The Operating Room

We have been in the OR for some orientation. It was pretty neat to see. Everything is stowed and secured while we are at sea. Everything is attached to the floor or the walls. The floors have all sorts of hooks on them for securing the tables, anesthesia machines and such. I think I am going to be tripping over them a lot. We will be running 4-5 OR's. They are equiped with 12 OR and have equipment for full trauma in case of war and we cannot touch those supplies. We can only use the supplies that were alloted for this mission. We do have less than was was expected due to the relief given in Haiti.  We found out that we will be making 3 stops in Indonesia for our “Disaster Relief/Response Exercises” in the Maluku Provences. The first one is only 4 days so this limits our ability to do a ton of surgeries as the patients need to be all recovered and ready to go home by the time we leave. The other stops will be 7 days each. The DSS – Director of Surgical Services will be setting up Search Caps on the first day of the stops where OR teams will go out and screen individuals to see who is a candidate for surgery. They plan on 4 SearchCap teams going out and all the OR nurses will get to be involved with this. I am excited for this opportunity. The OR stays very busy as their desire is to help as many as possible while in port. I'm ready to work