A little knee pain

Well Allen is okay but he did hurt his knee this week. He is a quote from an Oct 21 e-mail.

I just did something stupid today. We were washing vehicles, and I was guiding a humvee off of the elevated ramps. The flat part on top is solid, no holes. The ramp down from there is not. I stepped right through one of those gaps, fell backward with my leg caught in that same hole. For a second I thought I had broken my leg, but it didn't hurt that bad. I got up and checked it out. It appears I only scraped my leg up and wounded my pride. I think I'll have the medics check it out in the morning though, because I may have strained my knee or something. I'm fine though, the Lord has seen fit to spare me a broken leg, so I am very thankful!

Here was the note on the 24th:

I got my leg looked at. The medic that initially saw me was real gentle as far as what force he put on my leg while he was moving it around, and then the PA came in. He walked in, grabbed my leg and whipped it all around! His diagnosis was the same as the medic's except for the reccomended drugs. I've got an antibitoic and some vicatin. They were going to give me some morphine to help me sleep, but I didn't need it. The vicatin did just fine and I slept pretty good. They wrapped up my leg from just above the ankle to just above the knee and gave me some cold packs, too.

Then the 25th he said this:

My leg is much better today. It feels better, it just doesn't look it. The bruising is really something! I had someone all the way down the hall in the BN building see me outside the TOC and thought I had really broken something. It just looks ugly, that's all.

It is bruised from knee to foot so I guess it does look bad. I would like to say he is taking it easy but 15 hours a day isn't really taking it easy. They gave him a new job to go with his other job so now he is also schedueling all in country flights for his group! I will get him to send us another episode of Sgt Fetters goes on leave as soon as he can!
Ann

Before Shot

Allen getting ready to get in with the big fish! Oh and the sharks too! 

llen in the Shark Tank

 

"SSG Fetters goes on leave"

Kuwait was only an hour out of Bahrain so we got there pretty quick when we actuallyleft. I waited about a day before I got a flight out of there. They have contractedflights going all the way from Kuwait to Atlanta every day. They wait until they havea full MD-11 and send us out. 5 hours later you're in Germany for a couple hourswhile they refuel and restock, then it's another 9 hours to Atlanta. I caught a shortjump from there to Orlando where we had a great time. I actually got an earlier flight from the one I had previously scheduled, so my wifewasn't quite ready to pick me up. I called her from Atlanta to let her know I'd beabout 3 hours early and she picked me up and took me to the condo she and the kidswere staying at. I walked through the door in time to see my mother in law workingwith my 2 year old son to go potty. He ran out and gave me a hug with no pants on! My4 year old daughter at least waited until she could get her pants on before sherushed me! It was too funny! We went to Sea World and the kids just loved it! Especially Cecilia, she may want tobe a trainer or something when she gets older. Ann gave me a 'Dive with the Sharks'ticket for our anniversary. I had a blast! We've got the pictures and will have toget them on here. They put me in a shark gage and took me all through their sharktank for about 30 minutes. Unfortunately they didn't have the helmets set up right,something about the radios not working. So they gave me a mask and snorkel. I usedthe snorkel some, but for the most part I just held my breath and went to the bottomas long as I could. It was cool! And to think I only got her a bottle of perfume.I'll have to get a little more creative, they do make jewelry here inAfghanistan....Anyway, I'll have to continue this a little later. Coming soon, another excitingepisode of "SSG Fetters goes on leave"!

Update

There's a perfectly good reason I haven't updated this site. Honest! Most of it hasto do with my being on R & R for the last 15 days. Of course I realize that I couldhave updated it then, but why? I'm on vacation! I can do it now though, I have plentyof time to kill and this needed done. I'm in Kuwait, waiting (no that's not a pun,but it should be) on a flight back to BAF. I'll get there one day. But that's anotherstory.In the spirit of attempting to keep this blog in chronological order, I'll start withthe beginning of R & R.My flight out of BAF was a C-130 bound for Kuwait where we would get on a charterflight to Germany and then Atlanta. About halfway, I had to pop my ears constantly. Ididn't think much of it at the time until a crewman came down from the cockpit andyelled that we needed to have our masks on. He continued stepping in between peopleuntil he got to the back of the plane. There were already maybe 20 masks or so totalhanging above us in little canvas bags and there were 60 some odd of us on there. Sothe crewman passed out enough from the back of the plane where I'm guessing the restwere stored. I opened up my canvas bag and found something that many of you fromScott would instantly recognize. It was a plastic bag to put over my head. I put iton and didn't suffocate but that's only thanks to the small cylinder of air attachedto it. Mine didn't seem to work so well because while mine went deflated some while Ibreathed, other folk's inflated like a hot air balloon and stayed that way! I found out later that it was a good thing mine did that. Apparentlythose folks felt the full pressure from the cylinder, while mine did a little less.It worked better after I took it off. There's no way a loudspeaker can be heard overthe engines in a C-130 so the crewman came back and passed a note around as to whathad happened. "Rapid decompression, diverting to Bahrain."We land and it's really really hot. And humid, I think that's the part I wasn'treally prepared for. We get off the plane and the Navy has a team of flight surgeanscheck all of us out for the bends. This is why we were diverted, Bahrain has the onlyhyperbaric chamber in the area and the bends are pretty serious. My only issue goingthrough there was the fact that I don't really like flying anyway. Dramamine is awonderful thing! We're told that it's a minimum 24 hours between when you endure rapid decompressionto when you can fly again. Besides, they had to check out the plane. So they put usup at this Naval base that's seems to resemble a resort more than a military post.Maybe I was too used to the lack of ammenities in Afghanistan, but the facilitieswere beautiful, and there was so much greenery! Bowling, clubs, movie theater, foodcourt, swimming pool, it was something! We spent a day and a half there, then we wentback to the air terminal where we waited untill our new plane came to pick us up.We get in the new plane, sit down and swelter. The plane sat with no power with us init in 100% humidity and plenty of heat for at least 45 minutes. They fire it up, allengines running. The ramp in back doesn't come up. The crewmen wrestle with it foranother several minutes, then they tell us to deplane. So we do. We hang out in theterminal for 20 minutes or so, then we get back on the plane. They fire it up again,the ramp still doesn't come up. This time, the crewmen raise it manually and lock itin place. It satisfies whoever clears the plane for take off and we spend an hour inflight and then we land in Kuwait. Finally. And then on to home, which is another story.