Update 6.1

Time, time, time to see what's become of me.

Yes, it is Update 6, actually 6, not premature 6 as we had last week. I know that as a 33 year old man I should be able to count to 10 without messing up, but I was home-schooled, what do you want from me? So this is the official 6^th Update, as opposed to the poxy #5 that came before.

There was an e-mail that went out to all hands today that said that we are not supposed to be posting information on Facebook. It said that there have been an awful lot of angry comments and that those comments are security breaches. So I am being careful not to tell too much. And I never post these on Facebook, but just in case, I will try not to say anything that anyone can use against me. Sort of a written version of pleading the Vth Amendment.

On the ever-popular bathroom news front: There is officially no water all day here in Camp Bastion. This makes the evening ablutions, brushing teeth before bed and so on, more difficult. It is much worse for the fellows who are just waking up and need to shave and don't get to shower. Today was the first day of the enforced water-fast and it was a stinky day in the hospital. When I woke up this evening the water was only on in one of the shower tents. It is the one I usually don't use, but I sacrificed my pride on the altar of cleanliness. (This as you may have heard, is next to Godliness.)

Not a whole lot has happened this week. It's been one of those work/sleep type weeks. The Patient of the Week was a 9 month old little girl who somehow drank diesel fuel. She was pretty adorable, though she had a unibrow. (A unibrow at 9 months is impressive to see. She kind of reminded me of Maggie Simpson's nemesis baby.) She would cry all night with this little cracking voice, due to burns on her esophagus from the diesel. It was really sad, but at the same time, how does your 9 month old get near enough to diesel to drink it? That seems like poor parenting or something.

MAN, is everyone seeing this latest Wikileaks stuff? Unbelievable, I guess there is a reason that private stuff is kept private, eh? The things that are said in these latest leaks about almost every world leader? Ouch! That PFC Manning should be in a lot more trouble than he is. None of that can be good, for anyone.

Did everyone have a happy Thanksgiving? It was pretty quiet here. I slept through the day, since I sleep through all the days, and by night-time there wasn't any turkey or stuffing left. I ate a microwave pad thai bowl. (This is not even as good as it sounds. If you read, "microwave pad thai" and thought, "Mmmm, that sounds delicious!" Then you're deluded. If you thought, "Yuck" you're still only half-way there.) It was kind of a bummer. The last Thanksgiving I had in the Navy that was similar was when I was in Camp LeJeune for Field Medical Training School. I was there for 8 weeks, but it seemed like forever and Thanksgiving fell about half-way through. I had duty all day on the holiday and thereby missed the entire celebratory dinner and party. At about 2200 (10PM) I managed to pass the duty on to the slightly inebriated on-coming watch and go to get food. As anyone who has spent time in Camp LeJeune, NC knows, there is nothing that exists there except bars, tattoo parlors, Wal-Mart and strip clubs. I ended up taking a taxi, alone, to Hooters, the only restaurant that was open after 9 on Thanksgiving Day, and eating chicken strips, alone. It was roundly depressing, but pretty standard for a military holiday.

And Christmas will no doubt be worse. But it's ok. There are WAY worse ways to spend the holidays. AND I had the good fortune to manage to offend a large group of British citizens. I walked into the Emergency Department (ED) on Thanksgiving and heard them talking about how it is a holiday that celebrates cultural genocide. Now, some of you will have heard my rant about this point of view before, and I really tried to hold it in. I walked away, but then I turned around and walked back. (Bizarrely, in the 15 seconds that I was gone, the topic had switched to the Twilight movies. Talk about cultural genocide! Am I right?!) I went back in and said, "I'm sorry, I tried to let it go, but I just can't. It's not a holiday about cultural genocide, it's a holiday about Creative Problem-Solving. You can blame the European cultures for wiping out an entire people all you'd like,  but the fact of the matter is, they were just striking first. There is no way that a Native American Nation that had things like guns and ships and cultural advances to rival the European nations wouldn't have done that exact same thing in reverse and we'd all be speaking Cree today. The fact that there WAS no Native American Nation who had those thing is evidence that they were not Creative Problem solvers. That is just cultural evolution. And if I might just mention: the Wheel. It's the single simplest machine. They didn't have it. If a Native American brave, of whatever tribe, killed an elk, he had to drag that elk to the village, on the ground. Sure, there were ingenious dragging devices, but no wheeled carts. Europeans had no more time to figure out basic technology than our Native Americans, they just bothered to figure them out. That's the difference. That's why it isn't cultural genocide, it's creative problem solving."

They asked me to leave.