Little Heart Little Beats

- when the resusee coughs or gasps during mouth to mouth. the resuscitator feeling it against their own mouth. in a drowning victim, they may get water in their own mouth.

- agonal gasping, in the same vein as the above, but it's regardless of mouth of mouth.

- the resusees mouth going gray-ish and slack. so hot hot hot. especially if the resuscitator has to work in their mouth or clear their airway or place a tube.

- manipulation of the jaw and tongue. the resuscitator hooking their fingers in a resusee's slack mouth, taking hold on their jaw, forcing the jaw forward. or pulling the tongue forward.

- over-complicating mouth to mouth in general. being extra thorough to ensure a clear airway. so forcing the jaw and tongue forward. frequently tipping the head back more. propping the resusee's head and neck in a arched position. using airways while still doing mouth to mouth (particularly OPA's). pinching the nose tightly. giving the breath until they feel a lot of resistance and then some. holding the seal even after the breath, to force the air to stay in their lungs longer.

same with compressions. taking extra time to prop their chest on something firm, maybe using one of those firm pillows to arch their chest and back and still give firm, deep compressions. straddling their resusee's hips. placing their hands in an alternative position for compressions, like putting both heels of their palms of their hands on the resusee's sternum and spreading their hands over their ribs, compressing their whole chest. or straying crossed palms to the left of their ribs, right over their heart.

even if any of it's not actually helpful, it's the desperation and thoroughness that's just 🤤💖

- the sound of breath leaving the resusee's chest (especially through an airway, the plastic causing a whistley sound)

- the way chest compressions make the resusee's tummy bulge. if the resuscitator is straddling, they get to feel it under them.

- hands clenching during defibs

- continuing compressions, or slightly gentler chest/cardiac massage, on a resusee. just cause or cause they have a weak little heart that needs some extra help. bonus points if they're slightly conscious.

- airways on a, currently, conscious resusee. watching them be helplessly gagged.

- irritation on wrists from restraints.

- having to give tummy thrusts to clear the airway.

- using lots of gear and having to work around it. using all sorts of monitors. like. the dream, chest wise, is 12 lead + long-term cardiac monitor + central line + thermometer patch). add BP cuffs (love when they have one o the arm and one on the leg. extra thorough), EEG tabs, pulse-ox clips (especially one on the tongue, cause that's just. so so unbelievable hot to me), other IV lines, etc.. all the tubes and wires. just getting in the way, even while serving an important job? the resuscitator having to weave between them? having to temporarily take some off and quickly put it back cause there's a tangle or it's in the way? yes yes yes yes 🤭🤭🤭

- getting conductive gel all over the chest prior to defibs. putting deep pressure on the chest with the paddles, keeping the paddles firmly pressed to the chest throughout the whole shock. using those orange gel pads. all of it. so good.

Patient moaning, groaning, whimpering during chest compressions as each thrust forces what precious little oxygen they have left out of their body. They’re sort of slipping in and out but they can see their rescuer trying so hard to keep them alive, pumping their heart above them

Them grabbing the rescuer’s wrists or reaching for their hands, not quite in their right minds. They don’t know their rescuer is keeping them alive, just that it hurts like hell and they just want it to stop.

Practically choking on the air being forced into their mouths via mouth to mouth or an ambu bag, their own oxygen intake is incredibly poor but the rhythm of breaths is going against the natural one their body is trying to take up. Or alternatively they desperately suck up any air they can get, grabbing at their rescuer and silently begging them to keep giving them air.

And defibs! Crying out as they’re shocked, clutching their chest. Rescuer feels like they’re hurting more than helping but their heart is just uselessly quivering and they have to do this to get it to beat. It’s just hard to justify when the person they’re working so hard to save is looking up at them with pained eyes and begging them to stop.

Her parents were, at first, super nervous about her being around the water. They worried that their young, blind daughter was more likely to fall in and drown, but after a few years, after joining a swim team, after their meeting other blind folks, they came around to her hobby. She'd spent her entire youth building her life around swimming. She was on her way to the Paralympics when her mom died, which threw things askew. But she'd never stopped swimming.

Now, Ruth lived across the country in a building a tad outside of her monthly budget all because it had an always open pool. In the 3 years she'd lived in the building she'd gone swimming probably every single day, sometimes twice.

