THIS IS TRUE: CPR Heroes Need More Support.

When she arrived at her neighbor’s house and found him unconscious and turning blue, Brianna Colquitt knew what to do.

While someone called 911, Colquitt, then a high school senior in Carrollton, Georgia, started CPR. She kept it up until emergency responders arrived. Her training, which she’d received in a high school health class the year before, had prepared her to act, she said. “Everything just clicked.”

But it didn’t prepare her for everything that followed. First came the news that her neighbor didn’t make it. Then came the wondering: Had she done all she could? Even now, more than three years later, “the memories are very vivid, because it was a traumatic experience,” Colquitt said.

The need to understand such experiences is part of what inspired a new report from the American Heart Association about lay responders and CPR.

“We’ve trained people for decades to do bystander CPR, but we’ve never actually gone back and paid attention to supporting them after we call them to action,” said Katie Dainty, who led the writing committee for the scientific statement published Monday in the AHA journal Circulation.

When we came upon that awful head-on collision on Interstate 81 a few years back, I ran up to the overturned pickup with my bleed-control/trauma kit and was super-relieved to see an obviously more qualified person (he turned out to be a former military medic) with a friend already looking after the guy. He didn’t make it — it was a 100 mph head-on, at least that’s how fast they said he was going — and the medic told me later he knew as soon as he got there the guy wasn’t going to make it, but he had to try. If it had just been me, I would have tried, too, but I would have wondered if my lack of experience made a difference.

And the sad fact is that when you’re trying to save someone with CPR or a tourniquet, there’s a really good chance they won’t make it, so lots of people will feel that way. In the last refresher class Helen and I did, they spent a couple of minutes saying it’s better to try and fail than not to try at all, but still.

More on that car crash here.