Safety Moment

Roy and I both work for oil & gas companies, where safety is always front and center. Every meeting either of us go to is opened with a safety moment either from an attendee volunteer or by the presenter. We both tend to back into (or pull through) parking spaces everywhere, as trained by our companies (in an emergency situation, being able to get in a vehicle and see where you are going and see any oncoming vehicles is a big win, versus having to back out with blind spots). This is an ingrained behavior at this point.

Many of you know that I also began harping on ladder and tree-cutting safety issues after Roy's accident in 1994. And we always are ultra-cautious messing with electricity for any reason.

So, you would think that we'd just be increasing our "days since lost-time accident" counters.

But sometimes, even when an unsafe condition is recognized, it is just such a hassle to get it fixed, and when you aren't around the area, you tend to forget about it. Such was the case of a poorly-anchored "walking board" in the new house's attic. Every time we were up there, and I crossed on that board, I made a verbal comment that we needed to fix that. Someone had screwed it down funny, such that it wasn't really secure on one end. To fix it would mean going down and bringing a cordless drill back up into the attic, unscrewing it, and then repositioning it. But we were always in the middle of something else and couldn't spare the 10 minutes it might have taken to fix it.

On Saturday, 12/10, I stepped on that board and it flipped me backwards, like stepping on a see-saw. My arms flew up in their natural reaction, and the right arm near the wrist came into contact with one of the few braces between two rafters. That stopped my fall and allowed me opportunity to throw my weight forward and steady myself on that fickle board. However, the arm took a pretty heavy hit, and by that night, I couldn't use my hand. Having sat in an ER all day before, I had no desire to do so again. I finally had it x-rayed at the chiropractor's office 4 days later, and no break was seen, though they had suspected a stress fracture.

Day by day, it has gotten slowly better. I was finally able to tolerate bracing it 6 days after the incident and braced it for for a week during the day. I lightly bumped it on Tue the 20th and it let me know that it was still really bruised and did not appreciate the contact whatsoever. On Wednesday, my physical therapist did Feldenkrais work on my arm. It finally started moving better (though after painting on Thursday, it is back to being a wee bit unhappy with me).

So the moral to this story is, do not pass up an opportunity to correct an unsafe condition. Had that brace beam not been there, I could have gone through the ceiling, backwards, or at the very least landed badly on joists in the attic, in an uncontrolled backwards fall. Things could have been so much worse than a banged-up arm/wrist, and I remind myself of that every time I am annoyed at my arm being messed up.

To bring everyone up-to-date on the sheetrock work, we moved back into the new house on the 16th, having cleaned up (most of) the sheetrock dust everywhere, and started decorating for Christmas on Tuesday night - we put up one of my small, 4-1/2 ft tall trees and some lights outside. We primed the Music Hall on the 22nd with one of our summer workers. We hope to get its ceiling painted this week, but we aren't sure of our worker's availability yet.