B.L.S.

Bacon/lettuce/squash? Bratty little Soviets? Breaking a lucky streak? No, it stands for Basic Life Saving. These are those first aid skills that you always expected someone else to know and you always wished that you were on the ball enough to know yourself. The skills include CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and how to use a portable defibrillator.

Last night I passed my BLS course up in Park City, making me a certified Basic Life Saver. This can be understood in several ways:

1. “Basically, I can save lives”. I put this one in quotes because I thought it would have sounded so much better if Kip Dynamite were the one doing the saying. Imagine that with me for a moment. Ahhh, yeah that was fun; let us now continue. With this definition I am your one-stop life saving machine. Of course I try to look humble about it, but hey, shucks if you aren’t impressed by a real-life lifesaver.
2. I can save basic lives (A.K.A. The dysgenic approach). Basic lives, and only basic lives. In this definition we need to recognize the different levels in the hierarchy of lives that can (or might) exist. At first I was going to dub it the “eugenic approach”, but this is anything but eugenic. If I am only qualified to save the most basic of lives, then all the great lives (the ones I can’t save) are lost when I’m the only lifesaver around. Maybe if someone in the vicinity were ELS-certified (Exceptional Life Saver), he could save the exceptional life that is choking on his pork chops. Me, I’m just not qualified because heck if my qualifications don’t end with basic lives.
3. I know the basics of saving lives. This is the most boring and, unfortunately, most applicable of all the definitions we might come up with. It just means that if I find someone passed out, it’s pretty likely that I will not make the situation much worse by being there. The unlucky guy or gal will have a perceptibly better chance of making it out of this one alive. I hope he appreciates it because it cost me $40.