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A co-worker once went into cardiac arrest and, thankfully, survived due to another co-worker performing CPR. I held the affected co-worker's head while the CPR was being performed. I write more about the whole process here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/2094412327785316661 Some key takeaways: - I had taken CPR many times before - I watched the entire even unfold from watching co-worker walk in to seizure like symptoms to not breathing to urinating on themselves - I essentially "froze" - This was despite having years of working in high stress environments (sports tournaments/SRE on a trading floor) - I was literally overcome by events and could not process what was happening (despite the prior training and dealing with outages etc etc) I HIGHLY recommend that everyone, at a minimum, watch a video on how to perform CPR. Even better, take a class. And even if you take a class, practice on a couch cushion every once in a while. It's just like with 911: there are stories of people in an emergency dialing 411 b/c they were overwhelmed. In other words, fire drills exist for a reason and the same concept can be used for CPR.
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Just being in a high stress environment doesn't avoid the basic problem of reverting to training in extremely urgent situations. And when said training doesn't exist most people don't perform very well. It goes both ways--my wife is not one that fares well under stress, but one day she dislocated her finger. To her own amazement she calmly put it back--because she knew how and it's something she had experience with doing for others. Fire drills are about ensuring everyone knows what to do, they aren't done enough to make people revert to training when there's a fire.
> fire drills exist for a reason I remember doing a fire drill once at work - we all headed down the emergency staircase and every single one of us missed the big sign on the door saying EXIT and ended up down in the basement - even those of us who were the floor marshalls. A great wakeup call for what can go wrong even if all the right signage is in place, and how easy it is to just trust the person in front of you assuming they know what they are doing. As the parent says, fire drills exist for a reason.
Also, in most places, calling 911 for a cardiac arrest will result in the dispatcher staying on the phone with you and doing telephonic CPR coaching (dispatchers typically work in pairs - one is talking to you on the phone, and the other has the phone in one earpiece, but the other is radio, so they're dispatching units while listening, and doing call-taking notes between them.