TRIO OF HEARTSAVER FIRST-AID TRAINING COULD SAVE A LOVED ONE’S LIFE

Tarla Atwell was overseeing her family’s hair-care manufacturing company when a maintenance worker severed his finger. “I didn’t know what to do, so I put him in my car and just drove to an urgent care clinic,” she says. Although the incident was in 2015, Atwell, an attorney in Jefferson, Ga., vividly remembers her overwhelming sense of panic. “Maybe with training I could have stopped the bleeding.”

Now, after recently completing the American Heart Association’s Heartsaver First Aid CPR AED course, she feels more confident in her ability to render aid until help arrives.

Atwell says the impetus to finally enroll in a course came from her desire to help her loved ones. “Many members of my family, including my grandmother, are in their 90s. What better way to help them than with this knowledge?”

More often than not, those who take a basic lifesaving class use those skills on friends or family rather than a stranger, says Janet Schulte, the certification coordinator teaching lifesaving techniques to students, faculty and staff at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo.

For me, the motivation to become recertified was the never-ending trauma I’ve seen on the news over the past few years — from floods, fires, heat waves, condo collapses, shootings, riots and more — and the sense that our first responders must be stretched thin.

I don’t think I’m alone. During the organization’s 2020 fiscal year, which included several pandemic months, more than 2.1 million