Your Mother Was Right...Make Sure You Have Clean Underwear!

Before moving to Jasper, Alabama to work with Midway Church of Christ, Mark and I lived in Atwood Tennessee where he was both the preacher at Atwood Church of Christ, and in the latter part of our nineteen years there, he was the town's fire chief. That made me both the preacher's wife AND the chief's wife!

I tried to support him in both efforts and when he suggested that we become licensed First Responders, I was right beside him. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term First Responder, it is basically a person (lots of times a volunteer) who has received medical training to administer care to a person until EMS can arrive on the scene to provide more advanced care. We had to take classes and actually take a test to become licensed to respond. We were not as advanced as an EMT, but we had to have pretty extensive training to be allowed to respond. It was much more than applying a band-aid to a cut! We dealt with horrible vehicle accidents, suicide attempts, cardiac arrests, you name it, we saw it.

As a part of being a First Responder, we had jump bags about the size of a back pack in which we carried all kinds of medical supplies, we had radios so that we could update the incoming EMS unit with medical information before arriving on the scene, we had an oxygen tank, and an AED. Most of the time when we made calls, Mark and I would divide up the supplies. I usually assessed the patient and he set up the medical equipment. This worked great...most of the time.

One Sunday morning during Mark's sermon, the pager tones went off calling out Atwood First Responders to a possible cardiac arrest. Anyone in the medical field knows that when a cardiac arrest call goes out that seconds count. Every minute that goes by, means a greater reduction in being able to resuscitate a person.

Here I am decked out in my Sunday best with high heels on and I head out the door leaving Mark at the pulpit doing his job as preacher. I am not sure where our other first responders were that day, but it was soon evident that for whatever reason,I was the only one in route to the call.

On the way to the address, I am reviewing in my mind what will need to be done to help this patient. I am even more nervous because I am by myself and may be having to perform one man rescuer CPR! I quickly pull into the driveway of this little house out in the country and a middle aged woman meets me at the porch and tells me, "I think he's gone." I ask her, "Is he breathing?" to which she responds, "I don't think so."

I just wish you could have been there to see me in a dress, pearl necklace, and high heels, lugging a jump bag, oxygen tank, radio, and AED into the house. I ran quickly to the back room clanging and banging down the hallway. I run into the room and briefly see a little withered old man lying on his back in the bed with his eyes closed. A man is standing next to the bed and I tell him that I may need him to help me get him on the floor. He looked at me with astonishment at the thought of placing the man on the floor. What he didn't understand is that you cannot do effective chest compressions with someone lying on a soft bed. I was getting prepared to do what I thought was needing to be done!

I dropped all my medical paraphanelia to the floor, grabbed hold of the blanket and briskly yanked it back revealing this tiny little frail man, naked, except for THE whitest little cotton briefs I had ever seen! I guess he felt the sudden rush of cold wind and suddenly his eyes were wide open with shock. I just sheepishly covered him back up with the blanket and patted him on the arm and told him, "I think you are going to be alright...the ambulance is on it's way..." I proceeded to check his blood pressure which was fine, and his pulse which was fine, and his respirations which were also fine. Why this family thought he was about gone...I will never know.

One thing I did learn as a First Responder was to be careful about accepting information from a bystander at the scene and to rely only on my assessment of the patient.

The lesson to be learned from this experience that applies to other areas of life as well? Be careful about believing or repeating what you hear until you have checked it out fully to know if it is even true.

And another lesson to be learned that holds true...make sure you are always wearing clean underwear.

Thanks for reading!

Marlene