I have been on deployment long enough now that many things seem routine -- for better and for worse. Unfortunately, small crises seem to be part of that routine. Just when things are getting calmed down and I think I can concentrate on just being the doc and doing sick call, something else strikes.
The most recent one was the urinalysis program. All Navy commands do random urinalysis on a percentage of sailors each month. I guess our urinalysis program wasn’t doing so well, because we caught some negative feedback from an Admiral. Very quickly some of the people involved were fired, and I was assigned to rush in to fix the program all up. When an Admiral speaks, we listen.
My skipper smiled, put his hand on my shoulder and said “Doc, I picked you because I think you are the right person to get the program back on track just like it should be.” It made me feel good that he would trust me enough to give me an assignment that was clearly important to him.
They gave me about two days, then I began to share the blame for anything dysfunctional taking place. “Why is it not fixed yet?” I was expected to know everything about the program. “Please provide me a list of all the past discrepancies by the end of the day….” “Give us a list of the top ten errors made in the urinalysis program.” “How does the software work?” “Are you sure that is correct?” “Did you call the lab to verify that?” All together, I was receiving about six emails a day about urine. Now, a few weeks later, the urine program is getting back on track, and the email volume is decreasing. According to the routine, that means another mini-crisis will happen soon to occupy all of my time again.
Perhaps a good part of my routine is that I am stuck here for the entire six or seven months of deployment. At least others tell me that’s good. Almost all the other officers in the squadron get opportunities to go off to other places for a while -- Europe, East Asia, etc. Not me. I get to stay here. Yesterday I was told “Doc, I’m jealous of you because you just get to stay here the entire time. Coming back here after my last trip was the hardest thing I have ever done. It makes it so much worse when you realize everything your missing. You are lucky to be stuck here…” I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I guess I’ll just take the advice and consider myself lucky.
There was one recent break in my routine. Saturday night I finally had something on the schedule besides work. I was going out for pizza. You may recall that I set up a bunch of health promotion programs at the beginning of deployment and laid out incentives to go along with them. I had volunteered to buy a pizza dinner for the shop that had the most participation in my health promotions programs as on a certain date.
The maintenance control shop won. I had announced then as the winners in front of the entire squadron and even called for a round of applause, although I knew their actual participation had been under whelming. When I made arrangements to take the shop to the pizza joint, they told me that the Chiefs, who are in charge of the shop, were going to excuse themselves, and let the junior sailors enjoy the night out. The only trouble with that was that the only people who had participated in the health promotions programs were the Chiefs. I soon saw that I was going to take a bunch of non-participants out for an unearned reward. Wanting to make the most of the situation anyway, I planned a few brief words to motivate them tp participate in the programs -- to be more active, lose weight, and stop smoking.
On Saturday night, I showed up at 6:45, 15 minutes early. I took a big table and told the restaurant people that I was waiting on a group of about 13. I thought about ordering the pizzas so that they would be ready when the crown arrived. When I looked at the menu, there were so many choices that I didn’t want to have to decide myself. I would wait for them.
7:00 came, and no one was there. 7:05, and I was still alone. At 7:10 I began to be a little embarrassed, but a little glad that I hadn’t ordered the pizzas. At 7:15, I drove over to the other pizza joint in case they had misunderstood -- no one. Not only did they not care enough to participate in my health promotion programs, they were even too lazy to come for free pizza. For a split second I thought about taking the promised pizza into their work center on a different day. I quickly vetoed that thought.
Although it was a fun idea to go out for pizza, I was too cheap to want to buy any just for myself. I went to the DFAC and had a regular dinner, according to my normal routine. Like always
