A "Typical" Day at Sea

June 14^th, 2011

Happy Flag Day…

Did I mention that I have 7 roommates now?  That’s right, there are 8 of us in my stateroom – myself, Carrie (another Air Force internist), Audrey (the JAG – lawyer – for the mission), Stephanie (a Public Affairs officer), Becky (the “Fun Boss”), and 3 Canadians – Isabelle, Tanya, and Tracy (a dentist, hospital administrator, and nurse, respectively).  We are a diverse group – Carrie, Isabelle, and I are off the ship most of the time we’re in port, while Becky almost never leaves the ship and Tracy works nights on the inpatient ward.  Thankfully, everyone is VERY respectful of the extremely tight living quarters and the need for personal space.  However, 8 women in one room, no matter how respectful, is a lot (“enough,” some would say).  It is crowded and messy, especially while we’re at sea (like right now), and everyone is on the ship all day.  This morning, I counted 19 pairs of shoes on the floor – not including the shoes we were all wearing.

While I’m sure this information fascinates you, it occurs to me that if I am counting shoes and reporting on that, there must not be a lot going on.  I’ve been meaning to write for a while about a “typical” day on the ship – so here goes.

Ok, really, there are 2 typical days on the ship – shore (mission) days and underway (at sea) days.  On most grey hull ships, the shore days are low-key (liberty) and at-sea days are more stressful – but as with many other things, the situation on the Comfort is the opposite.  I’ll start with an underway day, since that’s today.  At 6am every morning, the 1MC (overhead PA system) calls out, “Reveille, Reveille.  All hands heave out.”  Yes, that is exactly what they say – I’ve checked.  No, I don’t know what it means.  There is no heaving out going on in our stateroom.  For me, it means, you have 30 more minutes to sleep.  Sometimes I don’t even hear Reveille – on occasion there is a compassionate person on the mike who announces it very quietly.  Most of my roommates are up around this time, but are quiet enough that I can usually fall back asleep.  Those who know me know that I will wake up at the last possible second.  So at 6:30, my alarm goes off and I stumble out of bed.  There is always a light on in the room (for safety in case of a middle-of-the-night egress), so I get dressed by that light – I never turn on the main light.  I am ready to walk out the door at 6:45.  And then comes the first obstacle of my day: the stairs.  It is 66 stairs UP to the mess deck (cafeteria).  There is something about being awake for 15 minutes and having to climb 66 stairs in heavy boots that is very disheartening.  One of these days I’m pretty sure I just won’t be able to make it.

But remarkably, so far, every morning, I have climbed all the stairs and arrived at the mess deck (albeit a little out of breath – you’d think it would get easier doing it every day, but it doesn’t – it’s the last flight that does me in).  There are 3 dining areas in the mess deck – the main deck, the chief’s mess (for E7s and above), and the ward room.  On other ships (“real” ships, as my Navy friends say), the ward room is where all the officers eat.  On the Comfort, there are so many officers that the ward room is restricted to O4s and above.  Thankfully, I made the cut.  The ward room is much nicer than the general mess deck.  You can serve yourself (rather than being told you can have rice OR pasta, but not both), go back for seconds, and the lines are much shorter.  The ward room is less crowded and therefore quieter – which makes for great conversations.  Also because it’s less crowded, we tend to eat with the same people every day – and since I like the people I eat with, this is a good thing.  Another advantage is that there is no one rushing us along – in the main mess deck, seats are at a premium, so when you’re done eating, you’re done.  We like to lounge around after meals and just talk.  Anyway, so every morning I head to the ward room.  Breakfast is the best meal of the day.  It’s funny, because at home I usually don’t even eat breakfast, or if I do, I’ll have a ½ bagel or an English muffin.  Here, I have to limit myself.  I usually have a pancake or French toast, 2 hard-boiled eggs, a bowl of cereal, and fruit.  The coffee is awful, so I get my caffeine in the form of fountain Diet Pepsi (not as good as fountain Diet Coke, but I’m definitely developing a taste for it). 

