June 2007 Archives

In case you're wondering, the ongoing search for PC.com's lost archives continues apace, but let's give credit where credit is due:

Blogger.com isn't helping a bit.

No, it's the nice guys at the Fictional Company who are acting as my champions in this conflict. Jonathon (Hi, Jonathon!) and the FictCo crew have hosted this site since its inception, and (unlike Blogger.com) are responsive, helpful, and not hidden behind a wall of FAQ pages with too many technical terms for a layman to comprehend. They're also reasonably priced, particularly for such a full-service hosting company, and if you want to check them out at www.fictco.com, please feel free. Tell 'em PC sent you.

Meanwhile, I'm finally back from the Poconos, having acquired a new cousin (Hi, Catherine!) and a new life bird (the Chestnut-sided Warbler, #320 on the life list.) I've spent the last few days engaged primarily in driving. Starting Wednesday, I have spent at least two hours a day (and a total of twelve) in the car, which is pretty sad since I'm not actually commuting anywhere at the moment. Unfortunately, the boys have become rather butterfly-like in terms of socialization, and they've had three sleepovers in the last three nights, in three not-very-nearby locations. Thus, with Kelly actually at work, yours truly has been the go-to guy for transportation, which is why I've logged more hours behind the wheel than I have in any week since Dad and I drove to Ohio in March.

By contrast, I've managed only about six hours of writing, and there's still more revision to be done if I'm to get this draft of The Amazing Q into the proper shape. It's tightening up nicely, however, and I think the excitement level is going up as well. If I can just catch my breath for a few minutes, who knows? I might get this thing finished before our upcoming wedding anniversary. (July 12th, for those of you planning to send presents; I think the twenty-first is the Hard Liquor Anniversary...)

I'm also hoping to add something a little more substantial and/or entertaining to this journal soon; perhaps because of my concerns about the archive function, I've been somewhat reluctant to do much more than short, pointless Dear-Diary-here's-what-I-did-today entries. Soon, with FictCo's help, I'm sure I'll be read for something like, say, a pop-music-related list, or a lengthy analysis of some literary or ornithological phenomenon, or maybe at least a rude Dick Cheney joke or two.

In the meantime, let me offer you this:

First, a link to The Phil Nugent Experience. I don't know Phil, but I stumbled across a wonderfully cogent post of his thanks to a link (at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog, I think) and have enjoyed his extended musings on a variety of subjects for several months now. It probably helps that his name recalls that of the non-existent punk/metal band some of my buds and I concocted during idle hours in the CHHS library: Phil "Nugent" Gardinier and the Scottish Scrotums.

Second, a recommendation for the spiffy new album by Fountains of Wayne, Traffic and Weather. If you don't know them, but you're a fan of guitar-heavy pop in the vein of the Beatles/ Kinks/ XTC/ dB's/ Big Star/ Matthew Sweet, you're gonna love these guys. If the only thing you know by them is "Stacy's Mom," you'll love the big dance beat and huge pointy hooks of "Someone to Love." And if you were one of the clever people who picked up their debut, or Utopia Parkway, or Welcome Interstate Managers, you've probably already bought this new one and don't need my rec. Still, I'd like to end today's post with an appreciation of the wonderful opening verse of the gorgeous ballad "I-95":

They sell posters of girls washing cars,
Unicorns and stars,
Guns 'n' Roses album covers.
They've got most of the Barney DVDs,
Coffee mugs and T's
That say "Virginia Is for Lovers"
But it's not...

God, I love it.

7:59 PM

Whew.

THAT was intense.

For eight hours a day, since Saturday the 9th of June, with one all-too-brief Thursday off and one entire Saturday evening on, I have been going full-tilt in pursuit of my Wilderness First Responder certification. As of 2:00 yesterday, I am a WFR--pronounced "woofer"--for the next three years. (The good news: recertifying takes only TWO days.) This means I'm now certified to offer emergency medical care to people in the backcountry--defined for most purposes as greater than one hour from EMTs or doctors. The course, designed by SOLO (Stonehearth Open Learning Opportunities, based in Conway, NH) covers everything from anatomy to splint-making techniques to biological identification to differential diagnosis--sort of like a week-long marathon of Little House, M.D., in the Big Woods.

