Traveling east through Minneapolis/St.Paul airport on my way to a nursing leadership conference (and no, I did not see Idaho's senator in the men's room) I noticed how much bad food and stress exists in lives of travellers. Perfect place and activity for a heart attack.
In the airport these days, however, bright yellow AEDs are stationed along the walls. These devices, when used probably, even by an amateur, can deliver the instructions for using electrical shock to disrupt a chaotic heart rhythm in a person who is experiencing a myocardial infarction in the hope of restoring a normal or at least less lethal rhythm.
I mentioned to my co-worker and fellow traveling companion who is an ICU nurse that if someone collapsed we'd be able to activate a code response. She could grab the AED and I could pull out my handy resuscitation barrier device, a small plastic object that protects a person from the patient's saliva and other body fluids during mouth-to-mouth assisted breathing.
Then I reflected, it has been so long since I have looked at this barrier device that it has probably gone the way of the plastic protective device I carried in my wallet through most of high school. Dried and brittle and probably no protection at all!
Odd, one would be useless in preventing life, the other in preserving it.
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