at the end of the night "Are we doing anything fun today?"), but the parents must have thought it was useful, because we got asked to teach First Aid to the older boys [aged 12-17]. And by golly, I thought up some good activities, so we're documenting it.

Heimlich Maneuver: I pinched off small pieces of bread and rolled them into balls that could fit in a bunch of straws, then lodged a bread ball into the end of each straw that I handed out to each boy to then blow into a tub. The idea is the bread ball is blocking the windpipe, so we need to help the choking person force air out to dislodge the food. In real life, we do that by forcing the person's lungs to exhale--the lungs are never completely empty of air, which is why this works--by doing the Heimlich maneuver. Mark then showed them how to do the Heimlich--making a fist, covering it with your other hand, wrapping your arms around the person so that your fist is just above their belly button, and pulling in and up in a J-like motion.

Bleeding Control: I filled some zip-sandwich bags with water to represent blood in a blood vessel. I then poked a hole in a bag and, with the water leaking out, asked how to make it stop "bleeding." The immediate answer is to cover the hole (aka apply pressure to the wound), but I also talked about elevating the wound to reduce bleeding (I turned the bag so that the hole was facing the ceiling, versus toward the side or the floor). Plus, we covered why-you-should-leave-a-penetrating-object-in place by sticking a pencil through the bag [to represent an arrow, or rebar, or what-have-you] and showing that removing it would result in a clear exit path for the water, whereas leaving it in place blocked the hole, reducing blood loss. Obviously the object has to be removed eventually, but that would happen in a hospital.

this is a random Google image of hot dog fingers
Wound Care: I got several hot dogs and, using a table knife, made "abrasions" [rubbing the serrated knife across the top of the hot dog], gashes, flaps, and "amputations." Then I squirted ketchup [to represent fresh blood] and strawberry jam [to represent coagulated blood] on the wounds, sprinkled some dirt in there, and had them clean the wounds up with a water squirt bottle and some gauze. Some of the wounds--particularly the abrasion--needed light rubbing with moist gauze, and to clean the flap wound you had to be sure to lift up the flap to get the dirt out. The amputated hot dog part would go on ice for possible re-attachment, though we didn't actually cover that. 

Compression-Only CPR: Chest compressions alone can save lives! We talked about hand placement [in the middle of the chest], locking elbows, and pushing "hard and fast" to the beat of Baby Shark or Stayin' Alive or Another One Bites the Dust. I told them allowing for chest recoil was important to let the heart refill with blood for the next push, and showed them a squeaky ball--if I compress the ball but don't let up on the pressure, it can't squeak again; it needs to expand and refill with air to do that.

At the end of the night of teaching the older boys, I overheard one of them comment to another, "That wasn't First Aid, that was more intense." I'm taking that as a compliment.

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