The Breath Goes In.

Greetings! Guest blogger Rus here. Today we went to our Child/Infant CPR class today, and while it was very informative and both of us, Stephanie and I, feel we got a lot out of it, it has to be said there was plenty of comedy involved.

Class was put on by the Red Cross, which was exercising squatter’s rights out in the boonyland of the dilapidated Alameda Naval Base. The parking lot, surrounded on all sides by abandoned Navy housing and commissaries, was mostly roped off by the fire department so they could erect a bunch of metal poles. At first, they looked a lot like tent poles, sans tent, perhaps in preparation of a friendly 4th of July event. Turns out they were really radio antennas. A couple of good ol’ boys set up a table and listened to what sounded like a cross between ham radio signals and “the game” on their set, with the volume turned way, way up. This continued all throughout class.

The instructor was an interesting specimen. Claudine Kinworthy - one of the best names I’ve come across recently - has been a medical professional almost as long as I’ve been alive, and she demonstrated the kind of casualness that level of familiarity almost always breeds. She had a general “Eh, you’re all doing it right” approach to the whole class, which I found cool when it kept things moving, and disconcerting when I looked around. There were a few times my attention wandered, and when it came back I found myself doing compressions on the infant-doll’s throat. And I was still “doing it right.” We all were! Hooray, us!

But that hardly scratches the interestingness of Claudine. When we first came into the room (not a classroom, just a room), my first thought was that s/he was a tranny; she had feminine hair, nails, etc., and a voice that was just a hair shy of Wilford Brimley. Cut her hair, and she was a guy, no question. She identified as female, she used the ladies room, but no biggie, some female-identifying transvestites do. But then she started telling us childhood stories that made us question whether somehow she wasn’t, in fact, biologically female... with Wilford Brimley’s voice. And a head cold she’d caught from Satan. It became terribly confusing, and utterly fascinating.

Best of all, Claudine’s pants had a galloping huge hole in the crotch. Stephanie and I had an excellent view from where we were sitting, and both of us tried to use that vantage to correctly identify Claudine’s gender of origin. No such luck.

(This was all especially amusing to me, as one of my buddy Marcus’ more significant exes was also named Claudine, and man, would this have mortified her.)

Throw in Stephanie trying to turn “unconscious victim/lead brick” me, a Stephanie Giggle Fit (tm) when it was my turn to do the whole “Breath Breath” practice bit on her, and the de rigor instructional video with not-actors acting out “My friend just fell off steep incline and may be dead” with the same level of concern normally reserved for eating corn flakes, and the whole thing turned out to be far less morbid that I was expecting. And we both feel a lot more prepared now for when Wyatt gets himself into trouble, as he eventually will. I know infant/child CPR was performed on me at least once in my life (after I was trapped under a capsized boat), so it’s nice to know I’m now as ready as possible when it’s my turn to return the favor.

After class - and some stunningly ordinary Vietnamese bun with very good service - I dropped Steph off at the airport for her trip down to Long Beach and the first of her twelve baby showers. Talk about morbid...