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So, what do you do if you find an unconscious person? Say you're walking down the street
and you see someone laying on the floor or you come home and a family member or a friend
is on the floor. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to assess for safety
of the scene. You want to make sure that if there's something that put this person in
this position, you don't want that same thing to put you in the same position, because you're
not any help to anybody if you're also unconscious. And then, you go up to the person and you
say, "Are you okay? Can you hear me? Everything okay?" You know, kind of like we see in the
movies, "Annie, Annie are you okay?" You want to check to see if they're breathing, if they
have a pulse, and you can check on their elbows, on their wrists, on their neck. Up here you
can check on their neck. If they are, then you want to see if there's any other kind
of trauma. Were they hit in the head? Was there anything nearby that may have hurt them?
Did they trip on something? Is there anything around? Is there alcohol all around and maybe
they just had a lot of too much fun last night. Something like that. You want to make sure
you can see what's around and if you can try and figure it out. If you suspect any kind
of head injury, especially neck injury, if you suspect any kind of neck injury or spinal
injury you're not going to want to move your friend. Okay? Keep them as they are, still.
Call 911 and wait for help. Monitor to make sure that they're breathing, that they have
a pulse and stay on the line until the ambulance gets there. If the person is vomiting or there's
fluids coming out and you feel comfortable that there wasn't a neck or a spine injury,
then you're going to want to put them in the recovery position. And the same thing again,
you're going to want to bend their knee, roll them over and then bring their arm over this
way. And that way their head is to the side and any kind of fluids, or vomit or anything
that's coming up will fall out of the mouth onto the floor and they won't choke on it.
The recovery position is very simple. I can't say it enough. It is very simple. It can save
someone's life. If someone's unconscious, you just lift their knee, roll them over and
roll them to the side. It can save your friend's life by just one simple move of rolling their
body over to the side.