More medical

At one of our recent, regular weekly Emergency Response Team training meetings, we had great fun learning to use a Gamow bag: a bag you can seal and pressurize to help people who have altitude sickness simulate a lower altitude as a temporary treatment. One of our team members was eager to get inside and try it out.

Then, toward the end of our session, while we were sticking each other with needles to practice drawing blood, someone who had sustained an actual injury on the job came into Medical and we all got to help set up and practice using the x-ray machine.

So fascinating, and this continues to be an unexpectedly great part of my South Pole experience this year!

Weekly snapshot #13

How did we already get up to #13?!?!

Things have been a wee crazy around here lately. For a week, all the flights were getting cancelled and people who had been trying to leave were stuck because of weather in McMurdo. FINALLY a Herc made it in with 25 new people, but never made it out with the 25 people it was supposed to take away in exchange, because the weather shifted unexpectedly. Usually the Hercs never even turn off their engines in the cold of South Pole--they land, stay on deck for an hour while cargo and people are off-loaded and on-loaded, and then take off again asap. But this Herc had no choice but to park for the night, and by the morning its crew members had timed out on their on-duty limits and couldn't be the ones to fly the plane back. But also by the time the plane had been sitting here for just one night, it wasn't going to be able to start up and fly again safely without some help/repairs. So counting the flight crew, we had about 30 more people at the base than we could accommodate with rooms. People were sleeping in out-buildings, on couches in common areas, on mattresses in the gym. Amid all this chaos, we had a near-tragedy: a Twin Otter plane, trying to take off to evacuate a solo trekker in distress, lost a ski just before lift-off and veered off the runway. We had a full station emergency response, not knowing if anyone on board had survived. Miraculously, none of the three crew members on board had even a scratch on them. So scary, though. So then it took a couple more days before  they were able to complete the investigation of that incident, fly in parts on a Basler, and get the Twin Otter away from the runway. (Until all that happened, another Herc was not going to be able to fly in and use our runway to land and finally take all the extra people away.) In short, insanity. The galley has an electronic scroll that runs 24-7 with weather conditions, galley menus, recreation schedules, etc., and one of the slides on the scroll shows flight info with station population on the bottom. The station population cap is supposed to be 150, but we were already a bit higher than that when all this craziness started, and at some point the person who updates that scroll gave up listing the population and just wrote this:

Which I'm assuming means: "Too F**king Many."

But as I write this weekly snapshot, things have calmed down a bit. A working Herc finally made it in and out again, and our station population is down to a manageable 156. While the Herc that overnighted here is still stuck/parked here for reasons I'm not really in the loop on and we're still in need of more planes to get all kinds of backed-up cargo and people in and out of here, we're quickly barreling toward the end of the summer and station close. Less than three weeks to go, now. Summer-only people's redeployment dates back to New Zealand and subsequent travel plans are the major topic of conversation. And yesterday I took the pre-winter pregnancy test that all women who are wintering are required to take, so as to be sure there is no labor and delivery going on here before the station re-opens in late October/early November. I've been hearing people joke and talk about this rite of passage into winter since I was here last summer and now it was me actually taking the test. Hard to believe.

And, of course, the weekly snapshot. A gorgeous day, as usual for Tuesdays this summer!

SPICECore, again!

Thanks to some generous organizing souls, I got to take another trip out to the South Pole Ice Core drilling project this season to see them at work. A few weeks into season 2, they've made it down to about 1100 meters below the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet at South Pole and are hoping to make it as far as 1600 meters by the end of the summer. The building is much the same as it was when I posted about this project last year...

...but now the slices of ice that they gave us to hold are much older. This is SR with a 20,000 year-old piece of ice in his hands.

And this diagram shows how, once the cores are transported still frozen back to Denver, they are sawed up and distributed among different scientists with an interest in the project.

It was an eerily beautiful day out at the SPICECore site, too, which is a couple of miles from the main station. That's actually the sun in the sky up there, looking oddly moon-like.

Weekly snapshot #12

I just had to show you that not every day here is flawlessly sunny and gorgeous. I took this picture a couple of days before this week's snapshot.

But when Tuesday rolled around, things were back to beautiful, of course! Though the peak of summer is definitely over and it's cooling down again pretty consistently. I think the highest temp we reached this year was NEARLY zero degrees--as in, less than one degree below zero, but we never quite crossed the line. Now we're firmly back down below -20 most days.

