A story about a woman nurse who served in Afghanistan 
Quote:
http://www.calgarysun.com/cgi-bin/pu...es&s=lifestyle
City nurse has an eye-opening experience in her role as military reservist
Angel in fatigues
Nadia Moharib
Calgary Sun
November 26, 2006
Tara Sawchuk is one of three nurses from Foothills hospital who works with the Canadian Forces Reserves and served in Afghanistan.
TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS ... Foothills hospital nurse and Canadian Forces reserve Tara Sawchuk is used to the hectic pace of emergency room medicine but found herself in a whole new world during her tour of Afghanistan.
— photo by Kevin Udahl, Calgary Sun
The 38-year-old spent three months treating civilians and soldiers, and in the process, had an experience she will never forget. In February, the ER nurse returns to the military hospital at the Kandahar airfield.
• • • • •
She could barely sleep.
It was Lt. Tara Sawchuk's first nap before her first shift as a reserve nursing officer on the Canadian Forces base in Kandahar.
It was dusty, noisy, uncomfortable and she still had jetlag.
And the anticipation of a rocket attack weighed heavily on her mind as she tried to get to sleep in the stifling heat.
"I was waiting because I knew it was going to come," she said.
And when it did, Sawchuk said it felt "like somebody slugged me in the chest."
"I jumped up and grabbed my boots and shirt thinking I was late for work," she recalled.
"Then I woke up enough to know that was no alarm clock, that was a rocket ... 'Oh my gosh,' put your helmet on and lie on the ground."
Soon, Sawchuk would become all too familiar with the base being rocketed.
But in a country where many don't know their exact ages, only if they were born in the time of the Taliban or the time of the Russians, there was so much foreign territory for her to see.
"I took a pashto phrase book there and was just trying out phrases, saying silly things like 'Excuse me, I think the toilet is backed up,' " she said.
"The interpreters were laughing at me, but many of the patients didn't laugh because they didn't know what a toilet was."
Some had never seen running water, while one man ended up squatting outside rather than realizing he had taken the wrong door on the way to the bathroom.
The culture shock went both ways, Sawchuk said.
One day, she was struck in the chest by an Afghan soldier confused by the sight of a woman at work.
"It was quite a novelty for the Afghan men seeing women running around wearing pants with short hair, telling them what to do," she said.
"The interpreter told me (the patient) slugged me in the chest to know if I was a boy and I told the interpreter if he touched me again I was going to find out if he was a man."
The man was being treated for a chest wound in a military hospital a world away from modern-day conveniences of home but nonetheless a well-oiled machine.
"What I saw clinically, I expected to see,"Sawchuk said.
"It was just the reality of dealing with wounds you only really imagined and had never really seen ... gigantic machine-gun wounds, wounds from mines and bombs ... things you had seen in textbooks, educational and TV shows.
"Real life is very different.
"If they made it to the hospital, we did very well," Sawchuk said.
"It might not have been as slick and pretty as here in Canada, but I was very impressed with how it all worked out."
When a pager went off, it was a team effort on the whole base.
"When Canadians got hurt, soldiers would line up wanting to give blood," Sawchuk said.
"These guys would come in and I'm trying to treat them and they are trying to crane their head to say 'How's my buddy?' 'How's my sergeant?' 'How's my men?' and then they would go into surgery and wake up and say the same thing," she said.
"It was nice to be included in a team where people looked out for each other that much."
Those scenarios buoyed Sawchuk but so did meeting many of the locals.
There was the young girl who screamed in terror the entire time she was given a shower because she'd never had one before and another who didn't know how to hold a pencil and another .
"These people are just at such a disadvantage, but within a week, that little girl could count from zero to 10 in two different languages and could write the figures down," she said.
"What a difference from a little child baffled by a pencil."
She said her time there gives her a much better glimpse of what people in Afghanistan have gone though -- and, on the flip-side, confirmation of how valuable the mission to bring them help actually is.
"They deserve as much help as the world can give,"she said.
"We are so lucky and those four words just don't encompass the reality of what we've got here.
"On our worst day, we've got paradise compared to them."
The sad plight of women was something Sawchuk hopes to see change as the country rebuilds.
And she saw -- with one patient -- that possibility.
"He really, really wanted a photograph of all the staff," she said.
At first they refused, mystified by his request.
But there were touched when they learned why he made it.
"He said he wanted to take them home to show his daughters what women can do in other places in the world," Sawchuk said.
Sawchuk is scheduled to return to Kandahar in February for three months.
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