Our Christmas day will be like everyone else on this Friday, 12/25/09, in contrast to our Thanksgiving which was held on the weekend after. This week instead of our usual Sunday off we get Friday and Saturday off but work on sunday. Our extravagent Christmas dinner will be held on Friday evening-I have heard through the grapevine it will be Beef Wellington. I hope to spend a very quiet weekend given the past couple of weeks.
The last couple of weeks have run together with all the visitors. Our lead physician from Denver and McMurdo joined us for several days. During this time we adm over 200 H1N1 vacinations 8 gall bladder ultrasounds to physically qualify the people wintering over, another 2 kidney stone medavacs that luckily I didn't have to return to McMurdo. Our lab tech guy also joined us for a week to check, calibrate all our equipment, install new xr epuipment and computers, as well as our dentist for a few days. Incredibly busy with all these people. I have held some CPR/AED review classes as well as our trauma team training sessions. In addition to the company visitors we had "tourists" from all over. Canada, Japan, China, England, Russia.... they usually flew in from Patriot Base and might spend a day or two. The "tourists" have to camp out near their plane and provide their own bathroom facilities and food. They are allowed to come into the station for a tour and a visit to the company store. We are instructed that we can't feed the tourists or offer them the use of our facilities. However if they have a medical emergancy we are allowed to assist them. Like last night.... a plane arrived yesturday with 9 tourists. 3 of which were planning on parachuting. This hasn't been done at the South Pole since around 1997 when 4 of the 5 parachutists died (not sure about the # of deaths). At the South Pole it is difficult to have ground perception when you are jumping and apparently their altimeter equipment was not working properly. Anyway the 3 jumpers on Saturday did fine. However one of the pilots was not-possibly acute appendisitis. They left in the middle of the night after buying fuel from us and the pilot receiving treatment from me and doc.
This past week we also had a C17 do a food drop. The plane drops down to about a 1000 ft and lets lose cargo pallets attached to parachutes. Each pallet weighs @ 1000 lbs. This year was uneventfull however last year apparently some of the chutes didn't open. The pallets created about 4 foot craters and had to be dug out. Several were broken and contained flour and potato chips. According to the Antarctic treaty all spills have to be cleaned up. I can't imagine trying to clean up a flour spill in Antarctica.
Tomorrow is our summer solstice and the sun will be at it's highest @ 24 degrees above the horizon. The sun circles us 24 hours a day and will gradually decline in height until sunset sometime in March. Within the last 2 weeks I have completed the paperwork and signed the contract to stay through the winter season. Temperatures can reach 100 below. Should be interesting. Discovering the southern constellations, southern lights..... I will need to re-watch the old movie "The Thing".
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