02/06/2026
I want to tell you how Panic to Prepared came about.
Not the polished version. The real one.
It started in the weeks after Winter and I left hospital. She was still a new born. She'd choked. She nearly didn't make it. And I was a mess.
I'm a critical care paramedic and a resuscitation practitioner — I teach this s #*t — I know exactly what to do in an emergency — with strangers, with other people's children, in the back of an ambulance at 3am or in a midnight A&E department.
And in that moment, in my own home, with my own baby — I wasn't ready.
Not because I didn't know the skills. Because I wasn't mentally prepared for it to happen to us.
So I started building something. During naps. On walks. Wednesday afternoons when our friend Viola would come and snuggle Winter so I could sit at a laptop and build.
I even paid my kids in cookies to help me film the videos.
And then burnout hit. Six months of nothing. The kind where your brain just says no.
But I kept coming back to it. Because every time I thought about shelving it, a parent would message me. A question. A story. A "what would I do if..."
And I'd open my laptop again.
I just can't stop thinking about how it would have been so different if it were my sister, cousin, friend, instead of me.
We've lost something that is so key to our thrival and survival.
The village we had in the 80s and 90s — where someone's mum always knew what to do. Where nobody Googled it, because they didn't need to; it wasn't available anyways. Where calm, capable mums and dads just handled it.
We don't have that anymore.
Parents today are being left to manage emergencies alone, with shaking hands and a search bar and crossed fingers, or 999 on the line while they wait without being able to move.
That's not good enough.
So I've been quietly building something to try to rebuild the damn village we all deserve and desperately need!
More soon XX - Jo
