The Whole Life

By Tom Murphy
RedwoodAge.com

Like anyone else, I get tired of hearing about "National Fill-in-the-Blank Week." There are weeks for everything these days, and whatever message they're trying to sell almost always gets lost. But I've decided to learn CPR and it's purely because of  "National CPR/AED Awareness Week." Even though that's the worst title for a week I've ever heard, the facts behind it really hit home. Turns out 166,200 people die of sudden cardiac arrest in the US each year. Unless you happen to be in a hospital already, the survival rate is 6 percent. If you have an attack - and anyone can, even young, healthy folks - your chances of survival drop by up 10 percent a minute without CPR, yet only one-third of the victims get CPR. The rest die while people stand around saying "What should we do?"  Well, we know what we should do. We should learn CPR. Or, more specifically, I should learn CPR. And so should you.