BLS

Today, I cried in my Basic Life Support renewal class. The woman teaching the class was stern, factual, and proud of the work she does. She offered lots of corrections and areas for improvement and was exceptionally clear about the many ways we could seriously wound or kill a baby while trying to save a life. And then, suddenly, she got misty-eyed and started talking about saving babies while using CPR. She noted that while there isn't science behind it and the American Heart Association doesn't know why, babies respond better to CPR when the compressions are happening while they're being held. She looked at us in earnestness and said, "The major theory here is that a baby lives with the rhythm of its mother's heart for close to ten months. The sound track of their lives is a heart beat. And so in their moments of greatest stress and need, there is something unknown about the presence of a heart beat while you administer this life-saving work."

Crying in a BLS class is a first for me. But it hit me with tremendous magnitude that in all of the science textbooks and in all of the things that we know about the human body, we almost entirely neglect the soul or the impact other human beings have on our own existence. We can survive with food and drink and water, but can we blossom? And even though I am an adult (full-fledged), I am so infinitely fallible. I yearn for so much. I am so filled when in the presence of those I most love. I am lonely when I feel emotionally abandoned. All of the child-like emotions I have known for so long are still there, I just do a better job burying them.

I feel preposterous even writing it here because I am nothing if not a healthcare worker; but in the process of resuscitation, could the presence of another's heart beat draw you back from the edge? Could the warmth of a body remind you to return here instead of passing to the next thing? Could the warmth and vitality of my body speak, encourage, and push someone on the edge one way or another?

I am veering precariously close to the edge of new-age pseudoscience that I absolutely deplore, and yet it is not preposterous to think that the comfort of another human body could tip the balance. The warmth, presence, and encouragement of another human body has altered my existence multitudinous times, it just wasn't with something physical like encouraging my heart to beat again. But perhaps the division we see between one another is not so infinite. Perhaps your mere presence here alone is enough to nourish and enough to encourage me forward. 

Perhaps it is enough to share this space together, this very specific time, and to hold one another when we feel too weak or exhausted or overwhelmed to continue. Perhaps it should suffice to be near enough to you to feel your heart beat, the consistent thrum thrum of my heart working in unison with yours.