I Would Like to Thank the Academy

That glorious sensation of clean from yesterday didn't last long. Yes, we have achieved a relative steady-state of non-stinkyness, but today we added a whole new level of mess--moulage. Moulage is French for "big, simulated-bloody mess."

Our mission for today was to get hurt. And sick. And unstable. And occasionally die. All in the name of helping the rising MS-4s practice how to deal with hurt, sick, unstable and dead people. We bussed out to the central moulage site and deposited our stuff on a series of cots under the holding area tent. We then dug through old donated cammies and each found suitable ones to evolve into bloody messes. I pulled a set of soft green Marine digies belonging to someone named Evans that looked a little bit like pajamas on me. Command Central, starring Tim Gotham, Rebecca Hardy, and Mike Cullen, would recruit us in teams of two to eight, and hand us all cards with a set injury or illness on them, including relevant medical history, precipitating factors, vital signs, and what would reasonably be expected from an MS-4 treating us. If that injury involved diarrhea, out popped a baby suction bulb and some carmel-colored dyed applesauce. If the injury involved a scrape or fragmentation wound, out popped the scar wax and small silver wads of gum wrappers. If the injury involved an arterial bleed, out popped an IV bag with a control valve filled with super-saturated red cool-aid. Then Ben Nye make-up, fresh scab, and stage blood were layered on for color blending.

But, really, an injury is only as good as the Oscar-caliber theatrical performance behind it. Which was why I was terribly disappointed that my first card was to report to sick call with ear pain and itching. But then the first set of MS-4s upon whose camp we were assigned to stumble were dreadfully disorganized, having just arrived and set up their gear when Nicole Baker with back pain, Jen Nuetzi with blaster diarrhea, Anthon Lemon with an asthma attack, Kevin Gray with alcohol-induced gastro-esophageal reflux, and I arrived on the scene. Their lack of organization slowed them down, and in short order our whining had escalated. They were still in the process of slowly attempting to effectively treat our maladies when Loren wandered up with two large bleeding wounds on his shoulder to report that he, Jaime Piercy, Andrew Fisher, and Tara McClusky had been badly injured in a firefight. Nicole and I had already turned up the griping big time because of the wait, but this time we saw our chance to put something Oscar-worthy on the table and tried to run to Loren and help our friends. They tackled me. It took two of them. Anthon would have helped me out if he weren't in the middle of his asthma attack. On top of the huge collection of meds they had already given for my ear, they sedated me and strapped me to a litter. By the time the ambulance came to pick up Anthon and me, they realized that they couldn't give away a litter to send me, so they lowered the previous dosage of sedatives until I was capable of walking. Which meant I was conscious enough for another round of freaking out when the ambulance landed at EMED. There, they seemed to have a little better idea of how to calm down a hysterical patient (or, at least, in my Method acting, I wanted to calm down because of their treatment of me, whereas the other group's had only encouraged me to escalate). Finally, they just let Anthon come and keep an eye on me, until headquarters demanded we be evacuated and returned to come be patients again.

I was quickly turned around into the moulage station, where a series of gum-wrapper foil fragmentation wounds were waxed into my shoulder and covered in stage blood. Yummy. Chris Oching had been similarly pelted, Andrew Fisher was burned all over his face and hands, and Anthon was hit in the calf. Our scenario was that we had been caught in a firefight, and were found on the battlefield. Vivina McGintley won the Oscar on that one with massive abdominal injuries. I have to say, after all our tactical movement work last week, the MS-4s come off as pretty pathetic at it. They didn't have much of offensive line, so Anthon and I, as marines, kept asking for a weapon after our initial care under fire so we could get back in the fight and fend off the punks who had attacked us. Finally, one of the MS-4s gave Anthon his rubber duckie (a big no-no), and another one gave me a 9mm caliber stick. While they ran around like crazy trying to litter-carry ambulatory patients, we fended off hostile action closing in. But as soon as they brought me back into the camp in my triage area, someone who had been on the staff at the morning's sick call took away my stick-gun because she thought I was way too unstable to be carrying one. Which left no one guarding 180 degrees of their perimeter, a fact that upset me a ton more than it upset them. My bleeding wasn't serious, so they put a clean dressing over it and gave me morphine and a pre-emptive low-dose sedative--this time not taking any chances. They didn't sedate Chris, but he also would have grabbed any weapon lying around to pull security had he had the chance.

This time, I was evacuated back to the moulage tent get a skull fracture, with drips of blood oozing beside my nose and down my cheeks and eyes. Our Humvee had hit an IED and I was thrown from the vehicle onto my forehead. With pupils dilated and unreactive, I had a hemorrhage compressing my midbrain, and had no chance of ever regaining consciousness. They triaged me as expectant and got to me last. I have to say, the secondary survey the first medic performed on me included a whole lot more hands on breasts than the one we were taught. I was torn between staying in character within my coma and reminding him that he'd already checked there. A lot. Since I was the only patient left, they intubated me, but not until after a relatively long ethical deliberation. But once intubated, then they had to deal with me, so they sent over the chaplain, who kept trying to give me a poncho. After last week, the little trickle of rain was hardly even worth noticing. He then quizzed me--in my comatose state--about what the process is to return the body of a fallen American serviceman to his or her family. "What do you make sure to include in the bag with the body?" "Air freshener."

When I was finally evacuated, I came back to find that Anthon had been sent to the real-world medical tent because he was having a reaction on the tops of his feet to the make-up remover solvents. I grabbed his stuff and Sergeant Flores and I escorted him back to the dorms. Even though I came back in time for my next assignment--loss of hearing subsequent to a cold--they had already passed it on to someone else, so I got...arterial bleeding. Yay! A spurter, with it's own little squeeze-activated release mechanism. It also came with the bonus of altered mental status. This time, rather than belligerent, I went with loopy. It didn't make them freak out nearly so much. They got a tourniquet on me right away, and were the first of three groups to see me bleeding who actually bothered to cover the wound. In a series of progressively more pleasant and competent MS-4s, I was swept up through triage, initial eval and treatment, and orthopedic surgery, which was held in this beautiful inflatable clean plastic tent.

Here at Bushmaster, they seem so much more paranoid about our safety than they were at Kerkesner--we aren't to walk through the woods without chem lights and k-pots in the dark and they are attempting to enforce hydration. And then they go and pile sixteen of us on the back floor of an unmarked white van to drive on a highway. They are also beyond paranoid about making sure they have an accounting of every body on the exercise, having us check in and out of every area we use. One gets the suspicion they've lost people before. One also mourns a little that we can't have Major Burns running this by our year--he would remember to treat us like grown-ups, and would not let us get away with some of the slackage we've seen.

After my post-op evacuation, I had a few minutes to scarf some food before I was at it again, this time with a dry cough. That one was painful to simulate, and doing it too much brings on dizziness. The faculty and fourth years kept coming back to me to tell me I could drink water. Jen got bloody diarrhea, Seamus Cobb had a spontaneous pneumothorax, and Brian Pomerantz got to attack somebody. We could see how the length of the day was beginning to wear on them. It's been kinda fun to listen to the dialogues between the faculty and students about best course of action with our various complaints. It makes me excited to start getting into Pharmacology and Pathology and clinical rotations, and not just so we can show them up in two years.

When we arrived at the barracks, there was a mad rush for the showers. We're not quite ready to sacrifice that whole clean thing so quickly just yet.