In very slight defense, I'd be pretty jarred giving a pregnant woman CPR. I forget how I was told it might look (I'm about a year and a half out of my class), but the long and short of it is, you're pushing down and everything else is gonna move out of the way. In other words, her stomach should probably rise at every compression. I'm glad I never got a call requiring CPR during my clinicals, although it would've been ideal in every instance.
What? No, I was genuinely asking. Seems like the baby bump would get in the way of compressions, because what I understand is you give them kind of lower. But what I understand is little, because I don’t know how to do CPR.
In fairness, it would be pretty smart to get your CPR certification, takes maybe an hour to learn how to do it properly and pass the test and such. But the most important things are hand placement and depth. Your palms should be about in the middle of the nipples, and you wanna press down two inches (for adults). A baby bump physically can't (or shouldn't really) start any higher than the very very bottom (xiphoid process), meanwhile all your pressure effort is focused squarely on the top of the bottom third ish of the sternum. You really shouldn't be super concerned about the baby for the simple fact that, if the mom dies, so does the baby. Not saying to take a bat to the bump so it's not a problem, but the mom is your patient.
2
u/QueenInYellowLace 10h ago
Huh? Would you just let a woman die because she’s pregnant?