Thanksgiving in Neverland

Which is the real Neverland?
Conditions:  Con3.  Current Temperature 27ºF (Windchill 15ºF).  Overcast with occasional snow showers.  Population = 935

The Thanksgiving Holiday began Friday at 17:30 and ended Monday morning at 7:30.  It's the first two-day weekend that we've had.  Dean was on call on Friday night.  I was on call on Saturday.  Below is the weekend chronology:

Friday 
18:00:  Work as volunteer in the Craft Room sorting knitting needles.  Talk to the National Geographic film crew about climate change, the focus of much of their work.  Flooded with overwhelming sense of dread and despair.

21:00:  Head to the coffee house with Dean for a glass of hot chocolate with Bailey's but the joint is packed to the gills.  Go home, tidy room and stay up watching Ferris Buehler's Day Off.  Despair nipped in bud by fantasy about the good old 80's.

Saturday
5:00:      Awakened by page.  Dean called to take care of a member of the McMurdo Community, found stuporous in a lounge with vomitus on clothing and a blood alcohol level of 0.25.  

7:00:      Second patient brought to clinic by Fire Department with back pain.

10:00:    Turkey trot 5K.  150 runners.  I come in 118.  Very hilly race.  I beat the pink flamingo and tie the Air Force nurse half my age. And I did better than all 800 people sleeping off their late nights of partying.

Runners in Turkey Trot.  Who knew I should have brought a onesie?  Or an inflatable flamingo?
12:00:    Come to clinic to follow-up on someone who smashed his thumb with a hammer.  Drinker now contritely heading out the door after several liters of IV fluid.  

14:00:   Take care of a woman wanting plan B.  She says, "Maybe someday I'll be a grown-up."

17:00:   Called by Fire Department.  Morbidly obese man being brought in with severe back pain.  He had been on the Delta Dawn (see blog on 11/6) and, as usual, was not wearing a seatbelt and had been thrown in the air when it went over a bump.  His 300 pounds smashed onto the bench, crunching his back.  

19:00:  Time for Thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, still in clinic waiting for official X-ray report.   Patient probably has an end plate fracture of L5 according to the preliminary read at UTMB.  

19:45:   Shawn spells me so I can go to Thanksgiving dinner.  Amazing amount of yummy food.



22:00  Finish up with patient in clinic. He'll need to be medevac'd to Christchurch and probably will go home from there.   

Sunday
2:00:    Called by Fire Department for an intoxicated man with new-onset, bilateral hernias from
            lifting a woman at a dance party.

2:30:    Half right.  No hernias. Yes, intoxicated (0.15)  Walk patient back to dorm.  He tells me this is his first and last season.  I ask why.  He says, "This is Never Never Land, inhabited by people who don't want to live in the real world".   A truer word was never said.

9:00:    Laundry. Finish paperwork for medevac.

12:00:  Brunch.  Enough food to choke a horse

13:00:  FaceTime with family enjoying turkey in NJ

14:00   Fold laundry and watch Field of Dreams with Dean.

17:00:  FaceTime with Lauren, at skating rink at UBC.
.
19:00:  Watch two films from the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival:  Safety to Nome  about mid-winter bike race on the 1000 miles of Iditarod Trail (insane. Go for it TDHaggerty!) and Hike the Line about walking the US/Mexican border in its entirety (meh).

I miss home.  To paraphrase J.M. Barrie, "You need not be sorry for me.  I'm one of the kind that likes to grow up".

In the coffee house for the Film Festival (note McMurdo "shab carpet") wearing wonderful
Australian Shepherd- and cat-wear sent by our neighbor, Maria.  







Comments

Gabriela Gayer said…
Lovely picture of Dean and you, and that Club Med buffet made me drool, standing now in front of the empty refrigerator.
December 2, 2019 at 7:47 AM
Aidan said…
Wow those are some crazy days-- so many cases for a population of <1000! Awesome picture of you and Dean :).
December 2, 2019 at 10:41 AM
Upi said…
Happy thanksgiving. My kids were heartbroken to know that you were not making turkey and pies :-)
Your teeth look great BTW!
December 3, 2019 at 2:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

South Pole Traverse

Image
The South Pole Traverse moving down the Leverett Glacier: my dream job. Conditions:  Temperature 19° (4 ° with windchill).  Cloudy.  Population = 1100+ I mentioned in a previous post, the cowboys of the Antarctic are the South Pole Traverse (SPoT) team.  Like Scott and Shackleton, they troop slowly in tractors, pulling necessary supplies--particularly fuel--to the South Pole.  The Pole base could not exist without the traverse; planes simply could not carry enough fuel to supply the base. The eight man crew drives tractors 1031 miles, averaging about 5 miles per hour over 25 12-hour days (it took Amundsen 57 days and Scott 78 to reach the Pole).  The tractors transport diesel fuel in long bladders that drag along the ground. They also pull the team's living quarters.  On the way back, they fill the bladders with air so they drag well and also bring back the waste that needs to be shipped off ice.  Although I think of this as my dream...
Read more