Gas mask! Stat!

See? How creepy is that?

And yes, Bill Door (in the comments on the last post), we did get told the story about how Resusc Annie is lovingly based on the death mask of a dead girl dragged from the Seine. Mmmm. Corpse doll*. Sweet. Let me kiss it now.

Actually, snogging the rubber equivalent of Nosferatu wasn't even the worst bit.

The worst bit (burping course-leader, freezing bogs and substandard teabags aside), was having someone practice putting me in the recovery position. I'd been sitting quietly up until then, listening to the woman next to me doing that thing where someone interjects at every possible juncture to relate the lecture to themselves or, as is more likely, someone's sister's brother's friend's cousin's best man, who had it happen to a bloke they used to work with. It was driving me quietly bonkers (baby not breathing? Oh, my next-door-neighbour's daughter was like that. Heavy nosebleeds? Oh yes, my son's teacher's boy had those. Stroke? Oh, my Graham had one of those...etc...etc...SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!). What was worse, however, was the occasional waft of fag breath** that kept seizing my nostrils in a death grip and making me want to throw up. Uurgh.

Now, I'm an ex-smoker. I love smoking. Smoking rocks. But it also makes me not be able to exercise, which in turn means I stay fat. Which sucks. So, I gave up at the end of December. I have nothing against anyone smoking, per se. But if you're not going to brush your teeth between the last fag of the night and the first coffee of the morning (and presumably at no point after that), at least chew some gum, or something. Especially if you're going to smoke all the way to a course that will take place in a small, unventilated room. It's just nasty.

Imagine my delight, then, when the woman in question breathed directly into my face while pretending to check if I was breathing***, and then placed her ashtray-smelling fingers all over my face while practising the jaw thrust.

I don't want to make out it was all bad, though. I did learn how to plausibly fake a petit mal seizure. Could first aid training be any better?

* There was a baby one as well. I am SO having nightmares tonight.

** Note to all those random Yahoo-halitosis-group members who took offence to my post that mentioned one person out of the squillions I have met in my life who had bad coffee breath: piss off. This, like the other post, does not warrant one of you linking to it and trying to hold me up as some twisted example of a person who hates people with medical conditions that make you smell. Anyway, what are you doing reading this? Shouldn't you be flossing?

*** I wasn't, by this stage. Trust me.