Most of you know that we are on Semester at Sea for the next few months and why, but if not, here are the details. I’m working as the physician with SAS aboard the MV World Odyssey for the spring 2019 voyage. I’ve taken sabbatical from work and and following in the footsteps of many Group Health docs before me, sailing around the world caring for the shipboard community. I feel so lucky to be sailing with Geoff and the kids and being a part of this floating university.
Our Health Team consists of the following:
Emily, a nurse practitioner from CSU who is wonderful. Easy to work with and proactive. A really great partner. We’ve decided to staff both morning and afternoon clinic together for now - more fun and goes quicker. Plus we learn our way around the clinic and hopefully make it easier on our crew medical partners.
Our team also includes two counselors - Steve, a PhD psychologist also from CSU. He is also great, approachable and hard-working and “all in”. Laura is our other PhD psychologist. She works in student health at Regis University. She is our resident extrovert and has sailed twice before. She is fabulous as well.
There are no slackers. It is awesome.
The medical clinic is on Deck 3, four adjoining rooms and a hallway, just above water level so we can see the swell up close and personal through the portholes down there. Clinic is well-organized and staffed by three extremely pleasant women (who also live on this hallway within the clinic!) - two nurses from the Philippines and one physician from Columbia. They are competent and kind to us and our students. They are also buried in paperwork as many maritime regulations govern their days. One of the nurses is a real softy and has a rule that if a student is crying, she will break protocol and go out of her way to help that student. She calls me Doc-y.
We were lucky to board the ship a few days prior the the students to get oriented. We are the experts on board despite having just arrived, but these first few days were invaluable, to meet and bond with the other staff and faculty (“staculty”). It’s a pretty low maintenance group, curious and thoughtful with diverse life experience. They have clearly signed up because they also want to travel and make connections with others in this world. They are passionate about their areas of study. The biggest surprise for me is how much fun it has been to be back in an academic environment. So far I have made it to the fabulous Global Studies course every other day (school days are organized into A days and B days while we are at sea; no classes while we are in port).
Since we set sail from Ensenada, at every hour of every day, only sea surrounds us. It’s extremely difficult for me to wrap my brain around what I see out the cabin window. It’s SO different from my typical landscape at home - house, work, streets, car, bus, lake, sports fields. Sounds obvious to say, but I'm so used to being just one individual moving freely around my urban environment rather than being part of this large ship board community. It feels like we are a single organism, about nine hundred strong, living in a small capsule and moving over miles and miles and miles of sea, miles and miles and miles from land. Writing this from the middle of the Pacific - we are days from land on either side. We have three more days of sailing before we reach Hawaii. We love opening our window and feeling the warm breeze, watching the swell all the way to the horizon (soft swells so far - which doesn’t mean that many people have not been seasick, they have been! It sounds like we’ll get some higher, but not dangerous, seas tonight).
-M