The Readiness Is All

Last night, I was sitting at a table in a diner in Sunrise, Florida, having a meal with friends before we went to see The Who kick off their honest-to-goodness farewell concert tour.

As we were eating, I heard a wheezing sound from the booth behind me. I turned, and there is a lady standing up, wheezing and holding a hand to her throat. I stand up, took a few steps over to her, performed the Heimlich maneuver and in less time than it took me to type this, she’s okay.

Other people saw and heard what was she was doing, but they either didn’t know what was going on or had “Dial 911” as their response. I heard the wheezing, said to myself “That’s choking,” and went straight to the Heimlich. I had the advantage of being the closest person to her, but the only things I did differently than everyone else was quickly recognizing what the problem was and coming up with a solution on the spot. Afterwards, there was a brief smattering of applause in the restaurant and the lady thanked me over and over and over again.

And, to be honest, I was a bit embarrassed by all of that. I mean, I wouldn’t thank the driver of a car I was riding in for correcting a spin which might have caused an accident. In that case, the driver diagnosed the problem correctly and solved the problem right away. Same thing here. I saw the problem, diagnosed it correctly and solved it. No biggie.

However, as a friend of mine said in private chat later, what I did was the difference between someone who is mentally prepared to deal with this sort of emergency and someone who is experiencing a novel stimulus. For example, anyone who’s driven in less than ideal conditions has a card filed away in their response list for “Oh no, I’m in a spin” and plays that card when it’s needed. In this, case, I had a response card in the back of my brain titled “In Case Of Choking, Do This,” and my brain reached out into the card catalog of my pre-programmed responses and said “Ok, go with this one” once the start signal (the wheeze of a choking person) was given.

And that card did the job. It did so because I had spent the time and effort to get CPR training and expend some mental energy in pre-visualizing my response to a medical emergency. I banked away the time and effort to create a response to an emergency before that response was needed, and it worked.

Get training. Change your mindset. Have a plan ready to go when things get weird. The life you save may be your own, or in my case, someone else’s.