...well, a bit of one. This is why. The book, the idea, the whole point of all of this is not to try and sell First Aid courses. Of course go and do courses. Obviously buy them from me, I'm cracking at delivering them. That's not why I'm here. I believe this industry (like many others) is plagued by misplaced fear and confusion around its fundamental goals. The only way I can think of to challenge fear is to peel back the layers and try to deal with the root cause.
Here's a draft of a chunk of a chapter to whet your literary whistle and give a bit of insight into the way I'm approaching the whole project:
Boobs.
I go on about boobs a lot. They’re important to me.
I’m not trying to change minds about how brilliant they are. We all know how brilliant boobs are, some of us are just happier about saying so than others. Some of us are happier about discussing them.
An awful lot of us are terrified of them.
There are many reasons for being terrified of something. It’s big/heavy/pointy/aggressive/hot and could potentially do us physical damage. Or perhaps it’s intense/new/loud/disagreeable and might challenge our carefully guarded mental state. The boob, as a thing unto itself, as a physical object, is not scary. Soft, often aesthetically pleasing, nurturing, safely inanimate. That is until the person wearing them moves around. Harmless unless brandished by Madonna in 1990.
The fear surrounding this undeniably harmless physical structure fascinates me. It’s one of myriad things we’re scared of the idea of as opposed to the thing itself. Modesty has been part of our society for millennia. Clothing, dressing rooms; societal distress and uproar when these ingrained protocols are disregarded. The fear of stuff like this is of the repercussions of going against social norms. We are often incredibly rigid in our thinking – this is your place, this is what you do, this is how you act, these are the rules. Going against the rules is difficult for many reasons. We are pack animals; we appreciate safety in numbers, safety in an hierarchical society which gives each member an understanding of itself and the world around it. Safety within boundaries. We love that.
Our brains are conditioned to keep us alive by handing us instinctive actions and reactions which cater to the only two possibles in any situation: I’m safe vs. I’m not safe. I need to run vs. I'm ok to stay put. Boobs fit both possibles, don’t you think? Infant at the breast. Comforted child in the folds of a gargantuan bosom. Consensual sexual partner. All arguably positive boob situations. At other times, though, their inability to cause harm is overshadowed by the situation they’re in. Society gave us the fear of exposing ourselves because modesty was more important for...you know...reasons. Society has moved on and it is now far more acceptable to go against rules and be disruptive and challenge the norms, but modesty, certainly where breasts are concerned, has stuck pretty fast. It’s not just fear of exposure now, either – this has morphed heavily into a fear of inappropriacy – and we’re not so scared of inappropriacy as we are of the repercussions of it. Personally, I am comfortable in my blinkered, romanticized, naïve lack of capacity for the idea that anyone would inappropriately touch, sexualize, etc.; it doesn’t compute. The fact that it happens and has happened forever means those of us who can’t compute behaving in such a way are now frightened of being seen to behave in such a way. Because it’s so abhorrent a concept, right? There are many reasons for the fact that women are less likely to survive out of hospital cardiac arrest*, but part of the problem is that we are conditioned to be afraid of touching breasts inappropriately. Blam. Smack you in the chops with the point of my argument. A frighteningly large number of the people I discuss CPR/women/boobs/should we? with genuinely have the word, "inappropriate" at the front of their minds when, surely, one's first thought ought to involve something leaning further towards, "Won't this person die if I don't do something?". How are we more frightened of litigation than the idea of watching someone die instead?
In medical situations, in the care sector, in parenthood, a boob is a boob is a boob. They are attached to a person and they either serve a purpose or they are, quite frankly, in the way. We are just about getting to grips with the idea of breastfeeding in public. This is marvelous. Late as arse, but marvelous. Medicine has no space for a fear of boobs and neither does the care sector. First Aid? First Aid cannot cope. First Aiders are, incredibly broadly speaking, laymen who are not built for the medical front line we find ourselves unceremoniously planted upon. We have spent a day or three on a course, or we haven’t, or we’ve been handed a certificate for completing an e-learn as part of a box-tick compliance exercise, or or or. Many possibilities. The one on a night out who doesn’t let their puking friend choke and die. The caring bystander who sits with the peaky old lady until the ambulance rocks up. We are not medical minds, nor have we the kind of fear-busting game-face which goes with being them. We are faced with situations which baffle us, frighten us witless, and make us want to join in with the vomiting and/or passing out. If they didn’t, perhaps we would be part of the medical community in the first place and not the accountant/beautician/farmer/dentist’s receptionist we're built to be, whether or not armed with a First Aid certificate the gaining of which we have all but forgotten.
Let's bring this back to fear. The added layer of all the above mentioned ingrained social protocol does not much more than to screw with our ability to find our game face as First Aiders. It is a familiar fear. We like familiarity because we understand it. Regardless of how dangerous something is, we are going to prefer a familiar danger over an unfamiliar one. A First Aid emergency is mind blowingly terrifying to the vast majority of us while the fear of touching or exposing someone’s chest is familiar and far more acceptable. People with breasts are less likely to receive timely defibrillation because the process requires sticking the pads to totally bare skin which requires removing clothing. It's not going to go brilliantly chucking electricity around when there's metal nearby so now we need to remove underwire. All of this means we must go against the safety of our familiar fear of inappropriacy.
Oh, and we fuel all of this by teaching those who do attend first aid courses that CPR happens on Ken Doll-esque mannequins bearing very little resemblance to those most likely to require us to dig out our dusty, unpracticed skill set in a panic. Don't you just feel ready?
Now I'm going to pop into your mind the idea of a religious garment over the top of all these boobs and underwires. And I'm going to walk off.
* From UK Resuscitation Council (full article and links can be found here):
Research published…in the European Heart Journal reveals that women in cardiac arrest are less likely to be resuscitated by a bystander, leading to decreased survival rates.
The study, led by cardiologist Dr Hanno Tan (MD, PhD) at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), found that “people did not recognise that women who collapsed were having a cardiac arrest, leading to delays in calling the emergency services and delays in providing resuscitation treatment.”
Dr Tan states that “People may be less aware that cardiac arrest can occur as often in women as in men, and the women themselves may not recognise the urgency of their symptoms. Women may have symptoms of an impending heart attack that are less easy to interpret, such as fatigue, fainting, vomiting and neck or jaw pain, whereas men are more likely to report typical complaints such as chest pain.”