Stuff I learned today: I'm really really tired

I am sacked, and tomorrow is a full day for us: 8 hours of class, quick dinner break, and then a nighttime mock rescue during which we're supposed to get the first rain we've had since our class began.  On Saturday we learned about altitude sickness, how to identify its different stages and the best treatment approach for each (the short answer: go down).  Bites and stings, including how to deal with poisonous critters.  (more myth busting: pretty much anything you've seen in a movie is outdated and no longer recommended.  You can't suck the poison out of bite, nor should to put a tourniquet on to isolate the poison. you just have to monitor and evacuate.)  We also covered lightning and submersion.   There's a guy in Canada doing really interesting studies on hypothermia and cold water accidents, and this was the most interesting tidbit from the day.  According to his findings (gathered from making himself and his willing students/participants intentionally hypothermic) there's a fairly universal rule for the timeline of cold water submersion, which they call the 1:10:1 rule.  If you fall into freezing water it generally takes 60 seconds for your body to recover from cold shock.  The best thing you can do is to just focus on getting control of your breathing during this time.  After that, you have about 10 minutes of "meaningful" movement before the cold begins to immobilize your muscles, regardless of how cold that water you fall into is.  And after this, you have about 1 hour during which you can stay conscious.  If, say, you fall through some ice, and you've used your 10 minutes of movement with no success, the best thing you can do is to try to get your arms to freeze to the surface so that if you lose consciousness your airway will remain above water and someone can still find and rescue you.  We also learned that if you do drown, your chances of survival are much higher if you drown in cold water, because it slows down your body, which slows down your dying.  We read an article by a girl who was trapped underwater in a snowy stream for 66 minutes as a child and was successfully resuscitated.

Yesterday was our day off, and after napping all afternoon I get myself together to grab a drink with some folks from our class.  Most people don't live in Portland, and it's been fun to show some of them around a little bit and recommend places for them to check out.  One day of brain recovery time wasn't really enough, and I'm glad today was some easy to digest information.  Today we did cardiovascular and respiratory medical issues, as well as CPR training.  We spent a lot of time with the CPR... although it's conceptually quite simple we spent a lot of time practicing to develop the muscle memory and rhythm of it.  There are some well known songs with a tempo of 100 beats per minute, which is the rate of chest compressions for CPR.  One of them is "Stayin' Alive" and another "Another One Bites the Dust".... like I said they have a good sense of lightness in this class.  Also learned how to use a defibrillator (modern ones are placed everywhere, and the machine literally talks you through the process.)  I was interested to learn that King County (Seattle) has a roughly 50% success rate in CPR, whereas the national average is somewhere between 10-15%.  Apparently it's a combination of having a population that is better educated in CPR, and having the money to have more defibrillators placed around and faster EMS response.  As heart disease is the leading cause of death our country, it makes you wonder what a populace better educated in how to handle a heart attack might be able to do for our national life expectancy.

Oh, and I learned how to remove a fish hook if someone gets it caught in their skin.

Don't think I'll make it onto the blog tomorrow, as I've been told our mock rescue could run as late as midnight.  I'll catch up in a couple of day... wish me luck and calm!