To cover the cost of living in a building a tad outside of her monthly budget she'd gotten a second job teaching what the Department of Veteran's Affairs called "navigation classes" for newly blinded Veterans. She did this 3 or 4 times a week in the evenings.

She taught her class in a PT room because it was large, mostly empty, but with a few innocuous obstacles for folks to practice navigating around. It was at this job that she'd met Sydney. Sydney was probably 10, maybe 11 years older than Ruth. She was a retired Army something or another, and now worked as a physical therapist at the VA. Sydney had said "you live in the same building as me" by ways of their first greeting, and, ever since, they'd been friends.

They were fast friends. Friends who shared the odd meal together, joked together at work, and once had gotten very drunk and slept with each other at Ruth's apartment...which was the only time Sydney had ever been to Ruth's apartment, despite their living in the same building. Sydney had said that was a one time thing and had apologized a lot. She'd said that she "wasn't even gay," but since then, Ruth wasn't so sure. She, at least, was smitten.

A few months into their friendship they'd started to swim together. Sydney wasn't very good at it, but liked to start her day with exercise. So, most mornings, Ruth put on sweats and a hoodie over her favorite no-nonsense one piece (she had like 9 identical suits) and plodded over to the pool, usually taking the stairs instead of the elevators because those always smelled weird and there was a very creepy mouth breathing guy who always talked to her so much and she hadn't figured out, yet, how to navigate that little social hell.

The water was always cold, and always smelled a little too strongly of chlorine. From spending so much time in and around pools, Ruth had a feeling that this specific pool wasn't being maintained super carefully, but, it hadn't killed her yet, and it was always open to her.

This morning, she got to the pool first. As she opened the door to the room she felt the muggy, stifling air hit her. Everything was quiet save for the gentle "splip splip splip" of the still pool sloshing gently in itself. A circulation fan was slowly "zhoom zhoom zhooming" away in a corner.

She always swam in the same lane, if she could. 1 over from the left-most edge. She preferred to have a lane on either side of her, but liked being nearish to a long edge because it made it easier for her to tell where in the pool she was if the sound was asymmetrical.

She pulled off her hoodie and sweats, and left them in a heap by the door with her towel and white cane. Then she walked over to her lane, and stepped right into the pool. She knew that this was kinda dangerous, but she'd only done it successfully like 800 some odd times at this point, so, she figured it was fine.

The room erupted with splashing sounds as she got into the water. Everything went from still to crackling. After dunking her head under water and pulling her hair back she kicked off the wall and started to swim laps. Freestyle at first. She usually did 20 or so laps freestyle before moving to butterfly.

After 3 back-and-forth laps of the pool she heard the door opening, and stopped mid-lap. Standing on the bottom and straightening her hair back over her head. Sydney's curt greeting: "it is weird as hell that you do this in the pitch black." Ruth made a high pitched squeaking sound in return, holding her hands up to the sides of her head like big floppy bat ears. This was their usual morning conversation. Ruth knew where the light switch was, but liked the routine of Sydney's gentle mocking.

Ruth walked to the edge of the pool and hung off the edge while Sydney got ready. They chitchatted about work gossip, and idle nothings. Ruth was happy. Before long they were both in the pool swimming. Sydney's strokes were precise, but maybe a bit too forceful. It always sounded to Ruth like Sydney was trying to chop the water, as if she didn't hit it hard enough it wouldn't let her arms and legs under.

As Ruth zoned in and did her first quick twist into butterfly she could hear Sydney's strokes slow a bit, her kicking stop. Ruth swam on. As she twisted for the next turn she couldn't hear Sydney at all. She swam to the other side of the pool, and, instead of twisting to do another lap came to a stop. Sydney was at the end of her lane, next to Ruth's, breathing hard. Sydney whispered through gasping breaths, "really winded." Her voice was strained, and less calm than usual. Ruth asked, "you okay, Syd?"

She repeated, "really winded."

Then Ruth didn't know what to say. So, she said nothing. But before it felt truly, and painfully awkward Sydney took a sharp, quick, whistling inhale of air through her teeth, moved quickly, and gasped "oh my god," and then, more confusingly, "Ruth, help."

Ruth immediately dropped under the water to come up next to Sydney in her lane. She misjudged the distance between them, though, so she kind of slow motion body checked Sydney on her way over and up. She brought her arms around Sydney to hug her in place to make sure she didn't knock her over. As she hugged Sydney she could feel that Sydney was clutching at her chest with both of her hands pinned between her own and Ruth's bodies.

