Hello, my name is Robin. I’ve been through 8 hours of wilderness first aid training.

It looks like you may be injured, would you like me to help you? And then it goes into the ABCDE’s, the vital signs, the SAMPLE questions, and so on… Tomorrow we attend the next 8 hours of this course and then I will be Wilderness First Aid certified for the next 3 years. Hopefully I’ll remember all of this stuff when I need it! My hope is to be comfortable taking my high school students on camping and backpacking trips in the future. Like probably this spring after the rain is done. Today was a long day with much information thrown at us. Tomorrow when I take the written test, we’ll see how much of it stuck to me. There were many times that we got to pretend and practice on other people in the class. That was a lot of fun and definitely helped with the learning. All of the talk about injuries was going good until the instructor pulled out the pictures of an angulated fracture of a forearm. Then she had this prop where a blue glove was taped to a duck tape coil about 20” long in such a way that she could bend it and talk about how you would bend it back into place to splint it and evacuate the patient. All of this was after we talked about the damage a broken femur can do to your leg and how to traction it. So my calm went away and that acute stress reaction kicked in, which for me in nausea and the beginnings of a faint. Luckily we were going into a scenario, so when the instructor said, “the patient needs to lie on their side,” I was more than happy to. In other news… CAC sold almost 200 candygrams this past week with a profit of about $160. We deliver the candygrams on Monday at the end of the day. We stayed at school pretty late on Friday to put them all together and organize them by teacher. We’ll probably do another fundraiser at Christmas, Valentine’s Day and then before either Prom or Graduation. Grant is under the weather. I hope he feels better soon!