Or more pertinent to today's speaker, why some people are especially competent at dealing with disasters and death and others have trouble just passing roadkill without tearing up? - just a little bit, I mean, not a lot, C''mon, it's sad right? These cute little Pocahontas-raccoons are all smushed up waiting to be scraped off the road by some unforgiving, totally non-ceremonial dump truck.
Well, it turns out that there's actually a test that can determine how well you might fare in a traumatic situation - it measures your "resiliency level".
Our speaker today, Donna Leinwand, is a national correspondent for USA Today. She's also known as "Hurricane Donna", because of all the disasters she's covered.
Donna, after being tested by a trauma center, was found to have a "high resiliency level", meaning that she can bounce back more easily from most terrible and emotionally painful situations - a quality she certainly needs when covering disasters like the Haiti earthquake.
"You'll never forget two things," she said. 1.) The smell of gang green. It was everywhere in Haiti, a horrible limb-blackening disease that, if left untreated, would spread to the heart and kill the infected. and 2.)? The smell of rotting bodies.
Lovely.
And these are only the top two horrors she deals with in the field. In Haiti she had to handle breeding superbugs (when only a single dose of an antibiotic is available, the bug overpowers it, becoming even stronger than before), women giving birth on the street, and vigilante justice (the prisons fell down with the rest of Haiti, so the citizens took it upon themselves to kill the lawbreakers - and brutally so).
Not to mention the sadness and emotional trauma of seeing thousands of people trying to cope with the destitution and loss of loved ones on a disturbingly large scale.
She even talked about how depressing it was to see the Haitians clothed in donated American t-shirts that often read terribly demeaning things - things they had no way of knowing the meaning of.
I found it interesting, however, that just because she can "bounce back" easily, doesn't mean she doesn't experience emotion altogether. I guess I had always thought that people who could cope with such horrible things (apologies for the overuse of the word "horrible" - I'm running out of unfortunate adjectives) were just less feeling - but after today it seems that they do in fact feel, but they are just are more able to move on from these emotional situations and effects than the rest of us.
Anyhow, you can see that why when Donna comes back to the U.S., she has a particularly hard time dealing with the "big whiners" who can't handle the line at Bloomingdale's, or when the air conditioning goes out (though she understands fully the trauma of a lost cable signal).
"I know what catastrophe is," she said, "and we rarely see it here."
As much as I truthfully would hate to have her job - there seemed to be one incredible benefit. Because of all the real horror she has seen, Donna is a self-described "mellow" person in her day-to-day life. Nothing rattles her. And that makes me wonder if all in all, she might be healthier than the rest of us?
If we experience a steady stream of stress every day, all day, might someone who experiences intense stress in short bursts, and extreme calmness in everyday life, be better off?
Scary thought. Kind of makes me think we're all doing to explode from within at some point.
Anyhoo. I'll leave you with all with my favorite quote of the day by Ms. Donna (aside from the title of this post, of course). She said it when speaking about her time in Iraq and her first experience with the Iraqi people - "Iraqi hospitality", she called it.
"If you're not going to be kidnapped," she warned, "you're probably going to have tea."
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