At times it was something close to a med school class, as when we learned about the often-confusing variations of shock, all of which share a basic underlying issue: pressure in the circulatory system is dropping. In cardiogenic shock, it's because the system's pump, the heart, isn't working properly. In hypovolemic shock, it's because there's not enough fluid in the system, usually due to either bleeding or dehydration. And in vasogenic shock, something is causing the vessels themselves to expand, resulting in less pressure--either septic shock (due to systemic infection, which is hard to treat in the backcountry), neurogenic shock (usually due to a spinal injury, which causes all the vessels below the injury to relax), or anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction--get an antihistamine into the patient ASAP, and have your Epi-Pen ready.)

At other times, however, it was an Outward Bound course with the added possibility of having someone go into cardiac arrest at any time. On Saturday night, for example, the eleven of us taking the course answered a 7:30 p.m. "distress" call down by the Rapidan River. Our instructors, Jon and Josh, had set up a scenario using two volunteer patients: our school chaplain, Geoff, who is himself a WFR and an accomplished outdoorsman, and my wife, Kelly. I'd had some inklings about this and had informed my team that I didn't want to work on Kelly--too many emotional entanglements, even in a practice scenario--so when we hiked into the forest and discovered her sitting at trailside, calling for someone to help her friend, I probably worked a little too hard to look past her to her buddy, which resulted in my missing the fact that Jon & Josh had made up her left leg to look like it had been impaled by a branch. In fact, I actually brushed against the branch in my effort to get down to Geoff, which is probably not going to qualify as good patient care.

Still, when we did get to Geoff, I felt a little less guilty about wanting to move quickly: he was lying in his sleeping bag under a tarp onto which a large dead branch had "fallen." He was really getting into the role, too, demanding that we not move the tarp, dammit! and struggling for breath. I was the "med leader" for this patient, but my team worked so smoothly that I had to do very little outside of diagnosis (which is my favorite part of the gig, honestly--I'm much better at that than at tying splints, certainly.) In the course of removing the log, the tarp, and the sleeping bag, all of which took us less than five minutes, I gave Geoff a primary survey and discovered a fairly nasty injury: a sucking chest wound.

Yes, I know, all chest wounds suck... but this was the true punctured-lung-producing-bloody-froth variety (technically called an open pneumothorax), with froth that Jon had carefully created with stage blood and Alka-Seltzer. It also happened to be an injury that I knew exactly how to treat: an occlusive dressing, such as a flexible piece of plastic, taped down on three sides to produce a flutter valve. It can be burped to let out the air that is escaping from the lung into the chest cavity and putting pressure on the lung, but no air can get into the cavity from outside the body. I did reject verisimilitude in one area, however: Geoff is a hairy guy, and I was not about to make him have to rip fur out of his chest with big strips of duct tape just so I could practice my dressing techniques. I taped down one side firmly and put the other tape mainly on the ziploc bag we were using for the valve. I didn't really want to re-enact the waxing scene from The Forty-Year-Old Virgin out in the woods, y'know?

Once we had his breathing stabilized, his head and spine immobile, and his tibia/fibula fracture splinted, the group set about building a litter from local wood and lots and lots of rope and twine that we carried in. Kelly's puncture was treated and she was sent ahead with two WFRs while the other eight of us worked on the not-inconsiderable task of getting the litter finished, getting Geoff onto the litter, and then carrying it half a mile along the narrow river trail to the junction with the broad uphill trail from the waterside to the forest edge. By the time we were finishing the litter, it was dark enough under the trees to require headlamps, and by the time we actually took up our burden--9:18 by my watch--we were almost entirely out of light. We had three people on a side, one trailer keeping Geoff's head stable and his attention focused, and one "litter boss" leading the party and scouting for potential hazards, including fallen logs, loose rocks, unexpected depressions at pathside, etc. And then the long haul began.

