Sometime after the Twitchy Adventure, I realized it would be a very good idea to re-up my CPR skills. Yesterday I took the class, earning my re-certification twenty-plus years after the fact.
The classes are a bit different now. The dolls are different, for one thing: they don't have limbs anymore. Presumably this is because if you ever have to perform CPR on someone, it will most likely be a quadruple amputee. And why the doll is called "Anne" when it looks more like one of the male robots from I, Robot is beyond me. Also, the idea of "breath shields" had never occurred to anyone twenty years ago: you swabbed the doll's mouth with alcohol each time a new student took over, and that was that. Now you use these thin plastic doo-dads that bunch up awkwardly as you use them and encourage you even more to see the doll as an object rather than a person. (The instructor kept noting that the chief difference between class and real CPR would be the rescuer's adrenaline.)
But there was another new thing that I found particularly interesting: coverage of Good Samaritan laws. In yet another example of the woes of the litigious society (which I see not as the fault of the GOP's much-hated trial lawyers but as a result of a society that teaches people that it's your obligation to try to get something for nothing, anytime you can), apparently people have been sued for trying to render aid and not succeeding. This prompted the state legislatures of, I'm told, every single state to enact Good Samaritan laws to protect the legal rights of those who attempt to render aid. Because it does no good at all if someone decides not to help a dying person because he's afraid he might get sued.
The key term in Good Samaritan legislation seems to be that the rescuer should not attempt to render aid that "exceeds the scope" of his abilities. In other words, just because you saw a character on a TV show do a tracheotomy doesn't mean you should try to dig a hole in someone's throat and insert a pen tube. Now, when I was in the midst of the Twitchy Adventure the thought of litigation never once entered my mind because it almost never does: I am resolutely non-litigious, and would much rather see people try to work things out between themselves than holler out "I'm gonna sue!" over the least little thing.
Still, it's an interesting question. Given that I was more than twenty years past my CPR certification, if I had done what Twitchy was begging me to do, would I have been exceeding the scope of my training in attempting CPR? (God knows, at the time I was terrified of compressing the wrong part of her sternum.) Then there is the other issue: given that Twitchy's heart was clearly beating and blood was circulating just fine, if I had gone ahead and done CPR and something awful had happened, would her family have been able to claim wrongful death? Even though I was only doing what she had instructed me to do?
Who knows; it never came to that, and I'm even happier now that it didn't. But here's the danger: now the thought of litigation, which as I said never occurred to me before, might very well occur to me the next time. And then what decisions do I make in the heat of the moment, with all that adrenaline pumping?
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