"Syd, what is wrong, what can I do?"

Sydney's voice was tight, and airy, she was struggling to breath, "I think I'm having a heart attack or something."

"Oh my god, what!?" Ruth wasn't proud of how quickly she went from 0 to panic. But after her initial outburst got herself under control. "Lets get you out of the water, okay?"

Sydney nodded, but right as she did so she started to shiver all over and her body got real tense. Ruth could feel Sydney's hands clenching around her own boobs as the shivering became more and more pronounced. Ruth released Sydney from the hug and pulled herself out of the pool, she reached back and grabbed Sydney under the armpits right as her face hit the water. She hauled her back up, out of the water. She was heavier than Ruth, and not helping to get out of the pool like Ruth had expected her to. Instead Sydney was hugging herself tightly, shivering all over, making spluttering sounds, so Ruth hauled, hard, with all her weight and strength, lifting from her legs, while also letting herself fall backwards so that gravity did some of the work, too.

This move got Sydney's shaking body about half way out of the water. Grunting, Ruth got her the rest of the way out of the pool, knowing she'd scrapped up Sydney's back along the edge of the pool as she cantilevered the other woman's body over the concrete curb. Sydney now lay next to the pool, with her shins and feet dangling into the water.

Ruth was breathless, "Sydney, I need to get help. Where's your phone?" Ruth never brought her phone to the pool, she mostly left the thing un or barely charged in her fanny pack hung by her front door with her wallet. Sydney didn't say anything, she was just making spluttering sounds.

"Sydney, you still with me?"

Spluttering sounds.

Ruth turned and ran to the door into the pool, she hauled it all the way open so that it'd stay, letting in a rush of cold air, and she screamed as loud as she could. She was surprised at how loud and how shrill her voice sounded. "HELP" and after a beat, "SOMEONE HELP! I NEED HELP!"

That done, she went back to Sydney. Ruth's hands were shaking as she reached out to touch Sydney, first her cheek, accidentally catching her lip, and then sliding to her neck. Sydney wasn't shivering anymore, but also wasn't spluttering.

"ohmygodohmygodohmygod."

Sydney wasn't breathing at all, her hands were still folded over her chest, clutching at her suit and chest, but Ruth was easily able to pull them aside. Syd's pulse was fast, like a thrumming rodent's heart, not like a strong person's heart.

In theory she knew how to do CPR, but, in practice she...was a full time professional computer person who had taken a single CPR class when she was 16 like 18 years ago. She shouted Sydney's name one more time to confirm she wasn't alert, and then tilted the woman's head back, feeling her short, cold, wet curls fall across her face. She pinched Sydney's nose tightly shut, pulled her mouth open and sealed her lips over Sydney's and blew as hard and fast as she absolutely could.

In return, she got a mouthful of hot pool water and who knows what else. Gagging and spluttering, Ruth turned Sydney's head away, realizing that she must have aspirated water or worse while being hauled out of the pool.

Sydney was larger than Ruth. Barrel chested with large breasts, and powerfully built hips and legs. Making sure Sydney's head was turned to the side, Ruth straddled her hips, and pushed upwards into the other's stomach with the heals of her palms, running along the clingy suit from Sydney's belly button up to her sternum. Ruth pushed hard a few times and could hear the water thickly splurting and glugging out of Sydney's mouth on to the pool deck. She repeated this move a few times until she didn't hear or feel any more water leaving Sydney's mouth. As she did it one last time she took a moment to scream, "HELP!" and again "SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!"

She moved Sydney's head again, and breathed into her, sealing her lips over Sydney's very cold, wet mouth again. This time when she breathed into Sydney she felt the air going into her, down into her body, past her mouth. She breathed into her again, and again, checking to feel for the rise of the other woman's chest. With each breath Sydney's chest inflated, her diaphragm remaining relaxed, though, meaning her belly was sunken and soft.

Ruth, breathlessly, "I NEED HELP!"

