Synthesis
Synthesis
My drowning child
About 4 years ago, my younger son, who was 5 years old at the time, nearly drowned. Twice. Within an hour.
Possessing that terrifying blend of curiosity and fearlessness that parents dread, he had crawled out of the wading pool, ran to the edge of the 3 m deep main pool (about 10 feet for my American friends), and just as I was vaulting out of the chair I had been reclining on, he jumped in, sans floaties.
I was able to pull him out within a second or two of his plunge. The sight of him looking up at me through his dark blue goggles, submerged and trying to kick to the surface but failing, was a vision that I had thought would be the worse I'd ever have to see of my child in a life threatening situation.
I fished my baby boy out of the water, but he didn't seem the worse for wear. No fear. No worries. It was kinda exciting for him, until he got a tongue lashing from his father, a tirade born out of the panic and terror of a parent who had almost lost a child forever.
My boy seemed to get that he should not jump into the deep end again. Not one to let a near tragedy get in the way of water-proofing my kids, I took him to the shallower end and begun to teach him to float by taking in a deep breath and curling into a ball, bobbing just beneath the surface, while I stood hip-high in the water.
He caught on fast. He got real confident - perhaps too quickly. By this time, I had another child that I was teaching the floating trick. I had my son put on his floaties, and admonished him to float close to me. I turned to teach the other child the floating drill, and less than 30 seconds later, as I glanced back to check on my boy, time seemed to freeze. My boy was gone. I looked closer and saw that he was at the bottom of the pool, no more than half a meter away, seeming to be staring up at me.
My brain checked out for a second, but thankfully my body did not. In a strange kind of robotic auto-pilot mode, I scooped my boy out from the bottom, and without any actual conscious thought, noticed that his lips were plae blue, and that he wasn't breathing. As I waded with him in tow to the side of the pool, my training kicked in and I began in-water resuscitation.
In the mere seconds it took to reach the side of the pool, my boy begun to cough. I propped him up over my right shoulder, and let him throw up a lot of the pool water that had found his way into his belly.
Fortunately, he hadn't been under long enough to get water in the lungs. All the same, I had him admitted into the hospital for observation overnight - sometimes, in near drowning situations, the victim actually dies of asphyxiation hours after being rescued due to the alveoli being compromised by water.
Fortunately, besides a copious amount of peeing that night, my boy was fine and discharged. What did we do that day out of the hospital?
We went right back to the same pool that almost killed him. And despite a lot of apprehension, my boy got back in the water, dealt with the fear, and learned to swim.
Today he is a real water baby, and no one who sees him in the water will ever guess that the element he so loves is the same one that almost took him away from us.
I am grateful for the rescue diver skills that I had learned as a scuba diving instructor - those in-water rescue skills made all the difference, and is yet another reason I seem to be training and preparing for when bad things happen. Because, for some reason that I do not understand, they do!
Possessing that terrifying blend of curiosity and fearlessness that parents dread, he had crawled out of the wading pool, ran to the edge of the 3 m deep main pool (about 10 feet for my American friends), and just as I was vaulting out of the chair I had been reclining on, he jumped in, sans floaties.
I was able to pull him out within a second or two of his plunge. The sight of him looking up at me through his dark blue goggles, submerged and trying to kick to the surface but failing, was a vision that I had thought would be the worse I'd ever have to see of my child in a life threatening situation.
I fished my baby boy out of the water, but he didn't seem the worse for wear. No fear. No worries. It was kinda exciting for him, until he got a tongue lashing from his father, a tirade born out of the panic and terror of a parent who had almost lost a child forever.
My boy seemed to get that he should not jump into the deep end again. Not one to let a near tragedy get in the way of water-proofing my kids, I took him to the shallower end and begun to teach him to float by taking in a deep breath and curling into a ball, bobbing just beneath the surface, while I stood hip-high in the water.
