Sirens at last

If you've been wondering where all the emergencies have been this year, as opposed to the wildly eventful year I had last year, I keep missing them. While I was out sick, an elderly substitute went down in a dramatic fashion the other week: reportedly clutched her chest, eyes rolled back, and onto the floor she went. It traumatized the students a bit, but she was okay - a heart attack, I heard. Today as I was pulling up to one of my schools to check my diabetic, I saw my normal parking space in the loading zone was taken - by a firetruck and ambulance. Lovely. Turns out a teacher called 9-1-1 for an asthma attack, prematurely so, according to the prinicipal. Though I usually like to err on the side of caution when it comes to breathing, I'd go with the principal on this one: the kid was screaming his head off. If you're screaming, you're breathing. 

However, my agreement with the principal was in stark contrast to last week, when an incident occurred that left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I didn't even want to go home and write about it. I had a kid in my office having an increasingly distressing asthma attack. We called home, and mom contacted the babysitter to come pick him up. I'm not sure where the babysitter was coming from, but it wasn't anywhere nearby, and as the minutes ticked on his coughing was getting worse and people were staring at me asking what I was doing about it. He started sweating, but his color was still good, and he was still talking, so I sat with him until the babysitter came in. In the meantime though, the secretary came in more than once and told him "it's just a tickle in your throat, you need to stop coughing." Um, kids die from asthma, and it's not really a tickle in the throat. I was quite sickened by the comment, because although in this child's case he did turn out to be fine, I've witnessed the other direction such an attack can take. It's not pretty. Along the lines of, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all," I think there should be another important guideline for speaking: If you don't know what you're talking about, don't say anything at all.