Ruth pushed her index and middle fingers hard into the side of Sydney's neck, she could still feel that fast, rabbit pulse. Unsure if she should keep breathing for Sydney or not, Ruth hesitated for a moment, but then she shifted herself over a few scoots and reached out, walking her hands across Sydney's right breast, and over to the center of her chest, sliding her hands to the other woman's still, cool, sternum. She put the heal of her palm flat against the hard, flat space between her breasts and then placed her other hand on top, interlacing her fingers. She sat up straighter, her hair coming down over her own face, hearing it dripping on to the pool deck and on to Sydney's still body. She started chest compressions. She pushed hard, and fast, exhaling with each compression.

After a few compressions Sydney made a long, wheezing sound, but didn't wake up. It sounded like air escaping from a wet bag. With each compression Ruth heard Sydney's mid back hit the concrete floor with a sucking sound, and her limp legs dangling in the water. Before doing another round of rescue breaths Ruth ran to the open door and screamed into the hallway, at first just a scream, and then a scream for help, this time even louder and more frantically.

Back at Sydney again she breathed into her. This time it was harder to get the air to go in. The last time it went in smoothly, this time it was like trying to inflate a blocked up beach ball or something. Sydney's cheeks started to inflate after a moment, and her chest remained in place. Unsure, Ruth returned to chest compressions, this time kneeling more directly over Sydney's body so that she had better leverage. Ruth didn't hear the footsteps. She started to cry, pushing as hard as she could on Sydney's chest. Ruth felt her self begin to sob, the shuttering breaths of tears starting to creep in as panic, or shock, was settling over her when she heard the foot steps of someone at the door, and a man's voice say "hello?"

Contents: Resus in a DnD setting, rescuer POV, mlm pairing, paralysis.

💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐

Wandering wasn’t a profession that paid well. It was fun, of course; the people, the creatures, the adventure. It also came with a woefully light purse. Something that led the tiefling to drift into the town settled just outside the forest. Dendry had stared at the job board for ages. Looking for something that paid well but wasn’t a suicide mission. A surprisingly small list.

In the end, there was only one job of the many parchments that seemed suited to his skill set. An escort for a charge to the capital. The journey would take nearly two weeks to get there, a five-day stay, and then the two-week journey back home. The job would be easy enough. Bandits would be the most pressing danger, but they wouldn’t be much of a threat. So long as he kept a steady supply of toxins at the ready. Toxins that his frog companion was more than willing to supply. Hells, so long as he could land a single hit, they’d be prone in the dirt before they knew what was happening.

So, the rescuer covers the victim in as many layers as they can take off of their own body and curls up with them to warm them up, maybe slipping an arm under the victim’s shirt in the hopes that a hand on their chest will help. They can feel the victim’s weak, sluggish heartbeat like that, how it stumbles and pauses for far too long before the next feeble beat comes. Their breathing is too shallow and their lips are turning blue, so the rescuer starts mouth to mouth, praying their warm breath will keep the victim alive long enough to recover.

It feels like it’s too late, but they can’t give up. The phrase they’re not dead until they’re warm and dead rings in their mind as the victim loses what’s left of their consciousness. By the time help arrives, they’re pulseless with the rescuer desperately performing CPR on a heart that’s too cold to beat until the professionals can take over.

The rewarming process is agonizingly slow, and the rescuer can’t do anything except watch a machine circulate and warm the victim’s blood for them while their heart is just…still. But eventually the color returns to their cheeks and they’re approaching a normal body temperature, and only then can the doctors really start trying to get a heartbeat back with CPR and defib.

"I don't know what you did differently tonight," I gasped, arching off the mattress as his hands trailed lower, "but don't stop."

The bedside lamp cast elongated shadows across his shoulders as he leaned down, murmuring something about the new pressure point techniques he'd learned. His breath hit my neck—warm, uneven—while his fingers worked with precision that made my vision blur at the edges. Every nerve felt live-wired, electric in a way that wasn't just pleasure but something closer to revelation.

Then came the hitch. My laughter dissolved into a choked inhale as my ribs seized mid-arc, a white-hot spike driving straight through my sternum. His hands froze, but the aftershocks of whatever he'd just done kept ricocheting through me, pleasure and pain indistinguishable now. "Wait," I managed, but my voice sounded underwater, distant even to myself.

The room tilted—no, I was tilting, collapsing backward against sweat-damp sheets while my pulse stuttered like a faulty ignition. His face swam into view, pupils blown wide with concern, lips forming words that didn't register. Something was wrong. Not the good kind of wrong, not the breathless surrender we'd chased a thousand times before. My fingers scrabbled at his wrist, but the connection felt muffled, like touching him through layers of wool.

