The whirlybird cometh

Sitting here in my little student room at the clinic this afternoon, I realized that I could hear a helicopter, getting louder and louder and LOUDER.  "There must be a retrieval happening!", I thought, "And those buggers didn't even tell me!"   

Normally if someone is being retrieved by chopper back to the city they'll have been brought in first by ambulance, then they'd be stabilized here by the doctors while someone jumped on the phone back to the big hospital to give them the picture and arrange the retrieval, then the chopper has to start up and fly down here.  It'd be an hour at best I reckon before it arrives.  So I was a bit irked that in all the excitement nobody had bothered to let me know what was going on.  I hadn't even heard an ambulance turn up.

So I grabbed my stethoscope in case there's any stethoscoping to be done and strolled nonchalantly out the back of the clinic.  Strolling nonchalantly is a good way to make people think you know what you're doing, so I do it all the time.  Otherwise I'd be as giddy as a schoolgirl.  But out the back of the clinic there doesn't seem to be anything going on.  The same old guy is still lying there on the drip that I should have put into him but for some strange reason the duty doctor got very possessive of and did it himself before telling me that I probably could have done it, and he's certainly not needing retrieval.  But where were all the staff?

The back door was open and the helicopter noise was even louder, much louder than it usually is when the chopper lands.  It normally lands across the road on the football field.  Which must be exciting if there's a footy game going on.  Possibly a good way for the retrieval team to guarantee that they won't be going home empty handed - just generate some fresh trauma on the way in. 

I stepped out the back door and saw why the noise was so loud.  This was not a medical retrieval - there was a flippin' great big Navy helicopter hovering over the building next door.  Wow.  Those things are huge.  They might look small up in the sky, but they look large when they are hovering 10 meters above the ground, slowly coming down in a little children's playground with tall trees on each side and a hundred gawping villagers standing so close it looks like they're in danger of losing their wigs.

A couple of the doctors and nurses were standing out behind the clinic already, watching the chopper come down.  They looked like they wanted to go closer and watch, but obviously there were sick people who needed looking after in the clinic.  I, on the other hand, have no responsibilities at all, and furthermore I was now as giddy as a schoolgirl.  Helicopters are awesome.  We all wanted to be helicopter pilots when we were young, right?  Plus this one had a big open side door that you could probably shoot big guns out of.  Maybe like that minigun in Predator.  We all wanted to shoot big guns out of a helicopter when we were young, right?

So in the hope of seeing the helicopter suddenly and mercilessly machine-gun the growing crowd, I trotted off away from the clinic to get a closer view.  As I stopped to snap a few blurry photos on my phone, I realized that the doctors and nurses were coming too.  So much for the sick people, there's a helicopter!  Wheeee!

Perhaps fortunately, there was no machine-gunning, nor did any squads of special forces soldiers with handlebar moustachios and aviator sunglasses rappel out of it to the ground.  It seems that there is to be no bloody coup this week.  I'm assuming that it's down here for ANZAC Day on Sunday.  I hope not.  It doesn't seem right to commemorate the deaths and maimings of thousands of people by strutting around showing off your death-machines and maiming-guns.  I know that probably sounds hypocritical coming from someone who just two paragraphs ago was hoping that his townsfolk would be senselessly mass-murdered for his passing entertainment, but who ever said the interwebs was for stuff that makes sense?

Sigh - back to the books.