Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings to all my readers. Once again, I have been the lucky recipient of handmade holiday cards from many of the students at Forest Elementary School in Forest, Virginia. Thanks to all the students that made cards and especially to the students in Mrs. Shuwarger's fifth grade class. I love receiving your cards and very much appreciate the time and energy you took to make them and send them to me.

The McMurdo community is getting all geared up for the upcoming Solstice, Hanukkah, and Christmas holidays. The dining hall is decorated with a Festivus Pole, Christmas tree, garland and many other seasonal items. The Jewish members of the community hope to complete work on a large scale paper representation of a Hanukkah menorah to display there too.

There will be a Christmas dinner on the 25th. I'm told there will be breast of duck, chilled crab legs and prime rib. Just one thing....there will not be as much prime rib as the galley staff planned. It seems that while the prime rib was out thawing, two of them were purloined. Yes, we have a beef thief. The irony is that now that the word is out about the missing prime ribs, who in their right mind would think they could cook and serve it without being discovered? It is the community's hope that the missing 160 lbs. of prime rib magically reappears. Naturally, this event sparked numerous jokes and rumors. The latest is this graphic I received in an email from a friend.
On a sadder note, this has been a busy week in the medical department. We had three medical evacuations this week, one of which was for very serious trauma. Our flight nurse went out on the first medevac and on the day she returned to MacTown she had only time enough to change clothes and there was another medevac waiting to go out. Her gear had not been returned to the hospital yet by the cargo department, so she had to cobble together an entire second set of equipment, supplies and drugs to take our second patient out. This patient flew in a Bell Helicopter from the hospital to Pegasus White Ice Runway where it met up with an Australian Airbus A319 that was scheduled to leave hours earlier, but was delayed specially for this mission. This beautiful twin jet is equipped and outfitted to enable an ambulatory patient to be medically treated. There are numerous 110 volt 60 cycle outlets along the walls and in the seat arms. The seats fold flat to allow litter placement.

Our third medevac patient was not fortunate enough to ride on this plane, nor was he ambulatory. He flew by helo to the airfield, then flew to Christchurch on an Air National Guard Hercules LC-130. The ride north normally takes about 8.5 hrs, but this crew made it in 7.5 hrs. The patient is in the ICU, is stable and is expected to make a full recovery.