Corpsman

Chance Meeting with Jarheads.

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Yesterday evening I was lucky enough to run into a few fellow veterans while I was picking up dinner, which is very rare where I live. I ended up having a beer with them because… well, camraderie. I’m an old Corpsman, and serving with the Marines was one of the best experiences of my life. It made me grow, it allowed me to think on my feet, and it allowed me to be a part of something greater than myself.

Civilians won’t understand. They can’t possibly understand. What makes it worse is that most people who know me know that I’m not a big fan of war, or harming others – but that wasn’t my job. Most of the time, a Navy Corpsman is embedded with his beloved Jarheads, gets razzed for being in the Navy (nowadays, they call us Ubers), and so on.

BUT. These are experiences the average civilian won’t understand, and when veterans get together… we may have never met each other before, but there’s a camraderie that I have never found better.

There were things I did that were stupid during that time, just like everyone else, but I had the ability to do those stupid things with a safety net and guides. I also got to do very smart things, which I did and fortunately that outweighed the stupid stuff.

My Marines were in good health, despite themselves, and myself and other Corpsmen worked hard to assure that.

It’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic over a beer or two. They went their way, I went mine, and all was well in the Universe.

They certainly made my day. Good times.

Last Moments

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Reading Last Days by ThatNursePatty reminded me of something. My medical experience as a Hospital Corpsman was largely emergency medicine, and I rarely got to follow up on patients we admitted. I tried because it’s good to get feedback from the wards, such as why they hated our antecubital IVs.

It was an overcast day as I pulled into the apartment complex in New Smyrna Beach when in the middle of the roadway a woman flagged me down, a phone in one hand, tears streaming down her face. I pulled over and got out.

She was someone I had not seen before, and she was screaming at a million miles an hour. Following the general direction where she was waving I found an elderly man laying on the ground, and remembering my old days as a Navy Corpsman, I did a quick assessment. He was unresponsive.

There was a pool of blood on the ground below his head and I could not get an answer from the screaming woman how he had gotten on the ground. I told her in the calmest voice I could she needed to call 911 and get an ambulance there, but she was… not listening, screaming instead, and finally I projected my voice and got her attention.

She called, and promptly started screaming into the phone at the poor 911 person, and I could hear it going nowhere.

My assessment of what I now knew was her father was a possible C-Spine injury, eyes not equal or reacting to light, and a really thready pulse with low respirations and decreasing. I was holding a rag I had grabbed from my car against the back of his head, where the wound was. The blood on the ground wasn’t clotting, he’d lost at least a pint on the asphalt before I got there and it wasn’t coagulating. I suspected he was on blood thinners. CPR wasn’t called for at this time, so I just maintained his C-spine while keeping my fingers on his carotid so I could keep track of his pulse.

I got her to come over and place the phone on my shoulder so I could talk to the 911 operator. I fell back easily into ER talk, giving the operator a rundown which she couldn’t understand. She couldn’t connect me to the ambulance. She couldn’t connect me to an ER to talk to a doctor. I knew this old man didn’t have the 15 minutes she said it would take for the ambulance to get there.

She was back in the middle of the road screaming her dismay at the Universe, and her father was not likely to last that long. His pulse became increasingly thready, his respirations became slower and more relaxed, and I called her over to hold his hand and talk to him. She was, unfortunately, not done with the Universe, and still had much to say to the Universe. He was slipping away.

I spoke to him quietly,focused on him, and I waited while counting his respirations, feeling his pulse slip away, managing his head wound as best I could while keeping his neck in line.

The ambulance eventually arrived, and I did my handoff to the paramedics. He was pretty much gone, his pulse still faintly there, shallow respirations down to about 4 a minute. I gave one paramedic the look, he nodded curtly and quietly, and I got up and walked to my car and drove off to my parking spot for my apartment.

I would find out that he didn’t make it, as I expected. Too much time had been lost. His daughter would end up finding me the next day and thanking me for helping, breaking down into tears. She had been so wrapped up in herself she had not spent the time with him when she could have, but that was not for me to tell her. It wasn’t even necessarily right for me to tell her.

In the moment, people react to emergencies in different ways. Not everyone is trained for them. Not everyone is good at them. And when it’s a person we care about we become compromised, some more than others, but we all become compromised in one way or the other.

I don’t know what happened to her. I saw her off and on over the course of a few months. She kept to herself, possibly reliving that time herself in dark moments. Did she have regrets? Would she have them? I do not know.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a thing, and it wouldn’t be the last. People thought highly of me in that complex afterward.

I hadn’t saved his life. I hadn’t even made it better for the short time we were in contact. Hopefully he was a little more comfortable. In the end, that’s what we can do on the worst day:

Make someone a little more comfortable.