Happy Birthday Verna!!!

Hi everyone!!!
The first thing I want to do is send out some very happy birthday wishes to my wonderful mother-in-law, Verna. I hope you have a great day, Verna, and I'm thinking about you lots. Wish I could be there this weekend SO MUCH!!!! Love you.

The photos I have posted are from last Saturday; my friend Sandy and I went to the market and had a great time shopping. When we got back to our room we celebrated with a near beer (like I've said before, in the desert you take what you can get!).

This past week has been a more normal pace for us. Day before yesterday, four local people were brought in after having been injured in the crossfire - it was an elderly man (60 is very elderly here), a woman and two small girls. The bigger girl, who they said is about 4 years old, was rushed to the OR pretty quickly because she had penetrating abdominal wounds from shrapnel. The younger one, who is 3 and the daughter of the woman (who has a pelvic fracture), has shrapnel in her brain. She seems to be doing quite well right now, but as usual with the local people there is only so much we can do. We don't have the capability to do neurosurgery here. I'm not sure what will happen with these poor people, but no one knows who or where the 4-year-old girl's parents are...and the mother with the pelvic fracture is distraught because she also has a 14-year-old daughter and has no idea where she is now. These situations are almost beyond comprehension for me. It's so hard to see children affected by war...

I am amazed yet again at the passage of time as I notice October is almost over. Three months down, and only six weeks til I get to go home on leave...unbelievable. That's only half the time I've been here already!

Love to everyone at home - I will try to post tomorrow because it's my baby boy's second birthday...love to everyone!

Lindsay

New photos!

Hi all,
Here are a few new photos I took over the past few days! You can see the "patio" outside the building where I live, which has been christened "The Witch Way Home" by the previous maxillofacial surgeon who was here. Note the brooms everywhere - and what you can't see in this shot is the mural that he painted on the concrete of a witch flying past the full moon...
The Halloween candles are on the little table on our patio, very dusty as you can see. The pic of me was taken as I was leaving work yesterday evening. I also included a shot of the new ball hockey rink they just finished inside the boardwalk - we need Don Cherry to come and christen it! It looks great, especially at night when it's all lit up. The fantastic painted truck is known as a "jingle truck" because it has chains hanging off everywhere that make noise when it moves - these trucks are used for garbage on the camp. Finally you can see Tim Horton's, with the little cafe set up with tables and umbrellas, and the "boardwalk" which goes all around in a square, where you can find little shops and the other food places like Pizza Hut and Burger King and Subway.
Things remain quiet at the hospital, which has given us a wonderful respite for the past few days, but we all have the uneasy feeling of waiting for what comes next. Of course we have no idea about what might happen, it's just not normal for things to be so quiet. So we will take a deep breath and hope all stays well - it's the best we can do!
Love to everyone, especially to Robert and Julia and Stephen, my angels and my sweetheart. I'll try to write again soon!

Lindsay xoxoxoxo

A Day In The Life

Hello again. I feel that it's time for another update...things are
truckin' along here; I am tied with our anaesthetist for first place
in the flycatching contest with 7 kills under my belt. I still can't
beat our senior tech, who caught the mouse...thankfully, the OR
has remained free of other little critters, because Afghanistan
is home to some nasty spiders and scorpions that I would never
like to meet.

For lack of other exciting news to impart, I suppose I could try
to describe a day in my life here at KAF. I usually wake up
around 6:15, shower and get dressed in my uniform for work.
I meet the other OR staff and we drive (yes, we have a dusty
piece of crap SUV devoted to the OR) over to the DFAC (dining
facility and canteen) nearest the hospital for breakfast.
We like it better there because it's not as busy as the one closer to
where we live. There is a large selection of food at the DFACs, from
your standard bacon, sausage, eggs, oatmeal, toast and cereal to
biscuits with gravy and grits. The fruit they bring in here is
amazing - I've never had sweeter kiwis and peaches - and they
have strawberries, canteloupe, watermelon and honeydew every
single morning. Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day.

From there we head to the hospital, where our first order of business is whatever elective cases need to be done on the inpatients (mostly Afghans). Otherwise we expect at least one or two traumas about every other day - sometimes it's every day, sometimes we'll go a few days where it's quiet. The ANA and ANP don't have body armour like our soldiers do, so they are more vulnerable and tend to get hurt more often and more severely.

The rest of the work is pretty unexciting but terribly necessary, with washing, drying, wrapping and sterilizing the instruments, cleaning the endless dust, stocking and restocking, ordering and
reorganizing and keeping statistics. Now you can see why we have fly-killing competitions! We also have a "quote of the week" (which really should be called the "MISquote of the week") where we take an unassuming comment completely out of context, which, of course, makes it hilarious to everyone except those who don't work in the OR and think we've been inhaling too much anaesthetic gas. Incidentally, we are losing our minds to the extent that the quote of the week changes almost daily.