He caught on fast. He got real confident - perhaps too quickly. By this time, I had another child that I was teaching the floating trick. I had my son put on his floaties, and admonished him to float close to me. I turned to teach the other child the floating drill, and less than 30 seconds later, as I glanced back to check on my boy, time seemed to freeze. My boy was gone. I looked closer and saw that he was at the bottom of the pool, no more than half a meter away, seeming to be staring up at me.
My brain checked out for a second, but thankfully my body did not. In a strange kind of robotic auto-pilot mode, I scooped my boy out from the bottom, and without any actual conscious thought, noticed that his lips were plae blue, and that he wasn't breathing. As I waded with him in tow to the side of the pool, my training kicked in and I began in-water resuscitation.
In the mere seconds it took to reach the side of the pool, my boy begun to cough. I propped him up over my right shoulder, and let him throw up a lot of the pool water that had found his way into his belly.
Fortunately, he hadn't been under long enough to get water in the lungs. All the same, I had him admitted into the hospital for observation overnight - sometimes, in near drowning situations, the victim actually dies of asphyxiation hours after being rescued due to the alveoli being compromised by water.
Fortunately, besides a copious amount of peeing that night, my boy was fine and discharged. What did we do that day out of the hospital?
We went right back to the same pool that almost killed him. And despite a lot of apprehension, my boy got back in the water, dealt with the fear, and learned to swim.
Today he is a real water baby, and no one who sees him in the water will ever guess that the element he so loves is the same one that almost took him away from us.
I am grateful for the rescue diver skills that I had learned as a scuba diving instructor - those in-water rescue skills made all the difference, and is yet another reason I seem to be training and preparing for when bad things happen. Because, for some reason that I do not understand, they do!
Black Swans and Mortality
This morning I woke up to some bad news - a friend of mine, Simon Chew, had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Malaysia. He was a contemporary of mine, and some one I had worked with as a rookie reporter, and he was somewhat new too as an IDC analyst.
I shan't pretend that the two of us were really close. We weren't. But he was a good person, helpful, and those who knew him are poorer without him.
Although I live my life preparing to deal with bad things to potentially happen, there really is no way to predict them. They are truly black swans, and the disquiet that I feel has as much to do with the loss of a friend as it does with the sense that there really is very little one can do to psychologically prepare for one's mortality.
You can prepare your will. You can leave instructions on how your spouse can access bank, insurance, and investment accounts. You can make sure your kids are taken care of. You can let folks know how you want your remains handled.
But none of that really matters. Simon's death has hit hard - disproportionate to how close we were not. But I hope he was able to have his affairs in order, so that there would be one less stressor for his widow.
There is just no preparing, mentally anyway, for ultimate Black Swan events like one's death.
But if there are people depending on you, we owe it to them to get things squared away. The last thing they should have to worry about is how they will keep going on without us.
Helping put bad people behind bars
The blogging tool I use shows that it's been almost 60 days since I last posted. That timeframe almost coincides with the beginning of a new project that I accepted with the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, or DCU.
Put simply, the DCU is a team of highly committed specialists such as attorneys, investigators and subject matter experts within Microsoft that help law enforcement go after bad people who do bad things on the Internet.
Most of the team go after criminal organizations that try to turn your computer into a drone that can then be remotely used, together with millions of other machines, to mount a denial-of-service attack, and worse, steal your personal and financial data, including your credit card data and passwords to your bank accounts.
As important as the above is, it is the other part of the DCU work that really resonates with me - the bit where we go after people who create and share child abuse material over the internet. As a father of three, I really appreciate the ability to play a small role in helping the cops and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children get the tools and resources they need to more quickly rescue missing or abused kids
Ever since taken on this new project, I've been putting in hours that I didn't think I was still capable of sustaining (yes, I am feeling my age). It really helps when it's a cause that one believes in, as well as with a team of good people trying to do a good thing, led by a great manager. It's one of those situations where the stars are all aligned, I guess.
