Please note all the injuries are simulated (i.e. no real blood).
After a long weekend we are starting our final week of lectures and scenarios. The month has flown by and it is starting to sink in that we are finishing up. Only 3 more days after today and so far the course has been great and I’m sad to see it ending. I’ve met a bunch of great individuals and have learned a tremendous amount about wilderness medicine.
Enough reminiscing though, yesterday was a great day of learning with several new lecturers and two more scenarios. We learned about lighting strikes, burn injuries and planning for an expedition from the medical perspective. We saw videos and pictures from Haiti from a Doc who had been there treating patients. The pictures and stories were heartbreaking and sobering in terms of our training and what some of us are shooting for as a career.
As to the scenarios, we had two in the afternoon and evening. The first scenario of the afternoon started around 2:30 and didn’t end until after 5:30pm. Of all the scenarios this was by far the most difficult. We didn’t rise to the occasion and struggled with the difficult extractions and triage.
Adding to the difficulty of the extractions we learned a new rescue structure and roles. The confusion about the new structure really increased the time to extraction and treatment. We learned a lot from our trials and struggles. In the end everyone was extracted successfully and no one got injured.
Our dinner consisted of MREs around a campfire waiting on our next scenario. The MREs from today are much better then the old ones. They are still not the greatest but are nourishment. After finishing our dinner, it was dark and we were notified there was a group of Boy Scouts missing but we were not given a point last seen. After about half an hour we were provided a point last seen and preceded to start searching for them.
I was on the transport team and since we had an unknown number of inpiduals we positioned ourselves in strategic positions to quickly transport them out. It turned out that only two inpiduals need transport and 3 of the 5 could walk out. We completed the entire scenario by about 9:30pm. It was great and we set a new record for speed of extraction.
In total, we were outside for about 9 hours by the end of our second scenario and slept really well. We finished up about 10:30 and were able to get in bed by 11:30.
