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October 10, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Whatever else, try to remember to not shake the can

By Stephanie Salter

“Warning: Contents under pressure.”

That phrase is on the back of a can of hair mousse in my bathroom, but the situation it describes seems to be in every nook and cranny of the city and country in which I abide.

Why do I think you know exactly what I am talking about?

You, working in the health care industry.

You, toiling in the public school system.

You, flight attending passenger jets packed with sneezing, coughing, generally unhappy travelers.

You, trying to hold together what’s left of your local library’s administrative staff.

You, digging deep as a pastor for some words of comfort and calm.

You, wondering if your body will last long enough to get your 20 years with the fire or police department.

You, trying to keep a city’s, county’s or nation’s park system clean and operational.

You, processing bar coded grocery items at the check-out of the chain supermarket that’s just downsized the employee population and upsized the hours of daily operation.

You, after months of dread about your place on the assembly line, delivered the hard way from worrying anymore by a terse corporate announcement that the factory’s closing.

You, further stretching donated food and dollars to feed an exponentially increasing number of men, women and children who come to your soup kitchen for what may be their only meal of the day.

You, sitting alone at your breakfast nook, long past midnight, shuffling through the stack of past-due notices (again) and searching for a way to tell your kids there is no money for new anything — not a video game, not a movie at the cineplex, not a pair of shoes.

How hard is it to imagine one of those NASA photos from space, focused on the United States, with big red letters printed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, “Warning: Contents under pressure”?

As one of the fortunate U.S. citizens to have decent medical coverage, I have just completed a round of tests that indicate the source of periodic discomfort in my chest, neck and left shoulder is likely not a clogged artery, and definitely not diseased lungs.

Like all tests, the encouraging conclusions are qualified, of course. Nothing short of a heart catheterization can tell us in what shape our arteries truly exist. But all the other, less risky exams point away from occluded passageways to …

Stress.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition) offers six definitions for the noun “stress.” The one that applies to the United States of America in the autumn of 2009 has five sub-definitions, the most pertinent being:

(c) “a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation,” (d) “a state resulting from a stress; esp: one of bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium,” and (e) “STRAIN, PRESSURE [Webster’s capital letters] … to the point of collapse.”

Equilibrium. There’s a word you don’t hear anymore.

Does anyone remember the date of your last state of existent equilibrium? I believe mine was in September of 1999, but I may have missed a short-lived stretch.

A couple of other parts of those stress definitions that jump out of me are, “may be a factor in disease causation” and “to the point of collapse.”

The first one explains why my doctor said what she said when we were going over the good test results and I made a comment about being embarrassed to have gone through all of this “and it turns out to be just stress.”

A healer who makes Marcus Welby look like a dispassionate and unavailable sawbones, my doc fixed me with a fairly stern look and said, “The symptoms that brought you in here were real.”

To people like my primary care physician, the words “just” and “only” have no business being attached to the word “stress.” They know that stress, experienced long enough and unabated, can and will make us “really” sick — as in terrible test results and remedies that require cutting, burning, chemo or life-altering medication.

Multiply one person’s stress by a dozen or two (or six or 100), and you have a workplace full of stress, an environment in which almost everyone’s immune system is limping. People — often sleep-deprived — are more susceptible to accidents, injuries and every bug that comes along, like the weird and creepy H1N1 virus, which lately is adding to everyone’s stress.

Co-workers go down for a few days or weeks and the ranks thin, which adds more stress to the work environment and to the individuals who occupy it for at least one-third of their day.

All of which, one of these weeks, could produce the perfect health storm that leads to the aforementioned state in which stress increases “to the point of collapse.”

Multiply one work environment by thousands and thousands, and you have that NASA photo I mentioned with the big red letters.

One very basic suggestion: When contents are under pressure, first acknowledge the warning, then open the main valve to let some of the pressure escape.

In mousse cans that’s called “a handful of product.” In human beings, it is called “exhaling,” and it is meant to be done really, really, really often.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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