The sun was shining, we’d just broken up for Easter and I’d had only two hours sleep before a busy day Thursday so i should be / was ready to crash! Off home for relaxing evening followed by a relaxing weekend! Or not!!!!
Jess and I headed off to Tesco’s to pick up stuff for a BBQ before picking up Ash and Callum for a weekend of hard focus and long lectures to get first aid qualified! I first did my first aid qualification when I was in year 11 like Callum and renew it religiously every 3 years, luckily my renewal year coincides with our Alps trip so I had company with our crew making up 6 of the 19 people there for the weekend. First aid is a vital skill and something I think everyone should do at one stage or the other but did it really have to be such a sunny weekend!! Friday night we had a BBQ chez Mummy Power before watching the Hangover, this obviously gave Ash inspiration for her fall the next day....
8.45am we arrived at the Victory Hall! Boo! We started with the joyful legalities and found out just how many ways we can be sued for anything we do, a brilliantly cheerful start! In the first day we looked at CPR, the safe airway position, full body checks and major medical problems like heart attacks and diabetes. We also got tested with lots of practical activities including pulse counting. Unfortunately i was lumbered with sitting next to Ash so immediately looked like a complete freak with a dodgy pulse rate of over 20 beats more than anyone else in the room! Thank god she’s not in charge of calculating our budgets! We were very lucky at break time with the arrival of an extremely large box of sticky buns from Sergeant Bun’s bakery! Mmm!
After a full day we finally escaped just after five to hit Portland for fish and chips and some caching! The sun was surprisingly deceptive today though and we had to swiftly find shelter behind the light house before we froze to death! Fab light for photos though! We brushed up on our climbing skills by scaling Pulpit rock as the sun set before refining our navigation with a few sneaky caches! On the drive home we passed Church Ope cove which Callum remembered from childhood trips so we headed down to the beach. With both Ash and Jess armed with IPhones we swiftly located a third cache and wound our way into a creepy pirates’ grave yard to search for a skull and cross bones.
We found the skull and cross bones eventually on a tomb under a tree. Ash at this point spotted something high up in the tree and feeling the need to put our first aid in to practise tried unsuccessfully to scale it! She eventually got up there after climbing on to my shoulders to find that it was a shrine to someone’s child who had died so tried to make a swift exit.... Surprise surprise she was stuck! Callum tried to rescue her but it needed more than one person so she called me in for the rescue attempt. What a mistake! Caring as ever, i tried to help, how was i rewarded....? Ash decided to ignore all of my sensible instructions and instead of standing on my shoulders decided to re enact the Hangover and the crazy Chinese man by falling out the tree to sit on my head with absolutely no inclination of going any where or trying to remove herself!!! Good job there were 4 nearly qualified first aiders on hand!!!!
Day two gave us lots and lots more to think about. We looked at common problems when out on the mountain like hypothermia and did lots of splinting and bandaging of breaks and head injuries. Very amusing! We took it incredibly seriously! It was really important though to think about the implication of us being in the middle of no where in the alps though. At school or at work and first aid consists mainly of phoning for an ambulance. We won’t have the novelty so easily over in the Alps and help will be a lot further away. It changes how you treat things and increases the seriousness of things...
In the afternoon we were tested through a range of scenarios which were really fun and definitely got us thinking about prioritising treatment and spotting injuries. We had people that had fallen off roofs, were diabetic, had heart attacks, things sticking out their eyes, broken limbs under inconvenient benches and the a huge and mighty big bang scenario with over 15 casualties! We also managed to sneak Ash into the Resci Annie track suit!
It was lots to learn and an intensive weekend but an incredibly valuable experience. Congratulations to Hannah, Ash, Callum, Jess and Me for being our qualified first aiders!
