05-SEP-A-15
ENTERING OUR SECOND FULL WEEK OF OPERATIONS
IN “OPERATION LIFELINE” IN LINCOLN ELEMENTARY “CLINIC”, NOW ELECTRIFIED;
OUR ARKANSAS INFANTRY GUARD “GOES HOME” AFTER EMOTIONAL “LEARNING EXPERIENCE” ABOUT HUMANITY,
AND AN ISLAMIC AID TRUCK OFF LOADS DONATIONS
September 13, 2005
You may have been able to receive a whole series of pictures I had painstakingly sent last night. Each photo took almost ten minutes, since at half a meg each (“High Rex” images were requested) it took a very long time to transfer them from my digital card to the mass storage “thumb” device and then “attach” them through the wireless connection of the Mobile Command Center’s “TuffBook” laptop to the tower the command center has set up to have them wired out. But, I thought the pictures selected will show you a bit of the clinic’s operations even though I did not downloads the scores of pictures I have taken of the Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in the wreckage around the community of Gretna and the town of Marrero, the two parts of Jefferson Parish through which I travel in a convoy with sirens and flashers going. We will be able to do so in convoy still and with curfew as a guideline, but if no other incidents of gunfire upon our convoy occur, (none have since early last week) we may be able to “move out” when our groups are ready as opposed to waiting for the Louisiana State Troopers and MP Armed Escorts to travel between Meadowcrest Hospital and the Lincoln Elementary School. We still have the full dress armed escort of the Arkansas battle-hardened troops all around us in the Meadowcrest on perpetual guard duty checking anyone who tries to come through the perimeter and then again through the door and still again as they enter the floor of the hospital on which our separate contingents stay.
The second major communication technique I have attempted yesterday is the more usual one I have relied upon form every site I have worked over four decades. I have written a few postcards, and this time I was able to use my stock of US 23 cent postage stamps as opposed to the usual colorful postage that carries most of my recent messages to you—such as the Azerbaijani and Eritrean stamps that brought you my most recent messages. I learned that there were no US Post Offices open in this Parish nor, of course, in Louisiana. A vehicle came by and dropped off for the troops at the guarded Lincoln School Gate a bunch of packages from Quiznos, a fast food chain, which included sandwiches brownies and cookies. Showing how far I have degenerated here acting almost exactly like the troops on long boring stretches of mid-day—I ate a double chocolate brownie. Next thing you know, after the breakfast of Honey Buns, I am on the long and slippery slope and will next be on a steady diet of Ho Ho’s Twinkies and Jujubes and will start to look exactly like the patients we have been seeing for their insulin and anti-hypertensive and twenty-four other meds refills as they waddle in to see us from their sedentary lives led in front of TV!
One of the people who had stopped at the gate and got some MRE’s and ice asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” I thanked them, and then said “Yes! Do you know where the nearest operational Post office or mailbox drop might be?” They said it was out of the Parish but they had seen mail trucks for the first time today looking like they were reassembling and they could make a special trip over to that spot to see if they could drop my cards which I had addressed and stamped. I thanked them for that, and that means you may have a few cards from the first US Post Office to open in the Louisiana Parishes from which any service as usual can be restored!
Little items like that are slowly returning, and a big one is the sight of lights on in the school. That means there is A/C and we can find our way to the johns without doing it by Braille along the wall, assuming that there is a urinal against the wall where we had last encountered it. It means we can start up the copier and see if it is ruined and since we jury-rigged an access code, we can Xerox the handout for the patients to contact the emergency numbers to get their debit card or any other contact numbers for people to search out family or fiends not heard form since the storm. A number of people are getting started on the stinky business of “snow shoveling” out the soggy debris from their houses and a few have taped their appliances shut and hauled them out to the curb—just as I did to get rid of the refrigerator-freezers downstairs after a month without electricity and the spoiled food and meats inside being dumped with the appliances they are permeating. I talked with one man who had driven a garbage truck before the storm, and he said if only he had a truck, he would get back to work. “There will be plenty of ‘O T’ for you!” I told him.
