WHOOP is not just a personalized digital fitness trainer!
It’s over. The small child is asleep and his makeshift bed in an anteroom is painted with a light sea mist delivered from a source on land.
A few hours earlier, the house had been the scene of a moderately wild teenage bacchanal, if nothing out of the ordinary.
A dozen of them send it, as I am told later: boys with their synthetic cannabinoid products and girls overturning bottles of pink moscato, whispering loud clapping stories, sweating as they spin and laugh and dance, everyone is hell from their Mango Tango and Watermelon Wave Vape Pens.
The guys pose as tough, slightly dangerous, diabolical characters who drink and smoke more than most of them can handle. When night falls, puddles of saliva decorate the garden in hideously abstract shapes.
A child encounters plastics more than he should, drinks more than he can, hallucinates, panics, his heart leaps out of his chest.
I do my midnight laps of Bondi, looking for inspiration on those lonely walks, cataloging various mistakes and trying to repeat them over and over again when the party hits the front yard.
Someone is yelling to call an ambulance.
A child collapses in the front yard.
Is there anything you can do? They ask when I stop, mistaking myself for someone who is capable.
He says it’s his heart.
Heart.
I throw two fingers at the usual pulse points.
I’m not a doctor. It feels quick. Is it 120 or 220?
Who knows.
I grab my WHOOP, wrap it around the child’s little wrist and open the app.
Heart at 140, wild 170 beats.
Will he go into cardiac arrest?
I ask the other children if he took pills.
No, no, no, of course not, they sing.
Yes.
I tell them it’s time to be real. It could mean keeping your buddy alive. If it’s pills, the child goes to an ambulance.
They swear it’s weed and brandy.
It’s a good sign.
Doing something and having a little knowledge is key in situations like this, says my buddy, who makes tourniquets for surfers. The simple act of having something to do, take the panic, take a step back, let things be assessed.
I hold the boy’s head, a reassuring hand on his back.
You are good, you are good, I tell him.
I watch the heart rate stay steady at 140 and the peaks subside.
Gradually it goes below 100 and stays at sixty, sixty-five as the weed-induced panic turns into a deep sleep.
An elderly neighbor says the child can sleep in the anteroom of her joint. We get his parents’ number and give them a call. You’re thirty gone.
I stay with the boy and now keep the heart constant at fifty-nine until his parents arrive.
Thank you, shaking hands and so on.
However, I am forced to rip my personalized digital fitness trainer from the child’s wrist as it is carried to the car.
There’s a limit to this compassionate bullshit, isn’t there?
