Certified to do CPR!

So my husband and I (well, I did, and forced my husband onto this) made a New Year's Resolution to "do something we've never done before once a month".

This is what we've done so far:

January- buy a waffle press
February- redecorate our bathroom (I admit, we did these two things the same day, only because the latter part of January consisted of me being SO DAMN SICK, but we would have bought the waffle press had I not been sick)
March- went to Providence (for our anniversary) since we've never been there before
April- we got certified to do CPR!

For the CPR class, I was accosted by a student in one of the main lobbies of one of the main buildings where I work (oooh to be so....descriptive) to sign up, and it seemed great, so I signed up and dragged the Hubs into it as well.

I am so glad I did.

The tutorial movie we had to watch was SOMEWHAT lame, but it was SO great at showing us how to do everything step by step.

Many people seemed to have fun with this, and laughed about a few things. To me, I did not find any of this funny. The procedure is to do 30 chest compressions (as a volunteer EMT told me, sort of to the beat of 'ah ah ah ah Stay alive stay alive'- (you know, that disco song?)- the irony hahaa). But to me it was REALLY emotional- even just watching the actor EMT doing compressions on the dummy, doing compressions myself, watching my group mates do the compressions.

It just seems SO painstakingly long to do this-- one , two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty - tilt head back, hold chin up, hold nose, blow- blow- then back to the 30 chest compressions--- just thinking of possibly having somebody I love (or even a stranger) not breathing and doing this for them. I don't know how to explain it. But it was emotional. 

But now I know how to assess a person's breathing (or lack thereof), administer CPR and use a defibrillator (I guess also called an AED?).


Unfortunately, I only know how to do this on an adolescent-adult. We didn't get trained on children. When I asked an EMT about 'how hard is too hard' on a child, I was told to worry more about getting that heart beating again.

But I keep thinking- just counting to thirty- seems like a damn long time. But it saves lives. And now I can do it.