You know, something somebody said to me last Friday hit home. Full of praise for some safety issue I was dealing with at work he encouraged me never to give up. Is it false humility that made me feel as though nobody was listening? Was it frustration at what seemed like chronic apathy that made me so frustrated that others could not see the point I was trying to make? Well, I never knew until he told me that folks were talking about the issue, were thinking about safety, and indeed were, in many cases, grateful that I had taken on the fight for this particular issue.
The issue, or topic, was the use of satellite tracking in flight. I feel so passionate about survival, knowing that one of the greatest tragedies could be to survive some crash landing only to succumb to the cold or to injuries sustained in that crash only because people could not find you.
The four principles of survival… etched in my thoughts about all this are:
- Protection
- Location
- Water
- Food
So many get confused about survival priorities, worrying unnecessarily about food when you can survive many days without, but will die within minutes if you are not protected against, say, the cold. Item two, LOCATION, is simply the fact that the best way to survive is to get out of the survival situation quickly. In the EMS world we’re “blessed” with the concept of the so called Golden Hour. Yet talking to my EMS aviation colleagues they seem to forget that golden hour applies to them, too, if faced with a survival situation.
So what’s that all got to do with the title, “Who’s life have you touched today?” Until mentioned in a gracious way on Friday, I had felt that nobody listens, nobody cares. Well, friends, lest you forget, people sometimes listen, but rarely say “thank you.”
Well, a big thank you right back at the gentleman who stated he was probably one of the few people who read my blog. Keep reading, my friend… I will never forget our conversation last Friday.
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