Today, Monday, was our day to get medically processed. This consisted of a briefing of what was going to happen to us, followed by lots of paperwork, then filing into nearby buildings to present said paperwork to clerks who ranged from friendly to bored to hostile (I’m looking at you, Audiology Lady, aka Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS). I am hugely indebted to my “handler” back at A-T Solutions in Fredericksburg, who spent the previous two weeks beating me like a rented mule to get all my shots, and take all my training, and get all my certificates before I reported to Atterbury. As a result, I was just about the best prepared person out of the 300 or so of us who are deploying this week. I breezed through most of the test areas without having to do anything. I passed the blood pressure test—the only one I was really worried about, which of course is a feedback loop for failure—and ended up only having to get some blood drawn for a DNA test (in case I’m blown to smithereens by a rocket and all they find of me is a bloody boot) and a smallpox vaccination. I idly wondered to the doctor why, if the UN touted that smallpox had been eliminated, we had to get this inoculation, which includes 15 quick needle jabs. He dissembled, mumbling something about prevention just to be sure. My bunkmates later were less equivocal and we got into a loud discussion about the “features” of not enforcing our borders and letting people from the Third World pour into our country, uncontrolled.
Anyway, if you’ve never gotten a smallpox vaccination as an adult, Google images of the resulting injection site and how it develops over 28 days. I am not amused. Also, it means I can’t wear contacts for the next 28 days because if a speck of smallpox virus gets on my fingers and I put it in my eyes, my eyes will melt out of my head in a fountain of blood and pus. That’s good enough for me—no contacts till April.
So I sailed through medical and was feeling quite pleased with myself… until the end, when an actual doctor-doctor goes over your collection of records, which by this time looks like a dog-eared copy of a Leon Uris novel. The doc I drew was annoyingly thorough, and decided I didn’t have enough documentation to prove conclusively that the little, meaningless aortic aneurysm I had back in ’09 wasn’t going to flare up under the stress of writing computer code at night. Like I haven’t been doing that for 30 years. Doc, lemme tell ya, the only stress I’m getting right now is the possibility that you might not green light me to deploy on Friday. But he stood firm and would not be swayed even by the signatures of two doctors saying they had cleared me for overseas travel. So I had to scramble, once all the exams were over, to call the offices of these doctors and beg them to please please please quickly fax all my records to this guy so he could clear me by Thursday. I won’t be able to truly relax until I know that these records have been received here (recall, we have to fax the records—not email them; how quaint!) and that the doctor has given me the go-ahead.
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