Fly the Plane - Work The Problem

As caregivers, we have so many things that hit us all the time, and we can't always nail these things down by ourselves. Who helps you?

What does that look like? I'm Peter Rosenberg, and I want to tell you about a program I've been a part of now for almost 10 years, and that's Legal Shield. For less than $30 a month, I have access to a full law firm that can handle all kinds of things.

If I get a contract put in front of me, if I got a dispute with something, doesn't matter. I've got a full law firm that can help me navigate through all the sticky wickets that we as caregivers have to deal with. Power of attorney, medical power of attorney, I will.

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If you don't need any of those, don't select them. Check out and be protected starting today. That's caregiverlegal.com. Welcome to Hope for the Caregiver here on American Family Radio. I am Peter Rosenberger.

Glad you're with us. This is the show for caregivers, about caregivers hosted by a caregiver. Why do we need a show for family caregivers? Well, I'll tell you why. Glad you asked. Because there are more than 65 million people right now in this country who are putting themselves knowingly, willingly, voluntarily between a vulnerable loved one and even worse, disaster.

What happens if they go down? You know, that group of people is responsible for over 500 billion, with a B, $500 billion of unpaid labor every year, caring for the most vulnerable among us. And most of us are not trained. We don't have any formal education in this.

We don't have formal skills at this. We are just doing it out of love and a sense of duty and responsibility. What happens if the caregiver goes down? What happens to the cost to our country, to our healthcare system, to families? What's going on emotionally with families, with the trauma going on in people's lives? When you're dealing with the mentally ill, with somebody who's addicted, somebody who has some type of terrible disease, kids with special needs, what is this doing to our economy, to the workforce? All these things touch the family caregiver. And I am committed through everything that I do, this program, podcasts, books, the blog, the music I do, everything that I do, the articles that I write, is to strengthen that family caregiver because healthy caregivers make better caregivers.

But it's very personal to me because I've been doing this now for over 36 years. And I struggled along for so long. Nobody knew really what to say to me. They would say things to me, but I didn't really understand it.

It didn't penetrate all the way down. And I didn't see how this made sense with scripture, with anything. And I've learned how to speak fluent caregiver. And so that's what I do on this program. And I'm glad that you are with this.

I touched on something a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to circle back if you'll indulge me. And there are new people that are coming to this audience all the time. And so sometimes I do a little bit of review of some things. But in this particular story, I think I'm going to be saying this for the rest of my life.

I love this. I have a lot of friends that are pilots. And one of them is a trainer with the FAA. And these are guys that are fascinating people. I love just to listen to the stories and the way their minds work on problem solving and just the organization in their brains.

It's just fascinating to me. And all of them have expressed this one axiom that is common to pilots. And this is always given to less experienced pilots. Fly the plane, work the problem. Fly the plane, work the problem. Now the context involves pilots who fixate on a problem like a storm or a console light or other issues. When we rivet our eyes on that single point to the exclusion of the bigger picture, oh man, that can result in disastrous outcomes, especially when flying a plane. Fifty years ago this year, the crash of Eastern Airlines, I don't know if you all remember this.

Some of you may not remember this, but you look it up. Eastern Airlines Flight 401. It was December 29th, 1972. It caused 101 fatalities. And the investigation after the crash revealed that the cockpit crew fixated on a burned out landing gear light, but failed to recognize the disengaged autopilot. Now the landing gear light, it was a bulb that was burned out. The landing gear was fine, but the light was messed up. And so the entire crew locked in on that instead of flying the plane and working the problem.

The problem became paramount to everybody. Well, who was flying the plane? And the autopilot was inadvertently disengaged and they just kept going down and then crashed into the Everglades. And when you lock it on one issue while dangerously losing perspective, you know, that's not a problem that's unique to pilots. We do that as caregivers and we can frequently spiral out of control while arguing while arguing with an impairment like Alzheimer's, alcoholism, addiction, all of which can easily overpower us as caregivers and divert our eyes from flying the plane. We have the responsibility of flying the plane.

We must not deviate from that because if we do bad things happen. Our responsibility as caregivers is to see the bigger picture when our loved ones can't. And just like every passenger in a plane depends on the pilot not losing focus, so do all who rely upon us as caregivers. You see the connection there. And look, no one's going to hand over a plane to a novice. I mean, that's just not going to happen. But how many of us took the helm of something way beyond our scope with no training?

I mean, think about it. How many of us right now were prepared and trained for what we take on? If you're taking care of somebody with Alzheimer's, how much did you know about this before you found yourself in it? If you got a loved one who is addicted to coke or whatever the drug de jure is out there now, how much did you know about addiction before you got into this? If you're in a relationship with somebody who's bipolar or has personality issues, how much did you know about this before you were charged with caring for this person?

