06-16-08

Meet the Press

I turned on the television today for my daughter. The station comes in to two anchor people talking about Tim Russert. In their all-too-annoying break from journalistic integrity, the segment is entitled something like “What can we learn?” and they go on about what was done wrong bothin the life of Russert and in the aftermath of his heart attack. I turn the channel to Do Do (Dora) and sit down at the computer slightly annoyed. I, recent graduate of my third certification in CPR and First Aid as of Saturday, know what went wrong. He was mortal, we all are.

I had this happy idea that if you preform CPR long enough/sincerely enough/prayed hard enough/carried the right talismen/wore the right shoes somehow the person would magically snap out of it, jump up, shake your hand and walk away. But, for some reason the statement “keep going until medical help arrives or until the person regains consciousness” didn’t seem right after the sixth thime I heard it in ten minutes, so I asked the wrong question…

“How often does a person regain consciousness during CPR?” It wasn’t answered. Instead I got “The chance of a person walking out of the ER two days later is 5%, this chance is increased to 50-60% with the use of an AED. With children, the prognosis is less than that.” So with that, my happy fantasy of the eighty year old jumping up and skipping away down the street was shattered. But then the perspective…

“If you are performing CPR on someone, they were dead the moment their heart stopped, all you are doing is everyting in your power to bring them back.” CPR isn’t about sustaining life, it’s about playing God. Truth is, Russert was dead when he hit the floor, no amount of CPR or AED would have changed that unless the fates deemed it, and an AED is only useful if his heart was in some sort of weird arythmia (V. fib), so if it stopped completely the unit wouldn’t have shocked him anyway. Most CPR done by paramedics is just for show, to give the family a sense of hope. It makes sense.

Not all the press is exploiting this the way Channel 3 has, NBC released these photos of the cast of Meet the Press breaking into tears during a taping…these intimate photos they probably had no right in releasing if they had any part of a soul. Might as well make one last ditch effort to capitalize off the man, right?