Air evac messes

It's been awhile since my last post, because I'm generally too wiped out to motivate myself to sit and type out what happened that day, but we had an air evac come in from Landstuhl (Army hospital in Germany) on Friday that warrants a post.

The two intensive care teams--MICU and SICU (medical ICU and surgical ICU) split the evacuees, so no team gets slammed if the Iraqis and Afghanis had a busy week. There was only one on Friday (thankfully), and we had fewer patients, so we took him. I was looking through his discharge records from Landstuhl and saw that he had facial burns, so I asked why he didn't go to BAMC (Brooke Army Medical Center, in San Antonio). Apparently, the person doing triage for the air evacs thought that his orthopedic injuries were more severe (still has all his limbs, but both of his arms have wound vacs), which is ridiculous, because they have orthopedists at BAMC as well.

Anyway, he showed up, and the surgeons (the orthopods and the general surgeons) got to work on taking down his wounds, and the general surgery chief resident said, "He should be at BAMC. He needs to get these burns taken care of." So I called the air evac office at WRAMC and explained the situation. The air evac nurse came up and handed me a pile of papers, and said, "To transfer him to BAMC on the flight at 0600 tomorrow, you need to get an accepting physician and fill these out, then contact pharmacy and get the medications for transfer sent up. Oh, and our office is closing in an hour and a half. If you don't get it done, there will be another flight on Monday." Well, burn treatments run on a tight schedule, so we knew we had to get him to BAMC as soon as possible, so we went to work, and to make a very long and complicated story short, we got an accepting burn surgeon and filled out the papers in time, and then spent the next several hours coordinating things between surgeons, with pharmacy, and filling out documentation. So I didn't get any sleep that night, but it was worth it, because I did something for this soldier that's going to make a difference to him. I'm never going to actually fight in a war; my job in the Army is to take care of those who do, and doing that is worth a sleepless night every now and then.