From the Fall to the Legacies

It was just within this month when my brother and I were discussing safety in tall buildings. My brother remarked that the buildings in this housing complex of ours were much more safer than the ones in other places he had visited. To illustrate, he said that the presence of canopies, pot holders and raised windows, although unable to completely eradicate accidents, would ensure that only the really darn frisky children would encounter the most severe consequences.

Yesterday, one darn frisky two-year-old boy did suffer the most severe consequence of falling from the fifth floor.

My first inkling of the accident was a terrified wail from the boy's mother. She bawled out loudly and continually of how she was about to prevent it all but was still too late. When I peeked out of our window, the boy was already whisked away for treatment; instead, I saw dazed onlookers staring from their own windows and a throng of kibitzers at the ground. A crying, ballistic four-year-old stares and jumps at a spot surrounded by scattered bougainvillea bracts. He most probably witnessed it all and was heavily traumatized. From the scattered bracts I pieced out in CSI fashion how the boy might have been outbalanced from the fifth floor, plummet through the overhanging bougainvillea branches at the third floor, bounced off the canopy roof of the ground floor entrance, before falling on the cement walkway. My brother's wife, who was at the window before me still saw the immobile body, the right side of the face blackened and bruised, the mouth oozing with blood, and was shakened by the vision for the rest of the day. Actually, everyone in the vicinity were shaken for some time. Even my brother who missed the whole episode by a couple of hours would not bring himself to play the piano. "Play a somber piece, say, the Moonlight Sonata," my wisecracking self still managed some dark humor.

What frustrated me in this incident was that, of the large number of military personnel and nursing students in this housing complex, the first one on the scene was an idle bystander (tambay) who was clearly ignorant of first aid procedures. In a seemingly heroic gesture, he cradled the boy in his arms and rushed him to some transportation to the hospital.

Pathetic and downright wrong!

To manually carry the victim in this instance is the last thing anyone with even the faintest first aid knowledge (that includes me) would do! Doing so may potentially exacerbate any injury to the head and neck like for instance, completely severing the spinal cord leading to paralysis. Instead, one should check on the pulse and breathing while another looks for a stretcher and a neck brace and calls for transport. Lack of pulse and breathing will necesitate CPR like in all those TV dramas. Stop external bleeding by applying pressure with a clean cloth. Etc, etc... Consult a more reputable and updated source for first aid techniques, save lives and be a real hero, not just on style but substance.

It is fortunate that with the help of prayers, building safety features that prevented a direct slam to the ground, and the fact that growing children are more robust than we consider them to be, x-ray results as of this writing amazingly indicate no fractures to the skull and the boy is now responsive to stimuli.

-oOo-

Ugh, what a gloomy entry! Allow me to lighten things up:


At around the same time as the falling incident, I was engrossed with a five-CD Click-Art and font collection from the mid-1990s. It came with legacy software for viewing and editing the numerous images in the CD along with instructions for installing in Windows 95, imagine that. In fact the viewer program was clearly of a different era because it uses a different window theme, a more primordial one. The most funny thing about it was the eye icon for its View button: like a precursor to present-day cheesy Flash objects, this eye follows the mouse pointer around and blinks randomly.

Creepy.



I don't know why, but encountering relics of electronica, especially those of the 90s, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Perhaps, it's because of the fact that these were the very first objects that have captured my imagination, and launched me to a quest of knowledge from MS-DOS to Windows to Unix; from Game & Watch to Brick Game (Tetris) to PC games (note the jump, no Famicom to Gameboy to Playstation for me, loser); from QBasic to Turbo Pascal to Java to Unix scripting; from dBase to Access to SQL; from copy con file.txt to Wordstar to Word to Blogger; from 256 KB floppies to 1.44 MB disks to CDs, hard drives and USB drives.

Sigh.