You know, my wife is orthopedically just... Well, the surgeon just said a couple weeks ago about as tough as it gets orthopedically to take care of her. And that's from a guy that does this for a living as a surgeon at one of the top teaching hospitals in the country. I was a music major.

I'm a pianist. I had no understanding of this. I had no understanding of this. And yet here I am flying the plane. And that's a tough thing for us as caregivers. But here we are. And so when things come up that want to divert our attention, to want to distract us, who's telling us, fly the plane and work the problem? Well, I'm telling us because that's our job.

We cannot give ourselves the luxury to get obsessed over something else. We keep flying the plane because while those guys were looking to figure out why that bulb was burned out, what was going on the landing gear, that plane was still moving at hundreds of knots per hour. The plane doesn't just stop while they go figure it out.

You can't just pull over to the side of the road. You got to fly the plane. What's the same thing with us as caregivers? Now, even the best of caregivers, we will find that we are outmatched and ill-prepared.

Okay. We get that. But that's why we need these regular reminders to keep calm, fly the plane and work the problem. Now, what does that look like for us as caregivers? Well, we can't get pulled into the weeds when, particularly like when you've got ancillary people that want to tell you things, you know, football players have Monday morning quarterbacks. Well, so do we. We got all kinds of people going to tell us, well, have you tried this?

Have you tried that? You got to push that aside and you got to focus on what is the next right thing for you to do in this situation as a caregiver. Now, I'm not talking about the moral or immoral or right or wrong as far as that goes.

I'm talking about the next step for us. There are always those moral decisions and things such as that. And I highly recommend that you have a team of people around you that you can seek out for that sort of thing, that you can run things by them and certainly get their opinions and always bounce it off the Word of God. But I'm just talking about keeping the plane in the air, keeping it safe, keeping what you're doing as a caregiver on track and not getting pulled into all these different directions. Proverbs 4 25 says, let your eyes look directly forward and your gaze be straight before you.

It's real easy to get diverted with shiny objects. I know it, you know it. But as caregivers, we need to fly the plane and work the problem. Okay. And let's keep those priorities straight.

There may be a blinking light, but it may just be something simple. We don't need to take our hands off of the switch and go chasing rabbits everywhere. Okay. This is Peter Rosenberg. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We got more to go.

We'll be right back. Do you know what a PVA bag is? I'm Peter Rosalberger and at Standing with Hope, which is the presenting sponsor of Hope for the Caregiver, we do prosthetics for amputees over in West Africa. We've been working with Ghana for years, since 2005.

This was Gracie's vision after losing both of her legs. And we help them buy a lot of material for the prosthetic clinics. In exchange, we get to share the gospel with individuals and be able to present the gospel, not only with the patients, but their families and the community and even the nation. We've done national interviews with many of their public officials, including their vice president and the US ambassador to Ghana. But PVA bags, polyvinyl alcohol bags, they're used in the lamination process to make these sockets that we make. They're brand new.

They're custom fit on site. And we purchased them in Ghana. Right now they're out and we need to get some more. So we make some more legs. We also need resin. We're always buying resin because that's one of the critical items in these acrylic resin sockets that we make. Now we'll recycle the prosthetic limbs that come from all over the country to a prison run by CoreCivic down in Arizona. And inmates volunteer to disassemble them for us so we can recycle the knees, the feet, the pylons, the screws, the adapters, the clamps, all that kind of stuff. But some things we have to purchase.

PVA bags and resin are two of those items that need to be regularly purchased. Would you help us out with that, please? Standingwithhope.com slash giving. Standingwithhope.com slash giving. And be a part of giving the gift that keeps on walking. Standingwithhope.com slash giving. Thanks so much. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.

This is Peter Rosenberg and this is the program for you as a family caregiver. We're staying with an airline theme today and I thought I couldn't resist it. I could not resist it. I mean, honestly, try to be miserable while listening to that song. You can't.

You can't do it. In fact, producer Pat, hold that up just a little bit more. I mean, listen to this right here. To a land where joy shall never end.

Isn't that great? I'll fly away. Well, we're talking about pilots and airlines and the concept that I've been gleaning from friends of mine who are pilots. And I thought I want to stay with that theme for just, if you just indulge me a little longer, because there's another term that affects us as caregivers that I've learned, at least for me. If it doesn't resonate with you, that's okay. You don't have to use it.

You don't have to even listen to the show, but this is what works for me. And when I heard it, it immediately struck a tone with me. And it was the word PIC, pilot in command, not really the word PIC, just the letters PIC, pilot in command.

That is a term used across the board with aircraft. And it's, this is the person who's responsible for what's going on. Okay. For all the flight of the plane, the operations, safety, everything, they're responsible. And this is, you know, the captain.

