Brianna Loves the ER

Last August, Brianna started having some major abdominal issues. Lots of very sudden, intense abdominal cramping that could only be relieved in the hospital emergency room via morphine drip. After several trips to the ER and many many tests, we determined that it was her gall bladder that was causing the trouble. Hence, on October 3rd, surgeons removed her gall bladder.

On Wednesday of last week, though, she had one of these episodes again, and had the priviledge of getting her second ambulance ride from school in the same school year. We didn't really figure out what the problem was, but morphine put it to rest, and we were waiting to do more doctor visits/tests.

Advance to today. Brianna had another episode in her AP Biology class (AP Bio would make me sick, too!!!) at school today, and her teacher called Michelle (whom was also at school, at BSU), who called me at home. Hoping to save another embarrassing ambulance ride from school, I raced over to the school and picked Brianna up. I'm not sure how many traffic laws I broke on the way to the hospital, trying to get her to the ER, but we both survived the trip.

Short story long... we still aren't sure what's going on. Brianna's gastroenterologist suspects that she is a spastic duck. Oh... wait a minute... that's not what he said. What he said was that he suspects that the duct emptying in to her small intenstines from her duodenum is spasming, causing the trouble. We will try to verify that and/or rule other stuff in or out, and then decide how to treat it. Meanwhile, Brianna is resting comfortably at home now.

Being the blogger that I am, and with Brianna's permission, I took this photo of her in the ER today, after her spastic duck calmed down. She is doing a "This is me being dead" pose and trying to be funny. She gets downright goofy in hospitals, with or without morphine. :-)

Thank you for keeping Brianna in your thoughts and prayers, and for doing the same for her doctors, so they can figure this thing out, and how to treat it!

Sweethearts Dance

Last night was our high school's "Sweethearts" girl-ask-guy dance. Brianna asked Jeff Brann from our ward, and Christopher got asked by a Japanese foreign exchange student whom is living with Amy Keithly, Brianna's friend. Christopher and Marina, Brianna and Jeff, and Amy and her boyfriend all went as a group, and they had a great time.

To the right here is a picture of Christopher and Brianna. Aren't they cute siblings?! You'll see some more pictures, below, and all 16 pictures I posted on Flickr (click here) or on Facebook (click here). Brianna has also posted several photos that she had taken, here on Facebook.

The group.

Sister and brother being silly!

Mark: A Good Sport

So... what's up this year with medical emergencies at home while I'm out of the country??? Steven last month while I was in Frankfurt, and this past Thursday morning I wake up in Shanghai to find a text message from Michelle, "I'm in the ER with Mark. His face is paralyzed."

Apparently, he had awakened with his face feeling a little numb, and he and Michelle thought he just must have slept on it funny. But later that morning he was in full-fledged facial paralysis on the right side. The doctors say that it was likely brought on by some sort of viral attack, yet it isn't contagious. He's on some anti-viral medications and some steroids, and they say that it'll likely go mostly away in 2-4 weeks, and totally heal in about four months. Sometimes it can last longer, so we wish him the best!

The right side of Mark's face is paralyzed, and he wanted me to take pictures. The picture you see here is not Mark making a face; the right side will not move. The biggest problem with that is that he cannot blink, and there is danger of his eyeball drying out and getting damaged. So he has to close it manually with his hands, and at night we have to tape it shut.

It's actually a bit creepy looking, especially when Mark laughs hard. But he's taking it all in stride. Please pray for a speedy recovery for Mark.

Mark has also done his own posting on Bells Palsy. Please click here.

Andrew Holding Court

Not THAT kind of court, silly!!! The basketball court. Andrew is enjoying eighth grade basketball this year, where he plays point guard and can often be seen dribbling down the court (even though Michelle and I tried to teach him better manners than that!). I'd love to say that the photo to the right is blurred because of amazingly fast action (which is partially true - notice that the non-moving cheerleaders are clear), but the fact is that I eventually need to take a better camera to his games.

As for me, I employ the same tactic playing basketball as I do in referee'ing soccer: I just stand in the center circle and casually observe what's going on around me. :-) But Andrew dribbles, runs, sets up plays, shoots, and SCORES (a lot). I wish I had his talent. And his good looks. Of course, it could be argued that Andrew got all of his good looks from his father, because his mother still has hers. :-)

Enjoy the two videos below, one of Andrew dribbling down the court and setting up a play, and the other of him making a free throw.

Hi-Tops in Boise

I've written before about our family's connection to Buena Park, CA-based Hi-Tops, and of Michelle's brother Michael and how he performed with them for 26 years up until his death just over four years ago.

