Thoughts from a Safety Professional-Resilience in a pandemic

This morning, I found John standing in his yard, a cup of coffee in his hand looking up toward his house. 

“Johnny, are you deciding whether or not you’re going to paint again?”  I asked as I continued walking down the sidewalk past he and my friend Renee’s house.

“No, I’m watching and listening to a cardinal in that tree.” John said. 

“But now I’m thinking about how you lectured me on ladder safety the last time I painted the house,” he said, taking his eyes off the cardinal. 

“Well, if you decide to paint this summer, invest in a better ladder. That thing you have is old and rickety,” I shared as I continued down the sidewalk.

Renee and I have been talking about the color of their house since the last time he painted it some 10 or more years ago. It was supposed to be terracotta, but it turned out salmon pink. It’s so pink, locals call it the “pink house.”

I felt a little bad after our brief conversation. He was enjoying coffee and the melodious sounds of nature until I came along jolting him into the realities of ladder safety simply with my presence on the sidewalk.

Such is the curse of being a safety professional, especially one who once carried an OSHA badge. Perhaps it’s like being typecast as an actor who only lands villain roles yet longs for inspirational leader role. In mixed company or life outside of work, conversations often gravitate to safety. “Don’t watch me do this, it’s probably not safe” or “Good thing you weren’t here to see what I did.” 

I have learned the hard way to never mention my profession under certain circumstances. Another example of someone having a defensive response was when I needed an injection in the space just under my kneecap a while back. The nurse practitioner prepping my knee casually asked my occupation. Workplace Safety Professional was my answer. He screwed up his face, not understanding what it meant. So I said, “OSHA compliance expert.”  He understood that answer, but it generated another question. “So, like you could work for OSHA?” he asked. I told him I had spent over a decade as an investigator and worked in the private sector now. That’s when I noticed his hands start to shake. Unfortunately, he was holding the needle which he still had to successfully insert under my kneecap in his now shaking hands. Then, the panicky breathing started.

I was nervous about the procedure before I arrived. It’s not everyday you get a needle in the knee, and I had reluctantly agreed to have a nurse practitioner do the injection rather than my orthopedic surgeon. Now, I had to stop being the patient and start being the practitioner. I invited the nurse practitioner to slow down, sit back, and breathe for a bit. I started talking calmly. I told him about all the things I observed that he was doing right from an infection control standpoint for both my safety and his and that he was the smartest person in the room to do what he was about to do to me. I assured him he was safety solid, and I wanted him to go about doing his skilled work. Honestly, I wanted to get up and leave and demand the surgeon. I just wanted to be the patient. Yet, I stayed, he did the work and my knee isn’t worse for the wear.

This morning when John recalled me ‘lecturing’ him regarding ladder safety I knew it was coming from a place of respect. John is a college chemistry professor and lecture is part of his daily life. In fact, John helped me with a fatality investigation when I was working with OSHA. It was the very last fatality I investigated before leaving the agency. The death occurred at an ethanol plant. A contractor had been blown up cutting a hole in a tank with a torch. While torch and tank sound like a perfect combination for an explosion, the case was more complex -  particularly because the young man who lost his life had cut with a torch on that same tank the day before and went home unscathed. I brought my evidence to John asking him to be Dr. John the chemist and help me figure out how the ingredients I knew were in the tank caused the explosion on that day. I wanted an iron-clad case with which to write the multiple willful citations I would present to my attorney general for review prior to issuance. The goal is for the same or similar incident to never happen to anyone again.

This work we do as health and safety professionals is deep and broad isn’t it? Ladders, infection control, and explosions are just a tiny fraction of what rolls around in our minds. No wonder many of us have difficulty turning off our safety-selves. Our eyes are always tracking on people, their movements, what they are working with and how. It’s exhausting and likely why many of us get the comments we do even when we aren’t on the clock.      

If I have learned anything this past pandemic year, it’s the importance of resilience. I learned it from health and safety professionals who have been responding to national emergencies for decades. These are the people who lent their expertise and curated response training for tragedies such as Deep-Water Horizon, 9-11, Ebola, Hurricane Harvey, and of course COVID-19 among others. Throughout 2020 I met virtually with these experts almost weekly. All the planning or education sessions ended the same way - with a focus on resilience, specifically on self-compassion. Truly, it was amazing. 

After listening to a lecture on the latest known science regarding the virus and hearing stories from front-line workers that pulled tears from your eyes, the whole group would stop to breathe together and we were led on a short, guided meditation as an act of self-care. The friends I made in the last year told me it was so we could keep fighting the good fight for the next day and the next. 

I think that’s what John was doing this morning when I spotted him with his coffee listening to a cardinal sing, he was practicing resilience.  How do you practice resilience in our profession?