Some detached part of my brain noted the clinical details: the way my left arm went numb first, the metallic taste flooding my tongue, the absurdity of dying mid-climax. His palm cradled my jaw, thumb smearing away tears I hadn't realized I'd shed. "Look at me," he demanded, except his voice cracked halfway through, and that more than anything made terror coil in my gut.

Then his mouth covered mine—not kissing, not really—and his lungs forced air down my throat in sharp, rhythmic bursts. Our teeth clicked together with each exhale, his breath tasting like spearmint and adrenaline. My chest rose mechanically under his hands, ribs expanding like bellows he operated by sheer will. Oxygen burned through me, raw and chemical, nothing like the slow intoxication of his lips on my neck moments before.

The bedside lamp flickered—or maybe my eyelids did—casting his silhouette in stop-motion flashes: the strained tendons in his neck, the way his shoulders hunched forward like he could physically will my heart into beating. Distantly, I registered the mattress dipping as he straddled my hips, fingers digging into my sternum with CPR precision. Each compression sent a jolt through me, pain and pleasure now twisted into something grotesque, my body convulsing under him in ways that had nothing to do with climax.

Somewhere beyond the roaring in my ears, a phone clattered to the floor. His voice fractured into syllables I couldn’t reassemble, though the vibration of his chest against mine transmitted the panic clear enough. The smell of sex and sweat turned acrid with the copper-tang of bitten lips, his breath hot and frantic against my cheek as he alternated between compressions and forcing air into my lungs. My vision tunneled, the shadows at the edges writhing like living things, until all I could see was the vein pulsing wildly at his temple.

Then—impossibly—his palm flattened over my sternum, not pushing but holding, as if he could reach through skin and bone to cradle my stuttering heart in his hands. The warmth of him seeped into muscle, deeper, until I swore I felt fingertips graze the very chambers that’d gone still. A sound tore from his throat, half-growl half-prayer, and suddenly my ribs were expanding without his mouth on mine, drawn by some invisible tether between his inhale and mine. My lungs burned with the borrowed breath, each gasp syncing to the desperate roll of his hips against my thigh, as if his body couldn’t stop chasing the rhythm that’d nearly killed me.

Colors bled back in nauseating swirls—the peach blush of our ruined sheets, the fluorescent smear of streetlights through half-drawn blinds—but his face stayed locked in focus. Sweat dripped from his brow onto my parted lips, salt-sharp and real, mingling with the spit he’d forced down my throat. His hands shook now, thumbs pressing into the hollow of my throat to check for a pulse that fluttered like moth wings against glass. “Breathe with me,” he ordered, except it wasn’t a command anymore, just a ragged plea, his chest rising and falling in exaggerated heaves I mimicked involuntarily. My fingernails carved crescents into his biceps, clinging to the proof of his pulse where mine faltered.

The door burst open with a crack of splintering wood—too fast for him to have called them, unless he’d screamed for help while I was busy not-dying. Uniformed bodies flooded the room, but the paramedics froze for a heartbeat at the scene: us tangled in the wreckage of pleasure and panic, his hips still pressed flush to mine, fingers interlaced over my sternum like lovers mid-vow rather than medic and patient. The lead EMT recovered first, barking orders about defibrillator pads and adenosine as she shouldered past my husband with professional detachment. He didn’t move, not even when they tore me from his grip, his hands hovering in the air like he could still feel the shape of my ribs under his palms.

The paddles hit my bare chest cold enough to burn, but the jolt that followed wasn’t electricity—it was memory. A staccato flicker behind my eyelids: his mouth on my inner thigh twenty minutes ago, the exact pressure he’d used where femoral artery met groin, the way he’d hummed against my skin like he was tuning an instrument. My back arched off the gurney as synapses fired in wrong directions, pain and ecstasy short-circuiting together until I couldn’t tell if I was screaming from the defibrillation or the aftershocks of whatever he’d done to me.

Voices overlapped in clinical fragments—“VFib,” “no pulse for 90 seconds,” “possible vagal response”—but beneath them ran his whisper, raw as open nerve endings: “Look at me, just look at me.” They’d shoved him into the hall, but I could see him through the doorway, palms pressed flat against the jamb like he could hold the whole collapsing world up by sheer force. The second shock came, and this time the pain had taste—burnt almonds and battery acid—while my hips jerked involuntarily, slick thighs sticking to the gurney’s vinyl. A paramedic cursed, slapping away the hand I didn’t realize I’d raised toward my own chest, where his fingerprints still throbbed like brand marks.

