Playing patient

For starters, I can't recall ever 'playing doctor' as a kid and I hate being touched. So pretending to be a trauma patient and letting five people I barely know essentially pat me down and feel me up was rather out of character. Still, in spite of wearing a skin tight t-shirt cut all the way up the front and jeans cut from ankle to upper thigh in a positively fridged room all day, I learned a great deal. I'm pretty sure I could go through the proper procedure for dealing with a trauma patient in my sleep. I now know how to do a proper intubation (in under 30 seconds!), successfully navigate spider straps whilst securing a prone patient to a backboard, get a sitting patient onto a backboard without excess spinal movement, and pretty much every other procedure required for the EMT-II test. Except for IO's. We didn't have a training dummy for that, and I wasn't exactly willing to let people jab a needle into my sternum (not that they would have.)

All in all, it was a great way for me to get hands on experience with many of the infield procedures without the actual stress.

On another note, since more of my extended family was in town, I baked up a storm over the weekend and managed to successfully duplicate my Oma's potato salad. I'm basically using this summer as a test run for many, many different recipes so I don't need to use The Lemming as a guinea pig next year. (Though I'm sure The Lemming wouldn't mind, I have many forgiving mouths up here so any culinary 'mistakes' disappear very quickly. This way I also get more feedback, so I can do a better job of improving the recipe for next time.)