A Few Medical Notes

Giving someone a ride to the hospital for a pelvic exam: Not the time to cheerily sign off with, "Have a good one!"

MRIs are my new favorite medical procedure. They give me candy, I get to stay modestly dressed, and sleep in a tube for forty-five minutes. Yes, admittedly, it's noisy. I spent the whole time pretending that I was somewhere in the belly of the Starship Enterprise (which accounted for the noise), and that nobody could find me and wake me to do one more productive thing. Bliss.

20 minutes before the end, the pretty technician woke me up to give me a shot. I'll assume that this is the case for all military, but it definitely seems to be the case with all sailors; We no longer care what's IN the shot. Nope. We get 9-12 shots over the course of Boot Camp, we get random ones periodically, and anytime we deploy we can probably count on another 12. All we care about is that the person on the other end of the needle is qualified. You're trained, fine, whatever. If you're NOT at least a corpsman, get yourself and your pokey stabby thing away from me.

We use corpsmen for everything. Corpsmen are roughly equivalent to EMTs for their training, plus double boot camp. If it's something really interesting, while you're on shore duty, you can go higher up the chain to get an actual doctor. Since ETs are in A School forever, this is considered our shore duty time - we'll be on sea duty for the five years after that. If we want to reenlist, we go on a 5-and-3 schedule until we change rates, make officer, or retire.

The women's health section of the hospital is the nicest place on base. Care has gone into the decor. Comfy furniture, in pleasing colors, and everyone - nurses especially - is actually nice to you. You have trouble remembering the proper way to respond when someone's truly nice to you - typically, when you're being nice to someone, you're physically helping them while being verbally abusive (but entertainingly so). Navy humor is actually really cutting in the real world, Adam says. We just don't think about it, because we're used to it. It's right up there with a back slap.

This is part of the reason I'm looking at both Wyoming and Alaska for after I get out. I will need time with the trees and letting go of an entire subculture before I can be released among regular civilization again.