Hospital’s patient load has U.S. medics in Iraq keeping skills sharp

[babylonsister]

I had to post this just for the title alone; talk about putting lipstick on a pig! :puke:

http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=45612

Hospital’s patient load has U.S. medics in Iraq keeping skills sharp


By Helen Hu, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, May 5, 2007

BAGHDAD — The wound was deceptively small.

Pfc. Dustin Fritschel, 20, of Lockport, Ill., had a small puncture in his back. He looked fine as he lay in his bed at Ibn Sina Hospital, run by the 28th Combat Support Hospital. He described a mortar going off, he and his buddies running into a building, a medic checking him over.

But CT scans detected what the eye could not: A piece of shrapnel had made its way into Fritschel’s body and appear to be embedded in one of his organs.

Surgeons opened him up and found his spleen was nicked. Since the body doesn’t need the organ, it was removed.

In a war whose signature weapon is explosives, combat medical staff in Iraq spend much of their time searching for foreign objects in people’s bodies that could become a problem.

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