I"m so glad you are ok!!  And I'll I can say is Wow!

And I'm with everyone else on the scrubs guy!

Tab, like everyone else, I am so glad you are fine.  I can only imagine the horror you experienced and am touched and humbled by your intricate part in saving so many of our beloved soldiers' lives.  THANK YOU!

I am very happy to see that you have found an attractive package in scrubs.  From the things I have seen on FB and from the bits you have posted on here, it seems that your life is now much happier.  I am so glad to see that, even if it means we don't hear from you as much.  I hope things continue to work out with you and scrubs.

Tab, you should be so proud of yourself! Great job, and like the others have said...thank you!

well today was debriefings with social work and more rumours, gossip, stories.

i know that the guy they did the thoracotomy on went to OR and back twice more but died in the ICU. he is one of the casualties profiled in the news. thoracotomies usually are the last ditch effort and unfortunately the vast majority of those pts do not make it.

i checked on my pt who ended up in ICU. the ICU nurses acted real put out that i came to see her (wtf) but i got to put eyes on her and tell her hi and let her know i was thinking of her.

i hear now that the shooter was at our hospital (according to the post commander, i believe) and has been transferred to BAMC, the military hosp in san antonio. send strength and prayers for the people taking care of him. we are not supposed to judge our patients, but he is in an army hospital being cared for by soldiers and everybody takes something like this personally and no doubt its difficult to be in their situation.

outwardly i think most of our staff is handling this well. the overwhelming majority of our patients in the ER are clinic complaints and it was harder today (than usual) to stomach some of the bullshit. i know some of us were hoping that our patients would better recognize our mission in the ER and "man-up" but that didn't really happen, LOL. i know i was short with a few of my patients but frankly, it was hard to be patient with someone telling me they were "allergic" to the room i was putting them in because "18 is a bad number." i offered to let that guy sit back in the waiting room til i felt like dealing with him again and #18 became more tolerable after that. so i'm going to use the next few days off to get my brain back in place.

april- breanne totally does not think you're a stalker, LOL! i was totally impressed you thought to do that esp as i was reading all the stuff on fb. tex totally cracked me up.

i was so glad to get home to corene today, i left work around 9 last night (14 hours! phew!) and given everyone trying to get off post, i knew i would never make it home in time to get c to bed so my folks had her last night. that poor girl, i guess mom talked to her about it and tonight on our way home she was saying that she was glad i was safe and she missed me and omg...she said "im sorry you got shoot" which...wow. she isn't old enough to understand what that means but it was so awful to hear her say it and im glad she doesn't know what it means. i tried to explain that i was ok and a bad person shot a lot of soldiers and she said "someone shoot the army"

out of the mouths of babes, right?

honestly, except for those first seconds after i realized there was a shooter, i never was worried about getting hurt and there wasn't much time to think about it. im still just in awe of the way it was handled, the support from everyone (bush's brought us loads of free chicken!) the ER staff from ft benning, GA sent us lunch AND dinner today (the only ppl that have no idea wth we did is the news, apparently). i hope that the staff from the SRP site (where the shooting happened) get reached out, too, also. i did not know until today that the shooting started inside the building and one of our former ER nurses works at SRP and was there yesterday. she looked terrible today and didn't say much except that after the shooting inside stopped and he had gone outside, it was dark everywhere and there was smoke all around and bodies slumped all over the place. a total nightmare that is 1000x more difficult than what we did. and most of those nurses and the staff are not trained in emergency care and do mostly ppwk and routine screenings. i can only imagine the panic at trying to figure out if it was safe to go out and then trying to figure out what step was next. it was hard enough in the ER trying to mentally walk yourself through it.

i have so much laundry to do tomorrow! but- its rob & kristi's engagement party and im so thrilled for them and happy to have something fun.

also, mom is very sad to have not been able to help. but seeing as how dad and i were both on post until they opened it up, its a good thing she was home because ihni what we would have done with corene otherwise!

i love all you guys so much!

Wow, Tab...you are amazing. Thanks to people like you!