All right. This person is in charge of what's going on. And there are very specific assignments, usually a seating place, and everybody knows who's got the plane. Now it doesn't mean that the pilot is hands-on with the stick the whole time. Sometimes you have the copilot doing that, you know, whatever, but the pilot is in charge. Oh, now why am I spending this time on this?

Well, because guess what? You and I are the pilots in charge in our caregiving circumstances. We're the caregiver in charge.

We're the CIC. We're the ones that are responsible and charged with keeping this thing going, operations and safety and everything else. If we weren't that our loved ones, we'd be out of a job. They wouldn't need us to do these things, but they do. And we have the responsibility to, that doesn't mean we take away their agency.

Okay. I don't, don't let the metaphor go all the way out, but, but just the concept that you have that authority and that responsibility as a caregiver for your loved one. Now I would go so far to say that that is a sovereign assignment. You're not there by accident. You're not there by happenstance. You're there because of God. He has equipped you and assigned you in this role that you may not like it.

You may not feel up to the task, but He is, and you can trust Him in it. But this comes with some responsibilities. You have elected to do this. I elected to do this. You, some people say, well, I didn't, no, I didn't volunteer for this. Well, yeah, you did.

You're still here doing it, aren't you? And nobody's got a gun to your head. So you stepped forward in line and maybe it was the situation that you were in. And maybe it was a situation where the line, when they asked for volunteers, that everybody stepped backwards and you're left out in front.

Maybe that's what it feels like. But in reality is you have done this. And so have I, and we can get all mad and angry about it and everything else, and we can feel all put out, but, but this is what we are. We have elected to do.

Okay. So let's get that role firmly ensconced in our mind. And secondly, we have resources. Now that's another thing that goes on with aviation.

It's called CRM, cockpit resource management or crew resource management, however you want to define it. But there are resources available to the pilot and it is the pilot's responsibility to inventory them, be aware of them, manage them, and utilize them. Well, how is that any different for us as caregivers?

You know, we put all this on ourselves, but are we it? Do we not have other resources we can draw on? You say, well, no, I don't have any budget for that. Let's, let's put budget over here on the, on the, on the, on the side for a while. Okay. Just put that at the other side of the table.

Money is not always the first thing that does make things easier, but it doesn't solve everything. So don't get hung up on that. Let's go to, let's go to Exodus three and four. Now you all know this story. Moses sees the burning bush. He goes up there and God lays out this case of what he's getting ready to do with Pharaoh and deliver his people. And he's going to send Moses down there. Moses, you're the PIC, not the pilot in charge. You're the prophet in charge. Okay.

So you going down there. He said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What if they asked me who sent you? So God tells him his name. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

What if they don't believe me? You know, and then he shows them the signs and wonders with the staff, throws it down, becomes a servant, sticks his hand in his cloak, becomes leprous, all these things. He said, well, he said, well, I don't, I don't talk so good. God said, well, who made your mouth? You know, but it's, you could just see God's just like, honestly, you know, and then he said, well, I don't know, Lord, I, I've never, you know, I'm not the guy.

And, and, and then it says in verse 14 of chapter four, the Lord's anger burned against Moses. He said, well, what about your brother Aaron? I know he can speak well.

He's already, I tell you what, I'll just, you, you still speak to him and put words in his mouth and then I'll help both of you speak and teach you what you do. So he just basically handed it out for him to put it in real simple things. But if you notice, when Moses got to Pharaoh, I don't see really a lot of scripture where Aaron was doing the talking. Moses was doing the talking. Somewhere along that line between that journey of Moses and then going to Pharaoh and so forth, something snapped in Moses and he realizes he was the prophet in charge.

He was the PIC. And somewhere along the line, you and I could realize that we're the CIC, we're the caregiver in charge. And we are equipped with everything we need to do this. Now, it may seem pretty bleak when we're making bricks without straw. And you serve as a caregiver long enough and you're going to find out what that's like.

And you're having to stretch a dollar till it's almost translucent. You're having to absorb things in your own body, your mind, your brain feels like it's just going to explode sometimes. And sometimes you feel so fighting mad or you get so despairing and all these things. Yeah. Okay.

We get it. Moses felt the same way. Gideon felt the same way. David felt the same way. You don't think Noah, while he's up there building that ark and these guys are mocking him for a hundred years this is going on.

You don't think he felt this way. You don't think this was going on in the minds of so many people that came before us and yet they found God's faithfulness to be sustaining in their journey. And we can't as well. That joy that that song talks about where joy abounds forever, that's also available to us right now. Not in its full form like we're going to have there, but we can by faith walk in that now. See the pilot in charge, the caregiver in charge, they're overseeing all these things.

