Blues

I have a massage already scheduled this week. Which is good. Had to update my BLS (CPR training) yesterday. Intentionally scheduled it at the class offered at our facility, rather than the main training site for the whole U system. Smaller classes, and all geared toward those of us who have been trained for years, and many of us have actually done CPR on actual people. Our own people run it, and test us. It's serious, but often fun, with stories shared that bring the rote process into real life.

Instead, the director of the Education department came to observe, after arriving late, giving us false hope that we could get through the material at speed. The guy is also an ass, thinks he's an old style comic, stupid, borderline offensive jokes. And a stickler on the kind of detail that doesn't matter - mostly because it gets lost when the adrenaline rushes into a real situation. So, our instructor has to go through every bit, in tedium, in order. Well, if it saves the satellite classes for the next time and for everyone else, we endure.

Making people go slowly through old material is a horrible way to teach. As a bright kid, bored to tears in school sometimes, frustrated at slow readers laboriously slogging through a simple sentence, I know the torture. It bred a contempt for the less bright in me. A personal grudge, that I was held to their speed when I wanted to run. I didn't mind helping tutor a kid who struggled, occasionally. But mostly, I'd love to have been put through my paces, without having to wait for the slowest, and forced to plod.

The BLS class from the 'Merican hart* is all on video, terribly repetitious, and in the situations where we work, largely off the mark. We've been in codes, we've done CPR, we were not out in a park, or in the cafeteria, but in a hosptial, and it was a patient. Not that we shouldn't have a plan if we are out in the wild, as everyone should. But we have to take this course because when we are most likely to use it is AT WORK. It's our job. And teaching from that perspective would be really, really useful. Instead, we get this tedious, generic, and largely not applicable, mandatory and torturous training.

The best ones have been taught by fellow nurses, ICU and OR people, who tell stories, of what actually worked, and how often it doesn't. And when they relate a tale of BLS out in the world, it's the one who saw her crawling neice put a marble in her mouth, and stop breathing. She grabbed the babe up, walloped her on the back, and dislodged the marble from her airway, shooting it across the room. Kid wouldn't go near her afterward, for years.

The "proper" method also involves going through the rather arduous physical process over and over. Now, my back, and my thumb, just can't tolerate this. If it was for an actual person, hellwith my back and hands, I'm throwing myself in there. But for demonstration? It's silly and harmful, to no purpose. And, when I have done it in the OR, we get the young guys with good upper body strength in as fast as we can. Plenty of them around. They get to feel all heroic, they do it much better, and the rest of us get the defibrillator and epi, while the anesthesiologist takes care of the airway. Any of us, offered an AED, could figure it out, without formal training, in a crisis. Which is what is going to work, while the CPR provides a bit of time to get it. Modern version of blowing smoke up our ass.

Which is all to say, my back hurts, my thumb hurts, and I have most of next week off work for a smidgen of a vacation.




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