Shipshape!

My morning reading includes reviewing a couple of newsletters from coastal communities and one or two on shipping and maritime affairs—pretty standard fare for someone whose professional interests are maritime. Today, I lingered on a shipyard ad. On their website, I found an overhead panoramic view of their operation. Having just a tiny bit of a familiarity with shipyards like theirs. I began thinking about where and how I could fit into their operations. Maybe as a staff videographer?

OK, I am bored. At seventy-eight, I work as a videographer, editor, and station manager, and I am bored. Any job becomes ho-hum, and we begin to wish for a change. Looking at the shipyard’s website, I came upon an entire section on their medical facilities. Wow! What a well-equipped clinic. My mind flashed back to the shack, which was the aide station in a shipyard where I had worked years ago. The term “antipodean” occurs as a description. It was so vastly different that they might be worlds apart. Here is the story:

Summers I usually worked as an aide at hospitals like Massachusetts General on their orthopedic floors. I had always liked ortho, and spending a summer working in a hospital again was a pleasant contrast to grad school.
One summer, though, the staffing agency had little work for me at the hospital. They were only offering home care options that I did not like. Then I received a call, a shipyard in the Boston area needed someone with the sort of skills I had to work in their aide station. I jumped at it.

The next day, I showed up. Two former Navy chief petty officers greeted me at the aide station. They had the sort of “presence” found among senior chief petty officers. And, without any thought, I greeted them with a simple, “mornin’ chief!” I was invited aboard for some authentic Navy coffee, a grilling on where I had served and what I knew, and a stern emphasis placed on standard Navy dungarees, workshirts, and safety shoes as the uniform of the day. I’d be there for two weeks while a staff member vacationed.

It had been years since I served, but going to the shipyard daily had me back in the flow in no time. The chiefs belonged to an era much before me. I had no experience with some of their routines. They regularly sharpened their needles for injection, which were disposable in my day. Each chief had and maintained a set of suturing needles for wound closure; most of the sutures in the ORs I worked in were swaged on. I had never sharpened a needle.
Those were just two of the things that differed between my era and theirs. They took me on as a project. Two chiefs, each with a career behind them, serving in a small aide station? They had no one to lord it over and no one to teach. I was a godsend to them. Now, there is a particular lyrical nature to being cussed out by a chief petty officer. I became reacquainted with it, working with two strong wills with differing opinions. Over the following weeks, I learned arcane areas of being a hospital corpsman that had been lost when I served.
At the end of the vacation, I was given a going-away present—a needle kit and a sharpening stone.

Work on an ortho floor was pretty dull afterwards. There were no suturing minor lacerations. No taking X-rays with a former dental X-ray machine or drinking pot after pot of Navy-grade coffee. and no listening to sea stories of duty stations as far apart as Norfolk and Diego Garcia and the difficulty of re-sterilizing surgical gloves.

Looking at the clinic photos on the shipyard’s website, I had these memories run through my mind. I could imagine a staff of former Navy nurses, corpsmen, and doctors, the bottomless pots of Navy coffee, and more. Not my ideal job.

I am not that bored yet.