Editorials

Editorials

Helping hands needed

Elsewhere on this page, an appeal from one of the county’s volunteer rescue squads appears.

It’s an unusual request. Instead of asking for financial support, the squad is asking for people willing to help their neighbors and families in a time of urgent need: a sudden heart attack or other medical emergency.

All Captain Rick Johnson asks is two or three evenings —perhaps six or eight hours of your time. In return, he’s willing to teach you how to save a life. It could be your father, or mother, husband, wife or child. It could be a friend at a picnic, or a co-worker who suffers a stroke at work.

CPR does save lives. It’s so effective that some companies require their employees to take the course, which leads to Red Cross certification.

One of our sister publications, The Loudoun TimesMirror, has such a requirement of its news staff. The editor explains that, sometimes, his reporters and photographers beat the rescue squad to the scene of an emergency. He’d like them to be able to save a life if necessary.

That’s what Capt. Johnson would like too. The squads can’t always be immediately available, and even if they were, some locations are 10 to 15 minutes from the rescue squad’s building.

When a patient stops breathing, or the heart stops, that’s too long. Irreversible brain damage and death occur within four to six minutes after the heart and breathing stop.

That short time means, even in a city where trained medical personnel are on call 24 hours a day, that effective resuscitation must usually be started before the ambulance arrives if the patient is to be saved. In rural areas, it’s a nearly hopeless task for the emergency medical technicians aboard the ambulance to revive a patient unless CPR is ' already in progress.

We urge all our readers to take a CPR course. If the courses offered by Sperryville’s Rescue Squad aren’t convenient, perhaps one of the local hospitals has one that fits : your schedule. There may even be a course offered by your employer. Some companies pay their employees for the time ■ spent taking the course. That’s how valuable they consider * the training to be. ] Capt. Johnson isn’t asking for much, especially when the 1 potential reward is considered. What better return on an - investment can you ask than the saving of a human life? I The sacrifice is miniscule compared to the potential in - savings — life savings.