In this instance, I have been given the opportunity to help put in place processes for the DCU to more efficiently engage with its stakeholders. These include folks across Microsoft as well as law enforcement agencies and NGOs across the world from Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific, through Interpol and Europol and several other Western European jurisdictions, to Canada and various federal agencies in the United States. Not only does this lead to diverse and interesting conversations, it also means long days, starting with 6 am calls with the European countries, then mid-day conversations with the agencies based in Washington, DC and Toronto, and then of course, the APAC countries later in the day. Of course, the actual work gets done between all those calls and meetings.
As with most of my roles, my mission is somewhat of a paradox because the job is to get things running so smoothly that I become redundant. We're not there yet, but we should be in pretty good shape in the next three months. I'd like to think I'd be able to stick around the DCU beyond that, but only if there is a useful role that I can play.
Put simply, the DCU is a team of highly committed specialists such as attorneys, investigators and subject matter experts within Microsoft that help law enforcement go after bad people who do bad things on the Internet.
Most of the team go after criminal organizations that try to turn your computer into a drone that can then be remotely used, together with millions of other machines, to mount a denial-of-service attack, and worse, steal your personal and financial data, including your credit card data and passwords to your bank accounts.
As important as the above is, it is the other part of the DCU work that really resonates with me - the bit where we go after people who create and share child abuse material over the internet. As a father of three, I really appreciate the ability to play a small role in helping the cops and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children get the tools and resources they need to more quickly rescue missing or abused kids
Ever since taken on this new project, I've been putting in hours that I didn't think I was still capable of sustaining (yes, I am feeling my age). It really helps when it's a cause that one believes in, as well as with a team of good people trying to do a good thing, led by a great manager. It's one of those situations where the stars are all aligned, I guess.
In this instance, I have been given the opportunity to help put in place processes for the DCU to more efficiently engage with its stakeholders. These include folks across Microsoft as well as law enforcement agencies and NGOs across the world from Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific, through Interpol and Europol and several other Western European jurisdictions, to Canada and various federal agencies in the United States. Not only does this lead to diverse and interesting conversations, it also means long days, starting with 6 am calls with the European countries, then mid-day conversations with the agencies based in Washington, DC and Toronto, and then of course, the APAC countries later in the day. Of course, the actual work gets done between all those calls and meetings.
As with most of my roles, my mission is somewhat of a paradox because the job is to get things running so smoothly that I become redundant. We're not there yet, but we should be in pretty good shape in the next three months. I'd like to think I'd be able to stick around the DCU beyond that, but only if there is a useful role that I can play.
Women and Guns.
So it occurs to me that this might be a loaded topic (pun intended). I mean, guns are such a male thing, right? And women just hate guns, right?
Actually, no, as this site shows.
As a firearms instructor, I've had the pleasure of introducing several women to firearms, and a few more to the more specialized field of close quarters defensive shooting. And without exception, I've found that they have all been great students who usually eclipsed the men in the class in the pace of learning and accuracy.
Sure, some women may have reservations about using a firearm, but once they decide to do it, I've found that they listen and retain instruction better, have less of an ego, and end up being far better shooters.
Check out the video below of one of my students - if you're not a firearms person and are wondering what the big deal is, well, she is firing using a non-dominant hand (or off-hand, as some guys call it), she is on the move (most guys just stand there), after just 10 hours or so of defensive shooting training.
I saw a similar dynamic as well, back in the day when I was a scuba instructor.
The only times I've ever had difficulties with women in a class, either on the firing line or underwater, is when they have been pressured by a guy to be there. My instructional approach in those situations is to split up the couples, and try to focus on the women to help her learn as much as possible on a 1:1 basis. Once she sees that she will outshoot most guys, confidence grows, and watch out men! 
To that end, I've also found the Center Axis Relock approach to defensive shooting is exceptionally well-suited to women. The structural integrity of the CAR system helps tremendously with recoil management, causes less fatigue, and allows better weapon retention.
Women totally rock at shooting, if they would let themselves!
Torn Apart (warning, gross photo in this post)
A couple of years ago, we had a terrible accident in the family.
We were out boating in Lake Washington, and had decided to break for lunch on shore. While trying to dock in choppy waters at a crowded marina, we came a little too close to side of the slip, and were about to bump into it.
