Our TY pupils receive training in first aid from Ms Maybury. One of them, Siobhan Brady recently had occasion to put this skill to very good effect indeed. Below, she tells of her experience.
On Friday the 17th of February I was sitting in Insomnia, St. Stephen's Green having a cup of tea and waiting for a few friends to show up. I was minding my own business and half-listening to my iPod when two girls walked into the coffee shop. They both looked hardly older than myself, probably around nineteen or twenty years of age. Both of the girls had infants with them, both infants were girls, the older girl being around two years old and the younger one being just six months old. The six month old girl was wearing a blue denim dress with pink flowers and bright pink tights with her tiny wispy hair tied up in a bobbin on top of her head. I noticed how one of the women was putting some food on a small plate for both of the girls.
I didn't see straight away what the food was but I then realised that it was Haribo sweets that she was giving them. Honestly, I thought nothing of it at first, because I assumed that the mother knew what she was doing. But as the six month old began banging the little table of her high chair with her little fist, flinging her plate at the ground, her face getting slowly redder and redder and all the while as she was making a strange rasping noise, I knew something was wrong. The mother of the baby started to pat the infant on the back but that seemed to be making the child worse. She stood up and exclaimed that she didn't know what to do, that she wasn't trained in First Aid. The other girl was busy cleaning up the mess that the child had made, she didn't see how big a problem this seemed to be.
An overwhelming feeling came over me that if I didn't do something at that very moment, this child could have suffocated to death. Fortunately, we had covered choking and what to do in a situation if someone was choking. I knew I shouldn't perform the Heimlich maneuver on such a tiny infant because that could cause me to break one of her ribs and perhaps puncture a lung which would have made the situation so much worse. I stood up immediately and told the woman to pick the baby up and to point her head to the floor but she held the baby upright which didn't help the child cough up the sweet at all and there wasn't enough time to explain to the mother what to do, so she handed me the toddler and I held her with her head facing downwards and her feet diagonally up in the air and the mother kept a firm hold of the baby's front, just under the diaphragm and I proceeded to thump on the girl's back. For a moment I thought nothing was happening and I was so worried I was making it worse because I had never practised this on a real person before, but the girl started to cough violently and eventually she started vomiting all over the floor and out popped the sweet! The woman was so grateful she started crying and I just told her to bring the baby outside to get some fresh air and I asked a passing waiter to fetch a glass of water. The woman insisted on buying me a hot chocolate as a gift of gratitude and I explained to her how it says on the packet of the Haribo "not suitable for children under 18 months" and she said from then on she would be far more careful with what food to give her child.
This day, Friday the 17th of February, was the single most terrifying day of my life. So many things could have gone wrong, but I just took a chance and luckily it paid off. I'm so grateful to Ms Maybury for teaching me these skills because although I am not an expert in First Aid, at least I had an idea what had to do. It's not every day you walk into a coffee shop and save a child's life so no matter what people say, everything you learn in Transition Year is valuable and I'm glad I paid attention to that SPHE class all those weeks ago!
Bravo Siobhan!
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