It's now September, so another calendar month is gone by. August was a fairly good month in retrospect. I left Jalalabad on August 6th and came to FOB Blessing which has turned out to be a positive change in most aspects. I'm pretty happy with the living arrangements, and I have settled into a comfortable routine here.
In the last month I have seen more serious trauma than I saw during my whole OIF deployment. That statement must be qualified by the fact that we didn't have a steady supply of local nationals that we were seeing and Iraq hadn't really heated up yet during my time there. After four years in Occupational Medicine I was feeling pretty rusty on trauma management, but just a few weeks here can knock a lot of rust off. Yesterday, I placed a chest tube in a local national that was hit by shrapnel and then we evacuated him to Jalalabad for further care.
Things to look forward to in the next month include the completion (hopefully) of the new dining facility which will result in the relocation of the MWR facility to the former mess hall area (which will allow more room) and possibly a small PX being put into the previous MWR facility. September and October are still fairly busy from an operational standpoint, so we will probably continue to get a steady flow of trauma patients.