Dispatches from the Bottom of the World: Odd Jobs

As you might have gathered, we are a pretty small community down here at the South Pole. So, in addition to the job we each got hired to do, everybody is expected to help out with other jobs around the station. For example, everybody rotates through the dish pit about once a month. On house-mouse Mondays we get together with our team and tackle the cleaning for some portion of the station, whether it is cleaning the bathrooms, moping a hall, or organizing the arts & crafts room. My team, Lynette, John O, and myself, is pretty awesome. We do a good job. Six of us have volunteered to be peer-counselors for the season, so we’ll be starting training for that soon.

Probably the most important of our extra jobs is the emergency response team. There are four teams on station and everyone is on one of them. The teams are the fire brigade, the hasty team (first ones on site to evaluate), the transport team, and the trauma team (my team). In order to be ready to go if there is an emergency situation, we’ve got training once a week, plus an emergency response drill every month.

Last week we had our March drill, and the first drill of the season. It was fun, if a bit stressful. The trauma and transport teams were actually already together, getting training on using backboards and stretchers. When the alarm went off, most of us started running for our ECW gear and then headed to the muster point. For trauma, that is Medical. Then we waited around to hear what our emergency was. In this case, there was a fire out in summer camp, at the cargo head quarters, one casualty. So four of us grabbed first-aid bags, a backboard and oxygen and head out to the waiting LMC to get a ride out.

Our ride. Sorry, some of these pictures are a little blurry.

On the ride over, we figured out that I was, somehow, the person with the most medical training (other than our PA, who was there as an observer), so I ended up taking over for the first responders in evaluating the patient. Our patient, a 90lb dummy with a welding mask for a face, was found unconscious in a building where the electric heater has caught fire. His breathing and pulse were normal, but he was unresponsive. We administered oxygen and got him onto a backboard, only to realize that the Dr. Down (a sleeping bag type thing that is easy to put on over a backboard) hadn’t made it out to the site. The nearest cache was over at cryo, and I was the only person who knew were that was, since it was the one cache we hadn’t visited on our medical tour the previous week. So, I left Katie in charge of the patient and went sprinting off. When I got back, between the hill climb on the way back, the cold air and running in big boots, I was pretty winded. Anyways, we got our guy into the bag and loaded onto a sled behind a snowmobile. After that, those of us who hadn’t stayed with the patient weren’t entirely sure what to do, since the LMC was gone. So, we started walking back, with the LMC picking us up part way. Back on station, we rushed over to meet the wheely stretcher and bring it to Medical.