By Misti Crane
The Columbus Dispatch
Copyright 2007 The Columbus Dispatch
All Rights Reserved
COLUMBUS, Ohio — One hundred Columbus kids -- some enthusiastic, some sulky, all middle-schoolers -- got personal with 100 inflatable partial people yesterday.
Maybe someone will live because of it.
Official CPR training, the kind where you leave with certification, takes hours.
But in just 20 minutes, doctors and emergency medical technicians say, they can teach a person some key moves that could mean the difference between death and survival.
Start with adolescents, they figure, and they’re bound to influence some parents and siblings.
“Listen to these kids. They already know everything, just ask them,” one firefighter said under his breath before the CPR training began at the Statehouse.
Some eighth-graders from Starling Middle School did know some things about CPR going in.
Torshell Porter’s grandma, who works in health care, put Torshell through a CPR class.
“I know that you have to hold their nose and push on their stomach,” offered classmate Joe Forbes.
Not quite, Joe. Stay away from the stomach, please.
Eric Keener, a firefighter and soon-to-be paramedic at Station 2 Downtown, was charged with the crew from Starling.
As soon as they inflated their torso-and-head CPR mannequins, he had their attention.
In minutes, they were checking to see if the victim was breathing and offering two big breaths followed by 30 quick and firm compressions.
Keener told them they shouldn’t stop until help arrives, and that if someone else isn’t around to call 911, they should do that first.
They listened as they pumped away at the chests of the mannequins donated by Ohio State University’s Ross Heart Hospital.
Dr. Michael Sayre, an emergency doctor at Ohio State, mingled and encouraged.
Sayre is leading Columbus’ part of Take Heart America, a coalition of people determined to improve heart-attack survival here and in Austin, Texas, and St. Cloud, Minn.
If their effort makes a difference, they plan to share it nationwide.
Their goal is hefty: Save 600 more lives in three years because of improved treatment. Their methods include CPR training and boosting the number of public defibrillators.
In Seattle, where they’ve worked hard to encourage CPR training, 44 percent of cardiac-arrest patients are helped by a bystander, said Dr. David Keseg, medical director for the Columbus Division of Fire.
In Columbus, that figure is about 32 percent.
Who knows, maybe Joe Forbes will have the chance to make a difference.
By the end of training yesterday, his arms were sore and he definitely knew where to deliver those chest compressions.