Sports First Aid, because it all goes pear-shaped sometimes
It happens so fast. You’re coming down from a cracking skydive. You land, laughing, and whip around for the imminent high-five with a huge grin on your face. That grin drops, right along with the friend framed in your view. Something happened in those last few feet of flight. You don’t know what, but that spectacular swoop somehow turned into an even-more spectacular case-in and suddenly your friend’s screaming, and you’re running towards him at top speed, and his leg is at a crazy angle, and this is suddenly a very bad day.
What happens now?
Wouldn’t you like to have a plan?
Even if you have no intention of becoming a medical professional (or even a uniformed first responder), every skydiver should make time for a short education in sports first aid. What you learn in this one-day course might make you the deciding factor in a bad situation. Maybe even your own.
The curriculum for such a course is comprehensive and practical. It integrates the essential principles and skills required to assess and manage medical problems and injuries that might arise not only on, but also in the chaotic world off, the DZ. The course doesn’t have a name that implies its usefulness for skydiving, sure. “Sports First Aid” sounds like a course for dads at the local football club, but hear me out. You need this. Here’s why.
1. Help is not always immediately at hand
Sports First Aid certifications are meant to be used in earnest when the caregiver and receiver are unlikely to receive the professional help they need as quickly as they might need it. While skydiving drop zones aren’t generally beyond the furthest reaches of civilization, they’re never in the center of it either. Response times are not, as a rule, immediate, even in the best-case scenario and badly bungled off-landings are never out of the realm of possibility.
Any medical education is of enormous benefit, of course, but, for a regular-strength skydiver, the ROI of a Sports First Aid course is very much in the sweet spot. The course is designed to facilitate intelligent, informed self-reliance in the absence of immediate help. It’ll help you to determine, in the most challenging of moments, whether you can semi-self rescue, to assess what additional resources you need, and to methodically stabilize yourself and/or others until the cavalry rolls up.
2. Whether or not you’re trained, you will always be the first responder to your own injuries
Make those early minutes count. If you end up injured during an emergency landing that’s outside the drop zone, and you don’t have a charged, functioning method of communication, then you’ll be waiting for help to find you. If you happen to be conscious in that interim (hooray, lucky you), first-response training will give you a method for understanding your injury, stabilising it and tracking its progress for later reporting. Without training, you’re more likely to just lie there, terrified, in blinding pain or unintentionally make your injuries worse.
3. You should be off the list of dead-weight liabilities and on the list of assets
Skydiving is a sport that demands proactive personal responsibility in the context of a mutually supportive, risk-educated community. We all understand this. While a Sports First Aid certification certainly does not confer the knowledge of a full EMT, it makes the bearer a much stronger member of the greater support team.
A baseline education in first response moves you from a gasping member of the horrified crowd to a literate, assisting partner in incident management. While your role in such a moment will, in all likelihood, be quite technically basic, it may be practically essential.
When it happens, if it happens, be ready…
4. You should really dial up your powers of observation
Heart attack? Massive compound fractures? You may (whew!) never see anything like them. Think outside the ambulance cabin for a minute. Dehydration? Hypoxia? Heat illness? These are real-life dropzone problems and your awareness could make a big difference to the outcome. This training will help you to recognize subtler symptoms in a way that could help you make a difference.
5. It’s a really good time. Seriously
There are few better-invested ways to spend a day than learning life-saving, life-changing skills in a group of fellow athletes. Here’s an idea: bring your jumping buddies and make it a social event.
James Carse said it best: “To be against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” Let’s take it to heart. Let’s accept the responsibility of the risks we take and get, even in a fundamental way, medically educated.
Remember: the day you save a life, it may be your own.
