Day in the Life

BURDASH: As a physician in the Guard, we have multiple responsibilities. First and foremost is to be a soldier. When I say be a soldier, it’s to know how to defend yourself, defend your patients, defend your peers. There’s the education of soldiers. Working in a medical unit, I have people who signed up to be combat medics, and they might have done it to pay for school, they might have done it to prepare themselves because they’re going to go into PA school, or nursing, or dentistry, and we have lab techs, we have all kinds of folks who are going into the medical field. And maybe they’re using this as their opportunity to educate themselves. As a provider who got all of that civilian experience, trained at, you know, well known programs, I get to use that experience to help those young folks, and that’s the same thing that happened for me, I had an ER doc train me when I was a medic. So, I feel to pass that along is really helpful, and I think a good responsibility to try to further and mentor the next generation of medical providers. ​

WINEGARNER: The common wounds that we really want to train hard are the ones that are — that we've identified as being causes of death that are preventable. So there's been some landmark studies out of Iraq and Afghanistan that have looked at what people die of on the battlefield, and the big things that we've identified that guys can basically intervene on and make a difference on are the massive hemorrhage, and so putting tourniquets on and stopping the bleeding as fast as we can is the biggest thing. And then we've also developed even more to get at more of the junctional wounds, which would be kind of up here in the armpits or down here in the groin area. Those parts of the body are really hard to put a tourniquet on, and you can't necessarily stop the bleeding with that, but we’ve developed special gauzes and even some clamps that we can use in the field to stop those bleeding sites. And so, so massive hemorrhage is always something that we're always going to train when we do this TC3 training. And then the pneumothorax, which we also simulated outside, that's another thing that's been identified as potential intervention that guys can do in the field and will save a life, because with penetrating or blunt-chest trauma, there can be basically a ruptured lung and then air leaking into the chest that collapses the lung, and then can even compress on the heart and cause circulation problems. And so just by simply putting a needle in and decompressing that, we can release the tension that's inside the chest and get the blood pumping again.

WINEGARNER: These are very advanced SIM, SIM men. These ones in here are fully electronic. We have the ability to hook them up to monitors, and they'll give real live feedback as far as pulses go. They'll breathe, you'll see the rise and fall of the chest; if you were to listen to them you could hear the heart rate, you could hear the lungs. At times during this scenario we can make them talk, we can make them blink, we can make them look around, we can do all kinds of things with these guys. Being able to set them up for IV or IO access, doing these escharotomies, these are all things that we're able to do, so. In this day and age we try and make it as realistic as possible, and these SIM men, they're very expensive, but they do a very good job of doing that.

So yeah, there's — there — simulation tools that we have come a long way over the last decade, so that's really nice.

TRENTINI: So in here I’ve got my laptop, small textbook, my stethoscope is here, always have a 14-gauge needle, tube of toothpaste. I do happen to carry a headlamp. Here’s a bottle of Motrin. Tongue depressor, some scissors — somebody came over and they were like, “Hey, do you have a tuning fork?” And it’s (inaudible) suture. These are calipers. Airway card. Oh, and a tourniquet, of course. You never know when you’re going to need a tourniquet, so. OK, that’s it.