At 7am on the dot, the 1MC announces, “Secure the mess line.”  One of my first days on the ship, I heard that and thought they said, “Secure the meth lab” – so that’s our running joke.  “Secure” is a Navy word.  It’s used liberally around the ship, usually to mean something is closed, off-limits, prohibited, or safe.  We have to “secure for sea” (fasten down all movable objects), the ward room is frequently “secured for DV luncheon” (closed, obviously), a sign in the bathroom tells us if we keep clogging the toilets, they will be “permanently secured” (this one makes me laugh, because it’s such an idle threat – are they really going to permanently close the toilets?).  My favorite was one day at breakfast, when there was no milk.  When I asked one of the FSAs (food service…agents?  assistants? Not sure – one of the mess deck workers), he told me, “I’m sorry ma’am.  The milk is secured.”  I just couldn’t think of a reason why we were securing milk.  Anyway…

After the mess line is secured, we all get in line to put our trays away, into the “scullery” – the dish cleaning area.  In front of the scullery are 3 bins, where we separate our trash into paper, plastic, and metal/ glass.  This is done everywhere on the ship – all trash must be separated.  This is because paper can be incinerated on the ship, but plastic and metal/ glass are held “on deck” until we are in a country where we can pay to recycle or dispose of it.  After we turn in our trays, we head to “quarters” or “muster,” which is held daily at 7:15.  Muster is another Navy word – and they love it.  We muster constantly.  Basically it is roll call, and is done to make sure no one has fallen overboard since the last muster.  We have a fairly large department (85-90 staff), but have gotten the muster down pat and are usually all present and accounted for by 7:17 or so.  Then we are read the POD – the Plan of the Day, which includes any useful information about training, activities, or secured offices for that day.  After that, we usually have an internal medicine meeting and a brief lecture among the internists.  After THAT, the day begins.  While we are at sea, there is usually some kind of training or lecture scheduled in the morning and one in the afternoon.  We also have fire drills and abandon ship drills after every mission.  In the mornings, I try to find a computer where I can check email or work on my computer in my stateroom (on blogging, lectures, etc.).  I also do laundry twice a week (we have assigned self-service laundry days, so if you miss your day, you’re out of luck until 3-4 days later, so I do it every time just to be safe).  The ship’s laundry will do most laundry for us, but I’ve gotten one too many still-damp and smelly towels back and I just prefer to do it myself.  If I can find a functional TV (no small task), The Daily Show and Colbert Report are on AFN (Armed Forces Network) from 9-10am.  Lunch is served from 11:30-1pm, and I like to go as early as possible so I can be hungry again at 4:30, when they serve dinner (no, I’m not kidding).  After lunch it’s usually more internet time or meetings, then a workout after lunch has digested. 

At 4:30, it’s “Dinner for the crew” over the 1MC.  As much as I try to hold off, the response is Pavlovian, and I am hungry about 5 minutes after I hear the announcement.  Lunch and dinner are remarkably similar meals (both much heavier than I would eat at home), and I try to have a salad for at least one of them.  Unfortunately, we have run out of lettuce (or maybe it’s secured), so they’re serving cabbage instead.  For those wondering, cabbage does not equal lettuce.  Not even close.  Not even with a lot of ranch dressing, and not even if you cut it into lettuce-sized pieces instead of thin strips.  If I never see cabbage again, I’m ok with it.  For a while, they were also serving extremely under-ripe green tomatoes, and calling them tomatillos.  They weren’t.  We knew this when, after refusing to eat them for 2 weeks straight, they started turning red and delicious.  That was pretty funny.  My other favorite Comfort recipe came this weekend.  Saturday night was pasta night (my absolute favorite meal on the ship), and Sunday, they served “tomato soup,” which was, as it turns out, pasta sauce.  They didn’t even try to dilute it or add milk or spices or anything.  So when I get home, that’s going to be my new meal – pour some Ragu in a bowl and tell the kids it’s soup.  For all my complaining, I will say the food is, well, actually, it’s pretty bad.  Once again, my Navy friends tell me that the food on a grey hull ship is amazing.  They have all done tours on other ships and can confirm that the Comfort meals are not typical of Navy meals.  Thankfully, there is a seemingly endless supply of peanut butter and jelly, so I have made more than my fair share of sandwiches (on stale Wonderbread, but this is still better than some of our lunch options).

