Day 52: Post Call Days

For seven years (during medical school and residency) when I was on call it meant I stayed in the hospital to work. Most nights I slept a little, often I didn't sleep at all, and rarely I slept more than Sue did at home. With these call nights coming every 4-7 nights it could start to drain you a little. I still remember vividly the exhaustion felt during a full morning of clinic after a sleepless night on labor and delivery. Its never good when your doctor falls asleep as you are talking to them, is it?

Well, the reason I haven't posted for a few days is I got a reminder of what post call days are like. We went back out to the range on Monday morning. Our task this time was qualifying, both during the day and at night, on our crew served weapons (basically big machine guns mounted on the truck). There were 3 different weapons that we qualified in. Also, we test fired several foreign made weapons such as AK-47's, that we could possibly encounter while deployed. Rather than bore you with the details, I will tell you there were a lot of really loud "bangs", a lot of sweating, a 2 hour power outage at 2AM that we had to wait for, a colleague falling from a humvee and tearing his patellar tendon, and a lot of clean up from firing thousands of rounds. Overall, it was fun to shoot the weapons, but I have to say I am glad it is over. We left at 6AM on Monday and returned at 6AM on Tuesday. After sleeping for 2 hours, we then had to spend the rest of Tuesday cleaning thoroughly the weapons we had shot the day before--and when I say thorough I mean clean enough to eat with clean. It was pretty painful.

Consequently last night was an early to bed night. The whole experience reminded me of how glad I am that residency call nights are a thing of the past!

I have posted a few pictures and some explanations below although I was too tired to take any pictures from the afternoon or night portions of the exercise.

The "249"--the smallest of our machine guns

Firing the M2 0.5 Caliber machine gun--the gun and mount combined weight about 150 lb.Some of the ammunition for the day. Oh and for those of you who are wondering, yes I am growing a little mustache, although you may need to magnify the image some to see it.

A close up of the M2

Not the best video, but at least you can hear what things were like a little.