But if you notice the pilot is not out there changing a flat tire on the plane, there are people that do that. And we can find those people that will do certain tasks for us along this journey that will help us with certain things that we can delegate things to. It may take a while for you to figure that out and it may take a while for you to figure out how to pay for it. Been there done that.

You can't have 80 something surgeries like Gracie said, and all the stuff that we've had to deal with and not have to figure out, okay, where's this going? But I go back to a story I may have told you on this program. I think I did with Hezekiah. When he got a letter, a notification from the emissary from Sennacherib, you go read about this in Isaiah, I believe. And Sennacherib said, and this is the southern version of translation of scripture, said, I'm going to bust y'all up and it's going to be bad. And his guy didn't know what to do. And he went to the temple and he held this letter out before the Lord. He just laid it out and said, I don't know what to do.

And Isaiah sent a message through his servant to say, here's what the Lord said. Here's what's going to happen. Simmer down. Settle down.

It's going to be all right. Now they didn't have instant communication. So this was working on, Isaiah was hearing from the Lord way apart from Hezekiah. His guy was at the temple. Isaiah was somewhere far off and he sent it through his servant. And by the time it got there, you know, Hezekiah had been sitting there praying about this. He'd been stewing about it for a while. The Lord says, simmer down. It's going to be all right.

And it was. And if you'll notice last year, when we had the disastrous Afghanistan pullout, that the president of Afghanistan, I don't know if he's called the president, whatever he's called, he absconded. He left with two helicopters full of cash. Cash, by the way, that you and I have been sitting there praying about this.

He'd been stewing about this. He absconded. He left with two helicopters full of cash.

Cash, by the way, that you and I don't pay for. And he left. And left his country to ruins. To the Taliban. And he went to the treasury and stole. Hezekiah went to the temple and waited.

Which do you think is appropriate for us as the caregiver in command? And I'm going to tell you that going to the temple and waiting on God, and it could be a, you know, sometimes Pilate have to make the decision. They're in a holding pattern. Sometimes we feel like we're in a holding pattern.

Sometimes that holding pattern lasts a long time. But he's always in communication. He knows where we are. And he knows what's going on. And so as the Pilate in command, as the caregiver in command, you look around and see what's going on.

And so as the Pilate in command, you look around and see what are the resources that you have. You're making decisions. You're over the whole process of your loved one. You have that authority.

And you don't go to anybody with your hat in your hand. You are making decisions for somebody that you love very much. And you're doing the best that you know to do. And you can always do things better. You can always learn more. And that's what we're doing here together. You and I are going through this together. You already sense that burden lifting a little bit where you can catch your breath because somebody is speaking to you in a way that you can understand. So square your shoulders.

Sit up straight. You are the caregiver in charge in your situation. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver.

We'll be right back. I'm Gracie Rosenberger. And 26 years ago, I walked for the first time on two prosthetic legs. I saw firsthand how important quality prosthetic limbs are to an amputee. This understanding compelled me to establish standing with hope. For more than a dozen years, we've been working with the government of Ghana in West Africa, equipping and training local workers to build and maintain quality prosthetic limbs for their own people. On a regular basis, we purchase and ship equipment and supplies.

And with the help of inmates in a Tennessee prison, we also recycle parts from donated limbs. All of this is to point others to Christ, the source of my hope and strength. Please visit standingwithhope.com to learn more and participate in lifting others up. That's standingwithhope.com. I'm Gracie, and I'm standing with hope. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger. Glad to have you with us.

Hopeforthecaregiver.com. I've been talking about pilots, things I've been learning from friends of mine who are pilots. And over the break, I thought, well, you know what? I want to call a buddy of mine, and I'm going to ask him to be on because he is a pilot. Instead of me just fumbling around, I'm going to let you hear from somebody who really understands it. So I'm glad to have my friend, Frank Frazier. I've known him for a long time. He's been dealing with aviation since he was a teenager. He's also a caregiver, and he's going to talk a little bit about that as well. Frank, I want you to just take us right at the beginning of some things that you incorporate in your life as a pilot, as a caregiver. I want you to talk about aviation and the principles that you glean from it, how you approach it.

So Frank, glad to have you here. Tell us a little bit about your journey. Well, I mean, you know, I'm a student of aviation because I am a pilot. I try to learn things that I would use in my real life action as a pilot. So I try to learn from other people's mistakes. And so therefore I read a lot of NTSB reports.

I study every accident that I am aware of that may apply to something I need to know. So things that I have seen are pilots that I've had to do some remedial training with. Like in a Learjet one time, I hired a good young captain or good young co-pilot who was training to be a captain. He got bored or I guess put out with the lengthy pre-flight checklist items and the pre-taxi checklist items, and then the pre-takeoff checklist items. And then you do the after takeoff checklist and you do the climb and all that. So he showed up one day, did his pre-flight like he was supposed to. We got in the cockpit and we were getting ready to go off on a trip and we started the engines and you use a checklist to start the engines. And he didn't want to read the checklist. He says, okay, I'm watching you go ahead.

