polytrauma

Good to be home. Quick trips to the East coast are tough. Between Sunday and Tuesday I flew to New Hampshire, drove to Dartmouth, sat in a working conference for 12 hrs/day and flew home. I am not complaining as I don't want to start sounding like Wells, I love me job.

The conference was on Polytrauma, meaning those with multiple severe life altering injuries. Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) is like no other conflict in that medical care and body armor are so advanced that soldiers are living that previously would have died. For every casualty there are 10 severe injuries. The nature of these injuries is often so severe and so overlapping of systems that conventional treatment techniques are not always adequate. For example a soldiers humvee is hit by an IED and the blast injury leaves the soldier with upper and lower extremity amputations, severe burns, loss of hearing, mild traumatic brain injury, and post traumatic stress disorder. Bad stuff! So this conference brought together the nations leaders in trauma medicine, prosthetics, robotics, rehabilitation, neural implantation, virtual reality, sensory restoration, and psychiatry to develop a better management plan and research strategy for these complicated issues. I won't get into politics and the current fiasco in the mid East but historically one legacy of war time is improved Medicine, and this one is no different.

So after so much mental stimulation, today I finally got some physical stimulation. The valley is ugly but up in the canyon is pretty nice. From the house it looks like I could walk out over the valley on the cloud of particulates. I rode for 2 hours and was only a little uncomfortable due to soreness from an attempted early morning run in the forest of NH.

peace