Baby First Aid

January 9th, 2012 |Published in babies, Crouch End, family, N8, pregnancy | Link to this Post| 1 reply

John and I are doing three Ante-Natal courses, because nothing says you are prepared like hearing ‘it REALLY hurts’ from three different organisations.  We are doing NCT, because that’s what everyone else does and I hear they let you buy friends!  We’re also doing a local class in Crouch End called Birthing Matters, because it does, it really does matter, and when they ask us why we’re there I fully intend to say “my name is Hannah, this is my first baby, if I were an animal I would be a cat, if I were a colour I would be blue, and I think birthing matters because I CAN’T WAIT TO BE THIN AGAIN”.  We’re also doing the regular one day NHS class, just in case they tell us something essential about the hospital we’re going to, like where it is.

On Saturday the ladies at Birthing Matters ran a baby first aid course, two and a half hours of people racing through their normal 12 hour first aid course so that we expectant and new parents would know what to do if our childen swallowed something they shouldn’t.  Like Lego.  You see, that’s not funny, because kids DO swallow lego, one new mum however simply couldn’t understand how this might be possible, why would her child choke on lego?  What possible explanation could there be for lego being dangerous.  Which meant the rest of us had to sit through a ten minute explanation of how lego is solid.  And quite small.  And has no holes in it.  So when swallowed by a tiny person it gets stuck in a tiny windpipe.  And cuts off the air supply.  And that means the tiny body doesn’t get any oxygen.  And tiny vital organs fail.  And then the kid dies.

Seriously.

The same woman asked what type of water to put on a burn, hot or cold.  Because in her head, when her kid burns himself on something, she’s a bit worried that a cold tap won’t suffice and she should leave her child screaming while she waits for the kettle to boil, you know, so she can chuck the water over him.

But the best was yet to come, while covering allergic reactions, she asked if we were going to be shown how to perform a tracheotomy.  The procedure you’ve seen on ER, during which the SURGEON opens a patients throat in order to provide an airway when all attempts to intubate them through the mouth have failed.  There was a collective gasp in the room when she asked this, which only surprised me because we’d all been so good at holding back our gasps during her other INSANE questions.  The woman next to her leaned over and told her she was not allowed to babysit her son anymore, and then the man next to me remarked that there was clearly no need for him to be carrying around this hollowed out ballpoint pen anymore.

So yeah, I’m still worried that I’m not going to be the world’s greatest mother, but you bet your arse I am reassured that I’m not going to be the world’s worst one either.  Now if you’ll excuse this post being brief, there’s a kidnapped child in my spare room that needs water.