SHARON Cura and her husband, Dan, feared their two-year-old grandson Beau had died after he suddenly stopped talking and slumped to the floor, his face an ashen grey.
The couple had watched him chattering away to his mother Hayley on the phone while enjoying his lunch of roast chicken pieces, and one of them got stuck in his throat.
Luckily nursery manager Sharon, 50, from Birkhill, Fife, instantly knew what to do - and what she must never do. She had completed a Paedriatrics first aid course for her job, and had also taken the full First Aid At Work course with St Andrews in Dundee. "You're taught to put the child's head to the floor and to use the heel of your hand to deliver four hard slaps between the shoulder blades to dislodge the foreign body, but even though I was thumping his back repeatedly with my fist, at one point I thought it wasn't working and he wasn't coming back," she said.
"It's really difficult to do that to a wee child and especially one of your own. I didn't want to hurt him yet I felt I was breaking him. Doing it in real life is different from learning it in class and it's terrifying, but you have to hold your nerve."
Sharon's is exactly the kind of story Scotish First Aid Week is hoping to highlight over the next seven days. Launched yesterday, the campaign is hoping to address the fact that only 23% of Scots are trained in First Aid.
The campaign, launched by the St Andrew's First Aid charity, has been backed by Annie Lennox, James McAvoy and Hibs and Hearts football clubs, all of whom have signed T-shirts to be auctioned on eBay.
The charity hopes the campaign, which can be found at firstaid.org.uk/hero, will encourage more Scots to learn first aid.
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