Day Fifty-Seven

10 October 2006
Ah, another October day during hump month of this cruise. Joy, joy…If you had asked me at the start of the cruise if I thought I would eventually feel like I was in “ground-hog day,” I would have said I could keep myself from that feeling like that. However, lately I have had to look at my watch several times so see what day of the week it was. Is it really just Tuesday? What do I do on Tuesdays? Oh, yes. Sick call in the morning, lunch, and 14 sailors in the afternoon needing their yearly Physical Health Assessment paperwork completed. What day is tomorrow? Oh, Wednesday. Do I have anything special on Wednesday? Oh, sick call and then, hum, do I have any follow-up appointments in the afternoon? I might have forgotten to track anyone down to have forced cholesterol counseling…And the same thing happens everyday and every week. It is a strange feeling, this repetition and loss of sense of time (other than knowing it seems to be going slow).

Anyway, today had a small disruption by having some business executives from the US visit to see what this big Navy ship does. They also had the higher up officers stationed in East Africa traveling with them (acting like very special and high ranking tour guides). I was chosen as one of the escorts (my friend Zach, who was an escort also, said we were chosen because we are part of the beautiful people of the ship—I laughed and then realized we were called “escorts!”). We ate and conversed with our many guests at a sit-down-and-be-served three-course lunch in our wardroom. We then accompanied everyone for a tour of the ship. At lunch, I sat across from one of the visiting officers and had a wonderful conversation about their mission in helping teach/aid national, especially maritime, security in Eastern African countries and coastal trade routes. This officer gave me wonderful insight into some of the countries--the poverty, the governmental corruption, the tribal conflicts, the “wickedness, to use an Old Testament term,” he said. He stated that good work was getting accomplished through partnerships and told me about how our engineers work with USAID to revamp schools and clinics. It made me very excited to know what is going on and encouraged my heart in what God might have waiting for me in the future. My heart longs to help make positive changes in such devastated countries! I do not know what that will look like in the future, but I am so very excited to take the steps to get there.

I trust that this hot cruise and stint in the Navy is one of those steps (as I had hoped it would be so long ago when I was commissioned as an officer). Because of this trust, I am going to try very hard to not get caught in my personal ground-hog day. It is going to be difficult to get through October, I have to admit. I think I already gained a few pounds since the first of October and tears have been shed. I have tuned out this repetitive reality by sitting in front of Hollywood realities (yes, that is an oxymoron). I am sure I will have several days of shutting myself in my room with DVD’s, being uncaring toward patients, eating junk food. But I know that I will get through October. It is odd to view October that way, isn’t it? Usually, October is one of my favorite months of the year. The weather is often beautiful, the air so fresh! But it is a bit different this year. Instead, I find myself on a ship in very hot weather, no land in sight, unknown dangers lurking in every dhow we see, port-stops cancelled until sometime in November, and a possible extension to our deployment that would keep us from being home until mid-January. That is October, and I will get through it by only looking up…

And even when I was not looking up for strength, God still blessed me today. He reminded me that he is in control, that this military is making very good changes in the world, that I can make a difference in a person’s health, that he will calm my impatience with complaining patients and then help me encourage them instead of blowing them off, that my mountains still exist and will be waiting for me and my backpack, and that my husband loves me enough to waste his time by traveling a long distance just to get my favorite trail mix. God did all those things for me today. Another thing he did was making me laugh with the strange occurrences on this ship. A bunch of sailors from the same birthing space were complaining of strange looking itchy rash on their arms that looked like insect bites. Well, that is one thing that usually one need not worry about in the middle of an ocean. My corpsman went and investigated and found a small flat bug under a mattress. With a little Googling, we found that the pest freaking out our male sailors was a bed bug! Ha! My chaplain said that after he prayed tonight over the 1MC (intercom) like he does every night at 2200, he was going to add, “Good night, goodnight, don’t let the bedbugs bite. If they do, take a shoe and beat them until they’re black and blue.” God successfully cheered up my heart today!