Being prepared for a medical emergency

             Thinking ahead and training sure does help!

            Typical scenarios are coming upon a  car accident, or even having a neighbor with a dangerous snake in the yard. Even the recent Boston Marathon explosions come to mind. How about a sucking chest wound from a hunter accident? How about a sports injury? How about somebody choking at your local eatery?

            Now Plan A is to figure it out on the fly and at the time. That is most difficult to accomplish. Plan B is to think it out ahead of time, worse case things if you will, so if you get caught up in some emergency, your actions may be more on auto-pilot, like less thinking and more acting until reinforcements arrive.

            In either case, prior training is a good idea. I remember saving one fellow from drowning using my Scout training. In my case, I also later got some pretty good training from the Marines for obvious reasons. And I got a chance to apply them, too. Thank goodness I knew to pay attention during all this training, and it paid off on more than one occasion, none in combat by the way.

            So what are you going to do if you get placed in a predicament that requires your immediate action? Or even more simple, decades later having to prepare a customized first aid kit for where you live at the time and for the circumstances at the time.

            I would say think ahead of time; and also get all the training you think you need. The intent is not to be a doctor, or even an EMS type ambulance person, but to help out as a very first responder, if you will. Call it first aid.  And sometimes your job can be more like security, like keeping smokers away from a car wreck with gas and fumes all around it.

            Last I have been in a situation where one older than me gal was running around like a chicken without a head yelling "do something". And the local State Highway Patrolman wasn't much better. So I took charge and used just the basics to get things going, again "until reinforcements arrived". That's the idea behind this post...be prepared as best you can. I even left my mother sitting in my car in order to save the trapped girl inside her car, even though it would delay my delivery of my mother to her hair dresser. But even I had thought about scenarios like that, so what I did was pretty much auto-pilot, which again is the idea behind this post.

            A lot of people in Boston did it recently, and so can you and I if it should happen to us, too.