Monday, July 16, 2007

I guess this would make me an interesting person to sleep with...

IMG_5734_1I don't just walk in my sleep. I'm having first aid dreams again. It's major life-over-limb first aid, not the easy stick-a-bandaid on it first aid.

The only thing worse than taking three hours to fall asleep is having to deal with continuously vomiting spinals when you finally do. I wake up in a fetal position, my knees braced up against the back of the spineboard, my hands in a jaw thrust, calling for an oxygen tank and blowing into a pocket mask. My hip is sore from being ground into the pool deck, my elbow is scraped from smashing it into something in my haste to treat the victim. My hair is lying in the pool of vomit on the deck and my fingers are icky from scooping out the victim's mouth because I forgot to put my damn gloves on again. I wake up tangled in my sheets, smelling chlorine, with a bad taste in my mouth.

If the dreams were any more graphic than they are, I might face the possibility of getting post-traumatic stress from sleeping, especially when the people die. Because sometimes they do. Spontaneously, or they bleed out or aspirate on their own vomit. Can dreams do that to you? A lovely thought indeed.

One of my most frequent reoccuring dreams lately though is where I end up doing CPR on someone in a country where I don't speak the language. They die too, but that's because chances are next to nothing that they'll come back from you doing CPR, and if you don't get a defibrulator in there quick, your CPR is probably in vain.

One thing that scares me though is that I know first aid, but what if I'm unconscious or something, and no one knows how to help me? Or worse, someone thinks they know because they saw it done wrong on TV? Seeing first aid on the TV makes me scream because it's always wrong.