Life in McMurdo

Things are starting to settle down and I am getting in to the groove of living and working here. The clinic is not very busy yet, because we are still waiting for a lot more people to show up here. A lot of the flights to get down here has been delayed and normally there would be one flight a day from Christchurch to here and it has been one flight a week. Most of the delays have been caused by weather either here or in between here and Christchurch.

Our military collegues arrived 2 days ago. The flight surgeon is Dr Tom Watts from South Carolina, Flight Nurse is Emelie and Tech is Alfredo. They are both stationed in Okinawa. The three of them are going to be here for approx 4 weeks. After that we are getting a new crew.

The LC-130s should arrive sometime next week, so currently we don't have any aircrafts that are stationed here capable of going to New Zealand and due to the delays most of the time there are no flights back to Christchurch. I guess it is a good thing that nobody has needed to be transported to Christchurch from here yet.

We are preparing for our annual MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) drill. Our job as medical providers is to train and prepare other staff to become part of the medical team. We have a fair amount of EMTs, WFRs and a few paramedics available to us. The drill is scheduled sometime next month so we have a few weeks to train and prepare. In our training it will be training people to do x-rays, run the lab and the walking blood bank. The volunteers that showed up today seems to be really positive and wants to be part of this. In reality if there would be a MCI the whole station would be activated and everybody would have a role to fill.

Things I found in the store here

At 2130 last night 10/23/13, no more sunsets this year

Today I got to experience how cold and windy it can be down here. It is -7.6F (-22C) and with windchill of -45.4F (-43C). Happy that I don't have to be outside for too long.