Battle at Bagram

Coffee and chatting with French UAV friends. Above me, Jordanna and Lt Bouret

(commented on in my last blog entry).

Okay, so hands down, the most exciting thing this week was getting attacked during the wee hours of the morning. I won't go into details, but I will say it was a little scary at the time. Nonetheless, I was pretty safe at the hospital. Fortunately and surprisingly there were not that many US casualties. I'm now working on the inpatient ward for the last 5 weeks of my tour here, so I'm getting to see the traumas again. The worst we had was an amputated foot. It was a rough day, however, as far as morale goes. A lot of people were scared and we were all locked down in the hospital - no one coming or going, no planes coming or going. Miraculously our wonderful nutritionist got us food for breakfast (pancakes!) and we dealt with MRE's at lunch and dinner. We were allowed to leave late that night but obviously security was still extremely tight. Now that that is over though, things are pretty much back to normal operations and it is currently a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Now that I'm on the inpatient side of things, I get to see a few more interesting cases. Yes, of course there are still the heart attack rule outs and the occasional pneumonia and cellulitis, but often the trauma stories are interesting. There was recently a pack of 5 soldiers who came in pretty beat up after their MRAP ran over an IED. They spent all their time in the ICU before they were shipped off to Germany, but the one kid I got with a rather minor (compared to some) facial lacerations and tooth loss had an interesting story. I kept hearing bits and pieces, but once he was rather awake after his sedation from surgery, he drew me a picture of the events and did the best he could to describe the incident without his 5 upper front teeth and the fattest upper lip I've seen. Apparently this kid was in a tower and saw a jingle truck (Afghan decorated truck) come racing toward one of the gates that doesn't usually get trucks. He shot at it and it exploded sending shrapnel into his tower and thus injuring his face, however, he continued to shoot at some of the insurgents who were behind some barriers and shooting at him and some soldiers on the ground. He said he thinks he took down three before his back up got to him. I'm pretty sure this kid saved a couple lives if not many. Good kid too. I'm not sure he realized what he did.

Catching Up

So I'm a little behind on my blogging. I have no real excuses, but it has been busy in the clinic. It seems I can never catch up with my notes. Well, we sort of had break today and I'm all caught up, except that tomorrow is my Sunday to work, which just means more notes.

Seeing as I work this Sunday, I had Friday afternoon off which I spent with my Jewish, Army, Yoga, newly-promoted-to-Captain buddy Jordanna. Jordanna works in supplies and basically gets the infantry guys what they need. She also works we the coalition forces to get them what they need as well. In other words, she has connections. Friday afternoon we used one of her connections to spend some time in part of the French area on base, right on the flightline. This French unit was working missions with unmanned aircraft for reconnaissence. It was a beautiful day and we arrived walking onto their shaded little deck outside their office with helicopters flying overhead. We walked into their breakroom to be greeted with a bunch of French soliders yelling at the TV screen as they were playing some version of MarioKart on the Wii. We then enjoyed a cup of good strong French cafe with Jordanna's Lt contact and met his boss, Maj C. This was followed by a lovely tour of the control room for these unmanned aircraft. Everything I saw in that room was complete OPSEC, but very cool stuff to say the least. We chatted a bit more while we waited for one of the planes to land and I got to show off the little French that I remember. We got a picture in front of the tiny little plane once it landed which I'll have to post once we get a copy of it from Jordanna's friend. Needless to say, it was a nice day.

Bringing the conversation back to work, I've been trying to help this young infantry soldier with severe back pain. This kid is tight as a drum and almost got killed on his last tour when he was thrown out of the turret (the gunner position) of an MRAP 3 years ago. Not to mention he's about as type A as one can get which contributes, in my opinion, greatly to his back pain. I've tried everything up my sleeve for back pain. His been adjusted with OMT. He wears a portable TENS unit he got from PT. He stretches daily. And when I saw him on Thursday he was taking Seroquel 100mg and Valium 10mg at night to sleep which barely gets him 3-5hrs of sleep. He takes a valium in the morning,Mobic (an anti-inflammatory), Baclofen 3 times daily, plus about 12 percocet (narcotic pain med)/day. His pain, however, was doing pretty good on this. He's absolutely desperate to get extended to February so he can take the sniper position that just opened up. He's a good kid and I just discovered he's from Kentucky. I'm sure we probably have one friend, family or acquaintance in common. He works hard and was raised pretty much by his grandmother because is mother is an alcoholic and crack addict. So Friday he comes in again all distressed (which is normal) and tells me he just threw out all his percocet and Valium (which I had just refilled the day prior) because he just found out his grandmother died and he wants to get off all the narcs and sedatives so he can do his missions as he has nothing to got back to. With extreme discreteness, I've had him see a psychologist a couple times in the outpatient clinic (as opposed to the psych clinic which has a stigma attached to it). I simply don't know what else to do with him. He's suppose to have gone on a 9hr mission today and I can almost guarantee I'll see him in clinic tomorrow. All I can do is pray that he does the right thing and doesn't get hurt.

I've already nearly written a book for this post so I'll have to save the next two for the next post, but I wanted to mention that I got to shake the hand of Afghan President Hamid Karzai last weekend. I have footage of his speech to us, but it is too large of a file to get it uploaded. I also have great footage of all the outpatient clinic providers sing Karoke to the Jackson Five's "ABC, 123" in payment for losing against our techs in a game a Cranium. It wasn't pretty, but very funny. Again a bit long to upload, but I'll see if I can't clip it and give you all a taste of it.

Off to bed.