I am sitting on my bed, in my ten-foot-by-twenty-foot canister housing unit on Al Asad Forward Operating Base in Iraq. My can is small, but it is cozy, well-organized, and fairly clean. The television set has been strategically placed at the farthest distance possible in my little room, in the opposite corner from where I sit. I am watching a live-via-satellite baseball game on the AFN Sports network (a true rarity here except in the wee hours, but this is a weekend day game), and the Mets are beating up on Andy Pettite and the Yankees. Gotta love that.

The guys in the room next to mine are playing Halo, and the occasional obscenity squeezes its muffled way through our shared plastic wall. I usually put up with this for a few minutes, and if it doesn’t stop, I make a little visit next door, which generally results in the occupants going into radio silence mode for the next few hours, or simply leaving the building altogether.

Not a bad day to be a deployed soldier, all things considered. I had an interesting clinic today, in which I saw the following:

1. A man with cellulitis of his face, only partly responsive to antibiotics. We took a digital photo today, which will be used for comparison tomorrow; if he is not any better, he will be admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics.
2. Another pregnant soldier. Her 1st SGT came with her to clinic, and pleaded with me to let her stay for the remaining twelve weeks of the unit’s deployment. (No way, dude. She’ll be on a plane within a week.)
3. A 55 year-old department of defense worker with acute gastroenteritis (food poisoning). Imodium didn’t work, so he gets some lomotil, which will shut his guts down, and good.
4. A soldier who broke his fifth (a.k.a. “pinky” toe) doing some kind of martial arts at the gym.
5. A TCN who was doing some welding and had little white itchy splotches all over his chest and arms. Fungus? Or allergic reaction? Because we can’t do the tests here to definitively know the answer to this question, he got treated for both. RTC if no improvement in 2-3 days.
6. A young marine with bruises all over his body, and an abnormal clotting test. Right up the alley of this Hematologist. He got some more tests today. I’ll be discussing the results with his doctor when they are available, but my preliminary feeling is that he got in a fight which he is not admitting (hence the bruises), and the lab was a false positive (it is tricky doing clotting tests, especially in a field environment, and in this case, the test was repeated in the sample sample, with widely varying results). Either way, an interesting case.
7. Lots o’ runny noses. (Allegra, to the rescue!)
8. A couple of insomniacs, hoping to score some Ambien to undo the fifteen Red Bulls they drank earlier in the day. They left, unsatisfied and still pretty wired.
9. A guy with a bad, atypical migraine. I was about to give him some Imitrex (not my favorite drug, for various reasons, the main one being that it doesn’t work as often for atypical migraines), but he fell asleep when I left the room to get his meds, so I backed down a bit and gave him a shot of toradol (a strong NSAID) and sent him home to snooze in his own bed.
10. Finally, a Marine CPT who came in for a bicipital tendonitis. On talking with him, he admitted to taking a whole lot of protein supplements, and a nitric-oxide/caffeine mixture called N.O.-Explode (guess which is the active ingredient). Because of this we got a urinalysis on him, to make sure that he isn’t damaging his kidneys with the protein, and the protein came back normal, but his urine showed some glucose. My immediate feeling was that this was likely to be a lab error, because it did not make any sense for a healthy guy to be spilling sugar into his urine. We did a battery of tests, including a repeat of the UA, and suspicions were confirmed. But his kidney function was about seventy-percent of normal, so he and I had a heart-to-heart, in which we discussed the joys of dialysis. Shortly after our discussion, CPT Marine decided to stop taking the protein supplements and high-dose caffeine jolt.

After clinic, I read through some bits of Lorri’s impending novel (it is excellent!), and sent her my thoughts. A couple friends and I had planned to do two of our bike runs in a row, which would come out to an even 27 miles. We were pretty psyched for our “bicycle marathon,” but the wind picked up, some rare clouds gathered over our post, and for only the 3rd time since I arrived here at Al Asad, it rained. An hour later, it was too late for the marathon, and though the rain subsided, the wind had picked up dramatically, which meant that the Brown Cloud Of Death was swirling around our little dust bowl. Three of us decided to brave the wind and the dust and make at least one loop around the post, and I donned my best goggles and hit the road.

The wind blew so hard against me that every turn of the pedals moved my bike forward just a few feet. It was excruciatingly slow-going at the beginning, but I knew that if we could just make it the few miles to the back stretch, that same wind would be our best friend. One member of our party bailed out after about two miles, so that left just CPT Baker and I (ironically, the oldest guys in our whole company). Baker is one of those sickeningly fit dudes who eats nothing but green things, and has absolutely no discernible fat, and he led the way up the big hill by the reservoir, past the Ugandan guards with the David Ortiz smiles (zham-bo!), and finally, around the corner, onto the back stretch, where we absolutely cruised for the next ten miles.

As we rode effortlessly with the wind at our backs, we talked a bit, looked for hyenas, and noted how we couldn’t see ten yards in front of us. It was like riding in a dense fog, and kind of neat. At one point a very loud military plane took off to our left, with the same incredibly loud screaming noise as usual, but we could not see a thing. Kind of eerie.

We finally made it around the flight line, down the hill and past the guards, and finally back to the cans, where our company was (unbeknownst to us) awaiting our return, with barbecue at the ready. SPC Hert grilled some truly great burgers, and we sat out in the wind, eating our delicious, dusty burgers and talking about home.

[Final: Mets 7, Yankees 4. Woo-hoo!]