Dr Heimlich does the Heimlich
This is a very cool story. I heard about it yesterday, before it was in the papers, on Facebook via my friend Janet Heimlich, author of Breaking Their Will. Her name has always reminded me of The Maneuver, of course, but I always assumed it was just coincidence. It’s not.
Dr Henry Heimlich uses Heimlich manoeuvre for first time at 96
The surgeon who gave his name to the simple but dramatic procedure used to rescue people from choking saved someone’s life with the Heimlich Manoeuvre for the first time this week aged 96.
Dr Henry Heimlich’s technique for dislodging food or objects caught in people’s throats has been credited with saving untold thousands of lives around the world since he invented it in 1974 – but he had never once had cause to use it in an emergency situation himself.
Last Monday, however, the retired chest surgeon encountered a female resident at his retirement home in Cincinnati who was choking at the dinner table.
Without hesitation, Heimlich spun her around in her chair so he could get behind her and administered several upward thrusts with a fist below the chest until the piece of meat she was choking on popped out of her throat and she could breathe again.
Bam. Job done.
“It was very gratifying,” Heimlich told the Guardian on Friday by telephone from Cincinnati.
“That moment was very important to me. I knew about all the lives my manoeuvre has saved over the years and I have demonstrated it so many times but here, for the first time, was someone sitting right next to me who was about to die.”
She was too startled to talk at the time, but he sat there beaming. They had dinner together the next night to celebrate.
Standard practice for dealing with choking prior to 1974 was to thump the afflicted person on the back. But Heimlich argued then, and still does, that that can force the obstruction further into the gullet, not dislodge it.
He worked on various theories until he finally came up with the procedure in 1974, designed for use by the general public, not just medical personnel, of putting one’s arms around the casualty and exerting upward abdominal thrusts, just above the navel and below the ribs, with the linked hands in a fist, until the obstruction is dislodged.
The last line of the story though…
After her brush with death, Patty Ris wrote Dr Heimlich a note, saying: “God put me in this seat next to you,” she told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
But then why didn’t God just magic the bit of meat down or out, instead? Or cut it smaller? Or liquefy it just before she swallowed? Or change the menu to salmon? Why does God always do these weird patches?
God is a trickster. He likes to pretend he can’t do it, so we will have to have FAITH he exists. If he did all the stuff we want him to, we would KNOW and then we wouldn’t have FAITH.
Can you tell I’ve heard this many times before? :-(
Because it’s not that God didn’t want her to choke– it’s that she should be the means through which Dr. Heimlich could get to finally use his research personally. Had they not been seated near each other, he may have never had that hands-on experience. Twas the doctor who was being benefited by God that day. She was just the means to and end.
Which means, according to Kant, God is unethical. As if we didn’t know.
Back in the summer of 1960, South London; my mother was pushing an old-fashioned pram carrying my infant brother. I was seated at the handle end, enjoying an ice lolly.
Then my brother gave a kick, jerking me so I bit off the end of the ice lolly which lodged in my throat. I couldn’t breathe, and my mother was panicking, not having any idea what to do.
A passerby grabbed me by the ankles, turned me upside-down, and hit me between the shoulder blades. The ice lolly chunk fell out, and my life was saved by a stranger who never even left his name.
I remember the invention of the Heimlich Manoeuvre (as we spelled it) and how quickly the knowledge spread. No-one should be untrained; it should be taught in school. Congratulations, Dr. Heimlich, and yah-boo-sux to God for being an arse.