Off and Running Again
I made it home Friday night. After a couple of weeks of 12 hour days, needles, trauma lanes, and applied tourniquets, I am a little battered but the better for it. Although ours was a shortened version of the course designed for soldiers fresh off deployment, all the good stuff was there. I got lots of great new information on medical equipment and training, as well as lots of practice on using it. Combat Medic training doesn’t pull punches. Yes, we use dummies and lots of fake blood, but every IV is placed on fellow soldiers, Tourniquets are applied for real on classmates, and we play for real. The culmination being a series of “lanes” where we have to treat patients under duress and combat simulation. The only things we “missed out” on were classes on stuff we already knew from having used it daily in Iraq.
