In preparation for SSTIKS, I just completed my CPR training.
I was a bit surprised by one part of the course. They rushed over what to do when you had an unconcious person with a blocked airway. I expected them to encourage us to do a heimlich maneuver (abdominal thrust -- apparantly heimlich patented his maneuver so we can't call it that anymore). The compression of the diaphram would force any water out of the lungs and CPR could then be administered.
But they apparantly don't recomend that procedure. If the person is unconcious and not breathing, you are to try to get air into their lungs. If that fails, you compress the chest as for CPR. That should push an obstruction out of the lungs so subsequent assisted breathing would work. The recommendation was to do this before checking for a pulse.
I always thought that the chest compressions associated with CPR would seriously injure a beating heart and that you always had to check a puluse before CPR. But in the case of a drowning victim, they recommend going straight to the CPR as soon as you notice that they have unbstructed lungs. Apparantly people were lacerating livers in their attempts to empty lungs by diaphram compression.
This all started me thinking. Have any of you out there ever revived a drowning victim? Did your victim survive following CPR? How did you get the water out of the lungs, or was it a "dry drowning"?
Has anyone administered CPR at sea from a sea kayak? I know in my one episode with an unconcious person, we prepared him for CPR by laying him out across three kayaks. I held the lower body to keep him firmly in place. The folks on the front half of the victim had extensive wilderness emergency medical training and were positioned to do CPR, but decided not to since (1) the person was obviously beyond help and (2) they didn't have a CPR mask or gloves. But they felt if they had to, they would have been able to do CPR.
But it really took a large group to do it. As I said, there were three of us with the body, a third stabilizing the kayak-raft and talking to the coast gaurd and three other towing us out to calmer water. Frankly, I don't know if it would have been possible to deal with CPR from a kayak with fewer people.
Which brings me to my last point. I sometimes wonder about all the energy that goes into learning CPR. I am trying to dig up the statistics, but if my memory serves me correctly, very few people actually survive following CPR. As I understand things, only if a professional emergency medical team is available in 8 minutes or less, CPR has very little value. If you are off shore with a person needing CPR, I doubt you can hit the 8 minute window.
--Tim
