Briefly rejuvenated...

I just came back from a weekend in the mountains for an introduction to Wilderness Medicine training camping trip in the Sierras. I had been very hesitant about going, since there's this little test I'm supposed to be studying for, but fortunately, I felt bad about backing out. Even though the weekend didn't go much very much as planned, the trip was great.

After a night of pounding rain, we woke up in the morning to snow, a weather possibility none of us had expected. We spent most of that day huddled around the campfire, trying to make a decision about whether to stay or go while the sky pounded us with drizzle, heavy snow and an occasional, tempting ray of sun. We decided to stay, packed 9 of us into a tent and started learning our backcountry ABCDEs and SAMPLs, learned how to secure the C-spine with waterbottles and splint an open femur fracture with duct tape and a stick, and use safety pins to secure a broken arm. We made banana boats over the campfire and talked non-stop about medicine and med school, like med students tend to do. After a night of sub-freezing temperatures, we woke up to a beautiful day, which was spent "rescuing" one of our professors and attending physicians, who had been doused with ketchup and stuck under a tree.

Though I feel more than ever that I need to either take a serious wilderness medicine course or turn and run away the minute I see someone scrape an knee more than an hour away from real medical care, I do feel like I got a lot from the course. For instance, before you contemplate "carrying someone out", make sure you have done so once in your life, even if it was pretend and you only moved 10 feet. Carrying someone out is very hard. We had 7 people (all that fit around a large person's litter) and we could barely move a few yards -on flat ground and without backpacks on-- without getting exhausted. Nonetheless, I did learn some very important and useful things, and the whole experience made me want to run away for a month long wilderness medicine training course.

Anyway, the trip was great. Most importantly, it gave me my second wind...at least for the next few days. Which is probably a good thing because I've forgotten almost everything I learned before I left...