Time splintered. The cardiac monitor’s flatline tone stretched into a single endless note, but beneath it, my skin remembered the exact cadence of his thrusts when my heart had stuttered to a stop—how his rhythm hadn’t faltered even as mine did. A needle pierced my arm, icy liquid flooding veins that’d been molten minutes before. “Epinephrine,” someone announced, like I cared what chemical cocktail they used to counterfeit the adrenaline his teeth on my collarbone used to spark. The defibrillator charged again with a high-pitched whine, but all I could hear was the hitch in his breathing from the hallway, the way it synced with the spasms racking my body as if we were still tangled in the same ruinous rhythm.

“Ninety-seven seconds without spontaneous circulation,” the EMT muttered, wiping gel from my chest with a rough swipe that erased his fingerprints. I wanted to laugh—or scream—because how dare they measure my silence in seconds when his mouth had stolen whole eternities from me before tonight? My eyelids fluttered, heavy with drugs that couldn’t dull the memory of his palm over my sternum, pressing not just into flesh but through it, as if he’d found some backdoor into my bloodstream and flooded it with himself. The paddles came down. This time, the shock tasted like his name.

Somewhere beyond the fluorescents, a monitor beeped in reluctant triplicate. The paramedics exhaled collectively—a sound I felt before hearing, their relief vibrating through the gurney’s thin padding. My fingers twitched toward my throat where his thumbs had left bruises disguised as love bites. The lead EMT shot a glance at the doorway where he stood haloed in emergency lights, his silhouette sharp enough to cut glass. “Sir,” she began, but he was already moving, stepping over the shattered doorframe like it was our threshold again, his hands outstretched not for permission but absolution.

(Cw - choking, heimlich, crying/comfort, slight emeto warning)

He was eating alone at the dinner table when a sudden noise from outside the window startled him. With a short gasp and jump, he turned his head to look out and see nothing, must have been an animal. He turns his head back and almost instantly, whatever that noise was becomes the least of his worries. Feeling a large, painful blockage deep within his throat, he brought his napkin to his mouth and attempted to cough it out, but all he could manage was a silent gag. His eyes widen as he realizes he can’t make any noise, he can’t pass any air, he’s really choking.

His chair makes a loud scraping sound against the kitchen floor as he pushes himself back, clutching his throat as his stomach heaves for air, and drool begins to fall from his pale lips.

The loud sound of his chair alerts me from the other room.

“Hey, you okay in there?” I ask loudly, continuing to fold the laundry I was busy with. I wait a second, but there’s no response besides the sound of his feet as he walks around the kitchen. I was willing to assume he just didn’t hear me, but as his footsteps became heavier and more frantic, I drop what I’m doing and head to check on him.

Before walking through the door way I see his plate still sitting on the table, half eaten with his silverware and napkin strewn across the table. Fully entering the kitchen, I see him hunched over the sink. “Are you okay?” I ask again, but just like before there’s no response. Walking over towards him, I rest my hand on his back trying to figure out what’s wrong, when I feel his back trembling under my palm. His torso heaves violently as he weakly thrusts his stomach into his fists resting against the counter. He gags again before raising his head to look at me, eyes dazed and swaying on his feet as his senses begin to fade. He’s paler than ever, a blue tone taking over him as a deep purple creeps up his neck and flushes his lips and ears. I immediately understand the problem as he wraps his bluish fingers around his throat and saliva covers his mottled purple lips and chin, and his unnaturally blue tongue hangs over his lips with every involuntary gag. Tears fall from his bloodshot eyes and his entire body trembles, but I waste absolutely no time flipping him around and wrapping my arms tightly around his waist, positioning him for the Heimlich maneuver. He grips my arms tightly, fidgeting around and frantically hitting his chest. Before I can even prepare to start helping, he throws himself against my arms in a desperate attempt to clear his airway, a deep choking sound emanating from his throat.