TWO “TRANSFER PATIENTS” OF THE 148 PATIENTS TREATED
TODAY AND A TRANSFORMATION IN ONE OF THE INFANTRY SOLDIERS GOING HOME AFTER A LESSON LEARNED IN HUMANITY, FOLLOWED BY A PAIRED EXPERIENCE
OF AN ISLAMIC AID TRUCK OF DONATIONS
One of the first patients I saw today and the last one had to be “scooped and run” both transferred to West Jefferson Parish Hospital the site we were first bivouacked in at the outset before our plans changed. The first was a black woman with a long list of risk factors for cardiac disease at the gate saying she was having chest pain and also adding that it radiated into her left arm. Further it sounded like reflux GERD to me, but she knew all the right answers saying that it radiated into her left arm, and with all the risk factors as long as your arm I knew we would not be treating her long. So, we got Oxygen on her and an EKG strip showing ST depression and got her ready and monitored for the trip to West Jefferson to be admitted. Her sister came to me about he same size and shape and asked “How is my sister?” I said we were going to have her admitted to West Jefferson Hospital to check her out, but she was having a little chest pain that I thought was more likely to prove out to be GI reflux than cardiac, but it was better that she be over there just now and monitored. “Yes, that’s just what they did two weeks ago when they admitted her for a heart attack but said it was more likely to be nerves and her indigestion.” So, I made the right call, but apparently a repeated one that had been made before.
I will also give you the last patient of my day, with the first name “Douse.” She was a pleasant black woman who was full of little chuckles and a couple of laughs as she checked in. The person doing the triage did not know too much about a few warning signs since her BP was written down as 200/120 and she was on no medicines. So, I started talking with her and she bantered with me a bit with a few laughs. I said we would have her lie down and take a couple of medicines that I thought would be a good idea to get her blood pressure under control. I started with Lisinopril, and had her relax. I asked her about things at home and she told me about the destruction and the mess she had to deal with, and lost some of the jolly fun time aspect. But then I found out here kids were evacuated to somewhere in Texas and she did not know where they could be reached but was worried about them. WE got the tracer numbers started through the system and also checked her BP again. This time it was 208/130. I added a Beta Blocker and started her on a drip saying I thought it was a good idea that we should have here admitted to get her BP under control and start her up on a chronic drug regimen to get her closer to where she should be. I said to her” We certainly do not want to have you skirting along that close to a stroke!” “Oh, no,” she agreed. “That happened to me already and I don’t want to see that happen again!” It turned out that before the storm she had been seen and advised to take an anti-hypertensive Norvasc, but with the storm and other events she had forgotten about such trivial details and now during the most stressful parts she had a runaway BP skating close to the edges of a Cerebrovascular event. So, Eric Our newcomer psychologist form Annapolis Naval Academy was called over and he spent some time listening to her vent and cry and during that time her BP went higher. She really needed to have someone cut through the jolly fun woman and get to the real reason she had come in, and we will see here again after she is released from West Jeff if we can start her on a combination of meds to control her labile and risky High BP. She made the trip on a stretcher with our ambulance taking her.
GREATER POIGNANCY AND THEN DRAMA WITHIN OUR STAFF THAN EVEN IN OUR PATIENTS
I think I may be able to top the patient stories for human interest and drama today with our staff and especially our Infantry Company of Arkansas mobilized National Guard whose last days were projected to be coming in the last part of the week. I was planning a little party with a run to the newly opened Winn Dixie (under their own armed escort) and had brought a case of Cokes and a box of Snickers for the troops. Despite the fact that the later were their specific requests, I feel responsible for a coming wave of dental caries and periodontal disease that is going to sweep Northeast Arkansas in about six weeks when they are all back home!
As in all things Army, they got the word to be ready to ship out at noon today as they would be relieved and another Arkansas brigade was coming in to spell them. It was a quick change for them since they were really attached to “their Docs” and did not want to leave. In fact they were in a big transition in their lives and had told me lots of stories about their most recent experiences in Iraq and how it had affected them. I will give a couple to show later how this was a major turnaround today for them.
Big Darien Mckeelson, the Master Sergeant had told me yesterday about the political and military aspects of being in Iraq. He is a very big guy, a gas company technician for the gas filed sin Arkansas all but the waterfowl season when he is a full time duck and goose guide for 65 days of the year—this next month being the first season he is coming back, and the first time he has been separated this long form his yellow labs. He spent one of his precious leave days driving eight hours each way to go get the last of a litter of a well bred dog and he could not wait to get back to check her out. And, he told me about how he felt he was lucky to have got through Iraq as the other master Sergeant had not, having been hit by an RPG directly.
