The Plankowner Crew

Kandahar, Afghanistan








The quarterdeck to the new ROLE-3

I miss the old ROLE-3 hospital.  I am not alone.

One of the 'tent wards' of the old ROLE-3

We moved into our new building on May 23rd.  It has taken awhile to adjust.  Last night was the first time I managed to get real sleep in my makeshift bed in the new ROLE-3 while on call.  I woke up in the early morning, realizing I had actually made it into a pair of scrubs.  If I sleep at all on call it is usually with my camouflage uniform and boots on.   In the old ROLE-3 I generally crashed on a couch that would have been rejected by most college fraternities for whatever minutes (or rarely hours) I could snag between admissions or emergencies.

Chris, one of our surgeons, and I on moving day - the morning after the big rocket attack on KAF

It occurred to me as I rushed to the trauma bay to greet the three new "Alpha's" that this mad rush would have taken all of 5 seconds in the old, M*A*S*H-style ROLE-3, whereas now I run down the 100 yard hallway to the vast and impersonal trauma bay.  Sometimes I don't get a page and may find out that we have an ICU-inbound trauma patient only when they are halfway through their damage control surgery.



This would not have happened at the old ROLE-3.  When traumas arrived, virtually the entire hospital knew about it.  The ICU was all of 10 yards from the heart of the trauma bay.  The OR's were adjacent to the trauma bays.  Now one has to trek through a maze of automatic doors that may or may not open when you hit the silver button, dogleg left, right, left again to get to the well-hidden OR.  Impersonal.

I used to follow the patients into the OR to lend a hand when necessary, or just to learn what I could from the surgeons.  Rarely is that the case now, as I generally only don scrubs when I am on call.  You can't go into the new OR without scrubs, as it ought to be.

Jon moves central line kits to the new ROLE-3

I feel petulant complaining about moving into a shiny new hospital with its new paint, its fly-free interior, its waxy-shiny floors, its cavernous rooms.  We are Plankowners - a Navy tradition and honor which is bestowed only on the first crew to inhabit a ship, or in this case, a hospital.  In the old wooden ship Navy the crew which inhabited a ship at its commissioning would feel entitled to own a plank from the main deck, as they helped to "bring the ship alive," hence the designation "plankowner."

The old ICU now lies empty

We certainly put some blood, sweat, and tears in bringing this "ship" alive.  Although we didn't labor with bricks and mortar, we did put in dozens of hours into building and stocking shelves, operationally testing equipment, configuring operating rooms and hospital wards into working units, and so forth.  Many drills were conducted.  The night before we were to move in we endured a rocket attack on the base, about which I have written in detail.  We awoke the next morning, a few hours later, to begin moving a hospital filled from the night before's activities into the new and sterile ROLE-3.

It is a better facility, no doubt.  But it lacks character, charm, and the cohesiveness of the old ROLE-3.  Being that we were "crammed" into a makeshift facility of tents, plywood shacks, and CONEX boxes, we were much physically closer together, and figuratively closer as well.  I see my surgery colleagues a lot less these days, the hospital ward folks even less.

Plankowner certificate - easier to provide than the plank of a ship

As we become tighter as an ICU, we become more like acquaintances with the rest of the hospital.  We are the plankowners of a steel cargo ship, not a salty ship of the line with torn sails who has sailed the seven seas.