A sudden crisis -- how did you react?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Long back story to this, but I once leaped a barrier and ran into an indoor arena to stop a horse from killing the person trying to work with it. Didn’t stop to think, just did it, even though the person had been abusing the horse for so long that its trying to kill the person could be called justifiable homicide.

Yes, afterwards when I had time to reflect I realized the peril I’d put myself in, and even had some regrets that the person escaped unscathed (though later, after she’d left the barn, I learned the horse had thrown and seriously injured her), but looking back I’m glad to have discovered that I could do the right thing in an emergency.

What are your stories?

2

This happened a long time ago, back when I was a trained first-aider. Mrs T and I were in a restaurant with her parents. Maybe the only other people in the restaurant were a young couple with a very young child, still in the process of trying out solids.

We were chatting and eating; and it became apparent that the child was struggling and, indeed, was choking. My mother in law said something like, “For Christ’s sake do something, you’re a first-aider!” - so I went over to their table (where the parents were in a crazy panic), said “Excuse me - may I…?”, picked the child up by it’s ankles with my left hand, held it upside down, and was preparing to give it the recommended hearty slap on the back with my right hand when it coughed up the obstruction and started breathing again (and howling). I handed the child back - the parents were crying and more or less hugging and kissing me. I went back to our table.

But your interesting question is, how did I react. So - I can explain none of this - during the initial choking I was uninterested and hoping it would just resolve itself somehow. Having been chastised by my mother in law I was thinking, oh well, if I must. It was tiresome. As I was handling the child I was - I dunno - bored? I was calm throughout to the point of being soporific. The praise made me wince with embarrassment. When I got back to the table I just wanted to pick up where we had left off.

It was somewhat of an out-of-body experience, I suppose. So yeah, I went through the first aid training for just that sort of occasion, and that’s what it felt like. You just can’t predict how you’re going to react - if I saved a life, I wasn’t expecting it to feel like that.

j

3

Friend’s house started to have a fire in the ceiling. I was 16. I thought “we need a fire extinguisher” but the only one I knew of was far away in my home apartment building. So I ran back, got one, then ran back, and we put the (small) fire out.

4

Tale of woe here.

Briefly I took off into Lake Michigan with only a canoe and paddle (no life jacket) to try to save a young child who’d been blown far into the lake in a kayak by strong winds.

How did I react? I just went after her, as soon as I was able. I recognized that I was rolling the dice and that I might not make it back, but all that was secondary in the moment. I think it boils down to the fact that I’m a dad, and a kid was in trouble, and there was absolutely no one else there in a position to help that kid quickly other than me. Not going out was not an option. But I was scared. Because I know Lake Michigan well, and it was NOT a good day to do something like that.

I focused on reaching the kayak, which I’d been able to keep my eye on. But when I reached the kayak, no one was in it. Nor could I see anyone in the water nearby. And that’s when I panicked, started screaming for help even though no one was near enough to hear.

Fortunately that lasted only about 15 seconds (tho it felt like a lifetime). I made myself calm down and tried to plan how to survive until rescue came (911 had been called). Then I capsized into the 50 degree rough water, the canoe semi-submerging itself, and I swam to the kayak and hung on for 10-15 minutes until the Sheriff’s rescue boats came and got me and took me to shore, where I had to tell the child’s family that the kayak was empty and the rescue crew was searching for her in the water (her body was never found).

I remember it often, especially since I still live right on the lake. I regret not looking more thoroughly for the kid in the water on my way to the kayak, maybe I’d have seen her. But I don’t regret the attempt.

My other major crisis was being in a small plane crash, but that just went quickly from “I’m going to die” as we neared the future crash site to “where am I and why does everything hurt so much? Oh, there’s an ambulance. That’s nice!”

5

I jerked an elderly woman back from the rail on a small train ride at the zoo. The train full of families was coming and she was just standing on the track, under the ringing bell, chatting with someone.
I may not have saved her life. But it surely wouldn’t have been painless if that thing struck her.
She actually chewed me out cause it hurt her arm where I grabbed it.

It’s a thankless job, sometimes.