The heat and humidity were intense, so we were all sweating like mad before long--and poor Geoff, wrapped in fleeces atop a sleeping bag and tied into place, was doubtless the most miserable of all, but he remained completely in character. Within a few yards, however, the primary equation of the improvised litter had become clear to us: a trail is usually one shoulder-width apart, but a litter requires three--yours, the patient's, and the person on the other side of the litter. We had no real way to "tap out" and let new people take over as litter-bearers until we came up behind Kelly's little party--we were, I should note, moving damned quickly for eight people carrying a six-foot-one chaplain--and were able to switch roles, or at least positions. My back and legs, which bore the weight of not only one-sixth of Geoff but my pack and myself as well, were doing pretty well, but my cramping arms felt like I'd been clinging to a rock face for the last half-hour without a break. We took occasional stops to burp air out of Geoff's dressing, but we couldn't set the litter down without shifting the pressure of his bandages and straps to the point where his breathing was hampered. Despite the urgency of our situation and our shared desire to get it the hell over with, a walk that had taken perhaps ten minutes with only our packs took us forty-five with our patients. The last stretch, up a steep clay slope from riverside to forest edge, was actually a relief, because it was a wide enough trail for all of us to get good footing. We set Geoff's litter down for the last time at 10:03, debriefed, and went home to collapse. Three days later, my biceps are still a little stiff.

After that, the practical exams--splinting a broken ankle and diagnosing a 67-year-old woman with a stroke, in my case--and written test (on which I got a 96% and am still vaguely irritated that I didn't get 100%) were nothing special, almost anticlimactic. I've got my WFR card (and my CPR card, which was a bonus) tucked into my wallet; all I need now is a backwoods injury or illness, and I'm ready!

I'm really hoping I don't get one, though, especially this week. I'm heading up to my cousin's wedding in the Poconos tomorrow, and since there's no net access that I know of, I won't be able to post for about a week. In the meantime, you can ponder these questions:j

1) Can the manuscript of The Amazing Q be turned into a satisfactory children's book? (I sure hope so; I'll be working on it--by hand--in Pennsylvania.)

2) Will someone from Blogger.com ever help me figure out what's wrong with my archives? (Again, I hope so, but I'm not sure I'd bet that way during the next week.)

3) Can my Varied Buntings maintain their five-game lead in the Injustice League while I'm gone? Will my staff aces, John Smoltz and C.C. Sabathia, return to early-season form with big wins? Will Ryan Howard and Lance Berkman get their power numbers up? Can Joe Mauer come back from his leg injury and regain the skills that led me to draft him in round four? I guess I'll find out next week...

4) Is there any pleasure quite like that of getting CDs of old favorites? I recently dropped a few bucks on some old North Carolina favorites: the first two Don Dixon albums, Most of the Girls Like to Dance... and Romeo at Juilliard, and a single-CD collection of the first two albums by the dB's, Stands for Decibels and Repercussion. Considering how fabulous I have always felt "Bad Reputation" and "Neverland" were, I can't figure out how I never had any dB's in my collection before; I hear elements of R.E.M., Fountains of Wayne, and even the Pixies, so what's not to like? And considering that Girls contains Our Song--"Praying Mantis," which may or may not tell you a lot about Kelly's and my relationship--and that our son Dixon was named in part for its composer, it's ludicrous that we didn't have this on CD until now.

5) Can my summer vacation start soon?

Please?

5:02 PM

Thanks to five straight days of Wilderness First Responder instruction, I'm currently swimming in a sea of physiological information about everything from high-altitude pulmonary edema (bad) to open pneumothorax (also bad, but not as bad as tension pneumothorax) to principles of managing cardiogenic shock (bad) to treating flap avulsions (not necessarily bad, but grody.) And if I can get through four more days of class and scenarios, I'll be a real live WFR (pronounced "woofer"). Luckily I get today off to recharge (and to see if, maybe, I can solve the Mystery of the Disappearing Archives).

