Got to take someone to the hospital. Will report more soon.

UPDATE (four hours later): A few days ago (on the boat), the corporals in my shop agreed that we'd go to get some curry at CoCo's the night we got back. So when at 1700 Cpl O_ walked into my room, I first thought he was coming to get me for that.

Then I got a look at him. He was clearly in medical difficulty. Sad to say, I'm now familiar with signs of pulmonary problems, and he was having them. He had a stabbing pain under and below his sternum, and was unable to breath as deeply as he needed to.

He'd really come to see my roommate, who's a corpsman. But I could see his distress too. Doc was wondering if it might just be severe acid reflux, but then, we'd been doing a great deal of hard labor in the brutal heat that morning while unloading gear, and a heart attack was certainly a possibility. So Doc got him downstairs while I rounded up the duty driver to get him to the hospital.

Our squadron duty driver was all the way at White Beach, getting people off the ship. That was a no-go. So I called the unit that we share our barracks with. Their guy was also a half-hour away. Then I called for the group driver, that being the next higher level of command. Their driver had gone to chow and accidentally left his cell phone in the office.

In the trade of war, we call this "friction"- when things are going wrong, small problems start piling up and everything gets very hard. I started banging on doors, looking for someone that had a vehicle and was sober. Finally we ran down another corpsman from a different barracks who could take us. I was about to send one of my subordinates to the taxi stand.

We got to the hospital, and as you might imagine, the triage nurse took "male, chest pain, difficulty breathing" quite seriously. I'm not a relative, so I had to hang out in the waiting room.

Good news is, he's not having a heart attack. Bad news is, he's not having acid reflux either. So he's staying overnight while they steal all sorts of his precious bodily fluids, and he's getting scanned by many of the more interesting devices known to man. After we'd been there about four hours, I got sent home, as they wanted to close the waiting room. So we left him with lots of phone numbers to call if he gets discharged overnight. Which I was told he probably wouldn't be, but who knows.

So we drove back to the barracks, and I got mobbed. Marines are brothers. When I came back without O_, people were worried. So I had to pass what little I knew on to a few key people that will then tell everyone else in the barracks. Meanwhile, I had to work the phones- I had to call the duty officer, the Sergeant Major, my Gunny, and Sgt R_, all in a row, to pass what I know. I may get a call from the CO, too. When someone gets hospitalized, the chain of command gets involved in a real hurry.

So what should be a night of happy celebration in the barracks, is kind of grim tonight. People are worried. Plus, we've got to go to work tomorrow, that kind of damps things down too.

Posted by: Boviate at 03:53 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 586 words, total size 3 kb.