CPR

 “Turn the doll over and smack it as hard as you can in the back. Harder!”

I flipped the surprisingly heavy and misshapen plastic doll over—dressed in pink baby rags with a tube connecting its mouth directly to an air bag glued to the front of its stomach—and pulled up my hand like I was going to shove my palms together and shoot a fireball out of them. I began smacking that baby with the front of my palm.

“Keep smacking!”

I tried my best to smack hard enough to detach the baby’s head from its body, but to no avail. Following instruction, I flipped the doll back over and pumped its chest with two fingers at a steady beat.

They set up the class so it sounds like infant CPR is the hardest kind of CPR. You learn adult and child CPR to ease into it, and only then do you start smacking that baby. To me, if you ignore the fact that you’re probably puncturing the child’s lungs, infant CPR is the easiest. Much less room to smack the wrong body part, and God knows the baby’s not going to swear at you for starting mouth-to-mouth only after they became conscious.

My wife and I were both pretty good at it. Heroes, you might say. At one point, I grabbed a strangers doll and started pumping. Damn it if I’m losing two babies this evening.
There were five other couples taking the class with us—a diverse enough group to function as a cast for the new “not movie-star attractive, but tolerable” version of The Real World. Minus the gays, and double the white people.

I actually arrived early and was the first one in the room, as even the teacher was far outside the infant CPR classroom, standing next to the elevators at the hospital to make sure everyone found the place. So there I stood, alone—just a 30-something year old man surrounded by fake babies.

Of course, I immediately started taking photos and posting them to Twitter. I thought about just taking one of the babies, folding it into my work bag. Sure, there might be a small arm sticking out of a random bag from some dude walking out of a baby’s hospital, but it seemed like all would be good. It would be a benevolent steal—a baby to practice on as much as we needed.
Minutes passed and still no one joined me in the hell-scape of plastic babies flattened out around a cold conference room. I turned to the window and watched the cars pass by the hospital, once in a while one stopping with a real baby on the way, except for the plastic baby delivery truck.

“Keep smacking!”

As the class ended, my wife and I swung by the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way out, half for a coffee and half to make me happy that there was a Dunkin’ Donuts in this baby hospital. Plus, the coffee gave me something to spill if I needed a distraction from the baby arm sticking out of my bag.