Got my first care package today, courtesy of the USO. Mine was from a young person named Dakota, and her note is above. It was our departing gift as we leave tomorrow for our next stop on our journey - the Army "bootcamp" portion of our odyssey. I go to Ft Lewis, WA and depart from our quarters at 4am tomorrow to catch the early plane.
We also finally got our seabags full of our camouflage gear, boots, hats, tee-shirts, socks, and so on. That was exciting. We are starting to feel like soldiers, even though we are really mostly doctors, nurses, and corpsmen. For the next 4 weeks we must put on our best soldier faces though.
Last night, a former fellow internal medicine resident from Bethesda, Sanh Gao and his wife Fenney took Corey and me out for dinner. It was a fairly posh seafood restaurant in Virginia Beach. Sanh chose seafood because "you aren't going to have that for awhile." Sanh had recently gotten back from Kandahar and was chock-full of useful information like our day-to-day routines, call schedules, what it was like to work with non-US NATO forces, and particular challenges he faced (best: trying to put in a central venous catheter into an ICU patient, in sterile gown and gloves, when a mortar attack occurred -- and then had to put on battle gear). Sanh had a great attitude about the whole endeavor and made us feel comfortable about what we were about to embark upon. He was also the one who gave me the idea for this blog.I'd like to send a shout out to Dakota, wherever she might be:
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