Things that happen in class...

[intertext]

So, one of my students had a "petit mal" epileptic seizure today during Peer Editing. Hardly anyone, except me and the members of her editing group, even noticed, which is extremely surreal. She came to a stop - she was just... stopped, and I went up and said, " *student* are you okay?" and she quite obviously wasn't, so I was thinking "oh, gee, what shall I do???" and I just touched her and spoke to her and apparently that was the right thing to do because she came out of it and said she was okay... But it made me think "fuck - what do I do if there was a genuine emergency?" Of course, nowadays you can depend on one of your students having a cell phone (in fact, I have a cell phone in the bag I have with me), but even so - what would you do??

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[mrshingles.livejournal.com]

Helpfulness is a double-edged sword.

An older man blacked out and fell onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street as I was walking home. There was another man there who helped him to stand and brought him over to a bench to sit down.

Being the dork I am, I have a first aid kit in my backpack, so I dodged across the street to see if I could help. I talked to the man giving the assistance, who turned out to be a ski patrol dude, and let him take some band-aids for the older bloke's scraped hand.

At that point, an entire wave of first-aid attendants, nurses, nurses-in-training, dabblers, dentist assistants, and Starbucks workers rushed over to give their textbook 2 cents. Poor old chap was pounced on with a dozen simultaneous questions of medical history, accident description etc. If his brain wasn't completely backed-out before, it certainly would be now.

I put my cool dude first aid kit back together and scooted out of there. Did my part. Ski patrol man had the scene.

It's usually pretty easy dealing with the direct emergency. The toughest part is dealing with everybody else. Speaking from a few summers doing first aid work, there's my textbook two.