My wife tried to push off against the slip, but was at an awkward angle. Her left hand got trapped between the slip and the overhead wakeboard tower of the boat, and in an instant, the torque from the impact ripped open her palm. I could describe it, or you could have a look at the photo I took of once she was safe in the ER (just in case some folks don't wanna see it, I've stuck the photo all the way towards the end of this post).
That was a bad, bad day for us. But if there was a silver lining, it would be that I had just completed a Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course a few months before because it helped me fight back panic and take the right steps to mitigate the injury, manage multiple stressors, and triage priority action items. The effort to staunch blood loss and prevent onset of shock on a rocky boat, care for freaked-out children, and coordinate on-shore emergency personal was highly stressful. While a lifetime of training for “Oh Shit” moments helped me keep my sanity, the WFR course was especially crucial in helping me keep my composure during a medical emergency.
For that, I thank my instructors, Rocco Altobelli, Nick Runions, and Lucca Criminale.
The WFR is a pretty intensive 8-day course that goes way beyond your basic first aid and CPR. The main difference here is that with WFR, the assumption is that you and the patient are isolated and can expect no immediate help. So the skills taught are not just more advanced (administering epinephrine, patient evacuation, using defibrillators, and more), but given that the philosophy is that of self-reliance, there were several high-stress search and rescue scenarios.
I really think that anyone who is a caregiver should consider taking a WFR course, even if you never go out on the water or into the wilderness. Think about it – during a civil emergency, such as a major earthquake, we cannot expect medical help as emergency services will be overwhelmed. Which means we would be isolated, even in an urban environment
If this is something you think you’d like to do, search “WFR”, or go to Wilderness Medical Associates’ site at www.wildmed.com. There are several different agencies offering these certifications, WildMed was just the one I took.
How do you feed 300 kids during an earthquake?
Really, how does one even begin to do that? Mostly by being a little bit sneaky, but I'll get to that in a bit.
In the beginning of the school year here in the US, I volunteered, or was volunteered, to "help out" at the Parent-Teacher Association at my kid's elementary school. And no, unlike in Singapore, involvement was not tied in any way to admission - most people do it because they want to (except me, I kinda had to).
The job? Being a member of the Emergency Preparedness (EmPrep) committee - helping with disaster planning and training, as well as inventorying and stockpiling emergency food, water, and other essentials.
I thought, well, given that the Pacific Northwest is earthquake country, that was the least I could do, since I had already invested a bit of time to prepare our home for an earthquake - you know, strapping down tall furniture, stashing away food and water, etc. I mean, how difficult can it be to show up once in a while, give some advice, maybe lend a hand here and there?
Well, as it turns out, it was a committee of ONE person - me. So they asked if I would please chair the committee. And then, at the first meeting I attended to report to the PTA Board, I was told that the chair of the EmPrep committee was automatically a PTA Board member. So much for dropping by casually. Yikes!
It's kinda like saying yes to a double date with your best friend because he begged you to, then having your best friend and his date ditch you right before date night. But you're a decent kinda guy, so you go anyway, but upon arrival, discover that the girl comes from a culture where a blind-date equals marriage.
Apparently, there had been no one parent volunteer helping out for EmPrep for a few years at the school, and all the work fell onto the shoulders of the overworked teacher in charge.
That first day I did an inventory of the school's emergency supplies was a sobering one. The shelves in the EmPrep metal container (the kind cargo ships carry) had been severely damaged, much of the food and water had expired or would be soon, and that a few of the teachers who had been trained in search & rescue, triage and medical operations had left the school.
And the budget that had been allocated? $500. If I had been me on that blind date, it would have been at the swankiest restaurant, with just a handful of change in my pocket!
We needed more money - a lot more.
Thankfully, with some background in marketing, and generally just be somewhat sneaky, I decided the best way forward was to work on credible fear and of course, that most common of deadly sins, envy.
