By Kerri Loudoun, Communications and Marketing Portfolio Leader (kerri.loudoun@skipatrol.ca)
For some patrollers, you might go your entire CSP career without having to perform life-saving care on someone.
But, for others, they have found themselves in circumstances outside of their scheduled patrol shifts, jumping in to assist members of their community when needed when it became clear the situation is a load-and-go.
The following heartwarming story is unique. Most patrollers who are involved in these high-acuity situations performing assistance based on their CSP training don’t get encounters like this. Many of us who are in life-saving calls, don’t ever see those patients we helped again.
But this time, we are fortunate to hear of one such moment a person who was saved by a CSP member, came back to say hello.
Thank you to Joel Dodd, from the CSP Western Zone, for sharing this touching story with us. Joel writes:
In August of 1981, I was awoken by a screaming woman across the street from the home I had recently moved into, as her child was unresponsive.
I remember dashing out the door and across the street. I yelled “call 911” and proceeded inside and upstairs. I found a distraught father holding a young child.
I told him I was first aid trained and took the unresponsive child, realized quickly he was in a seizure and unable to breathe effectively. I attempted to ventilate the child, unsuccessfully. I began rapidly cooling the high fever child as well.
After a minute or so the seizure stopped. I opened the child’s airway, and we all heard him cry out.
I brought him downstairs and handed him to his mother just as EMS arrived.
Today I had a very unexpected visitor at work.
A man came up to me and said “you wouldn’t know me, my name is Christopher, when I was just one year old, you saved my life!”
The man had come to thank me. This small child I helped 43 years ago, was standing in my workplace, with a young boy beside him.
Christopher shook my hand, looking down at his young son and told him that I was the person who had saved his life when he was very young. He explained that had I not been there that night he may not have grown up and had a son of his own.
It was a very emotional moment!
Reflecting later, I realized that as trained advanced first aiders we can have a profound effect on people’s lives and beyond.
While it may be cliché to say that you never know what impact you will have on someone’s life, rest assured that the training you receive in the CSP may one day help save the life of a stranger.
Excuse me, I need to grab a tissue, is someone chopping onions?
This post is also available in: French