Do not resuscitate

I am obsessed with weird dolls. We've talked about this before. Thankfully today I encountered a whole new class of prosthetic people who frighten me more than ever.

CPR dolls.

I was in a CPR class this morning, as would be any mother in her right mind who ever saw a baby gag momentarily on a piece of banana. Among other things, I learned:

• That in Vermont, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Quebec, failure to act laws require you to assist a downed victim. Live anywhere else, and you are free to pretend you didn't notice.
• You can't be sued for trying to resuscitate someone, as long as you are neither accepting cash nor pretending to be an EMT. Or something like that.
• I have no idea how to spell resuscitate, and had to look it up.
• Defibrillators talk.
• You should not necessarily put your mouth on a strange person unless you have a funky mouth thing with a tube. An EMT wouldn't.
• The entire subject of bodily trauma and death scares me even more than the clown from Poltergeist.

But back to the dolls. The ones we dealt with today were textbook CPR: a pile of limbless, block-chested grownups and a duffel bag of babies. Nothing particularly alarming about these pulmonary puppets, other than the insidious inner fears you might project upon them while blowing into their chest cavities through a prophylactic barrier. However, as I later found out on the trusty interweb, things in resusci-doll territory get even scarier than your own imagination.

Let's start out in the shallow end: Mrs. Bates. Featuring "intramuscular injection sites at the deltiods, right gluteal muscle, and at the thighs" and "interchangeable male/female genitalia with full-functioning catheterization," "Advanced Grandma Chase" looks harmless enough, but I am not entirely sure I would want her in my hallway closet.

For only $289, you could own Fat Old Fred, the politically incorrectly named "typical cardiac arrest victim" who is, as the name implies, fat and old. He comes complete with the requisite "elderly physical appearance," and his own "extra fat layer." As the Boy Scouts are wont to say (that is, in addition to "gay kids should not be taught how to put up tents and tie square knots,") be prepared.

Looking like something exhumed from Stephen King's Pet Sematary, CasPer the CPR dog, with his "sanitary replaceable airway" and his "femoral pulse," is sure to give the late-night driver pause as he or she speeds down badly-lit residential neighborhoods on the way to Taco Bell. Can I just stop right here and say how badly that book scared the crap out of me in the 6th grade?

But oh, it gets even scarier. Everything has a worst-case scenario, and CPR manikins are no exception: meet Terry Trauma. Forget what I said about the scariest image I have ever encountered on the internet. Terry actually scares me more. (Actually, is that true?). As a bonus, Terry comes with "two heads, a rigid rescue head and a second head for sanitary CPR training." We should all be so lucky.

If you have ever had vague anxieties about what you might do in an emergency situation, just meditate for a moment on Terry Trauma. There you are, hanging out at Starbucks, drinking your half caf mochaccino, and there is Terry Trauma on the floor right in front of that little table with the creamers and straws. And oops, did I mention that he's your best friend? What the hell are you going to do?

For god's sake people, get out there and sign up for CPR.