I said, no, what do you mean? And he looked over and he got a pad out that he had handwritten his own checklist, that he was going to make sure I followed, but it had nothing to do with what the FAA approved checklist. It wasn't in the same order.

It wasn't the same procedures and all that. And I said, Ed, stop the plane right here with a start over here. You don't ever do something like that again in an airplane because you're going to miss something very important there. So let me tell you some things that can be missed. There's a particular check on this particular airplane where the starting of the engines can sometimes cause a breaker failure because of the amount of current going through them.

If you don't separate the two generators and see if they're both working, you pull a main breaker there to do that, then you won't ever know that one of your generators may not be working because you're still getting the correct reading on the single gauge of both generators. You would be getting 300 on each side, you think, but you may not be. So that's one example. Another example would be pilots who forget as they're taxiing out, get in a hurry, forget to put the flaps down.

That's not a good thing. If you don't read that checklist and say, when the copilot reads flaps, if you don't reach down with your hand to that flap switch and say set for takeoff, as you look at that gauge, it's 10 or 20 degrees, depending on what you want to use for the conditions. So that is a real good example of things that can go wrong really bad. And if you don't mind, I'd like to give you an example of an airliner which did the same thing back in the 80s out of Detroit. The pilots landed and you would think this professional crew, highly trained, and they land and they're in a hurry to make their gate turn around and they are taxiing in using a lot of power. And there's a system on that airplane that will warn you if you're using a lot of power and you don't have the flaps down, this was a DC-9 MD-82, that if you're taxiing and using a lot of power and you don't have the flaps down, that's a warning, hey, you can't take off without flaps. So they disabled that breaker, that system by pulling a breaker on it, went into the gate, got their passengers, taxied out. And I've heard the actual audio recording, they use it in training when you go to school, of these pilots taxiing away from the gate and they're not in a hurry now, so they never raised the throttles up very high, just use normal taxi power.

And they're talking about everything under the sun as they go out there, they never performed any checklist whatsoever. They got all the way to the runway, cleared for takeoff, gave it the power, no flaps are down. I'll remind you, they didn't know the flaps weren't down. The plane barely got off the ground at the end of the runway and what we call ground effect, it never got over maybe a hundred feet and it crashed right off the end of the runway onto an interstate. Every passenger on it died except one.

And there was a little, little baby girl that was underneath, just happened to be in a seat. I don't know if anybody remembers that crash. When they go back and read or listen to the cockpit voice recording, they learned that's what happened, that they did not follow the checklist.

And that's a, that's a, that's a horrible way to learn, but that's how things happen like that. Well, I've heard that when the NTSB, by the way of also another thing I've heard, and you tell me if you've heard the same thing that of all the government programs out there, and we all kind of raise our eyes at the government, we're here to help you, that kind of thing. But the NTSB is one of those that actually does exactly what they're supposed to do. And they're very serious about it. And they know their business. They're right. They're, they're very, uh, uh, I've attended a couple of hearings that happened to be, uh, close by before.

And, you know, it's very professional. They're, they're a group of judges that call them. They, um, sometimes it's a full, you know, three court judge, or sometimes just a single judge who's hearing a pilot violation. Uh, they, they adjudicate all the violations that get appealed. If the FAA, you know, wants to, uh, revoke someone's license or suspend their license or whatever, the pilot has the right to appeal that to the NTSB and then get a hearing with a judge. That's not an FAA judge or a FAA person. As you, as you tell me these principles, now these guys didn't follow a checklist.

They didn't follow a pre agreed upon set of protocols that are there for their safety and everyone else's safety. And how important is that regiment in your life as a caregiving dad, you have a special needs daughter and it re you can't just wing it and not go through a checklist in your own life with her Kenya. Well, our daughter has taught us that we must write a checklist for her. And so she gets up every morning and brings us a notepad.

She can't talk, but she can, um, she has a talker, but she doesn't like to use that with her mom and mom and dad. She likes for us to figure out what she wants us to do. And, um, she brings us a notepad, uh, one of my yellow pads and she hands us an ink pen and says, here, you know, write down what we're going to do today. And so we write down, well, you're going to brush your teeth. You're going to, we're going to put your clothes on. You're going to eat breakfast. We're going to get in the car. We're going to go to school.

We're going to, um, uh, take these certain things to school today. Then we're going to, when you get out, you're going to do, she has to follow that checklist. So therefore I have to follow that checklist and know what she's got on that checklist. And, uh, I guess that maybe came from my training as a pilot is where she learned that.

