In my last posting I wrote about the frequency of small miracles and the likelihood that we are all less impressed with how we appear than anybody else would be.
I didn't write these things to demonstrate I'm turning over a new and less cynical leaf - let's not be ridiculous. Even though I do believe those things, I also believe in my ability to recognize amazing things happening, and yet still manage to screw them up.
A couple of weekends ago I resigned myself to obtaining level one first aid and CPR certification. I've accepted a new part-time position with a recreation centre in addition to my regular gig, and management at the rec centre would prefer clients not die needlessly.
Admittedly my first aid skills were gleaned solely from watching the first few seasons of ER and occasionally sleeping with emergency services personnel, neither of which would help much in the event of a heart attack.
In order to get any hours on the schedule, I needed to prove I could do better than the four options I would be capable of employing without taking the course. Those options would be patting a victim on the back, offering a glass of water, providing a blanket and or fleeing the scene.
This is how I came to be lying on the floor in the basement classroom of an ancient high school on a Saturday morning, four hours before I would normally ever be awake while a girl I had only met 30 seconds before patted down my inner thighs checking for a possible arterial bleed.
Personally I thought this level of due diligence was a little much, given the scenario was supposed to be all the "victims" lying on the floor had just fallen off of their bikes. Granted, it's always better to check, and if anybody could manage to suffer an arterial bleed from falling less than two feet onto asphalt it would likely be me, so best not to question these things.
The instructor was actually pretty good and I wanted to learn, despite being distracted on a couple of fronts. During the lesson on when never to move a victim, I was texting back and forth on the sly with Alex.
After hearing what kind of permanent damage could be done to an accident victim if moved unnecessarily, I had decided I would never move anybody, ever. Not even if they were in the path of an oncoming train. Therefore, it was safe to take a few minutes to let Alex know I wouldn't be coming to Kelowna the next week as planned.
It was a hard decision to make, because I want it all to be over with. At the same time, there was no way I could justify this business trip to my superiors. Normally I can justify any bad behaviour short of genocide, but if the powers that be saw I spent money out of the budget for no reason at all I would be the one paying.
Also, I was chicken shit.
My first text to Alex said I wouldn't be coming as planned, so very sorry, trip vetoed by the boss but I would be there for sure in February.
He got back to me immediately with a question. Is this Bambi? This is a new phone.
I typed the following message:.
Are you kidding me? WTF else do you think it is? How many randoms are you waiting for to be flying into Kelowna for business? Also, glad our "friendship" is so important you couldn't even be bothered to put my GD name and number into your new GD phone. Ass.
What I actually sent was,"Yes. It's me."
He said that was really bad news, I agreed and we would for sure keep in touch. Then it was time to start paying attention in class again.
This lesson was treating for shock. Should my victim live through the first 30 seconds of my care, treating for shock is always the most important step until the ambulance arrives. Victims should be rolled on to their sides in case of puke, covered with a blanket or coat and spoken to reassuringly with the rescuer in their line of vision.
We practiced various methods of rolling our partners safely, when I was distracted again. More accurately, distracted still.
It hadn't escaped my attention that at the other side of the room was some very intriguing eye candy. Some very young, extremely attractive eye candy. I suspected he was so young there was every possibility that when he was born I was already fourteen, trying to lose weight and crying about boys not calling me back.
Good to know how little has changed two decades later.
Gauging his age took some consideration. On the one hand, he just looked puppy dog adorable. That is, if puppies could be sexy and make you want to see them naked. On the other, watching him watch other people in the class led me to believe that he may not have fallen off the assembly line yesterday. Within a week perhaps, but not within the last 24 hours.
The next day started just as ungodly early, only I had mysteriously found the time to apply make up and find something slightly more attractive to wear than the hoodie and yoga pants I sported the day before. Our first task was to file into a separate class room to share and compare answers to a quiz on what we'd learned so far and what was in our text book.
The eye-candy was sitting by himself on what appeared to be a very small love seat salvaged from the decrepit high schools teacher lounge in 1952, shortly after a fire and flood. Not seeing any better place to take a load off, I nervously joined him.
