Ft. Meade Preventive Medicine

I've been rotating in the preventive medicine department at Ft. Meade for a little over four weeks now, and have just been procrastinating pretty bad about writing about it. So here's finally a blog entry about the wonderfulness of Ft. Meade.

First of all, there's the drive, which is the map above. It's 33 miles, according to GoogleMaps, which doesn't seem like a lot, until you factor in DC-area traffic. Fortunately, most people are coming into DC in the morning and leaving in the afternoon, and I'm doing the opposite, so it only takes about 50 minutes to go those 33 miles. It's still far too much time in the car, and even with buying gas on base (usually a few cents/gallon cheaper than outside the base), it's pretty expensive.

My schedule's been a little erratic for this rotation; I'll try to simplify it as much as possible:

Monday and Tuesday: Occupational medicine clinic (ugh). This is mostly pre-employment physicals for jobs around base, such as child care, firefighters, and hazardous material handlers (there were a few other jobs, but you get the idea). We also do pre-deployment physicals for Army civilians who are deploying, which is something fairly new at this clinic. Because they haven't been doing it very long, they don't have a protocol for it, so things are pretty chaotic, and it's a ton of work. It takes quite a lot to be able to say, "okay, you're healthy enough to deploy. Go forth, have fun, and make lots and lots of money."

Wednesday: Fortunately, I get to go to WRAIR for didactics on Wednesdays (six mile drive instead of 33). Last week we were learning about recruit medicine and went down to Quantico to do sick call for the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. That was pretty fun, but I am glad I'm not a Marine. There's something about not being allowed personal pronouns that I don't think I'd deal with very well ("This candidate's leg has been hurting since yesterday" is how they say that their leg hurts).

Thursday: Random other clinical stuff at Ft. Meade, including more of the pre-deployment physicals, travel clinic, and work injuries. I do love travel clinic, that's for sure.

Friday: My preceptor's admin day, so I usually tag along with the Environmental Health tech to do inspections. There are quite a few places on base that need to be inspected monthly, including all of the kitchens (such as the dining facility, Club Meade, the golf course, bowling alley, child care kitchens, etc), the child care centers themselves, the pool, and home-based day care centers (of which there are about 40 on base; four or so will be inspected monthly, at random). There are also places that have to be inspected quarterly, including the barber shop and the gym. Quite a lot of stuff on base that has to be inspected.

And then I have weekends off, which is nice. My summer/fall running season ended on Sunday with the Marine Corps 10K, so now I have the weekends to be a bit more lazy. Well, this weekend, the parents are coming into town, so I'll have to keep them entertained, but other than that, a bit lazy in general.