Taking care of feet

Theodore Roosevelt once said about the importance of taking care of your feet, "Sound hearts are not much good if the feet won't stand." Any infantryman who has put a ruck on his back and worn combat boots would attest to the same. I believe that second only to the maintenance of one's weapon is taking care of one's feet. That was reiterated by my preceptor on day one. My mentor here, we'll call him "Dr. L", blew all of my expectations away as a civilian Doctor. Typicaly, physicians I've worked with, so far, on the civilian side have had no interest in applying his/her knowledge to a military setting. I don't think it has been intentional, but rather, naturally, one would gravitate to his/her strength which in most cases is civilian medicine for most doctors. It takes either a lot of experience in war medicine, or a good imagination and in-depth research to take the scope and knowledge of an M.D. and transfer it to an SF Medic in a way that best prepares him for what he'll see. Dr. L has shown this to be his mission for me and my battle buddy, "Sgt B" while we are here on the resevation. Dr. L isn't former military but his enthusiasm and knowledge, particularly of the SF mission, is umatched by even some of the military doctors that I know. Dr. L's plan is to make sure we get training in various different scenarios from truama, to delivering babies, to going out to homes in rural North Dakota for treatment, to dealing with translators (which we will certainly need here), to the simple things like feet, and more complicated things like surgery. Day one was feet. Dr. L said, "Guys, I know you may want to go straight to the OR or ER, but I think we should start with an often overlooked area for the soldier- the feet. You guys have already had your trauma rotations, so now we're going to focus more on clinical medicine because most of the time you'll be treating indigenous village folk in order to build rapport and gather that valuable human intelligence. And it will be you, the team medic, who will be getting this intel after you've taken care of a son, daughter, or chief with simple clinical procedures." I was impressed by this conversation and many others throughout the day. I am very fortunate to have such a dedicated preceptor, he is more dedicated to us than to anyone else in the hospital, he makes it very clear to everyone that we are priority one, and he makes it clear to us that we are to actively seek out his colleagues for their valuable knowledge. The physicians here have all been excited to meet us, and even on day one I was invited to come to a Brain Trauma Conference at the community college outside of town with the ER doc, which was today, and was great. Anyhow, back to the feet. What did we do? We did a lot of wound care with diabetic patients whose feet ranged from literally rotting off, to simply paring down callouses and seeing if an ulcer was about to open up. We also did some ingrown toenail removals, all along talking about how to treat infections, trench foot, plantar warts, blisters, gangrene, and when to recognize the need for amputation. Very good training. With every procedure and patient Dr. L would apply his favorite SF mantra "See one, do one, teach one." We would watch him do a procedure, then we'd do the procedure ourselves, and then we'd have to do some role playing and explain step-by-step how to do the procedure. Looks like it's going to be a great learning experience here.