Trauma team

I knew when I signed up for a full year at the South Pole that I would automatically be part of an Emergency Response Team, since our wintering group of 45 has to be totally self-sufficient once the last plane leaves in mid-February. What I didn't anticipate is that I would somehow get roped into being the team lead for the Medical/Trauma response team (talk about the blind leading the blind!) or that I would have the opportunity to continue to learn so much (well, considering I'm starting from nothing) about emergency medicine. Every Thursday morning, we have an hour-long Medical Team meeting (there are 8 of us on the team this summer, 4 of whom will be staying for the winter) followed by a second hour of Clinic Assistant training, where the awesome summer doc, Sarah, teaches us all kinds of things that in a million years I never imagined I would get to learn/try.

Last month, we learned how to start IVs...

...and practiced on each other. I managed to get one into my patient patient, fellow winter-over R, on the first try, which I hope wasn't a total fluke (SR sometimes says he'll let me practice on him and then sometimes recants, so we'll see) because it was very exciting. And then everyone wanted to try to put an IV into the veins of my hands, which look like easy targets, but turns out they roll a lot, and all I ended up with was some bruising. (This picture is for you, Mom, with your weird love of bruises!)

Very curious to see what else this year of unexpected medical training opportunities will bring! The day after the IV practice, we had our surprise monthly Emergency Response Team drill scenario, where this time a community member was pretending to be unconscious and severely bleeding while tangled up in a ladder in the -60 degree underground fuel arches, and we all had to figure out how extricate and treat and package and transport him to the medical center on the second floor of the station--an hour-long drill involving about 50 people. We're learning as we go what to do, and just hoping that each month's drill goes a little more smoothly than the previous month's--and above all that the occasion doesn't arise where we're in that sort of situation for real but that we'll be prepared to cope with it if it does. Luckily, among our winter-over crew, we'll have a doctor of emergency medicine, two professional physician's assistants, at least one professional EMT/fire-fighter, and an army medic--plus those rag-tag few of us who have just gotten some training along the way of this particular experience. Pretty decent for a group of 45, and in any case, what we'll have to work with, come what may!

Weekly snapshot #11

Before I give you the weekly snapshot, I just had to share that I'm starting to prepare for my winter job (which I'll explain more when the time comes), which involves learning to drive these loaders, which is how I spent my afternoon! I'm realizing that these pictures don't give any sense of scale, except that a bit of my shadow is cast in the second one. Suffice it to say, they are PLENTY big for my first experience of operating heavy equipment, and I couldn't quite believe that the guy who was training me just gave me a run-down of what does what and then set me loose in them to drive around and practice lifting pallets and moving them around in the cargo yard. I guess there's only one way to learn, but....perhaps we should all be very afraid? :) The first one is only for summer use and they get stored away for the winter, but the big daddy in the second picture is what I'll use when I need to move stuff around outside in the winter months.

Okay, and then here's your weekly snapshot. Probably looks just like all the other ones, I guess, though the summer is definitely on its way out--the wind felt mighty chilly today. And I swear, as I'm typing this, the sky outside is so white with the wind that you can't tell much of a difference between sky and snow. But of course, when I took the picture it looked flawless out as usual!

A bit for the New Year

I was a being a little cavalier when I wrote that post about New Year's not being a very big deal here. I forgot that New Year's Day is when the whole station goes outside to unveil the new geographic pole marker for the coming year. It was a fun ceremony, and the new marker is really interesting. Looks kind of like a planet...

...and the names of all of the 2015 winter-overs (who designed the marker for 2016) are engraved under the ring around the globe.

And it was beautiful weather while we were out there at 7pm on New Year's evening.

Then, I have to give huge props to all of the people who put a ton of effort into building a stage, setting up a sound system, and those who participated in bands who did an amazing job performing so we could have some live music that night for a party. They were all really impressive and it was great fun to listen and be part of the community here that evening.

Happy 2016!

Weekly snapshot #10

It's kind of becoming comical, how we can have blustery weather and unusual skies for much of a week, and then as soon as Tuesday rolls around and it's time for my weekly picture, it becomes perfectly blue out. But also kind of nice. So here's your snapshot for this week...

Ice Core

Happy New Year! Though we have celebration dinners for Thanksgiving and Christmas here, New Years' isn't such a big deal, especially because we work through New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, and then just have a two-day weekend. There will be a dance party, though, for those who can't call it New Year's without a party. :)

Last year I know I did a blog post about my visit to the South Pole Ice Core (SPICECore) drilling project, which was so much fun, and I think I also mentioned at some point that every Sunday evening during the summer season, one of the scientists here through the NSF gives a lecture about the project he or she is working on. One recent Sunday, it was a SPICECore scientist talking, and he even brought in bits of core samples taken that day for us to pass around (as they slowly melted). The thing that I thought was most incredible is the way the ice sparkled, due to the fact that it is compacted snow, and snow is composed mostly of air. So beautiful. I zoned out when he said how many years ago this snow would have fallen on the continent so I can't give you a number, but safe to say it's many hundreds of years ago--likely thousands. Wowzers.