be prepared

I am going to a Committee Meeting this evening.  Somehow I have been invited to join the committee of the local music society, subject to election at the forthcoming AGM.  That sounds grander than it is, in that I think my main role is to pour out tea and make cheese straws and other savory nibbles for post concert refreshments.  I was asked because I'd been going to the concerts since discovering that they existed, and was spotted as a regular and apparently physically fit attendee under the age of fifty.  I warned them that I knew nothing about classical music, but that is not a barrier to making tea and cheese straws.  I rather like the idea of having a Committee Meeting to go to every now and then.  It makes me feel quite grown-up, and connected to local life.

Extending my reach beyond catering and distributing posters, I volunteered to put together some concise guidelines on what to do in the case of a medical emergency at a concert.  The Chairman is a lawyer (retired) and I think she thought that we ought to look as though we were prepared.  I thought it wouldn't hurt to actually be prepared, in case the worst should happen.  I hate anything medical, as it happens, but I gather not as much as the Chairman does.  Looking at the demographic of people who attend music society concerts, I decided that some sorts of medical emergency were relatively unlikely.  I would be very surprised if any of our audience went into labour without realising they were pregnant, for example, and fairly surprised if they were to overdose on illegal drugs during a concert.  I would be rather less surprised if one of them were to suffer a heart attack or stroke, and not at all surprised if they were to fall over.

There is a lot of medical information on the internet, some of it from reputable sources.  Trawling through websites of the NHS, Bupa, and various medical charities, plus a US one on emergency care that I'd never heard of (deduct marks for using a source of unknown reliability) but that looked sensible, I came up with lists of symptoms of and appropriate responses to the most likely ailments I could think of.  Heart attack and stroke topped the list as being the most serious, but as well as falling over I thought that nosebleeds ought to go on the list.  Nosebleeds in older people can be serious (I knew this, having known a couple of older people who suffered from them).  You should keep the patient upright (less blood flows to the head) and if after twenty minutes you can't get the blood to stop then they need medical help.  It is rather depressing thinking about so many different medical problems in one go, since one would be unlucky to get all of them at once.  The chairman of course has to think what she is going to do with a church full of people while we wait twenty minutes for somebody's nosebleed to stop.  Does the concert go on?

I finished up with the addresses including postcodes of the concert venues, in case we should need to call an ambulance, and the addresses of the local A&E departments, for the benefit of concerned friends and relatives who wanted to know where their loved one had been whisked off to.  It took ages hunting around the website of the Ipswich hospital (which is enormous) to establish that it did have an A&E department at the main hospital site.  Maybe they thought it was so obvious it didn't need spelling out.  Now that I've thought about all of this depressing stuff (and that we need to know where the first aid box is kept, and the whereabouts of the cleaning materials in case somebody is sick) I hope we never have to use any of it.