He and the group her had set up TCP’s (“Traffic Control Points” as everything n the Army must be acronymed) and had intercepted an Imam who was irate to be searched and detained. As a cleric, he could only be collared on the street and not in the sanctity of the mosque toward which he was headed which are off limits. They searched his robes and found $8,000 in US $100 bills on him, and thought that was suspicious. When they have done so before, they arrest someone like that and put the “Flexicuffs” on him and turn him over to the interrogators who almost always had to release them immediately and they would see them back at the same TCP’s later to their great annoyance. This time, they put the Flexicuffs on him and put him in the hatch of the Humvee, which is not A/C nor protected from the overhead sun and in the 1208 heat it is not a very comfortable ride. They were in no hurry to get him turned over and they had kept his cell phone. As the drove around in a rather deliberately not-too-hasty delivery of their charge to be interrogated, they had four phone calls come in on the cell phone by the time they had arrived at the point where he should be transferred. Some of the guys knew the other master sergeant, so they were eager t spend a little more time in getting to where they needed to be. At that point the interpreter picked up the four voice messages, “We do not want the AK-47’s but have sent the money for the RPG’s and will make delivery under the overpass at midnight.”
The Arkansas boys figured they could play that game so they got decked out in abayas and kafiyeh head gear to disguise the fact that they had no beards, and waited under the overpass on foot with the same weapons they are carrying her under their robes. Two beaten up old Isuzu pickup trucks appeared carrying sacks of rice, which when split open revealed the RPG’s and under the floor the C-4 charges for a SED (self-Explosive Device.) So, they triumphantly collared the two drivers and their contraband and were disappointed to learn that their perpetrators were released later since, of course, they did not know the cargo they carried. They suggested that a lot of stray rounds could have solved that problem, but they are going strictly by rules of engagement, and only added that they were like the Mayor of New Orleans –who is not a real big FEMA fan—they were not really big on Islam and its clerics.
Now remember that backdrop for the stories that follow since I have a pair of stories that immediately involved me and the events just before the departure of my future hunting buddies and their own flexible response to what is happening here.
Enlisted man Hay came to Roy Smoot and wanted to tell him something even though he is not very big on making speeches. He said he would like to tell the group but certainly not in the presence of his buddies since they would think that he had gone soft. For that reason he gathered the team in the back of the kitchen and turned off the machines that are now making noise like the fan and even a radio now that we have become electrified overnight. He said to a small group of us that he could not give a speech, but wanted to tell us one thing. “I have been two and a half years in the Army and had been scheduled to go home—but I am glad I did not go directly but was reassigned here. I have only been face to face with people who are trying to kill me whom I had never done any harm to, and I got to see the worst part of humanity and suspected it in everyone. I would have carried that feeling home. Then I was assigned here and had a chance to work alongside you—and I saw the best and most beautiful part of humanity, which is going to stay with me now. I am glad to have been here with you and it has changed me. I am ready to go home now.”
With hugs all around and a few grunts since that was the most articulation he had done, I snapped his photo and we exchanged slaps since it would otherwise appear as though the battle hardened guys had gone soft in the underbelly. This was his paring shot for us as we lined up for a farewell picture.
Wait—we are not over. The others went back inside as I still stayed out with McKesson and Hay and four other guys with their M-16’s strapped over their shoulders. A big 18-wheeler rounded the bend and pulled up to a stop, then backed up the big semi trailer to enter the gate and drop off a load. On the side is a large hand painted sign: “From the Islamic Communities of North Texas for the Hurricane Katrina Victims.” The troops were dumbfounded and stood there with slack jaws as I went up to the cabin of the tractor and stuck out my hand “Bismallah, Salaam a lechem, and Shochran for your Zakat!” I said. They were astounded then shook my hand. At first bewildered, out hopped three grey-bearded men, each of whom were eyed suspiciously by the troops. “Come on and give a hand here! “ We tossed out boxes of stuff, some of it junk, but all of it was hand packed personally by citizens, including large plastic bags of stuffed toy animals, and a number of small plastic bags with toiletries and toothpaste and a few items of use like nesting cooking pots. When we had offloaded, I said to the two Moslem clerics and the one layman “Come on over here, I have a couple of friends I would like to have you meet.”
I brought them around to big Darien McKeelson and specialist Hay. “I thought you might like to meet a couple of fellows here who had dropped off this donation I said, and shook their hands starting a somewhat reticent exchange in which they finally shook hands, Darien being the first to do so, as the others all followed. “Thanks!” I said to both as they got in their tractor trailer to drive off. As they eased out, one of the guys said “They have a lot of ‘makin up to do’” I added, “Yes, maybe, but here they are, and there may be as much difference among each of them as there is on this end, and we are all in this thing together. Thanks for thanking them!”
With that, after another hour wait in the sun, a big Army truck pulled up and the last of the Arkansas brigade piled in, each giving me a salute as they left, and they called back to me “We’ll get together in a duck blind soon, Doc!” And they are gone.
Hay was right. Things like this change each one of us. I am glad they were here, on each side of someone else’s struggles, and I am glad I am here with each of them.