I was out in Chester-le-Street with my wife and two friends during the Christmas period of 2023. It was early evening and we came across a young man who was lying unconscious on the pavement in a large pool of blood beside the taxi rank. He was on the other side of the street from us and there were a lot of people standing around but no-one was doing anything to help him.
A man - who I later found out was his father-in-law - was panicking. I knelt down beside the injured man and tried talking to him. There was a lot of blood from a large head wound pooling on the floor and he was making a gurgling sound.
After checking his breathing, I grabbed my wife’s scarf and used it to bandage his head while she called 999.
While protecting his head, I got him in the recovery position and continued talking to him. I was applying pressure to his head wound but blood was seeping through the scarf and my fingers.
While my wife was speaking to the emergency services, I was telling her about my assessment of the situation to relay to them. Luckily an ambulance arrived in about five minutes and the crew took over from me. The young man regained consciousness in the ambulance before they took him to hospital. One of the taxi drivers came over with some wet wipes to help me clean up all the blood I had on my hands.
I honestly believe I would have never stepped in had it not been for my St John Ambulance training, as I wouldn’t have had the confidence. To be honest, I never thought I’d have to use what I’d learned. Now I’m so thankful to St John Ambulance for helping me to help someone else and I’d 100% recommend the training to anyone who hasn’t learned first aid because you never know what’s going to happen.
The instructor on my refresher course taught us the importance of improvisation because you’re probably not going to be carrying a first aid kit when you come across an emergency. I bought my wife a new scarf afterwards!