I pull my fists up and into his stomach, the soft flesh right beneath his ribcage quivering with every thrust as I promise him he’s going to be okay, and that I’m going to get the blockage out and get him the air he needs. I can feel him getting heavier with each passing second as his grip on my arms grows weaker. His frantic movements become slow and drowsy as he loses the battle to stay awake. His body twitches from oxygen deprivation and I can feel his stomach muscles relaxing, as he loses the strength to keep trying to cough.

I muster all my strength for one last thrust into his abdomen before he fully loses consciousness. His feet are momentarily lifted off the ground, and his head lolls back and rests on my shoulder. I catch a quick glimpse of his face and he’s a shade of purple that I didn’t think was physically possible, his mouth and eyes wide open, before his completely limp body falls back down into my arms. His knees buckle as he loses all strength to stand, and I gently lower him to the floor, cradling his head with one hand to be as gentle as possible with him.

He lays on his back as I throw one leg over his hips, straddling his still form. His half lidded eyes are glossy and unfocused, looking somewhere past me, and his dark purple lips are slightly parted as drool spills down his cheek, pooling on the floor beside his head. His throat bobs and his chest weakly twitches as his unconscious body tries in vain to breathe.

I curl my thumb over his lower teeth, forcing his mouth open as I use my other hand to hold his head still, gently cradling the nape of his neck. I peer into his mouth, but I see nothing in the back of his throat. I feel his pulse, weak but there, so I clasp my fists together and reposition them to the same place I was pulling into during the abdominal thrusts. In this position I have much more leverage, the pressure feels more useful. I push my fists deep into his stomach over and over again, as quickly as possible. His head tilts to the side as drool and mucus puddle on the floor beneath his mouth and nose. A deep, nearly silent gurgling sound comes from his mouth with every compression to his stomach. This is taking entirely too long, he needs to breathe right now.

As I quickly position myself to sit beside him, I once again force his mouth open and sweep the excess fluids out with my finger. I grasp the nape of his neck again and slightly lift him, straightening his neck and allowing me to see straight into his throat. This time when I look, the obstruction is near the top of his airway. It feels almost violent the way I shove my fingers deep into his esophagus, maneuvering them under the blockage and slowly pulling them out. I quickly sweep the food out of his mouth and onto the floor. I could hear the release of suction, and a small, wet exhale of the old air that had run out as he asphyxiated. I immediately pressed his cold, wet lips to mine, pinching his nose and breathing deeply into his lungs as I cradle him in my lap. His arms hang limply as I hold him close to me, continuing to breathe for him.

Thankfully, with each rescue breath I can feel his pulse getting stronger, faster and more stable. By the fifth breath, he began to cough weakly as he exhaled the air I gave him. Before I could give him another breath, he sharply inhaled on his own, it was strained and shortly cut off by more hacking. As I held him in my arms waiting for him to come back, I watched as with each breath he took on his own, his eyes became more focused, and his limbs began to twitch once again. I gently stroke his hair as I position his head and upper half to be lying on his side, making sure his airway stays clear as he regains his consciousness. His weak cough turns into violent hacking which fills his face with color, going back to a normal flushed tone. I gently pat his back as he lays on his side, occasionally gagging from the intensity of the coughing fit. He inhales huge, desperate breaths of fresh air between each wet gag and strained cough. Tears fill his eyes as he looks around, his hands grabbing to hold onto anything he can. I take his hand and gently pull him up to my chest. He’s sitting on my lap, chest to chest as I pat his back, holding him tightly. He cries into my shoulder, asking in between gasps what happened and, “why do I hurt so much, my throat hurts so bad.”

I gently explain that he choked as I continue comforting him, letting him know I’ll always be here and keep him safe. I pick him up and carry him over towards the counter, setting him down right next to the sink as I fill up a glass of water for him. He finishes it quickly, and I gently ask “Would you like to go lay down? I know you probably don’t feel very good right now, my love.” He nods his head, sniffling and rubbing his eyes as I pick him back up and head towards the bedroom.

my dream scenario is still being conscious, but facing respiratory arrest. i’d be at high risk so i would need your help. i’d be able to feel your touch as well as u forcing your breath into me. your concern and worry for me only would make it hotter.

i would grab you tightly, and enjoy all the air you’re giving me. my belly would rise and fall with each desperate breath. and a hand on my chest to monitor my heart through this would be amazing.

But is it shallow gasping? Flaring ribs as breath doesn't quite seem to satisfy?

Or is it barely visible hiccup-like inhales that can only be felt if you put your hand over the parted lips?