I did my CPR and First Aid recert today. It went by surprisingly quickly and was actually quite enjoyable. There have been a lot of changes made to the program this past year and they were definitely good ones. As my instructor put it, the changes make it easier to perform so more people will feel confident to do it when necessary instead of feeling unsure of themselves. Instead of having different numbers of compressions and breaths for adults, children and infants, it is all the same now. We also got to learn how to use the AEDs (automated external defibrillator) which was really neat. We learned that since they were introduced that the rate of survival for someone who's heart stops has gone from 5-10% (with CPR) to 65-70% (with the AED).

One more thing that I learned (I think I may have learned this in school, but forgot about it) is the AED (or doctors in the hospital with their fancy little paddles) do not shock people who have no heart beat. So on ER when they see the flat line and then break out the paddles to shock them it's not accurate. The AED will shock a person in 2 circumstances: either V-fib (chambers of the heart are beating erratically not allowing blood to pass through the heart in the way it should) or V-tach (heart is beating so rapidly that the heart cannot fill with blood before it pumps). And when it shocks the heart it actually makes the heart stop beating. Once it is stopped the cells in the heart that create the electric impulses that cause the heart beat are able to 'reset' and start beating regularly again. Just a common misconception that I think is neat.

It's stuff like that, that I really enjoyed learning in massage school. The way the heart beats, and the little features of the heart that allow the blood to be squeezed out the way it should. Another one that really fascinated me was the process of how hearing works. With those tiny little bones and the tympanic membrane and the perilymph. So cool :) Really makes a person appreciate the creation of the human body. God thought of everything!