Feb. 11, 2015

By Signe Trewyn

Imagine this: you decided to go to dinner with your family for Valentine’s Day where there are many different aged people around you. You are in a middle of a conversation with your mom and dad when someone near your table falls out of their chair. Everything happens so fast you can’t make sense of what actually happened. It becomes clear that the individual at dinner collapsed due to a heart attack. What you begin to notice right away is the majority of the people at the restaurant stand in shock without taking action. You begin to wonder why no one knows how to revive the individual or how to do CPR.

Throughout life, you have seen someone administering CPR to a person who has stopped breathing, but you haven’t given it any thought. You have never thought that maybe one day you would be the one administering CPR to your best friend or a total stranger.

Here’s a statistic to get you motivated: 383,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur annually, while 88 percent of cardiac arrests happen at home, according to www.heart.org.

If a heart attack were to occur at home, it might take several minutes for emergency vehicles to respond to the emergency. In that case, if someone at home knew how to do CPR, they would be revived much faster. CPR stops preventable deaths due to cardiac arrest, and every second counts.

A good place to start for CPR education is the American Heart Association. It trains over 12 million people in CPR annually, according to www.heart.org.

At UW-Whitewater, there are classes offered that meet in Esker Hall to educate students how to perform CPR and use the automated external defibrillator (AED). Students can sign up for this course for extra points in the “Personal Health and Fitness” course. Students should sign up for the course regardless of whether or not they are taking the class. Being educated in saving someone’s life should be every student’s priority, since as soon as they get into the real world, the UW-W police might not be there to save the day. In that case, it would be up to you to save a person’s life. These classes often do not cost much and most of the time students can take the classes on Fridays. According to a previous Royal Purple article, classes are available Feb. 6, Mar. 12 and April 16, along with other dates. These classes are not only available to students, but community members as well. Community members can complete a training request form at http://www.uww.edu/adminaffairs/police/defibrillators.

With the help of community members and students along the way, CPR/AED training can become as common as a driver’s license. Many more people would survive cardiac arrest emergencies even before the ambulance arrives. What you get from saving someone’s life is pride, another day with that person and a great reputation in whatever city you live in. Who doesn’t want any of that? So what are you waiting for? Open your web browser and sign yourself up today.