I don't know, but she adheres to it. Doesn't she, she doesn't forget that she, she marks it off as we accomplish each one. She has, she puts a line through it, but you know, that's so much of our life as caregivers. And I, like I said, I've learned so many different life applications from the things you told me as pilots, what happens when we try to make shortcuts, uh, we try to hurry up, you know, haste makes waste. And there's a reason that saying is out there. And when it comes to our job as caregivers, we can't afford to do shortcuts.

We can't afford to skip steps. We have to be regimented and consistent. And these are things that I'm learning.

I've learned from you. What is it like to be the PIC, the pilot in command and those kinds of things that we got one minute before the break, then we'll do it. We'll come back on the next segment, but talk a little bit about pilot in command that you're in charge of this. Cause I want caregivers to understand that they're the caregiver in command that, that it's okay for them to wield that authority.

What does that look like to you? As a pilot? Yeah. As a pilot, you know, you're, you're responsible for the entire success of the, of the mission that you're assigned to. So you, you have to not only be capable of doing, uh, everything that's on that checklist, but you have to be, uh, qualified to, and, and I guess smart enough to delegate those things that you should delegate to someone else who, you know, is, uh, properly qualified, uh, your co-pilot, it could be a flight attendant. If you have one of those on board, sometimes you have a maintenance technician that rides along on a flight and you might, uh, if he's your employee, you can legally assign him something to do. That's, uh, something you need done on the flight. You have to be able to delegate. You have to rely on them doing their job and be able to rely on them doing their job and then, uh, you know, execute the mission.

How is that any different as a caregiving dad? It's not because I'm going to tell you, you know, we have to do that every day, every day. And sometimes we make a little mistake. Natalie usually catches us because she is what we call an OCD child. She she'll get in the car, Peter. Um, and she has a checklist that she goes through.

There's nothing to do with that bad. She, she has a, uh, uh, a name band or name tag on her wrist that she thinks is crucial to her life because it's got her name on there. It's got a medical alert thing on it.

It's got mom and dad's name and phone number on there. And she will show that to someone who says something who comes up to her and says, what's your name? And she'll, she'll show them that if we go push the button, if we're late to school, for some reason, she will hold that name tag up to the camera to show them because she can't talk when they say, who's, what do you need when to come in school here, she'll hold that thing up there on the camera.

And so that's one thing she, she absolutely won't just this like Mary express. She won't leave home without it. And, uh, she has another thing. She has to have her headband. She has to have her, um, speakers that go to her iPad, the headphones.

She has to have her water bottle. And if we get in the car and I start out the garage and she'll, she'll say, ah, and I'll say what? And she'll go point to her head or she'll point to her wrist or she'll point to that water bottle or the speaker. She'll say, I don't have a thing to plug into the, to the iPad. And so, you know, it's, she makes sure that your flaps are properly down.

She makes, she makes sure that your flaps are probably, she's my co-pilot in the car. I mean, when I make a wrong turn to go, if I don't go, if I were the summer school she went to this year was not the same as her high school. And so when I, we got down Hillsborough road and almost to Franklin high school and I turned left on Mack Hatcher, which was right before the school, she, she pointed out, no, no, no.

You got it. The school's over there. And, uh, I said, no, Natalie, we're going to a different school. Now you're going to, uh, she says, oh, okay, that's fine. And you know, if I make a wrong turn or if she doesn't say, she doesn't say, okay, but she nods it.

She she'll say, okay. Like that. Yeah.

Yeah. But, uh, I'm talking to my friend, Frank Frazier. We're talking about life lessons learned as a caregiver from being a pilot. This is Peter Roseburg. This is hope for the caregiver. Don't go away.

We got more to go. Do you know what a PVA bag is? I'm Peter Roseburger and at standing with hope, which is the presenting sponsor of hope for the caregiver. We do prosthetics for amputees over in West Africa. We've been working with Ghana for years, since 2005.

This was Gracie's vision after losing both of her legs. And we helped them buy a lot of material for the prosthetic clinics and exchange. We get to share the gospel with individuals and be able to present the gospel, not only with the patients, but their families and the community. And even the nation, we've done national interviews with many of their public officials, including their vice-president and the U S ambassador to Ghana, but PVA bags, poly vinyl alcohol bags, they're using the lamination process to make these sockets that we make. They're brand new.

They're custom fit on site and we purchased them in Ghana. Right now they're out and we need to get some more. So we make some more legs. We also need resin. We're always buying resin because that's one of the critical items in these acrylic resin sockets that we make. Now we'll recycle the prosthetic limbs. They come from all over the country to a prison run by core civic down in Arizona and inmates volunteer to disassemble them for us.

