Abdominal Thrusts

The other morning, I had to report for CPR training.  Yes, it’s the middle of summer, popsicles are wet and simpering, and I had to show up for unpaid work….AFTER completing 58 online modules that covered such far-ranging topics as: What to do when someone’s intestines are showing; whether to use cotton or linen cardstock for a cotillion invite; and whether to save yourself when you happen across several of your co-workers unconscious.  (One of these might not be true.)

Lucky for me, my wife finds clicking through mindless online modules relaxing.  If she ever divorces me, I’ll add this quality to the ‘seeking’ column of my dating profile, along with dewy skin and a stable athletic stance.  She completed most of the modules while I cooked dinner, and I managed to finish the rest in time to qualify for the 90-minute unpaid training.  Thank Jesus’s weeping sores.

Looking around the room, it was obvious that most of us had taken this training more times than our teacher had taught it.  We were drawn from a random cross-section of my school and nodded at one another with the familiarity of people who have been through many meetings together without forming a single memory or impression of those same meetings.  

The CPR dummies, grownups and babies, were all white, like White,  as in ‘White People’ (they were the pink of pencil erasers).  I was shocked when none of my (White) co-workers took righteous umbrage at this.  It was a slam dunk for that species of ineffectual liberal that haunts West Coast ‘progressive’ education.  But alas, no takers.  Instead, one woman of a certain age inquired whether the outrageous prices of bras might be considered when removing the clothing of a heart attack victim.  From an actuarial perspective, this woman was several steps closer to death than anyone else in the room, so good on her for also being the most sensible.  I imagine her funeral will be of the ‘no fuss’ variety.  Her kids, if she has them, are probably grown-ups who won’t be surprised to learn their inheritance has been diverted to a cat shelter.  

Did you know they don’t call it the ‘Heimlich Maneuver’ anymore?  I’m sure most of us will still call it that until we die, but whatever nebulous shreds of medical authority still exist have rebranded this comic stalwart as ‘Abdominal Thrusts’, which is admittedly funny in its own right.  I suspect that we’ve replaced the relative brevity of the ‘Heimlich Maneuver’ with “We don’t call it the Heimlich Maneuver anymore, it’s now called Abdominal Thrusts because Heimlich did some bad stuff.  No, I don’t know what he did, but it was bad”. This was news to me; I had no idea that Henry Heimlich had been caught in the cultural undertow, though it made sense in that Heimlich is a slant rhyme for Final Solution.  But get this…(checking Wikipedia) he wasn’t a Nazi!  He was a more familiar type: an American-style grifter.  

I won’t get too into the weeds, but for most of his long life, Henry Heimlich proselytized (against the Red Cross and heaps of emerging research) for his eponymous maneuver to be used as a primary alternative to back slapping when someone is choking. He introduced his little maneuver with an article titled: “Pop goes the café coronary”, which is perfectly delightful.   He also invented a chest-drainage flutter-valve that was inspired by watching a Japanese soldier die of a bullet wound during WW2.  And finally, and this is where the trouble started, he was a zealot for Malariotherapy.  He thought a host of diseases could be cured by introducing Malaria to induce high fevers.  Now, I’m not a scientist, so I won’t get into the merits of his theory, but I feel like I’m on solid ground in condemning his traveling to Africa to infect AIDS patients with Malaria to test his idea.

 Anyway, normally I’m loath to brag, but I’ve used Abdominal Thrusts to save a student’s life.  So there.   

I was a couple of years into my teaching career, and as kismet for cheating on my state’s capitol test in 6th grade, I was given a large, particularly uncouth student named Thomas.  (His running buddy was named Jerry.  No joke.)  

Thomas was an inveterate pain in the ass, though he was possessed of occasional bursts of insight, such as, “it’s not fair to compare me to these girls ‘cus they have big ol’ brains”.  Thomas was ahead of his time in assessing the prefrontal deficit he and his male colleagues were facing in 7th grade.  

During class one day, Thomas began performing all the classic hits of choking noises.  Initially, I was glad because he usually went with a painfully ignorant pantomime of sexual arousal or poorly phrased Lil’ Wayne beats, so choking was a fresh choice.  His performance was laudably physical; he even turned red.  The class rolled their eyes collectively, making yet another vow not to yield to his attention-seeking.  He kept at it for quite a while, and my respect for his method acting was real.  I wasn’t ready to put Thomas up there with Daniel Day-Lewis or Nick Cage; nevertheless, I was impressed.  But as the color of his face graduated from Coral, to Salmon, to Firebrick, and finally to a Lusty red, I finally realized his airway was, in fact, compromised.  

I had no training in the heretofore named Heimlich Maneuver.  My only education was from seminal films like Mrs. Doubtfire and Kindergarten Cop.  But, as I’ve told you before, the cocksure mental-vacancy of a 24-year-old man can, on rare occasions, be leveraged to heroic result.  I removed Thomas from his form-fitting desk, encompassed his midsection, and pulled him off his feet while compressing his considerable torso.  The result?  He expelled a pen cap across the room and sent me reeling on my ass.  

I can still hear those gasps.  Not Thomas’s, but those of his classmates.  These were not the kind of gasps you get for splitting your pants at the roller rink; these were the kind of gasps you get when brains are too broken to clap.  I hope, I pray, dear reader, that you are blessed to hear gasps like that one day, that you can count on their memory when you're in a tough situation.  At some point, surely, you’ll have to take a shit in a crowded rest stop in Idaho, in a stall with no door, and god willing, you will have gasps like that to remember because you know there won’t be toilet paper and your sock is going to have to come off.

There was no parade to save Thomas.  My principal’s first reaction was to joke that I might regret saving him.  Someone must have submitted paperwork related to the incident, because a few weeks later, I received a coffee mug from Chicago Public Schools that said “Caught Being Good”.  Not a bad haul.

The following year, Thomas and his pal Jerry impregnated a pair of 7th-grade girls.  I didn’t stay at that school too much longer, and I slowly lost contact with much of its community, but sometimes I wonder if he ever considered naming his child after me.  If you’re out there, Daniel, cheers to you.