At any moment I expected Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC to come bursting through the doors with a camera crew, eager to expose female predators wanting to make a date for sex with underage boys.
Shoulder to shoulder, eye-candy turned his head toward me and asked me what was the deal with number 14. We were allowed to talk about our answers, and so I asked him which one was number 14.
Question 14 was multiple choice, asking for the likeliest dangers of shock to the victim. The correct answer seemed pretty obvious to me, so I asked him what was confusing. This was the best mistake ever.
"Well...I could totally see how if you were like, hit by a car or something you'd be pretty surprised but I can't see how being surprised would be that dangerous."
Oh. My. God. Our faces still less than a foot apart, I tried desperately not to give in to bursting into the kind of laughter that could make me pee myself.
Apparently, he was mistaking physical shock - the kind that could cause a rapid and fatal decrease in blood flow to an already severely injured person, for the kind of shock experienced by walking in on your parents having sex.
He also had the nicest eyes. Green with flecks of gold, and the stupidly long eyelashes women would pay hundreds of dollars in mascara to achieve. Really nice lips. He smelled good. Not like cologne, but like the outdoors, laundry detergent and guy.
A friend of mine has told me on more than one occasion that I really need to watch what I say. I can be sharper tongued and more sarcastic than I think I am, and guys especially may not appreciate my supposedly clever wit as much as my good friends do.
It was with this advice ringing in my ears that I tried so hard to choose my next words carefully, and to deliver them slowly without any tone.
"Did you...when the instructor was talking about shock...going into shock...treating for shock...did you think that she was talking about...an emotional condition...?"
I could see slow realization creeping into his face. He was getting what I was trying to say, he wasn't stupid and I didn't have to say any thing further or smart-ass at all.
Except I did. This had struck me as so funny that if I didn't say something withering I would be personally demonstrating the dangers of shock once my spleen ruptured from the effort to hold in the sarcasm.
"Oh yeah. I can totally see it now. The doctor comes out to talk to the worried family and says, 'It was touch and go there for a bit. We were worried it was shock, but it turns out he was just really startled.'"
I may have even waved my hands around at the end for emphasis.
Then I looked at him again. Still so cute. Freckles I hadn't noticed. Those eyes that seemed a little too bedroom for a guy who may not be able to legally buy beer in the U.S. for at least another year got wider. I'm sure he's thinking I'm the biggest bitch he's ever met.
"That was fucking awesome," he said. And then he cracks up, looks away and then back at me with something different...it looked a bit like admiration.
He followed me back up to the classroom which is how we ended up seated next to one another and then in the same team of three with another girl I can only offer my apologies to because him and I were a bit of a shit show for the remaining eight hours of the class.
A large part of our training was participating in simulated situations, or "sims." For each sim, two team members would leave the room, and the instructor would give the remaining victims instructions as to what acute medical emergency we were suffering and how to behave.
Team members would then come back into the room to save their hapless victim, the only information provided being the location and what the victims had been doing prior to disaster.
The other girl on our team took every sim very seriously and the eye-candy and I took every new situation as an opportunity to crack each other up.
When he first played victim I purposely skipped the last steps and suggested he go stand outside to wait for the ambulance, prompting him to ask why I wasn't going to treat him for shock.
Obviously I wasn't going to because he seemed only mildly surprised he'd slipped and fallen on a slippery floor and we laughed like mental patients.
The next time he played victim I did treat for shock, which meant tucking a blanket around him and telling him it would be OK while I rubbed his back. His strongly muscled back. Half way through providing comfort, I realized my thoughts were less comforting and more Mary Kay Letourneau and I should really stop. Immediately.
My turn to play victim I put in an Oscar baiting performance as Little Girl Stung By Bee While Playing Soccer and Experiencing Anaphylaxic Shock and In Desperate Need of Her Epi-Pen Which Is In Her Purse Placed Inconveniently Across the Room Although Most Little Girls Don't Carry Purses and Now She Can't Breathe and Collapses as a Result.
My breathlessness was believable and moving as I gestured wildly toward which bag was mine so that the life-saving incredibly handsome and questionably aged bystander could retrieve the epi-pen clearly sticking out of the side pocket and end the terror.