We had a very special treat this past weekend, as the Hi-Tops were in Boise to perform at the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games. Over 2,500 athletes from more than 100 nations are in Boise this week, and the Hi-Tops are in town to entertain them. This past Friday night, we invited them for a pizza fest at our church building, and afterwards they treated us to a great show, featuring all of their numbers (including two that had never been performed before).

It really was a great event, and all in attendance were deeply moved. It's tough not to be affected by this group; they're very inspiring. Our hats are off to Sandy Garcia, their director, and all of the volunteers who work so hard to make this such an awesome group!

For some reason, I'm having a hard time uploading photos to the blog, though I took well over 100 on Friday night. To see all of the photos/videos I've posted, please check our Flickr site (click here). They're also in two separate albums in Facebook (here and here).

Embedded below is a video of the group performing to Neil Diamond's "America." This was by far one of Michael's favorite Hi-Tops numbers, and our family can barely watch it without crying our eyes out!

Stories from Drill (#3-Sgt Waters)

So Sgt Waters is one of my favorite guys in our platoon. I met with him when I was first looking at joining up and he gave me a tour of Gowen Field which is my base. He was an MP(military police) when he started and then became a security specialist later on. He also spent time driving in a convoy but I don't know if this was during his time in one of these MOSs or if it was separate. We had a great time going around the base and meeting with Mr. Queen (one of the Apache pilots), one of the fixed wing pilots (whose name escapes me), and some of the other guys on post. Very nice guy.

He's told a few stories about his time in Iraq which I found interesting.

The first story that I remember from him he told when I asked something about whether or not they ever had a problem with rocket attacks or something. He told me of a time when he and a few other guys were driving a suburban around the perimeter of the base. Their base in Iraq had a 2.5 mile perimeter making it a fairly sizable compound. As they were driving around a rocket was fired at the base. It went completely over the base and landed outside the perimeter, about 6-8 feet from Sgt Waters Suburban. They were obviously shaken but when they returned to base he said it was comforting to find the rocket hadn't even scratched the paint and it was nice to think that the people he was fighting couldn't even hit that large a base and their weapons had that small of an effective radius. Now, the point of this story isn't to diminish the fact that the people we're fighting are dangerous and the war in Iraq is certainly no picnic by any means. It's simply nice to know that 90% of the time our enemies succeed it's through luck and we can win this war simply because we are good at what we do.

Sgt Waters told many stories of his time as a driver in Iraq. His job mainly involved driving high powered people from one side of Iraq to the other. He said it was pretty nice driving people of high rank and dignitaries because it allowed him to get good equipment more easily than the other guys. He said it was also cool going around with them because it gave him a different look into what was going on in the area as he drove from meeting to meeting and negotiation to negotiation. He talked about how his favorite thing from his deployment was gaining that perspective and talked about how you can listen to talk show hosts babble all day long and never really know what goes on in the way he does from being there. His stories are very interesting and he's great to talk to because he really seems to have learned a ton while he was over there.

We also spoke for a while about IEDs and the affect that they have. I guess over in Iraq the convoys go absolutely everywhere going as fast as they can (which, for a fully armored Humvee, is about 80mph). They do this because people are smart enough that they no longer attempt to fight us directly except on rare occasions. The fighting is now done simply be a guy with a button who's trying to hit it at the right time to do some damage. This timing is obviously made more difficult as a convoys speed increases. He said they actually had the road explode behind him fairly often. There were a few times though where an IED went off in the middle of the convoy and disabled them and they were ambushed on some of these occasions. Luckily he was there later in the war and our strategies and equipment is much better at dealing with IEDs then when we first went in. The new Humvees are about 2000 pounds heavier than the old ones and have much better protection. One big problem was that the flames from the IEDs would come through the transmission tunnel and the firewall and into the vehicle. This problem has been addressed and that has drastically reduced casualties. They also have changed tactics to where when a Humvee is disabled, the soldiers very rarely get out for very long. Instead they have tow bars they just slap onto the dead Humvee and they drag it to somewhere safe to avoid a second, generally larger IED which is popular after the convoy has been stopped. Because of such improvements his convoy only had two casualties despite multiple IED hits. One man went home due to a piece of shrapnel in his wrist and one with a piece of shrapnel in his ankle. Again, that's comforting to hear. Of course, the insurgencies methods are improving as well but I have faith in our organization and our commanders to stay ahead of the curve.

Well, Sgt Waters has told more stories than that but I'll leave this posting there, maybe I'll have time to put up more later. I still have a few more people's stories to do though.

Pictures

By the way, I feel like my posts should have pictures to go with the text. If anyone reading this has pictures that would be usable please email them to me.

Stories from Drill (#2-Sgt Barrier)

OK, so Sgt Barrier isn't actually in the National Guard, he's a Reservist who works in the ADA County Sheriff's Office where I worked until just recently until their budget ran out. It's still a good story though.

