Happy 90th Birthday Grandma!!

Just wanted to let everyone know that my Grandma is now 90 years old, and doesn’t look a day over 40! That's a huge accomplishment, I hope to be around as long as she has and still look as good! Happy birthday to you Grandma and I hope you have a great day! Last year my dad told me that she turned 90 so I got some flowers for her and the card said Happy 90th Birthday, the problem was that she was turning 89! Needless to say the Davis males are really bad at remembering people’s ages! Haha.

I’ve run over 250 miles since being deployed. To put that in perspective it’s like running from Cincinnati to Cleveland and turning around to start back to Cincy. Not too bad. Speaking of Cincy, I guess we are sharing first place with the Steelers, we’re still in first though! Now we just have to beat the Steelers to retake first, no problem! I’m sure they’ll pull it through.

The first picture this week is of the DFAC Pack, DFAC is short for dining facility. We all started eating together around 2 months ago and found out that we are all football fans, all married, and all without children, so we had a lot in common. It’s been great getting to know the guys and having a ritual at 1730 every day as long as one of us isn’t stuck working! Pictured from left to right is Dr. Sam Gao, CDR Todd Stein, me and HM1 Parris Mason. Sam is the first to be kicked off Survivor Kandahar and should be on his way home now. Next will be Parris followed shortly by Todd and I. Sam is going back to Portsmouth, VA, Parris to San Diego, Todd to Japan and I’m going back to Lemoore California. It’s been great knowing you guys, thanks for making the deployment enjoyable as possible! Go Bengals! The second picture is of the entire OR staff from the US, Holland, and Canada. Some of the people are missing from the photo due to a race that was held this morning. Most of the people in the photo are part of the incoming team, I sure hope they have as good and rewarding deployment as we have. Good luck guys!

Shayna had her left eternal fixator removed on the 23rd and is ready to hit the gym! She has to wear a brace for 2 weeks and then it’s back onto the workout train. She can’t wait and I’m very proud of her being able to deal with me being gone, carrying a 4.0 average in her Master’s studies, and going through the trials of major surgeries. You did great babe.

We saw some of the people we trained with in Ft. Jackson on their way home form Bastion. They are lucky that they are going home early, but they were unlucky in a sense that they had it a lot worse than we did here in Kandahar. They were in tents the entire time and the food was terrible. I guess from what I’m hearing the working environment was not friendly at all working with the British, that’s too bad. We’ve had great surgical teams throughout this deployment, regardless what country the personnel were from. Welcome back to Anne, Spencer, Toth, Trudeau, Schneider, etc. I hope you have a great trip home.
Hours worked:
18 OCT 09: 7 Hours
20 OCT 09: 7 Hours
22 OCT 09: 12 Hours
24 OCT 09: 13 Hours

# CAUSES OF SURGERY AS OF 24 OCT 09
115 GSW
132 IED
7 SVBIED
13 SUICIDE BOMBER
13 ROCKET ATTACK
49 NBI
7 MINE
9 AIR STRIKE (SAME PATIENT 9 SURGERIES)
7 MVA
1 GRENADE INJURY

That’s about it from Kandahar, only a couple of weeks left, woohoo! Shayna I love and miss you very much and I’ll see those sexy legs soon! Everyone else take care and I’ll be seeing you.

Dave