"Jesus Christ! What do you carry around in this thing? I sprained my arm just dragging it over here.
"Shut-up and keep your hands out of my purse."
I was annoyed to have to break character when I was really in the zone, especially when it made me giggle and forget which side of the epi-pen I was supposed to be sticking myself with.
Once I managed to stop laughing enough to fix this, I swooned as dramatically as I could from a sitting position to laying on my side.
Luckily my team members remembered an ambulance still needed to be called because the effects of an epi-pen are temporary. Every sim had a bit of a trick to it. I would get to survive this particular crisis, and now I could enjoy being covered by a blanket and the opportunity to nap.
Napping proved impossible. Despite having sprained his arm bringing my purse from one side of the room to the other, my distracting team-mate took it upon himself to "comfort" me. He brushed the hair from off of my face and ear, and leaned down to ask, "Were you winning little girl?"
A perfectly reasonable question for him to ask a little girl passed out on the soccer field to distract her from being upset, but I would be very surprised if St. John's Ambulance recommends asking this question with lips actually touching and lingering ON the victim's ear.
This wasn't just comforting it was...what exactly was that? What is it normally when I nuzzle somebody's ear...?
Oh my.
I sat straight up on one elbow because surely the only team member still trying to learn anything had noticed something weird, but she had stepped out for the washroom and I hadn't noticed.
It was just him and I, and he gave me a wide-eyed innocent look and cupped his hand around my neck to gently push me back down.
"The ambulance hasn't arrived yet little girl. Keep down."
Oh. My.
I started calculating in my head. Mary Kay Letourneau didn't get an overly long prison sentence, and Canada is more lenient. There's no reason I couldn't be out before menopause.
The last half hour of the course when we covered infant care was a gong-show. I noticed he and I were the only two people carrying our baby dolls across the room by the foot instead of cradling them like real babies as per everybody else, and then we couldn't look at one another and still behave.
When he sat next to me in behind the bigger circle and fumbled the baby, dropping it on its head while attempting to position the supposedly chocking infant for care, we couldn't hold it in any more. Numerous people turned to give us the evil eye but we still could not stop laughing.
For the record, pressing a baby doll against your face to stifle uncontrollable giggles, then noticing you got lip gloss on the baby and trying to rub it off does not help anybody at all. It only makes things worse.
Finally, after a 16 hour weekend we all get our certificates. I walked outside with the eye-candy, still laughing and chatting. Then we stood there. I shuffled my feet. He flipped up his hood.
"Well..."
"Well..."
Take care!
I turned my back and walked away, already kicking myself. Take care? That's the best I can do? I'm not sure I've had a first date in my entire life as fun as spending an entire Sunday learning about wound care and chemical burns with this kid and the most I can say is take care??
Thirty steps to my car and I'm most of the way there. I should have offered a ride at least. Asked him out for coffee? Something.
He had flipped up his hood, had a backpack on...he's walking or taking the bus.
I'm going to go get him.
I don't care if he's young. There's still time to do what I should have done when we were both standing there in the rain. I'll offer him a ride and whatever way he's going will just happen to be where I'm heading too. I may a little slow on the uptake but I can fix this.
Nobody has ever reversed out of a parking spot faster than I did. It was only about 20 feet to the road. Bus stops on either side of the street and I could see for blocks in either direction. He wasn't anywhere.
This couldn't be possible. We had just said good-bye. It couldn't have been more than three minutes between then and me realizing I'm a complete moron who needs to do something about it.
How could he have disappeared so fast?
It's not like he could have called anybody for a ride. Class was let out early and I didn't see him with a cell phone. There wasn't any other direction he could have taken so as I continued blocking the parking lot exit there was only one remaining logical explanation...
I've cracked. In the absence of anything better I'm flirting with imaginary men through the power of make-believe and maybe the hormones in my new birth control pills.
Or, he went back inside after I walked away so he could figure out how to get where he was going from a warm dry building instead of a wet and freezing sidewalk.
At this point both theories are equally viable, but I'll leave it up to my ten faithful readers to decide which is more likely.
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