6

What an incredibly experience, it must’ve shook you to your core.

My kid as a toddler was choking on a slice of bacon at a restaurant while we were on a road trip. I grabbed both her arms and quickly scissored them over head and out came the bacon. Thank god it was that easy. My sister heimliched an elderly man at a seafood raw bar who was choking on a huhpuppie. 2 thrusts an it was out. It took a few minutes before his distress was apparent she being an ER nurse recognized the signs pretty quick.

I once intervened stupidly between two dogs, one on a leash the other the demon Shepard from next door. I quickly realized it was a boneheaded move that’d get me bit so I backed off. Jeez that was dumb.

7

I wonder if your mind went into a narrow focus – do what has to be done – and turned off any emotional reaction that might interfere with the doing. A sort of “Cope with this in the moment; freak out later.”

8

I dunno. It’s something I’ve wondered a lot about, obviously, but I don’t think you can reach firm conclusions - too involved and too little expertise. There have been other crisise where I have been way too calm. I was so calm about having cancer that it scared me (for example.)

TLDR - it appears to be part of how I am.

j

9

This is one of my worst nightmares. My kid crams his mouth full of food all the time, and sometimes gets up and runs around, like he has no awareness at all how potentially dangerous it is, and I wouldn’t know what to do if he started choking. I grasp the heimlich but I’m not confident in my ability to handle a situation like that on my own.

I’m also terrible in an immediate crisis, and freeze right up. But I haven’t experienced many emergencies of that manner, and I’ve never been in a position where I was the only or best person to help. I will always do what I can.

(I’m really good at long-term crises, so that’s some consolation at least. Give me an unexpected life challenge and I’ll whip it into shape soon enough.)

10

I think a lot about reaction to crisis, and I believe behavior is governed by two things:

  1. Innate and / or early learned attitude to stress

  2. Training

My mother was slightly high strung, and unfortunately I think this left me with a predilection to react badly to sudden stress in unfamiliar situations. But when I have experienced crises for which I’ve been trained, I have mostly responded appropriately.

Good Example: When I was a flight instructor I once had an engine failure while training a student. I snapped immediately to the emergency procedures that I taught every day, began planning for a dead-stick landing in a field and then started troubleshooting. Those efforts were successful and I got the engine back in about 30 seconds (combination of factors, engine slightly out of adjustment). I then flew a high, careful approach back at my home airport, mindful that the engine could no longer be considered reliable.

Bad Example: Another time my reaction was to run toward the problem when I probably should have considered the danger first. I was briefing a (different) student when we heard an engine surging outside. Poking my head out the door I saw a guy desperately clinging to the front airplane. He was between the prop and the wing root, and I didn’t understand what I was seeing initially until he managed a small wave for help.

I set out at a sprint with my student following. I told him to grab the tail if the plane got away from the guy, while I would try to reach into the cockpit to stop the engine.

The guy was able to hold on and I killed the engine. But this could have ended really badly. Being a small tailwheel plane, it could have weather-vaned around, giving one or all of us a mouthful of propeller. If my student had grabbed the tail and then the man let go, student might have found himself waving an airplane around like a drunk with a pistol.

I still don’t know what the proper response might have been in that situation. All I know is we were lucky. And the guy learned to be more careful when hand-propping his plane - I think he neglected to chock it first, which is how the whole thing began.

11

A while back, I was standing in line at a c-store when suddenly a man ran into the store and backhanded the woman I was behind. I was using a heavy carbon fiber cane at the time, so I wound up like a baseball player and gave him a mighty whack on the head.

He saw my cane in time to turn his head so I didn’t split his skull, but much blood happened while it was sliding down the side of his skull to break his collar or shoulder bone, not sure which but something got broken. He hit the floor in a boneless heap and didn’t get back up, so I didn’t have to hit him a second time.

