Stop the bleeding.
In my senior year of college, I took a first aid course where I learned CPR and the Heimlich maneuver. Combined with what I learned years earlier as a Boy Scout, I felt prepared to breathe life into lungs, revive a stopped heart and stop the bleeding.
In those comparatively halcyon days of the late 1970s, the bleeding I envisioned stopping came from accidents and injuries.
Never did I consider the chances of needing to stop the bleeding from a gunshot wound.
Now, as I watch the latest horror of our growing American pastime of mass shootings, I consider my decision to take a 1-hour training course earlier this year that taught the basics of bleed control to help those who have been the victims of shootings.
The course was offered at Southern Connecticut State University, taught by instructors from Quinnipiac University’s School of Medicine. According to the promotional material announcing it, the course was developed following the shooting at Sandy Hook, where it noted that many victims could have been saved had someone known how to stop the bleeding.
I knew how to stop the bleeding from what I learned years ago. I knew about applying pressure and tying a tourniquet. But I knew nothing about how that applied to gunshot wounds and felt ill-prepared.
As I have always believed in being prepared, I signed up for the course along with a number of other instructors and staffers. In fact, the demand to take the course was so high that additional sessions were added.
Stop the bleeding.
The first priority of first responding officers is to stop the shooter.
This I knew, but the instructors explained that responding officers would rush past the wounded, meaning those bleeding had to hold on until the threat was cleared.
This also led to the purpose of the course: To empower bystanders to be trained to render first aid to stop the bleeding until professional help arrives.
The instructors stressed that between the time victims are shot and the shooter is captured or killed, victims die due to loss of blood. Stopping the bleed can give them a chance.
I recall an interview I did a few years ago with Vietnam veteran Henry May. Back in 1965, my hometown paper in Waukegan, Ill., called him the first casualty in Lake County. In recalling how he was wounded, May, a Marine corporal, described how his squad sergeant saved his legs and his life by ripping his pants and using it to tie a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. His sergeant’s help kept him alive long enough for the chopper to carry him from the battlefield to the field hospital.
From the battlefield.
It is not lost on me on how America has become a limited battlefield with weapons of war in too many hands, and words of hate in too many minds.
Kill the enemy.
And the enemy is them. And the enemy is us.
How do we stop the bleeding?
During the course, I asked questions. I always ask questions, preparing for something that may one day come, though I hope it never comes.
Only once in my life did I have to use first aid that I learned as a Boy Scout and as a college senior: the Heimlich maneuver. I applied it and it worked.
And now, stopping the bleeding. I want to know the particulars. What about this? What about that?
If the wound was large, I learned how to pack the wound. That is, take something — a shirt, towel, scarf, ripped pants — and stuff it into the wound and hold the pressure to it to stop the bleeding. Hold it until help arrives.
It seems a metaphor for the nation. Stop the bleeding. Apply pressure. Hold on for help to arrive.
But is that enough? Can we hold on?
Or better yet, can we stop the need to stop the bleeding?
Frank Harris III of Hamden is a professor of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. His email address is frankharristhree@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter at @fh3franktalk.