After dinner, as I mentioned, we all kind of hang around the ward room until they once again secure the meth lab.  We kill time for about 30 minutes (usually hanging out on the flight deck, where there’s a nice breeze and sunset), then we meet back in the ward room for “Internal Medicine Peer Review” – one of my favorite parts of the day.  I’m not sure if this is a Navy thing or what, but 4 of the 6 internists, and several of the radiologists and the dermatologist, are big-time gourmet tea drinkers.  So they started having tea time, and of course the rest of us had to join in.  And now it is our nightly ritual, to sit and drink tea after dinner.  Around the same time this started, we were told we had to have some kind of peer review program in place, so we decided to call that tea time (so now it’s an official meeting and we can’t be forced to miss it for other, less important/ fun meetings).  We usually discuss patients for about 5 minutes then resume other conversations.  After that, it’s the COPS brief (the Current Operations brief).  This is a source of entertainment if not information.  Every night, the brief consists of the weather report (hot and humid), current events (usually one story relevant to the country we’re visiting), the plan for the next several days (more of the same), the medical summary for the day (how many patients we saw at the sites and on the ship), the Navy band report (they continue to play music), the Public Affairs Office report (where they tell us how many Facebook friends CP11 has), and a message from the CO (the hospital commander) and the Commodore (the ship’s commander).  When we pull into a new country, we get a cultural brief, a legal brief, a safety brief, and a brief about the upcoming MEDCAP sites.  On a good day, the COPS brief lasts about 15 minutes, but sometimes it can go on for a full hour.  My favorite part is the band report (just because I think it’s funny that we’re getting a report on the band) and of course the medical report, where we get to impress everyone by showing how many patients we saw that day.  A typical day at the MEDCAP is 700-900 patients – Colombia was a bit less as we had fewer providers out there.  The guy in charge of the medical brief is pretty funny and is one of the internists, so frequently joins us for tea time.  As is common in group conversations, we come up with some key phrases that turn into inside jokes – and he manages to work these into the ops brief seamlessly.  So far he’s used “Danish butter,” “Jamaican handshake,” and “hot jungle popsicle” – which are all very benign phrases (in origin) but end up being hilariously funny when the origins aren’t known.  Makes us all laugh to hear how they are worked in.

After the COPS brief is the FOPS (future operations) brief, aka “the hot wash.”  Not sure why it’s called that.  It’s where the down-and-dirty logistics planning takes place for the next day – who goes out on which boat, how many buses will be needed, etc.  The only time I’ve had to go to the hot wash was when I planned the trip to the oncology hospital – that’s where I got confirmation of my transportation, security, local cell phone, and translator.  Most of the time during the hot wash, we go back up to the flight deck for some fresh air.  By this time it’s dark out and we can usually do some stargazing – I got to see the Southern Cross!  There have been a few days on this deployment that for some reason, I haven’t gone outside at all.  That is a huge mistake, I realize now.  Being stuck inside the “skin of the ship” all day makes time go by much more slowly and makes me feel sickly.  Being outside in the fresh sea air is much better (except in Peru, where the smell outweighed the benefits of the sea air).  After our time on the flight deck, we’ll either watch a movie, check email, or call it a night, depending on what the next day’s schedule looks like.  And that is a typical “at sea” day for me.  When we’re in port or at anchor (during missions), my off days are pretty typical, except there’s less outdoor time, because the helo’s are flying missions and the flight deck is secured.  And now you know what that means. =)