I don’t need my cane anymore, but I still carry it around, just in case…

12

Not as serious as the ones others have mentioned, but in one office I was working in, a co-worker was brewing a pot of coffee in a coffeemaker. The hot water was running into the basket, but nothing was coming into the pot. She pulled the basket out to see what was wrong. There was a clog, the basket was full of near-boiling water, and it spilled over her hand. Bad scald. There was a few of us in the room, and the others started patting her in the shoulder and saying encouraging things. Just looking at it I could see it was a bad scale, but I don’t have first aid training

I ran out, downstairs three flights to the commissionaires booth at the front, and asked if any of the commissionaires had first aid training. One came back with me right away with a first aid kit, and rendered first aid.

I don’t really remember any conscious decision, or going from the coffee room to the commissionaires’ booth, just remember the spill and me being at the commissioners’ booth, because I had a good idea they would be able to help.

My colleague thanked me afterwards for the quick action. She said she noticed that I had just disappeared, and then reappeared with the commissionaire.

Curious how the memory of both of us was discontinuous in a moment of stress.

13

My moment of crisis management came when I was not of sound mind. College days, at a raucous party in somebody’s second-story apartment. Lots of beer, weed, and cigarettes. Somebody dumped a butt or emptied an ashtray into the kitchen wastebasket. It probably smoldered for a while before it began blazing in the corner.

I wasn’t in the kitchen at the time, but I heard people yelling and saw the smoke. I was quite blitzed, but I knew that the efforts of throwing cups of water on the fire wasn’t going to be effective. So I grabbed a kitchen towel, used it as a pair of gloves, grabbed the wastebasket, hollered at somebody to open the door, ran out onto the deck, and heaved the basket onto the courtyard below. Other folks ran downstairs and stomped out the fire.

I grabbed another beer and continued partying.

14

Not my story, but it still brings me to tears to think about it, decades later:

When I was in college, a classmate of mine ran into traffic to grab a toddler who had run in front of a truck. Both were killed.

I worked on the student newspaper at the time, and we tried to cover the news with sensitivity and respect. I will never forget the handwritten thank you note we received from the student’s mother, covered in tearstains. I’ve always wondered - would I have done what that girl did?

I’ve never been in that severe of a sudden crisis - a few lesser ones I won’t detail here, but I’ve reacted both ways: the “plunge right in and try to help with no regard for personal safety” and the sort of freezing up “huh … what? …” response. Luckily all situations resolved themselves without serious consequences.

15

A few years back I was bike riding on my favorite trail and, right in the middle of a big downhill portion came upon a kid who’d wiped out and torn up his knee pretty badly. The skin looked like hamburger with gravel mixed in. He and his friend were freaking out – in Spanish.

I have no first aid training (nor first aid stuff) and was 30+ years removed from my last Spanish class. But I managed to calm the injured kid down a bit by asking him his name and how old he was, and I used the water from my Camelbak and a rag I carry to rinse off the knee. It was a bad scrape but not deep, and once it was cleaned up he was game to get back on his bike and (I hope) ride home for some Bactine.

Not a true crisis, I suppose, but I felt pretty good about my grace under pressure. Even if I did have to ride the rest of the way home with no water.

16

Not being glib ,but hopefully I still have my shoes on. I do not take them off until my wife is safe and sound at home. A rule I made for myself. We live in a rather difficult area re: snow.

I used to be in Mountain Search and Rescue. Taught me a lot. Way before cell phones, my wife was getting late from walking the dogs behind the house. She came home to me packing up all my gear to go look for her.

One thing drilled into me was don’t be a rescuer that needs to be rescued.

17

My husband is crazy good in a crisis. He’s almost superhuman in how calmly and rationally he can think through emergencies. He’s a clinical psychologist and with the advent of COVID, mental health professionals have seen a huge uptick of clients in crisis. He’s had weeks where he’s had to deal with 3 different people in crisis, people who are suicidal, people who need intervention because of threats to others, people dealing with the aftermath of mass shootings. And because of confidentiality, he can’t really talk about it with anyone. He doesn’t even talk about it much with me.

He’s dealt with my own mental health crises with equal calmness and rationality. When I was 20, I was hospitalized for suicidal ideation. He was right there with me. When I had my miscarriage, he was the one trying to get insurance coverage for the D&C I needed, petting my feet while I waited for surgery. Even at the time, the nurse said to me, “He’s extraordinary.” Yeah, I know. When our son was born, I was severely depressed bordering on delusional, it seemed like everything was crumbling around us. He held up the ceiling.