So we can recycle the knees, the feet, the pylons, the screws, the adapters, the clamps, all that kind of stuff, but some things we have to purchase PVA bags and resin are two of those items that need to be regularly purchased. Would you help us out with that? Please standing with hope.com slash giving standing with hope.com slash giving and be a part of giving the gift that keeps on walking standing with hope.com slash giving. Thanks so much. Welcome back to hope for the caregiver.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is the program for you as a family caregiver. Hopeforthecaregiver.com. While you're out there, check out all the different things we offer. Our podcast is free books, music, blog. You can also go out to Facebook, join our hope for the caregiver group on Facebook.

We put a lot of special things in there as well and hope you'll take advantage of it. Talking with a long time friend of mine, Frank Frazier, he has educated me on all things airline and pilots and aviation of what this means and the principles that he shared. I've seen such a correlation to us as caregivers, how we have to be regimented on certain things. We're the caregiver in command, just like the pilot in command and the pilot learns how to designate, delegate, and enlist help from whoever is on the plane, whether it's a flight attendant, maintenance worker, whatever.

The pilot is in charge, just like we as caregivers are in charge. Frank understands the journey. He's a caregiver himself. He's got a daughter with special needs.

She's nonverbal, but she is a force of nature. I've known Natalie since she was a tiny girl and she is a force of nature and it forces Frank to be on his game. I think he's probably rather be commanding a bunch of pilots than having to go head to head with Natalie. But he's taught me a lot of these things. And unfortunately, a lot of things that happen in planes that go wrong end up being disastrous. And yes, the airlines have learned from them. Every pilot learns it's incorporated training, but it's a very painful lesson. And we talked about the Eastern flight that went down in the Everglades 50 years ago.

Frank mentioned the one at a major commercial airline where they didn't have the flaps proper, they had to take it off a breaker, just little things because they didn't follow the checklist. I want to talk about a concept you've always said, because when pilots get up in the air and you're a big fan of watching all these investigative shows about airlines and what happens, and then you follow stuff with the NTSB and so forth. You've told me many, many, many times that pilots in the air, one of the things that causes so many problems is when pilots allow themselves to get distracted. And they're not just being in a hurry, they focus on the miners instead of flying the plane, fly the plane, fly the plane. And because the plane is moving and as a correlation, it'd be like us putting on the cruise control in our car, then go into the back seat and to fix a problem with the seatbelt in the back seat, who's driving the car. And so you got to drive the car. It's still moving.

The plane is moving. Talk about that and how we as caregivers, we don't have the luxury of fixating on the minor. We're going to have to do two things and keep the main thing, fly the plane, be the caregiver, see the big picture because our loved ones going to want to sometimes take us into these tangents that can get us all distracted and before we know it, we're off course.

Is that something you've seen in your own life and talk about how that principle works, not only in aviation, but for you as a caregiver? Well, yeah, one of the worst things that can happen is get distracted doing your job. And if you're a pilot flying along and say you have a generator failure and it sets off a light on the panel and you got to address that, it's usually not a red light. It's an amber light and amber means, hey, you need to take a look at this.

It's not an emergency, but a red light means it's an emergency. If you've got one of those, you've got about a hundred of them on the panel that could go off, but you have amber lights and red lights. So sometimes you get an amber light and it's like, maybe you need to reset a breaker. Maybe you need to look in the book and see what to do next.

Look at the checklist and you've got every possible breaker or light panel light is listed in the back of the checklist. And it'll tell you if this happens, do that, this is how you try to remedy that. If that doesn't fix it, you go do this. It's give you a step-by-step for each and every possible scenario you can get into. Well, when you do that in life here in our home, well, let me go back to the airplane. So what happens is, what that will do for you or to you is it'll take your eyes away from flying. It'll take your eyes away from the other instruments that are in the airplane. It'll take your concentration away from what your navigation is doing and all that. And ordinarily, if you're on autopilot, everything's going to be fine.

But when your head's down looking at a book, you're not flying the airplane. You're hoping that the autopilot's got it. And you're hoping that you're not so distracted that you miss your radio call sign. And they say, you know, so-and-so turn left to this heading, there's traffic 12 o'clock, five miles, whatever. If you miss that call, you know, then you got to then you got a problem, probably not with an accident, but you're going to get in trouble because you didn't react to that. And they're going to have to make the other guy do something that he didn't want to do.

So that gets you into a bad spot. So when your head's down and your focus is not there, you've got to avoid that situation. So what you should do in that condition is tell the copilot, hey, I'm going to look at this.

You watch out, you fly the plane in my absence here, you're in charge while I look at this problem. Same thing with Natalie. You know, when I get distracted, maybe with a phone call, maybe with a problem, otherwise, then I'm not paying attention to Natalie or I might miss something she's doing.

