I was given the idea for this post just yesterday at a 12-hour paediatric first aid course for teachers in Milton Keynes. I was recounting some of the first aid I’ve done on myself and others and it caused a bit of laughter, especially from one lady who I believe was laughing at me so here, in more detail are a couple of the stories I’ve told in class. I hope you find them interesting!
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ are words all of us have said at some point or another, I’m sure. As a young lad, and then not so young, I used to love it when it snowed. My family home is down a long lane and when it snowed, properly, not like these days, dad used to do something which in retrospect was quite illegal. But then if you’ve got a beautifully crafted old wooden sledge, not like the ones they make these days (again) and a ropey old, non road legal Land Rover your mate sold you for £50 it’s not going to be long before you think of combining the two in the depths of winter, adding a hefty rope and then you’ve got hours of fun in the lane during evenings and weekends because there wasn’t such a thing as snow days back then.
We would go up and down at thrilling speeds. 30 miles per hour was what we were aiming for. I don’t know why because at that speed the sledge really started misbehaving itself and it was difficult to hold on but it was great fun risking life and limb for a local speed record. The Land Rover was so sluggish and the compacted snow so treacherous that wheels seldom gripped enough to get to 30mph, the holy grail, but boy did we have fun trying?!
Not so much the last time we did it in my mate’s Mitsubishi Shogun though. Lousy grip was a thing of the past in this four wheel drive beast (I think the Land Rover was four wheel drive but the knob was stuck) and my mate Andy thought he could hang onto the sledge while I went round the 90 degree corner into the smaller lane that ended in mum and dad’s house. To his credit Andy hung on right until the last moment where the centrifugal force drove the sledge into the bank and threw Andy horizontally through the air, spinning him round and round like a gangster in a Jackie Chan movie, and down an 8-foot ditch into a very cold stream.
Somehow Andy had sustained quite a whack to the mouth and he was freezing cold. I like to look on the positive side of things and so I pointed out that he still had all his teeth. I got him to apply some snow to his mouth for the swelling – we didn’t have a tea towel so it had to go straight onto his skin, which isn’t ideal but he’s pretty tough – and he needed a dry set of clothes because you’ll never get warm if yours are wet. I asked him why he didn’t signal me to slow down, after all I’d given him a red bike light that he was to flash if I was going too fast, but it turns out I’d forgotten to recharge the batteries so that was a non-starter.
Coincidentally we haven’t been sledging behind a vehicle since then but never say never. We’re still mates so no harm done there!
The Rutland Swim and how I ended up with one working eye
But it’s not just mates I’ve been pulling on sledges behind cars who have been hurt. I’ve done some pretty stupid, in retrospect, things to myself. Let’s take last August 4th when I was up at 5am for an 8kilometer swimming race. The story actually started the year before, the first time I did the Rutland swim. It’s an endurance race across Rutland Water, Britain’s biggest man-made lake and despite my younger brother doing it with me the first time I was very nervous. Because my mask fogged up I didn’t see my brother for the whole 2 hours 45 minutes of the swim even though it turned out we were quite close to each other in the water. The next year I was determined that this shouldn’t happen so I went prepared.
The other thing that makes a long swim less than comfortable is going into the water ‘fully loaded’ as it were. It makes sense that whenever you’re racing, having less weight to shift can only improve your time. Nearly a decade before I’d invented a game I called ‘Beach Log’. Desperate, I mean really desperate, for a number two by the seaside and being nowhere near a public lavatory I could only think of one place to go. I jumped in the water and dropped the kids off, as the saying goes. We were at the seaside for a family celebration and there were some younger children there who were bored of the previous game I’d invented – Frizzball (where you throw a football up in the air and try to hit it with a frisbee, earning extra points for catching either when they came back down) so to jolly them up I suggested looking for what I’d done as the tide went out. Beach Log was born.
Suggesting an impromptu game of Beach Log to a bunch of serious swimmers at 6:30am seemed somewhat rash so I decided to make sure I emptied myself out in time for the race start by taking a laxative pill the night before. The packet said it would take about 12 hours to work so I took a single dose at 5:30pm, knowing I’d be up in plenty of time.
Here’s the thing though: 12 hours is about right if you are in fact bunged up, which I wasn’t. I was going very regularly and in great comfort, I have to say. So I had an early night, retiring to my pull out bed in the back of my little van and drifted gently off to sleep. The next thing I knew I woke up with a start. It was 1:36am and something strange was happening inside my intestines. Things were on the move, and fast!
Anyone looking at the back of my van at that time of night would have seen my back doors fly open (not a euphemism) and a panicked figure walk-running to the nearby portaloos with a toilet roll in his left hand using his right hand to squeeze his bum cheeks together. I must have made quite a sight. I managed to make it to the row of toilets but, horror of horrors, they were all, every last one, cable-tied closed until morning.
There was nothing to do but jump into a nearby bush but in the dark I squatted into a huge pile of nettles, stinging all up the backs of my legs. To add insult to injury stragglers were leaving a wedding on the side of the reservoir and their car lights picked me out as I perched there. I can only guess what I looked like.
