A night to remember, or to forget...

As I told you we had another dance competition last night, and it was certainly a night to remember, if not for all the wrong reasons!

The day started bad for me, with a headache that was close to a migraine, and in spite of taking way too many painkillers it still wasn't gone completely by the time we had to leave for the competition.

We didn't do all that well during the first round of our class and were sitting, chatting with another dance couple while watching the other classes first round. Then all of the sudden one of the dancers collapsed on the dance floor! Luckily the first aid people arrived quickly and started the reanimation process. The man came to quickly and was taken away for further treatment. Of course the dancing was stopped during all this and to give people a chance to recover from the shock the organizers decided to let another class do their first round first before letting the one where the incident happened complete their round.

So we were all watching this new round, when another dancer collapsed! This time it was way more serious, the man had a heart attack. The organizers called for the first aid people again, but they were away still treating the first man. Somebody ran to fetch them and they finally came and started reanimation again. It didn't work though and they had to get the AED kit for electric reanimation. Of course they had also dialed 112 (the European equivalent of 911). That turned out to be a bit of a disaster too! First the fire brigade arrived and they started their reanimation. Then the police arrived, but they just stood there and watched. Finally, way too late in my opinion, the ambulance arrived. They managed to resuscitate the man and where preparing to take him to hospital. But then the poor man had another heart attack and the whole reanimation process started again. Finally they stabilized him enough to take him to the hospital... We later heard that he's stable now, but I don't know what the slow reaction times of the emergency services have done with him.... I'm also upset with the fact that the first aid people took such a long time to come to the second man's aide... We were discussing later that perhaps the dancing shouldn't have continued until the first aid people had retaken their posts after completing treatment of the first man. Or maybe they should have had more first aid people on site!

Anyway, as you can imagine everybody was quite shocked by what happened. After some deliberation the organizers decided to continue with the competition anyway. But as you can imagine it's a bit hard to dance a happy, quirky, joyful quickstep after all of this! We didn't come home with any prizes this time, but frankly I don't mind at all. Any prize on display would have been a reminder of this evening, and like I said, for all the wrong reasons...

Let's keep this dancer in our minds and hope that he makes a full recovery soon!