So, first off, to me Sgt Barrier is Johnny so I'll just refer to him as that from now on since my foremost relationship with him is not military and we're not in the same branch. He has two stories that I thought were shareable on the blog.

The first was of the very beginning of his deployment to Iraq. He was a mechanic and was in Iraq a couple years back. He said the first few days they were really freaked out a few times when mortars hit the compound and they thought it was weird that they didn't really scare the guys who were already there. A few days in Johnny got called into his CO's office and while he was waiting he notice a pegboard on the wall with a map of the base on it. It was completely covered in little red thumbtacks. He asked his CO what they meant and was informed the little read tacks indicated all of the places where a mortar had hit in the last year. That freaked him out a bit.

Luckily though, the Iraqi's can't aim. Despite being there during a period where they had dozens and dozens of mortars hit his base the only had one casualty- another soldiers X Box. He said after a while you learned really well where the things would hit and they weren't really a problem although they were pretty ticked about the X Box.

He also told a story about an awesome picture they had in their shop. In it was a Talibani man on a camel. This man's eyes were all bug-eyed and he was obviously beating the camel trying to go faster. Right behind him, was an American F-16. Kinda reminds me of the saying they have about the Apache's, "Never run from an Apache, it just makes you die tired." I have to say, I'm glad to be on our side.

Stories from Drill (#1-SFC Stace)

So, I thought it might be fun to share some stories I've heard from the guys during my drill weekends. Military stories are always interesting.

I'll start with my favorite story from my drill sergeant/recruiter. I think it's his favorite as well when talking about how we really are making a difference over in Iraq. He was a medic while he was in Iraq (another cool thing about the military, you aren't stuck in one job all the time, my drill sergeant is also a recruiter and a combat medic which is pretty cool). He was on post and a man came in with a little girl in his arms who was obviously having issues. He couldn't speak English and just kinda put her in the arms of one of the soldiers there (I don't remember if it was SFC Stace or not, I'm writing these from memory so details may be off). They got him an interpreter while checking out the baby. One of the medics in the group there was a pediatrician and was able to address her properly. (That's another thing I like about the Guard- you can have a regular job as well which allows for a huge mix of skill sets. I'm not positive but I doubt the military specifically trains in pediatrics since we don't have our kids fight but in the Guard it totally makes sense.) They found an abscess on her side and were able to treat it before putting her and her father on a Blackhawk to Baghdad for surgery. After the operation the doctors were sure that the abscess had been within hours of bursting and would have shot toxic crud into her abdomen and almost certainly killed her. In short, they without a doubt saved the life of this young girl. All of this of course was done with no charge to the father. Now, I don't care who you are, that's pretty cool. The only thing I don't like about that story is the fact that it was never reported. A group of Idaho soldiers did that and not even our local paper reported it. That's life I guess but it's still too bad.

I've decided to divide these stories individually so this post doesn't end up too long, so there's going to be a lot more to come.

February Drill

Another drill, another posting. This month we did Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT). This involved going out and learning how to breach and raid buildings as well as how to maneuver while on a combat patrol. Before we got into our training we did our obligatory PT test. For those of us who have yet to go to basic training we do as many push-ups as possible in 1 minute then as many sit ups as possible in one minute and finished with as fast a mile as possible. For those who have already been to basic everything is doubled. I'm up to 44 pushups in a minute and 42 situps. Unfortunately, my legs were really sore from running and skiing this week so I added 23 seconds to my run and ended up with a time of 6:49. Kinda sad, but it'll improve. One thing I like about the National Guard is that our fitness is on our shoulders. It can be a bad thing for some people who end up just not working out and do 24 pushups and 11 situps and get chewed out at drill instead of working out. They'll get fixed in basic training though.

After our PT test we ate a quick MRE lunch and moved into our day. We started by prepping with M16A2 mock-ups which we call "rubber-ducks". We went through the fundamentals of room clearing and then got into fire teams of 4 or 5 to do drills in "glass houses" which are just rooms mocked up with black tape on the floor. The glass houses taught us basic movements but obviously you can only do so much with mock-ups.

After some glass house training we moved into some of the old barracks and discussed how we would clear such a building if we had to. These barracks had a total of 44 windows and 3 doors between the two floors and had lockers and bunks spread throughout as well as some half-a-dozen rooms and a latrine. Such a building makes for a very dynamic raid since you have so many "fatal funnels" (openings where people are easy targets). This, unfortunately, took forever since we are up to 97 troops showing up at drill and we still only have under a dozen people rank E-4 or higher who know what's going on and can lead everyone through. We also have a shortage of buildings and equipment which makes equipment intensive drills such as this very time consuming. Because of this we ended pretty early that night and hit the barracks to rest before we put what we learned into action by clearing rooms with paintball M4s.

