I Saved a Life

I saved a life 30 years ago on a dark night when I was scared to death for my own.

I’m not sure how other bloggers do things but I keep a Word document on my laptop that is titled “Blog Ideas”.  When inspiration or a muse strikes me I open the document and add the idea to this living document and when I’ve used the topic I cross it out.  When I have time to write, like right now, I open the file and see what “feels” right to write about (see what I did there?). When I’m on a creative jag sometimes I will throw ideas into the mix that aren’t strictly related to my core competencies of personal finance, investing, career advancement and early retirement and today is one of those days!  It is a story from long ago that changed two lives dramatically.  Mine and Mike’s.  But in a way it is about investing, saving and risk versus reward which are surely applicable to personal finance.

Mike and I worked in a plant environment, and by that I do not mean a farm or a forest.  Our plant was of the chemical variety with a jungle of pipes and tanks and furnaces.  Hundreds of acres of extremely complex equipment containing very dangerous materials under high pressure and temperatures with hundreds of employees supporting the safe and reliable operation of the facility.  I actually worked there for over thirty years and in that time we never lost an employee to a work accident in spite of the inherently hazardous materials we worked with. But that night we did lose six lives, in a terrible accident. And yet we didn’t lose a person.

 Mike was an operations hourly union worker who was helping our maintenance crew that evening.  I was a new engineer.  We knew each other but both of us were/are on the quiet end of the scale so we had barely talked.  That night there were some problems with some of the equipment and it was being taken off line for repairs.  It should have been routine but in the planning one source of toxic gas connected to the equipment was not properly isolated.  A crew of six men was working on the equipment when a cloud of deadly gas was released directly on them.

They all fell to the ground, dead, as the gas instantly paralyzed their lungs and they stopped breathing. I wasn’t part of the planning or involved in the maintenance but I was on the scene nearby looking at some related equipment when it all went down and along with a few other workers in the area responded to recover our stricken friends.  I dropped down on my knees beside Mike, who like the others was not breathing, and to all appearances was dead.

A person’s brain can survive for three to five minutes without oxygen so the absence of breathing may look like death but there is a small window of time where lives can still be saved. Because several of us had trained in CPR for an occurrence just like this we each were able to get our patients breathing again.  Without the onsite CPR we provided all six would have died long before the ambulances and EMT’s arrived.  That was over thirty years ago and to my knowledge five of the six saved that night are still alive and well today. One died of unrelated cancer five years ago.   Mike certainly is healthy and well.

It was a pretty simple thing to perform CPR on a friend when you are the only hope he has and there is no one else there to help.  It is a little less simple when you are in a toxic gas environment yourself and have no idea which way to drag your stricken coworker to safety.  There is a point at which you just have to weigh the risk that you will be killed against the certainty that your friend is already dead unless you stop and save him.  You can run or you can stay, we all stayed and they all lived.  Of the six none remained in the chemical industry.  I guess the trauma of “dying” and coming back was too much.  Of the rescuers everyone stayed with their jobs, because the privilege of saving a life is a rare thing and pretty much cancelled out the fear we had of dying ourselves that night.

We never talked about it later, to the point that I do not even remember who most of the victims  and most of the rescuers were.  I visited Mike in the hospital a couple of days later while he was recovering and he was obviously very uncomfortable in my presence.  We still live in the same small rural area and when I see him today it remains very awkward, I’m not sure why.   It was something way too personal between two people who were only barely friends, and I think I’m a reminder when we meet of something too dark and fearful for him to come to terms with.  I don’t know what they saw at death’s doorstep, none of them ever said as far as I know.  It just became something nobody ever mentioned again.  Maybe that’s why I am doing it here.  It profoundly influenced my life and was one of my best moments where I had a choice and what I chose to do had real and lasting consequences for myself and for another family.

I suppose it is easy enough to tie this into personal finance concepts like investing.  What did the CPR classes cost my company?  A few thousand at the most.  What would six deaths have cost them had they been of the permanent variety?  Millions probably.  Maybe more when you consider the regulatory agency fines, the impact on stock prices, the civil lawsuits that never happened, the impact on company morale the difficulty of finding workers for a plant with a damaged safety record and so many other negative consequences.  It might have been the best financial investment the company ever made.

This story also deals with risk and reward.  Investing is all about balancing risk.  It is also something you have to do when life presents you an opportunity to get involved in something real.  What are the risks and what are the opportunities?  And sometimes the reward is so great that you willingly undertake great risk, particularly in career and entrepreneurial situations.

What about nonfinancial returns?  All of those guys had families, wives, children and extended family that depended on them being there.  In all the ways that family matters broken families were kept intact. That CPR investment saved 175 years of human life (and counting), the most precious commodity we have.

Teaching employees CPR was a form of insurance and if this blog post accomplishes anything I hope it encourages somebody who is hesitating on term life to go ahead and get the policy because life is not assured to any of us.  And if someone was contemplating taking a first aid or CPR course then do it, please.  It is absolutely too late to try to learn by watching YouTube at the scene.  I would try that probably if I was not trained, but realistically in a crisis you will fall back to your training and if you have none you will probably fall back to failure.

And since this was about saving something, someone, what does it say about savings?  To me it puts money into perspective.  I have enough money now, I do not need to earn another dollar for the rest of my life.  But when I look back on my life’s accomplishments, I am prouder of what I did that night thirty years ago than of any of the equipment I designed or of my current portfolio.   My message is that achieving financial independence is not a “Why” goal worth investing yourself in.  It is a means to help you achieve what is important to you but in itself it will not make you happy.  Your impact in this world on others is what will matter to you later.  Your journey to financial independence and the things you do on that trip for others and for those you love are the real return on the way you invest your life.