September 9, 2005

Well, this has been quite a reintroduction to the Center for Marine Studies.  My week has been more or less crammed with a first aid course and I am trying to find the time to put together a fellowship application.  Let me tell you a bit about Wilderness Advanced First Aid: This is stuff I have always been interested in- I mean, it can’t hurt to know what to do if your friend dislocates his shoulder or little Johnny across the street gets runover by a truck.  And it could be useful to know how to act if a student gets anaphylactic shock after receiving some jellyfish stings or your fellow intern manages to fall into, or out of, a boat.  All this and more can be learned in just four days of wilderness first aid.  One day, I found myself with a large cut bleeding everywhere (fake of course) across my face.  Then we all learned how to give eachother epinephrine shots (not fake) and we injected one another with saline solution for practice.  Our course ended yesterday and we have all happily graduated and moved on to new exciting things like preparing for the students who arrive tomorrow.  It should be quite a semester.  Things have changed a bit since our summer sessions and, among other things, we will have 19 diving students (4x as many as we had in the summer).  That should present plenty of thrills and plenty of tank-filling hours.  The weather has been windy and pleasant and the nights have been remarkably quiet.  I hope it keeps this up.

More news soon. I am sure that after a week with a new batch of students, there will be a bundle of events to report.

Brooke