And the next thing, you know, you know, she's got the hot water on in the faucet and doesn't know exactly what that means. And, um, so you, you know, you can get distracted and then you, you're, you're, if you don't have someone else to help, and if it's just you, you, you really get, can, can get into a bad spot. And I have done that. I mean, that's, this is why this resonated so deeply with me because, you know, I'm the sole caregiver for Gracie. And when I get distracted with a smaller problem and take my eyes off the bigger picture, this thing can get pretty gnarly pretty quick.

And so I've had to learn to detach from some of those things. Okay, we're going to get to that, but not right now. Right now, I've got to bring us into a place of safety before we can look at that.

We're going to have to look at that on the ground, if you will. How big an emergency is this? Now, if I got a bunch of red lights going off, that's a, you know, that's a class 10 emergency and you have to, you have to use some discernment and wisdom and that doesn't come easily. That comes from experience and it comes from surrounding yourself with some, some smart people who've done this before.

But part of being a caregiver for me is learning what is the priority. And when this thing is moving like a plane in the air, the priority is make sure it stays in the air and it's flying, not spinning out of control. That, that lesson from Eastern back in 1972 is a painful lesson because those guys didn't realize they disengaged the autopilot and everybody in the cockpit was focusing on that, that light. And it turns out the landing gear was fine. It was just that burnout bulb.

That's right. And yet everybody's attention was on that. And it, and I understand if your landing gear doesn't work, that's a big deal. So they need to understand it, but they got, they've got more than one person in that cockpit to do that. They could have taken a different approach.

It does. And the NTSB is really good to take those things and put that into training. And out of that comes a lot of good stuff, a lot of good detection systems and so forth, what cost, but what cost. Right. And so as caregivers, I think we have, we have an opportunity to learn from the principles of those things. We don't have to freak out over every little light that blinks on the, on the pad. We're going to have to use some discernment and some wisdom.

Talk about how in the last few minutes, I got to talk about how that's changed for you in your life as a caregiver. I mean, when, when Natalie was young, I mean, this was all brand new and you're, you know, every time you're around something like this and go to the hospital or whatever, you think this is, this is Defcon five, but you've learned how to, how to settle yourself down with that over the years. Haven't you? Yeah, we have, I mean, we've had a lot of, um, early on, uh, reactionary things. I mean, Natalie is also prone to seizures, uh, and she takes very strong medicine to avoid those seizures. But, um, we just recently, um, we've, we found out that a particular type of cold medicine, uh, could actually trigger a seizure over and above the limits of the medication. And she had a couple of seizures over a two day period that she hasn't had two and two years. And, um, so we had, we had to figure out, well, what are we doing wrong here? And of course we had a, we had a good conversation with our neurologist, uh, that treats Natalie and he's a, he's a, he's a, um, pediatric chief of neurology.

And he's very, very good. He said, well, what kind of medicine she'd been taken? And so we told him, he's all, no, don't, don't give her that, that, that can override the seizure medicine. So we have so, but when that happens, you know, you're like the first time she ever had one, we were like rushing to the ER. I mean, we, we went straight down there and now that we've learned how to deal with her seizures, they don't last.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, the, uh, so, you know, you got to learn, well, okay. So she had a seizure, but she Christie, of course is wonderful because she's an RN and she's had, uh, seen a lot of seizures, but, uh, when it's your child, you look at it different. And, uh, so we had to not get used to it, but learn how to deal with it better.

And, um, if she doesn't react or, or come, come out of the seizure quickly, we have a rescue drug that we can inject her with and that will, that will bring her back around, but we haven't never had to use that at this time to date. Well, let's see, that's the kind of thing that comes over time and you learn how to prioritize it. It's it's wisdom that comes at a great cost. It always does wisdom comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Exactly.

I get that. But I wanted you to know, um, how much I've appreciated over the years you share, I've paid attention to everything you say, which I know that could probably get me in a lot of trouble. And, uh, but it's, uh, I do listen because I think that the high pressure situation that you find in the cockpit of airplanes, you know, that's a pretty stressful situation that you've got to learn how to do this and manage it with precision, with delegation, with wisdom, with discernment. And that's our life as caregivers. It, there's not a lot of margin for error, is there?

No. So, so we have to be, uh, on top of our game. I hope you've enjoyed this time today, Frank, I want you to know how much I appreciate it. We've got to run. We're out of time, but this is Peter Rosenberger.

This is hope for the caregiver, hopeforthecaregiver.com. And also please remember this, just like in aviation, there's an air traffic controller that keeps track of all the planes. We also have one, a savior who never loses any of his. This is Peter Rosenberger. We'll see you next time.