mandatory fun

madigan army medical center is a very large teaching hospital. thusly, there is seemingly a lot of time set aside for students to learn in ways other than hands on opportunities....which i am not convinced is the way to go, but whatever. as it turns out, ebm DOES exist in the real world. or at least in the army. crap.

so thursdays are "academic" days...so in between rounds there are all sorts of exciting meetings to attend. first up, intern lecture and morning report. no biggie cause that's pretty much every day. then we got a break and a chance to catch up on paperwork followed by tumor board. not terribly exciting except for the ginormous teratoma we discussed... this one had no teeth, which was a little disappointing. marissa would've been totally crushed.

then we did the crux of thursday meetings....the "mandatory fun" bit. which i'd heard about. which i thought was sort of a joke, but it wasn't. and lisa's scraped and bruised legs, ranti's nearly blown orbit, erin's hamstring pull, and everyone else's grass stained scrubs tell the true tale behind the steam that is blown off when the entire surgical staff gets together to play a game of full contact ultimate soccer. nothing like full on ego's, testosterone galore, ranger-danger tactics, screaming, and army style competition to have to suddenly have to negotiate...while running as fast as you can trying to prove something to someone even if you don't have a clue... not unlike being in the OR, minus the kicking of the ball bit. it was no-holds barred and brutal, to tell the truth. i was a little bit shocked at the lack of apologies and glad when it was over since it was rapidly becoming not fun. at all. on the bright side, it was a gorgeous day to be outside, and now i know who i NEVER want to deal with again. ever. on any level.

and then back inside for the m & m (morbidity and mortality) conference. i wonder how well it would go over next time if i brought a bag of m & m's to that meeting?
anyway...basically just reviewed all the screwing up that was done in the past week, and who died as a result of it. not that any blaming was done, (ahem) but to live and learn and never make that mistake again. today i learned that if over 75% of your liver is a cancerous tumor, then surgery is NOT a good option for you.

but the total highlight of my day was getting to eat lunch for REAL for the first time (not just shoving down a pb and j in 3 minutes in the locker room inbetween cases)...in the dining hall and all. at high noon. when it's packed. but the treat in all the chaos of this event was getting to share a table with an old timer who told me the most fabulous stories of his youth. like what it was like to grow up on a farm in minnesota in the 30's and 40's and being a farmer's son, getting relegated to fly the crop duster at the tender age of 14, and crashing it at the age of 15. (sorry dad, crashed the plane...) puttered around in high school, never graduated...(more on that later) and saw all his friends going off to korea, so he thought he'd give the army a go...but he had flat feet and they wouldn't take him. so he walked dejectedly out of the recruiter's office, not wanting to be the only one left behind when his buddies went to war...and ran into the air force recruiter who said, sure! we'll take you. and just like that, he was shipped to mississipi to attend fighter pilot school. which is where he met his wife of 56 years. they used to go out on dates to a bar down there where they would listen to a certain elvis presley play (live)...and they would sadly shake their heads and think that poor kid, he'll NEVER make it. we got a good laugh out of that one.

and the rest of lunch just sort of melted away as i sat chit chatting with this gentleman, i never did get his name. he was a fighter pilot in korea and vietnam, flew everything the air force had, he said. and then he blinked and his 20 years was up and they told him it was time to retire. in the 20 years he'd been in, he and his family moved 21 times. but they kept coming back to mc chord afb (just north of ft. lewis) and liked it, so they stuck around. when he got out of the military, he found himself unsure of what to do. it was the early 70's and boeing had just laid off thousands. the job market wasn't looking so good. he wanted to be home with his family and not fly anymore. so with the GI bill he went back to community college where, incidentally, he got in because they asked if he had been to high school and he said yes. they didn't ask him if he had graduated. we got another good laugh out of that one. so he became an accountant. a year later the bank he was working for asked if he knew anything about computers. and they sent him back to school to become a programmer. and that was that.

now he's retired for good. he and his wife had 5 kids, all but 1 military as well, including a west point grad who is now just retiring from the military as a colonel. he joked he wasn't sure if he should call him "son" or "sir"....and there was even more laughing.

then we talked for a while about something that was clearly on his mind, the idea of where people of our generation (gen X, gen Y, call us what you will) feel like they have no duty to their country anymore. that there is no great call for civil service and he just couldn't seem to wrap his head around the thought that we just take everything for granted. that we are too self involved to consider country before anything else, or have any sense of national pride. that we are too selfish to commit time to national security and well being, and that we are to petty and wrapped in our anti-reality personal technology gadgets to care. ouch. for a moment i wished i wasn't a civilian. and i've been thinking on it every since.

he was accompanying his wife for cataract surgery this afternoon, and all of a sudden got teary about leaving her alone up in the opthamology office and excused himself to go be with her. damned if i didn't get all teary too.