Bad advice

I'm often dismayed by the first aid advice offered in fiction. And yes, I know it's fiction, which means its not real, but can't you still try to get the basic stuff correct? In Stephen King's The Langoliers one character, a young girl, is stabbed with a very large knife. The spy character, who seems to know what he's doing in many other scenes, takes the knife out, in a gory procedure, and presses a tablecloth on the wound. The tablecloth on the wound thing might work if it were just a wound but when someone has an embedded object you should never take it out. Unless of course you're a surgeon and ready to operate or what have you. My first responder teacher taught us that the object actually works as a cork, keeping bloodflow down.

I'm a member of the dear reader book club and in Thursday's excerpt from a book called Killer Mousse by Melinda Wells I found this surprising passage:

"What happened? What's wrong with her?" His small eyes blinked double-time.

"I think she's had a heart attack," I said. Remembered grief stabbed at me: My husband had died of a heart attack.

George pressed the phone to his chest and muttered a curse. "We don't have a doctor here, or a defibrillator. Do you know CPR?"

I stood up. "I'm afraid it's too late."

"How can you be so calm about this?"

"I'm not. But if I let myself go to pieces, it could start a panic, and people in the audience might get hurt."

The question isn't why is she calm about this but why in the name of all that's holy did she say it was too late for CPR? The woman had been fine a minute before and this is exactly when you do CPR. (Actually we were taught to do it to anyone, no matter how long we thought they'd been dead, unless they were actually decaying, or if they were decapitated. People have been successfully resuscitated after three hours of not breathing. Extreme case and involved something called the mammalian diving reflex, but still.) You absolutely want to do CPR when someone has just stopped breathing and their heart has stopped. And you keep doing it until you are relieved by someone who is more qualified than you or until you're in the same shape as the victim. That's what I was taught and I'll stand by the words of my teacher, who was a Battalion Chief in the Anne Arundel County Fire Department.