Ugh

Going nowhere fast.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not summer camp

Image
Today, I was going to write about McMurdo being like summer camp, only colder.  I've changed my mind. To digress briefly, I had both a sadistic dentist (no novocaine) and a horrible orthodontist as a child.  The consequence--other than that I hate going to the dentist--is that I had dents on my front teeth that were stained and ugly.  About 15 years ago, I decided to get veneers to cover the damage.  Anyone who has had a veneer knows that they first shave down the tooth to a stub of its former self and then add a porcelain front.  If the veneer falls off, you're left looking like the witch in Snow White. A month before I came to McMurdo, one of my two veneers fell off and I lost (swallowed?) it.   In a masterful feat of scheduling, I actually had it replaced with a permanent veneer before I went off to Galveston for training.  While there, I expressed my concern to our dentist, Bob Koff (see post of 8/15), that the other veneer was similarly...
Read more

What we've been up to

Image
Ross Island looking out from the Pegasus crash site on the Ross Ice Shelf.  The peaked mountain is Ob Hill with McMurdo to its left.  Erebus is obscured by clouds.  The two dots halfway between the camera and the island at the left tip of the island are emperor penguins.   Condition:  Temperature 41°F (Windchill 39°).  Mostly cloudy Population = 1141 We've been extremely busy.  We've had several bad injuries on the base, including last week a hand smashed by a 42 ton ship's hatch.  Once again, Dean did an amazing job with the injury but with broken planes and unrested flight crews, the patient ended up spending seven hours in an ambulance waiting on the runway before being brought back to the clinic to wait some more. I was assigned to care for him that evening, re-bandaging his wound twice, giving him his pain meds and antibiotics, helping him shower, and ultimately, putting a squirting hole in his IV tubing AND covering myself ...
Read more

Off the ice

Image
Toto, I think we're not in Kansas anymore Conditions:  Temperature 70° (70° with wind chill).  Sunny. Population=381,500  Well, we got off the ice.  The trip proved somewhat harrowing and prolonged but we are now blissfully ensconced in the Crowne Plaza in Christchurch, heading back home tomorrow. Antarctica is shutting down for the winter. The Pole will close to all transportation in about two weeks just as the sun begins to set, leaving only the 40-50 person overwinter crew behind to face the brutally cold and dark winter.  McMurdo will close more slowly and, for the first time, will actually have winter flights to facilitate the new base construction.  Usually, about 150 people would be left in McMurdo by mid-February.  This year with all the new base construction underway, they expect to winnow down the current 1100 people to about 400in the next 10 days and and then to 300 or so at the end of April and 150 in June. The whole...
Read more