Depending on whether or not we are doing a case, we can get to the DFAC for lunch and supper as well. A lot of times we will eat the food they bring to the hospital for those who can't get away. We have seen chicken cooked in as many different ways as it's possible to be
cooked. At least it's real chicken, I guess. Besides, we don't complain (much) about the food because we know how lucky we are not to have to go outside the wire and eat whatever we can carry in our gear. Which is probably not chicken.

This is a description of my "on-call" day, which means that even after we leave the hospital at the end of the work day, we are on call for the rest of the night. So far we have only done one all-nighter, but many a time we have been in past midnight and into the wee hours. The next day is our "off-call" day, which is really our second call day, because we could still get called in if they need a second OR team. This is when we know things are bad.

My off-call days are a welcome respite...recharging of the batteries for the next crazy time. I go to the gym, do some laundry, go for coffee, be a vegetable, update my blog :-). Or sometimes I just sleep!

Today I received a wonderful gift from Carolyn, my sister (in-law), who put together a photo album for me of all my Newfoundland family and friends, with little notes from each of them wishing me well and sending their love. I can't tell you how much this means to me! Carolyn told me in the instructions that I wasn't allowed to cry, but let's be honest, sister-in-law - you must not know me as well as I thought you did!!! Thank you to everyone who took the time to write, and still do take the time, because it means the world to me.

Lots of love to everyone,
Lindsay

October already

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone at home...we
celebrated in our own way with special napkins and a tissue-
paper turkey as a centrepiece...it wasn't quite the same, but we
did get turkey for dinner. American Thanksgiving is in November,
and since the kitchen is run by Americans we didn't think we'd
get turkey. Luckily for us, Monday was Columbus Day so I
guess that was a good enough excuse to have turkey (even though
we usually have it once a week anyway) and we made it our own!
It wasn't as good as Mom's, but in the desert you take what you can get.

I haven't been able to get some good quality time on the computer until
today - been meaning to put up a new post for a while now. Things have
been busy, and as you know we have lost a few more Canadians since I
last wrote. Whenever an incident happens, communications from the
camp are locked down so that news can't spread home before families are
officially notified; sometimes this can take the better part of a day.

So what have I been up to? October began with a bang, quite literally
actually. On Monday the 2nd, we were just finishing watching a movie
when our pagers went off - another mass casualty situation. We tried to
prepare ourselves mentally as we made our way to the hospital, but as
it turned out, I don't think there was much we could have done to prepare
us for what we saw when we walked in the door. Burned patients
shivering on every stretcher we own...people running for dressing supplies...
a terrible smell in the air. Skin was literally falling on the floor. Normally
we have time to prepare for casualties, to assemble the trauma teams -
but not this night. These were civilian contract employees on the camp,
guys who were paving somewhere not far from the hospital, and they
were using gasoline to thin the asphalt, which was too hot and made the
gasoline explode. There were eleven altogether, and those of us who
arrived earliest were on our own with them until all the doctors arrived...
I'm sure it was only a few minutes but it felt like forever.

After that night I've almost lost track of everything that happened -
the next day we started in both ORs with dressing change after dressing
change - that night we were called back in for more casualties,
worked late and then went in the next morning for more cases. It was
three of the busiest days we've had since we've been here...there
are quiet times, and then there are times when it feels like we will
never get out of the hospital. You know the saying "it never rains but it
pours"? I think that should be our new motto.

I am having more homesickness lately. The time is still flying by,
but I think that waiting for the next terrible thing to happen is hard...
as usual, we laugh our way through the days, and the wonderful care
packages we've received from home make things a lot more bearable.
The Military Family Resource Centre in Halifax sent us Alexander
Keith's beer boxes full of goodies...it was great, but what a tease!
Here we thought they were sending us a 2-4! It was a wonderful
reminder of home nonetheless.

The weather continues to be hot. It was 46 degrees yesterday afternoon
on our little 'patio', and amazingly enough that doesn't feel super hot
to me! Boy, am I ever going to freeze my butt off when I get home.
Mom sent me some beautiful pictures of the colourful leaves at home...I
told her that if the leaves here ever turned colour, we wouldn't likely
know because they are so covered in dust.

I remain caught between being grateful for this experience and thankful
for the quick passage of time. Can't believe we're almost halfway -
amazing. Coming home is going to be so great, especially because the
renovations on the house will all be finished by the time I get there!!!! :-)

Love to everyone, thinking of you all...
Lindsay