In a presentation to the Board and principal, I showed how unprepared our school was, and how if an earthquake hit us like it did in Virginia and Washington, DC (for proximity), or in Japan, New Zealand, Turkey, and Myanmar, the situation would be extremely bleak for our children, even if they survived the initial tremor.
And then I showed another elementary school in our neighborhood which had about 5 times as much supplies as we did, in three well-kept containers to keep them all in.
It worked, I got my money, and I promptly went shopping, which was a blast. I take to buying emergency supplies the way my wife does to shopping for shoes and handbags.
We now have enough food and soon, water. Thanks to another parent volunteer, the shelves in our storage container are now repaired, and the next step is getting more emergency response training done. Lots more to do in 2012!
Happy 2012 everyone!
The year about to pass was a challenging one from a work and business perspective, as the economy got more difficult. We had to be a lot more careful with our money.
But I will remember it for the great bits - my older son finally acing his grades at college, just because he decided to!
Then there is my 10th wedding anniversary with my best friend, getting good enough to teach close quarter firearms, and going back to school to start a new chapter in my life.
Of course there are my two younger kids, but I am grateful for them every day, even when they squabble!
2012 has gotta be better!
But I will remember it for the great bits - my older son finally acing his grades at college, just because he decided to!
Then there is my 10th wedding anniversary with my best friend, getting good enough to teach close quarter firearms, and going back to school to start a new chapter in my life.
Of course there are my two younger kids, but I am grateful for them every day, even when they squabble!
2012 has gotta be better!
It's all about the Home.
What's this blog all about? Well, it's about being ready. In all it's various forms. And no, it's not about being ready for the Zombie Apocalypse.
Just over five years ago in 2006, there was a big old windstorm that felled many, many trees in the greater Seattle area. Our neighborhood, with its abundance of towering evergreens, was hit especially badly, with multiple power lines being snapped.
In the end, we went without power for 2 weeks.
Here's the rub. It was a pretty cold winter. And my little girl was just slightly over a year old. Plus, we had just moved to the US from Singapore, where every thing works (until the recent floods and train delays).
With no power for heat or to cook with, I found that my decades living in urban Singapore left me woefully unprepared. Standing out there in the pouring rain, trying to boil water to make milk and instant noodles with firewood that I had to chop, also in the rain, I swore to myself that I had to do better. My wife and kids counted on me, and in my mind, I had failed them.
I started a journey shortly thereafter, which found me deep within several disciplines, such as:
- wilderness survival,
- wilderness medical training,
- emergency preparedness,
- Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) certification,
- protection dog training,
- personal safety seminars,
- close quarter defensive tactics, and
- close quarters firearms training, like below.
I got pretty good at a few of these areas, joining the region's CERT leader corps, heading the emergency preparedness at my kids' elementary school, and being a close quarter firearms instructor. And then there's always my fabulous dog Six, who is super friendly, until he senses danger to me or the kids. Especially the kids.
I'm not done though. So I'm now back in school, juggling work and inching my way towards a double masters in science in acupuncture and oriental medicine at Bastyr University (funny how I've come full circle there back to my roots). Hopefully that represents a new chapter in my professional life, but if nothing else, it'll make me an even better caregiver.
Through this ongoing journey, I've met great people, learned incredible things, and have lived a more fulfilling life. I've also synthesized all the various skills and experiences, and they are an integral part of my perspective on life.
So this blog is a look back, and a glance forward, at how far I've come, and where I hope to be in the years ahead.
Along the way, I'll share my experiences responding to my son's near drowning, my wife's nasty boating accident, doing search & rescue, packing a survival kit, hoarding food and water, and even fending off rats to protect my stash.
I'll also share my thoughts on why every one, especially women, needs to first know how to stay clear of threatening situations and people, and then if there is no other choice, to protect themselves decisively. Just this past week, a teacher in my son's high school died after a confrontation with her ex-boyfriend.
As with all the things we prepare for, we hope to never need the skills and equipment we accumulate, but we do so knowing that when we need them, we're REALLY going to need them.
