Made it Home!

We just got back to warm and sunny Santa Barbara last night! We were supposed to get in on Monday afternoon, but Sunday night I came down with a terrible case of the flu. I seriously don't think I've ever been that sick before! Super kudos to Katie for taking care of me and staying up most of the night! (Another great reason why I whole heartedly support marriage!) :) After several calls totalling to about 3 hours on the phone with United Airlines to reschedule our flight we were finally able to get in last night. As much of a bummer it was to be sick it was nice to stay with Katie's parent's Beth and Bill an extra day! :)

Being sick wasn't so bad as well cause I was able to catch up on a lot of e-mails which was great. Plus, Katie was so sweet and rented me two of my favorite old school movies (Lethal Weapon 4 and Grumpy Old Men) which I got to enjoy on Bill and Beth's 91" big screen projector TV. (which is pretty much like having your own movie theater!) :) No complaints from me. :)

On another topic I feel like I had a bit of a reality check this morning in the car. I was driving downtown and thinking about all the things I've got going on in my life, upcoming shoots, travel arrangements I need to make, phone calls I need to return, etc etc and then I listened to a great interview on NPR's "Fresh Air". The interviewer was talking with Navy Cmdr. Richard Jadick who was a military doctor in the Battle of Fallujah. He just came out with a memoir called "On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story." It was pretty nuts listening to the interview and how he talked about treating wounded soliders.

He described at one point how he would handle catagorizing the soliders who came in. There were 1.) The wounded who would live regardless of what medical attention they did or didn't receive, 2.) Those who would die within three minutes if they didn't get medical attention and 3.) whose who would require more than 3 minutes of time to treat. He said often those that needed 3 minutes of time or more couldn't be treated because the time that it would take to treat them would be too much given the number of other soliders there were to treat who would die if he took the time required to treat them.

He also talked about what it was like often treating the insurgents who would come in and because he was a doctor under the hippocratic oath he had to treat any person, enemy or not who entered his area. Perhaps, the most compelling thing he shared was how difficult it was to choose who would have to go back into the battlefield and who had to go home, and how the Marines who would come in wounded always wanted to go back into the battlefield and rejoin their fellow soliders.

Amazing. Suddenly, all the things that I were worried about in my day didn't seem to stand much ground compared to what these guys were going through. It also made me a feel a little bad about sorry for myself that I was sick with the flu! Here are guys who have gunshot wounds and are begging to go back into battle and I think I've got it bad cause I've got a stomach bug!

Anyways, just thought I would share that. It's really put a bit of a different spin on my day thinking of how the reality of my day is so different from the reality of so many other people's days. Anyone who knows me knows I'm really not for this war that we're in, but regardless of that, I have the utmost respect for the people who go out and fight in it, particularly when I'm driving my nice car down a California freeway or sitting in front of my state of the art computer or complaining about how my hi tech cameras and lenses weigh too much! Just food for thought!!

You can listen to the interview HERE