~JcZw

I never really knew how much of an impact St. John had made on my life until today. I never knew how deeply the years of first aid training had been seared into my very instinct.

There have only been two cases before today where I have seen serious first aid situations.

One was WeiQuan's classmate at sports day who fainted and did not recover, and later on we discovered that person had med conditions.

The other was Junhao, who, as mentioned in a previous post, got hit by a car while running across a road.

In both cases, I had a bunch of first aiders with me and was half-expecting trouble.

But today was so so stupid.

It was just copying the topics for the review test, and then there was the thump. I thought chuaH had fallen off his chair (cos he was the only one directly behind me), and I was turning around to give him some of his klutz comments back heh. But I beheld a totally different scene.

When I saw my mind blanked. Training took over. All my senses except that of sight were shut down. How do I describe it. It was like a seriously bad dream. It was just him and me. So many things were crowding into my mind at the same time, the product of 4 years of memorizing signs and symptoms. My thought process looked something like this.

seizureconvulsionfoamingmajorepilepsydon'tapproachkeepalldangerousobjectsaway
don'ttrytostophimdon't putanythingintohismouthfoaminghisairwayisclearbreathingis
inimminentdanger etcetc

Well you get the idea. In the maybe 1.5 seconds it took me to cover the distance to him so many things crowded in at the same time. I wasn't even thinking of moving. My legs did it for me, as if the training made my naturally gravitate towards any casualty.

And suddenly, to cap it all off, he was suddenly sitting up yelling "Happy April Fools' Day!". I admit I slapped him (on the back). My muscles had gone from sleepy and relaxed, to so tightly wound up, and suddenly the situation didn't warrant such tension.... Well, the energy had to go somewhere, so I just vented it on the nearest moving object. Of all the ****** he still had the nerve to ask "so what were you doing that would have helped if it were real?"

Sure, at first I could laugh, but there was just so much wound up tension. My old first aid manual describes it as "Post traumatic stress disorder". When he sat up and went happy april fools I just felt like bursting into tears because of the sheer anti-climax of the thing, when your emotions go through a 180 deg turn.... your emotional system is totally shattered. When we went upstairs for GP, I was already feeling horrible and feeling like so disgusted with myself. When I went into the toilet, I could feel my heart thumping at 120 strokes a minute (20 over the normal, for non-firstaiders), and my hands were shaking as though I had hypothermia.

What kinda first aider am I man....

But frankly, in training they assume you do everything n you feel happy and all... In reality this feeling is something that I've never experienced before. Just a sense of frustration and anticlimax and I don't know why I was so upset frankly... I mean, the rest of my class seemed fine n all... I was like totally pathetic...

Sigh I've been thinking about this the whole day lar.... its like oh man....

Well, thats what I have to vent for now... What a stupid April Fool's joke to play