At 0200 the next morning we woke up and were in the drill hall starting to run teams through our mock village by 0230. My fire-team had a visiting civilian added to it around 0500 and we practiced with him to get team cohesion until we moved out sometime around 0600. (Yes, that does add up to 3 and a half hours of waiting in the drill hall. When you have to move 97 people through a 15-20 minute exercise 9 at a time things go REALLY slow. Some people took advantage of the break to nap but I wasn't able to do so since the drill hall was kinda loud.)

When we got to our "village" we were surprised to find that the buildings were nothing like the buildings we had been training in although we had been made to believe we would be clearing the same sort of structures. I'm sure this was done on purpose as it forced us to scrap all of our plans and adjust on the fly. The buildings we cleared looked like stacked cargo containers with doors and walls added to create buildings. Each building had between 6 and 9 rooms per floor, a staircase to the second floor and a balcony on the second floor. The lights were all off when we entered and at 0600 it was pitch dark which made clearing the buildings very difficult since noone thought to check for light switches once we had secured a room. Our first building was very sloppy since we were brand new, weren't use to being unable to see and were trying to do the building without any verbal signals which didn't work as well as we had hoped. Luckily, the first building we picked to go into happened to be the one with no one in it and we were able to get away with it.

Our second building we decided to scrap the stealth approach since we weren't really kidding anyone anyways. We're newbies, everyone knew we were coming. When we started into the room with the staircase in the second building we suddenly had rounds flying all around us. We could hear them bouncing all over but couldn't pinpoint them since there were three rooms across the hall from us after we passed the staircase and the rounds we were using were rubber bullets instead of paintballs to avoid a mess. I thought I saw a shadow up on the second floor and went to fire at it while entering the room and got quite the surprise when my gun didn't react at all. Of course, being a stupid newbie, I backed around the wall again to get cover. Since I was point, the three other guys behind me followed and took cover in the other room. Unfortunately, our third man, the door breacher, was not directly behind me since he was going the other direction through the door after breaching it. He didn't realize we had left and ended up stranded in the other room for a good five seconds before he was able to get out. Luckily, he did get out since the enemy upstairs was just blind-firing around the staircase but I very nearly got him "killed". Once we got into the other room I switched out my gun with our number 2 man since, as point, I kinda needed a gun that worked. However, shortly after we switched and before we had re entered the room we realized my gun had just been uncharged by the soldier who had used it last for some reason. We hadn't checked that because all of the guns were charged on the first round and remain charged until they were manually uncharged so our cadre hadn't even told us we had to charge the weapons. Having never been paintballing before I didn't realize a paintball gun even had a charging handle like a real gun.

Switching kinda stunk though because I now had Private Gallaher's gun which only had 4 rounds in it to start the game. We reentered the room and the civilian and I charged the staircase while the other three covered us from below. We noticed SSG Walls' head sticking out around the corner of the doorway to the balcony and the civilian and I opened fire on her but she ducked back onto the stairwell before we got her. We then posted on either side of the door to the balcony and Gallaher came around and we attacked the balcony. Gallaher got the first look and got her three times as she tried to run for cover which left us with a clear building.

When we entered our third building we ran into a similar rain of fire at the staircase. Gallaher got shot in the back while moving behind the staircase to cover the men going up. The civilian was supposed to cover him while he moved around but it didn't work for whatever reason. I didn't see whether the civilian failed to watch his opening or if Drill Sergeant Zupancic simply got a good shot in. At this point I found that I hadn't done a very good job of keeping aware of my weapon again and was out of ammo since I had used four rounds getting Walls to duck back in. Thus, I had to charge the staircase with an empty weapon hoping that maybe I could help keep the Drill Sergeant's head down while the other two who were going up with me got around to where they could kill him. Luckily, it succeeded and I was able to take his gun after he died which had a good 45 rounds in it. When I popped around the corner to the balcony I saw someone lying on the ground with a gun pointed at me but managed to shoot him twice before he got me. I thought I hit him and thought he put his gun down but he was back lit and I couldn't quite tell so I shot him three more times. I probably shouldn't have done that but I did and he didn't say anything. Luckily it was SGT Cole who is huge and probably didn't care at all.

After that we simply cleaned up and did our AAR (After Action Report) and took off early because the cadre all wanted to get home for Super Bowl Sunday and I was even able to make it to 2/3 of sacrament meeting. It was a pretty good drill I think.

P.S. I should make a correction to an earlier post. I spoke before of Colonel Goodale telling the guys at Gowen to make sure to mess with "the other" Private Goodale. I realized that when I had heard this I had flipped it in my head. When I heard "the other" I thought it was from Colonel Goodale's perspective and not mine so he was really telling them to mess with his son which makes more sense.