It does take a toll on him, eventually. But that’s more about long-term stress management than crisis intervention.

18

I was walking in our neighborhood one day when I saw two horses running down the street. I ran after them, and the ran down a cul-de-sac. They reached the end, and turned around to run back out, but I spread my arms and scared them back. There was a house with the gate open to the back yard, and they ran in there. I chased them in, and yelled at the yard guy to shut the gate. The owner came out, and was (not unreasonably) upset. He wanted to let the horses out, and I told him that he couldn’t do that. This house was one block away from a really major street - if the horses had ended up on it, they would get killed, and probably ended up killing some motorists. He was yelling at me about how they were trampling his plants, and I told him to STFU! I asked the yard guy for a rope or extension cord, and he handed me some rope. I threw that around each of their necks, and they behaved well enough for me to take them out of the back yard. The owners showed up pretty soon, and said some kids had opened the pasture gate as a prank. They were pretty grateful that the horses were OK.

And, then there was the time when I had to fend off my neighbors Emu from eating her Llama, but that’s a story for another time…

More recently, my wife and I came upon this scene:

We got there maybe 5 minutes after it happened. I got out with my knife, to see if anyone needed to be cut out of their seatbelt, and asked if 911 had been called. There were a lot of people helping, so I figured that the best thing to do would be to just get out of the way, so we left. The was a young boy bawling his eyes out - he didn’t seem to be hurt, but his sisters were pretty banged up and bloody. I regret not staying to comfort him, but people are so wary of strangers these days…

19

My reaction in an emergency is similar to Treppenwitz’s, and that’s a pretty good description. I basically have a circuit breaker in my head that trips when my adrenaline spikes, and my emotions get muted for a while. I become intensely focused on immediate steps to resolve the situation, while feeling something close to boredom. It usually lasts until a couple of minutes after the crisis, then I suddenly sit down on the spot and shake for a while.

Odd side effect: I can’t enjoy roller coasters. The circuit breaker trips at about the point where most riders get excited, and suddenly I’m bored and stuck in a cramped, uncomfortable cart. It’s about as enjoyable as being in the back of a bus going over a rough road.

20

I’ve had two pretty different experiences.

In the first one, I was distressed afterward about not being very good in a crisis, but I understand it differently now. I had just picked my mom up at the airport, and on the way home an oncoming driver turned left directly in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, but wound up crashing into the turning vehicle. The driver drove away without stopping. I got out of my car and tried to get the license plate. They only had a paper tag in the back window, and the window was tinted, so I got nothing. I was kicking myself afterward because it felt like I had just kept staring at the tag instead of trying to get other details. I was shaking and kind of a mess when an officer arrived to take a report.

I realize now that part of what was happening was the after effects of a huge burst of adrenaline from experiencing the crash. I’d still like to be better in those circumstances.

The other experience happened when my kids were between two and three. My in-laws hosted my family and my brother-in-law’s family in Mexico. The rental house had a beautiful, but unfenced, pool.

As we arrived there, I was walking behind one of my kids. As we walked by the pool, I saw him looking at toys floating near the side, and then I saw him just step out over the water - so focused on what he was looking at that he had no idea he was stepping off the side. Everything happened all at once, but I have distinct sort of snapshots of specific things. I can still see his little sandaled foot sort of hanging in the air over the water in the instant before he fell in. I know I started to think about whether I could grab him if I laid down on the ground and just reached down for him, but I also remember literally not completing that thought before I jumped in. He had gone straight down, and I grabbed him and popped up with him so fast that he never even really registered that he’d fallen in.

I handed him up to my wife, climbed out, and calmly started taking all of our passports, my wallet, my phone, and a bunch of cash out of my pockets.

Everything about it is crystal clear to me, I can remember what I saw, the sound of him entering the water, the thought that I pushed away because I didn’t have time to finish it, my glasses falling off. Even what the wet money felt like. And his sort of confused look at suddenly being in the pool with me.