Leaving for a conventional military deployment has come a long ways since the days of GIs stepping out to a rusty old plane hell bound to fight the Germans. The images of the lonely soldier dragging his olive drab bag down a flight line with a tearful wife holding a newborn baby in his wake [...]
Archive for the ‘Military’ Category
It’s incredibly difficult to be a good surgical resident when it’s the exact opposite of anything I self identify with. Working in the TRU is a lot of fun, and in my opinion it’s the reason the Air Force sends us to Shock Trauma. Unfortunately, call is only every third night, although working more than [...]
The Trauma Resuscitation Unit, or “TRU,” as it’s known, is probably the number one place you don’t want to find yourself after a night of barhopping or drunk driving in Baltimore. The TRU is kind of like an emergency department, except the only rooms are trauma bays. Each bay comes stocked with everything a team [...]
In non-acronym language it stands for the “Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills”. CSTARS is essentially the military’s solution to get Docs, nurses, and medics that are about to deploy some trauma training. There are a couple of sites where they send us, but the main one, and the one I find myself [...]
The bus dropped us off somewhere in the cold rainy Washington state wilderness. We broke off into our elements and started the short ½ mile or so hike to our campground. Upon seeing our campsite I got excited as there was a parachute suspended above a small clearing. Naturally I thought this is where we [...]
SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. Each branch of the military has a school that teaches the fundamentals of SERE, in the Air Force there is a small isolated compound on Fairchild AFB outside of Spokane, Washington devoted to teaching these skills. The main SERE course is about a month long and is [...]
For the next several months I’m being submerged into a training pipeline that is designed to get me spun up to the point of being a fully capable special ops flight doc. After completing the AMP course (aerospace medical primary) in San Antonio I move onto the first evolution in this training known as SERE [...]
For the next several months I’ll be engaging in various training programs with the idea of getting me “spun up” to be a fully functional flight surgeon. The first indoctrination of this training pipeline is a six-week course at Brooks City Base in San Antonio known as the aerospace medical primary course. The purpose of [...]
Here, read this abbreviated version of my personal statement for ERAS, it sums up what I’ve decided to to in that cheesy way only a personal statement can. ————————————————————————————- Making the decision to delay my residency and devote a few years of my life to being a flight surgeon in the Air Force was [...]
I found this article I thought I would share. Its about one of the Deans at Stanford med school who was a flight surgeon in the Air Force national guard for 26 years. Its a short gritty, truthful, and in my opinion inspiring account of some of his deployments in Iraq…. http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2007summer/winslow.html ————————————————- A doctor [...]
