Helping Hand

How many casual life-saving techniques are there? How many should a person know? What is required of the ordinary person? I was in a bookstore today and the guy behind the counter began to make warbled noises, which then became a cough and a choke and a splutter.

Initially, I didn’t make much of it. With those first noises I continued skimming over the names.. Beauvoir.. Flaubert.. Lessing.. But then it became more difficult to focus as the noises fluctuated more, and rose more violent. But I couldn’t turn around. I felt frozen, my eyes glued to the books. It was disorienting.

There was a customer by the counter, ready to buy a book. He asked if the guy was okay. And if he needed to enact the Heimlich. The teller wheezed, ‘do you have a tissue?’. The guy did - he said he’d just been to a cafe and hadn’t used it - and I guess he handed the tissue over. Then the teller asked for some water, but the customer didn’t have any. He was told there was some in the back room, and he was given the code to the door, and the guy went off to get some.

For some reason that interaction unfroze me, and I turned around. I looked towards the choking man, and I hope my face showed my intended sympathy and confusion and fear and desire. The man smiled at me. It was a smile of, I’m so silly aren’t I. I smiled back with, please don’t die. And then I turned back to the safety of the books.

The customer returned and the seller was okay. He said he really thought he’d have to do the Heimlich, but that he’d never done it before. The seller said there was a moment when he thought, am I really going to die here and like this? The whole interaction was anxious chuckle.

Soon after, I left the shop. It was only when I was walking away that I truly registered it all. The entire situation happened so quickly, and it felt odd. It was like I’d stumbled into an improv performance. But the guy could’ve… died? I felt embarrassed for my lack of action. I had as much of an impact as one of those books on the shelf.

But probably the more worrying thing is how little I could’ve helped if it had turned more serious. My dad saved me using the Heimlich once. I was choking on a piece of bloody chocolate cake. It was so stupid. And yet it was huge. You would’ve thought I’d have taught myself the manoeuvre soon after as a consequence. But I still don’t know it. It has always remained intention, no action.

And how about all the other skills and techniques and useful pieces of knowledge? How many other ways are there to aid a person in need? How many could I learn? How simple could it be?

Ultimately, the more you know, the better. I just searched the Heimlich manoeuvre online. I found an easy to understand article, and watched a one minute video, too. Altogether that took, what, five minutes of my time. And now I know it. And after this writing, I’ll look for more that could be useful.

Maybe I’ll never need to use these things. But maybe I will. For when I walked into that bookstore today, I thought I’d only encounter a Faulkner, a Woolf, or an Austen, not a man who would struggle to breathe.

[27.08.2023]