Finally, feeling thoroughly wretched and part one of my plan having gone terribly wrong I wandered disconsolately back to my van and lay awake until dawn when I had bouts of diarrhea right up to the start of the race.
There was, however, one last improvement I could make on the previous year’s race and that was ensuring that my swimming mask didn’t fog up. As a former scuba diving instructor I knew that baby shampoo was the way to go here – we always sprayed a mixture of it and water into our masks before dives, ensuring that those masks were bone dry beforehand otherwise it wouldn’t work.
I’d kept my mask nice and dry and in fact hadn’t touched it that morning until I was ready to swim due to several trips to the portaloos that were now thankfully open. I didn’t have any baby shampoo but I did have some fairy liquid in a small plastic bottle from a camping washing up kit that my mate Nick had given me so I used this. Give it a good rinse before I put it on and I’d be good to go, I reasoned.
I clipped on my tow float and in a very manly way I strode into the water, wincing only quietly as the pebbles hurt the sensitive soles of my feet. I rinsed out the mask good and proper, or so I thought, popped it on and started to swim. After about a kilometer though, I became aware of a pain in my right eye. It only took a few seconds of treading water to rinse the mask again and I needed to check my bearings anyway. On I swam but the pain wasn’t getting any better. If anything it was getting worse.
The first aid instructor in me would have told any patient of mine to stop at the end of the first 4km lap but I didn’t for two reasons. Firstly I was feeling pretty strong still, if a little sick, but I put down to the packet of jam doughnuts I’d shoved down my throat in between trips to the toilet prior to the race, and also because Alex Yee had very recently run the race of his life to win gold in the men’s Triathlon at the Paris Olympics, overtaking his Kiwi friend and fellow competitor in the final stages, so I invoked his spirit to do lap 2.
I really wish I hadn’t. By the time I finished, 10 minutes ahead of the previous year’s time I’ll have you know, I was really quite unwell. The inflammation around my eye had caused everything to swell and the pressure was very painful. It also felt like someone had poured hot sand into my eye and the combination of these and an endurance swim had sent my body into shock, something I only became aware of when I finished the race.
My brother wasn’t around this time but I’d befriended some other swimmers the year before and they came to my rescue now. They called a paramedic over from the nearby ambulance and she helped me onboard and to lie down in the warm. I threw up a few times into the receptacle provided and the paramedics irrigated my bad eye and made sure I had something for the pain. It took a while to stop shaking but that’s shock for you, unfortunately.
God it was a crap night before the swim and an even worse bloody morning. I was cleared to drive and instructed to go to hospital if there was no improvement and I made it home safely but that evening the pain ratcheted up several notches and by morning my eye was glued shut. I had to prise my eyelids apart and when they opened, a disgusting fluid slopped down my face. I couldn’t see a thing through it and had to ask my wife to drop me at Stoke Mandeville hospital. She offered to stay but I knew I’d be a while so I sent her home.
At Stoke Mandeville a litre of saline solution was rigged up for me to wash my eye out with – blooming painful! – and I was then referred to eye casualty in a lovely new building where I immediately fell asleep on one of the comfy chairs (here’s a video on how to properly irrigate an eye). I woke up naturally about an hour later, just before being called through to a room where, at last, a few drops of local anesthetic was put in my eye and it completely relieved the pain for about an hour. I popped my head into a strange contraption that allowed a rather terse chap by the name of Dr. Wang to look at the damage under magnification.
‘Good job,’ he told me matter-of-factly, ‘you’ve burnt off the whole of your right cornea. Left cornea no problem, very healthy. Right cornea gone, not there anymore.’
Okay, this was worrying. ‘Er, right,’ I stuttered, ‘will it, er, grow back at all?’
‘Yes, back by Thursday morning,’ he replied.
‘Aaah,’ I sighed with relief.
‘But you feel pain for 2 weeks.’
Crap.
Well, them’s the breaks. And, do you know what? I’d done it to myself because it seemed like a good idea at the time to wash out my mask with concentrated Fairy Liquid. In retrospect I call myself a bloody idiot and when I explained to my younger brother how I’d managed to hurt myself like this he said, ‘Isn’t that like going parachuting when someone else has packed your parachute?’
‘No mate,’ I replied, ‘It’s more like going parachuting when a blind man has packed your chute.’
‘Hmm,’ he countered, ‘probably more like when the man’s guide dog has packed it.’ He was probably right.
Now on the face of things it might seem like I’m not the greatest person to teach first aid but I’m going to counter that by saying, we’ve all done stuff like that, haven’t we?!
And what I hope you’ve learnt from this post is that baby shampoo is far better than concentrated Fairy Liquid for the eyes, and that Frizzball is way more socially acceptable a game than Beach Log.
I’m off to do the washing up now – with Fairy Liquid because I don’t mess about in the kitchen – you’d like to do a first aid course with me, do drop me a line here.
Here are some quotes from happy students:
Excellent course and tutor! Very informative and relevant.
Brilliant! Thanks. Will definitely use again and recommend!
Excellent course and content in a friendly and fun atmosphere.
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