The "Heimlich Maneuver"

Just like I post the good and the beautiful, I also feel compelled to post the bad and the ugly...and this is what this post is about...
I believe we learn so much from our bad experiences, probably more so than we learn from the good ones..(sad, I know.. but true!)...
I'm sure some of you remember this post, where I told the horrific story of Gaby's near drowning experience...it was a type of fear I never thought I could feel again..but unfortunately I did..way sooner that I had hoped...

I am by no means a perfect mother, but I do try my best to keep all eyes and ears on my kids at all times, which I consider to be the right attitude given the huge responsibility at hand...
Well, today Olivia was eating chicken nuggets at a fast food joint and as I was intently watching her chow down her food, I noticed she started to choke and she immediately grabbed her neck as if she was gasping for air.  Naturally I freaked out and started patting her in the back, followed by desperately shaking her whole body... She kept choking and grabbing her neck and I started screaming "somebody help me! I don't know what to do!".. A guy came from out of nowhere and practiced the "Heimlich Maneuver" rather swiftly and she immediately spat out whatever piece of food was stuck in her throat... I'm sure the whole thing took less than a minute, but it sure felt like an eternity....It's sad that I just didn't know what to do.. I felt so helpless!

This brings me to my point of how fast and unexpectedly bad things can happen... and how, as parents, we can never protect our children from everything... In the past I've taken infant CPR classes and also a few emergency response courses (Heimlich Maneuver included), but for some reason, in the middle of my stress, I just couldn't react... It has happened to me before, where my whole body freezes and my brain doesn't seem to be able to send the right orders for my body to move... It also doesn't help that I've never really had to use any of these techniques and whenever I learned about them, didn't really take them seriously!

In light of the scare, I started reading about the "Heimlich Maneuver" so that I could at least try to refresh (and expand) my knowledge about it.. I found a great site that describes how to perform the maneuver for choking adults and children.  Please take a minute to visit this website to learn a little bit more about this life saving technique.... You never know when you might need to save your child's (or someone else's) life.  I was lucky someone reacted as quickly as they did and I can tell the story next to my happy child!