The hand on the live wire: the first-response order that keeps the household from becoming two victims

Electric shock turns a household's first instinct - grab the person - into its second victim, and the entire difference between those two outcomes is one trained sequence that takes longer to read than a page. This is that page: not a first-aid course, not a doctor's substitute - the desk's boundary is printed at the end like every safety piece here carries it - but the fifteen minutes before the help arrives, where the right order saves two people instead of one.

The first sentence is the law: do not become the second body

A person still touching their source is part of a live circuit, and skin to skin is a conductor's own invitation - the grab that pulls the responder into the same current is the most repeated fact in this country's electrical accident stories. The law has three honest routes off, in the order that keeps the responder's feet dry and hands free: kill the source at the board - the breaker, the whole house, no heroics with the appliance's specific switch if the hand is still on it; break the path at the source's side - unplugging the cord from the wall, with the cord gripped at its plug and the body's contact point untouched, is the breaker the household can often reach; separate them with something that will not carry - the dry wooden broom, the plastic chair, the folded dry newspaper in a pinch, the rubber mat - pushing the contact away rather than grabbing, from a stance on dry ground with both feet together's instinct against the step voltage of a downed line outside (which is where the responder's own story ends and the utility's emergency call is the only route).

Once they are free of the current: the checks that decide the minute

1. Breath and pulse: the electrical injury's cruelty is the heart's rhythm - a person who is not breathing after a shock is the call that goes out while the chest compressions start, the bystander-CPR the first-aid trained in the family know, and the desk prints its own boundary here: the hands-only rhythm from a trained person is the help; the untrained responder's job is the emergency call, the scene's safety and the recovery position's patience if breath returns.
2. The entry and exit: current's burns are where it entered and left - check the contact hand and the feet, and note that the deepest injury is often the invisible internal one between those two marks, which is the whole reason the hospital evaluation in the section below is not optional for anything beyond a momentary finger zap.
3. The fall the shock threw them with: the body thrown from a ladder, the head against the block wall - the neck-and-spine caution the road-accident pages print applies fully here, and 'they are awake now' answers the electrician's question, not the fall's.
4. Keep them warm and still, nothing on the burns beyond the clean covering - the ointments, butter and the toothpaste habit belong to the burn's folklore chapter the desk declines to share; a dry sterile pad or the cleanest cloth in the house, loosely on, is the field care.

The hospital line, and why 'fine now' is not the verdict

The electrical injury's pattern that surprises every family: the person who looks recovered, went back to work, and came apart hours later from the internal burn's progression or the heart's delayed rhythm trouble - the medical guidance the emergency services follow is consistent that any significant shock (anything with loss of consciousness, any current path across the chest - hand to hand, hand to foot - any visible burn, any fall) gets the same-day evaluation regardless of the person's cheerful denial, and the desk writes the sentence with the full knowledge of how it will be argued with: the ECG, the burn's eyes on it and the advice that arrives with them are the cheap version of the admission the same event buys by morning. Lightning is this page's own bigger chapter and its rules are the outdoors' - the same do-not-touch law is suspended for the rescuer once the storm's passed the area, and the wet ground's story is different - the emergency services' lightning guidance is the reference, and this desk's line ends at the phone call and the compressions that begin after the scene is safe.

The prevention the house can install this month, because the page's last job is the visit nobody makes

The shock's own geography is wet hands and metal paths - the bathroom's heater wired without protection, the socket in the kitchen's splash zone with no cover, the yard's extension across the wet tile at the party, the borrowed adapter with its live pin gap the child's finger finds - and the fixes are the electrical pages' standing list: the protection devices the wiring guide names for water-adjacent circuits (the trip-class devices exist precisely for the hand-to-heater accident; their absence in a bathroom heater's circuit is the defect the electrician's visit quotes), the dry-position habit for every outdoor connection this desk's generator-rain page already preaches, the socket covers and the cord-inspection walk monthly, and the emergency card on the fridge: the board's breaker labels legible enough that the second victim's responder can find the right one in the dark at eleven.

The desk's boundary, stated as it likes to state them

This is the household's scene-safety page - the sequence that keeps the current off the rescuer, the checks that read the body, and the call that gets made early because the electric injury's worst hours are quiet ones. Every wire inside a wall, every 'repair' that means opening the meter's world, every heater's element and every panel: the professionals whose licences the trade's pages name, with this page's first law extended to them too - nobody works a dead circuit whose breaker someone at home could raise as a joke. The shock's two-stage mercy: the scene that is safe before the hands move, and the hospital that sees the injury before the injury decides to.