Texas

If I'm going to chronicle the last few months, I should probably start with my time in Cedar Rapids, which was the first block of my fourth year of medical school.  I enjoyed the ER and the staff, and could see myself working in a similar environment.  Maybe the best part of my rotation in CR was that I was close enough to DSM to make the drive back to see Aaron pretty frequently, and somewhere in there we squeezed in time to go to Saint Louis to our friend Kendra's wedding.  It was a luxury that I painfully miss right now, as I type from a minimally furnished and too-quiet house in Las Vegas.  I'm sure Vegas is awesome, but it's not where I want to be right now and I'm having a hard time taking advantage of all there is to do here.  Plus I'm poor, but that's another story.  Anyway, St. Luke's of CR was pretty good times, I think I performed well, and I definitely wouldn't mind being a part of the program at Iowa. 

I finished up at St. Luke's on a Friday, and drove to my parents' house on Saturday.  I left from there on Sunday and ended up in San Antonio somewhere around 9 or 10pm.  At this point I have to stop and take a moment to thank the Hart family for being willing to put me up for an entire month after the whole Air Force thing fell apart.  They were incredibly generous and hospitable, and even helped to fly Aaron down for a weekend--so incredibly kind, and so very needed on my part.   The rotation itself was a little chaotic and disorganized at first, made even worse by the need to figure out the military system on top of learning a new hospital.  To be honest, I hated it at first because of the chaos, but by the end I really enjoyed the structure, the didactics, and the people.  If my appeal to the military is denied, missing out on this program is what I will be disappointed about. 

The one memory that sticks out from my time at SAMMC has nothing to do with the ER at all; in fact, it occurred while entering an elevator.  I was looking for an office in the basement, and was totally lost in the dungeon of the hospital.  I came back up to the 1st floor to re-orient myself, and walked to an elevator in another area of the building to try to jog my memory of the super-sonic tour we had gotten on day 1.  I was super frustrated and tired and crabby and felt like nothing was going right.  I waited for the elevator to come down from upstairs, and when the doors opened, out walked a double-amputee, clad in his PT uniform, walking without assistance.  He was a young guy, definitely not any older than me.  He stumbled just a bit as he exited the elevator, but collected himself and continued walking.  Suddenly my frustrations seemed terribly shallow.  I wondered if I was ready for this.  This wasn't just playing soldier, like COT felt to be.  This was real, the battles are real, the wounds are real, and here I was potentially taking care of people whose pain I couldn't possibly begin to relate to.  It was a major wake-up call, and I think a turning point in how I looked at military emergency medicine.  Even in the setting of stabbings, gang-banger shootings, MVCs, and super sick patients, this was my most memorable encounter at SAMMC. 

Enough memory chronicling for one night.  More later!