Relentless Inquiry

Despite the only-5-hours-sleep thing, got up on time and mobilized out to the Baylands for the countywide CERT training exercise. We (SARES volunteers) were 'staff', rather than trainees. I was posted to the Exercise First Aid area, Mike was posted with Black Dot team, one of 3 groups that rotated through the training stations during the day. They taught cribbing (rescue from debris), site assessment, and triage. I was sorry to have missed being rotated around as part of a group, but got plenty of interesting training (and traffic!) at EFA. The local SNAP folks, Sunnyvale Neighborhoods Actively Prepare, adopted me and insisted I get in on the next SNAP class.

Interesting bit of self-discovery– when we got our one actual injury, a teen who crunched a finger slightly during cribbing training, I found that I went into 'problem-solving' mode rather than 'squeamish' mode. Several hours after the actual injury, thinking about it made me squeamish, but during the treatment, I would have been able to assist with no difficulties. The EFA site lead, who has been a nurse for 30 years, said that's the way it can be, and the whole group pushed hard to get me to update my first aid training and then add other training modules that the local city and Red Cross offer. “Even if you find you can't DO something, if you can tell someone else how to do it, you're still ahead of the game– but based on how you reacted, you really NEED to take this training, because we NEED folks like you!”

Our volunteer lead mentioned that a) he got a lot of compliments on the ops channels for my participation and b) people couldn't believe it was my first time participating in this kind of gig. I got that “this can't be your first time!” a lot, actually. Between various conference and local computer group work with the public, being a project manager, and doing 'incident response' as a sysadmin, this wasn't anything new to me. Although I'd put off for years participating in this kind of thing precisely because I was intimidated by it and thought it would be very difficult.

Cool. A good way to start the New Year.

And since I got so little sleep last night, when I got home at about 2pm, I headed right for the porch couch and ended up napping until about 8pm. Yow.