So far I've gotten to play a variety of roles during our simulations; in addition to serving as incident commander (whose job is, our instructor insists, to "drink coffee" and remain available for the rest of the WFR team), communications manager, medical leader, and SOAPNote writer, I've also gotten to play a patient. Patient is the most useless role, in some ways, but it's a) vital to the scenario, and b) the most fun. So far I've been a victim of spinal bruising due to a fall, a terrible mountain bike pig-pile that lacerated my forearm, and a broken ankle (caused by running for help when my buddy fell while rock-climbing). I also got to play the annoying friend of a trio of people with medical emergencies ranging from altitude sickness to diabetes.

Sometime in the next two days, we'll learn how to build litters to evacuate the poor saps who succumb to these complaints, and on Saturday night we'll actually gather to do a full rescue somewhere in the woods, but in the meantime, all I want is to chill out and not think about the difference between first-degree and second-degree frostbite. (Both produce skin that's pale, numb, and soft, but when the latter starts to thaw, it produces wet blisters or "blebs" of dead tissue. Ick.)

Also, I'm never going to climb above 18,000 feet. Just so you know.

4:19 PM

So. How's it going?

If you've noticed a pronounced absence of new posts here, well, that's because I've been hunkered down and doing a lot of stuff that didn't involve posting. Some of them were the usual year-end demands on my time--grading papers, writing exams, proctoring exams, grading exams, calculating term grades, writing grades and comments, etc.--but some of them were a little bit unusual. During the last weeks of school, for example, I had a heavier-than-usual rotation of dorm duty; some of that was due to my own ineptness in trading duties earlier in the year, and when they all came due at the end, I found myself spending waaaaaaay more time on dorm than at my keyboard. I've also been involved in a variety of negotiations over such matters as getting a new house (we're not getting one) and selling my children's book to an editor who's been looking at it for the last 20 months (she's not buying it). It's thus been a somewhat frustrating, as well as exhausting, few weeks.

The good news, however, is that I've already got the kids' book in the hands of another editor at another publishing house, and I'm hopeful that this one, at least, will be a bit quicker in responding yes or no. I'm done with classes, I've turned in all my grades and comments, I had an advisee win not one but TWO of the school's big awards on graduation day, and I'm preparing for what promises to be an enjoyable (if intense) Wilderness First Responder course next week. (Better still, I'm getting paid to be Woodberry's liaison with the course instructors, which basically means I have a key to the equipment shed and will be paid to unlock it when the instructors need stuff from it.)

Once the shed is locked for the last time and I have my WFR certification, I'll get a short vacation with the boys and my family. (Kelly, alas, has a work commitment she can't escape.) Then I'll return and spend a few weeks planning for our all-four-of-us trip to California, which we've been looking forward to for, oh, three years. Should be fun.

The one other fly in the ointment, which is one I've only recently discovered, is that my switch from the old to the new version of Blogger.com has apparently disabled this site's Archives function. The page you're now reading will hold about a half-dozen posts at once, and once they cycle off the bottom of this page, they're supposed to go to the Archives. Since about February, however, they haven't gone there. I've still got every post stored in my Blogger account, mind you, so they haven't vanished completely, but there's no way for anyone else to get access to them until I figure out how to get them from Blogger to the Archives. With any luck this won't be a huge problem, but Blogger isn't known for its responsiveness to my problems. We'll see if I can fix this trouble quickly or if it'll require a lot of head-to-desk contact first.

In the meantime, let me just say it loud and say it proud: It's summer vacation! I paid for it with all those Saturday morning classes and Sunday advisee meals, and I'm damn well going to enjoy it. Talk to you soon.

6:16 PM