Needles and blood.

Time for another update - I've had some time off for the 4th Holiday and been off the grid for a while.

This week we are doing a lot of medical training. Not your old school CTT stuff, training you could even use hiking or playing sports. Today's training is, as you would hope, much more focused on traumatic injuries and dealing with providing care under fire. I hate this training even though it is critical, mostly because I have a pretty visual memory and I find myself thinking about standing over my best buddy watching him die while while I scramble to try to save him with the little training I have. That, more than anything, is my biggest fear.

Part of our training is to practice giving each other IVs, and it can be humorous to watch guys fish around in another's arm trying to hit a vein. I don't enjoy doing this because I always seem to get the shakes right as the needle is going in. I manage to get it in the vein (most of the time) and not inflict (too much) pain on my practice partner. We do have dummy arms we can practice on, but everyone agrees they are no substitute for a living person.

So we all ended the day with a few extra holes in our arms. The best part of learning this is when we are hung over - we can just stick each other to rehydrate rather than trying to drink lots of water.