Rest In Peace.

Dear soldier,

You served your country, and for that you had my deepest respect, even though I didn’t know you. You were in your own country, somewhere you felt safe, somewhere where your family and friends and home are. You supported other servicemen and women injured through Help for Heroes. And yet, somehow, it was your lot to be hit by a car driven by two fanatics and then brutally murdered by them. To be attacked and killed outside your barracks.

Rest in peace, may God take you safely away to His Heaven. And God be with your family, friends and unit. And so, as the two extremists that committed this barbaric act are in hospital under guard, people forget that Islam and Islamist are NOT the same thing. This is not done in the name of true Islam, it is not fair to brand all that follow a religion by the deluded acts of some people from it. And yet people do. Marches with missiles thrown at the police. A man arrested in a mosque armed with a knife.

How is it that in our pain and anger we forget our reason?

And it is pain and anger. I was shaking when I heard this; this man was killed just for being a soldier. There but for the grace of God go I. Or many people I know. The forces are a community, it’s sent shockwaves through the country, but the twitter map of the UK now makes worrying reading. Edl; muslims; cunts…I just hope people calm down enough to realise that if they retaliate (and they’ll do it against innocent people), it worked. Terrorism produced terror. For my part, it’s made me more determined to make it. I go for Main Board soon, and it’s made me more determined to succeed, to show that they can’t break us. The heart of our forces beats stronger than ever, but we will not rise to discrimination and violence as knee-jerk reactions. I hope.

 

When you go home, tell them of us and say, “For your tomorrow, we gave our today”.

Things I should have learnt by now….

Having been introduced to the funniest procrastination ever by Bobbi my lovely sister (thanks. A lot. Byebye degree.), I feel the need to add one of my own here. The thread she introduced me to was on an emergency department forum and called ‘Things I Learn From My Patients’ and has probably convinced my flatmates I’ve cracked as I sit in my room occasionally howling with laughter. It contains gems such as:

“While playing in the desert with your 2 drunken friends, do decide to pick up a rattle snake and swing it around, then be surprised when it bites you. Then, while in transport to the hospital (via air lift) do jump up and try to open the door of the helicopter to get out- then act upset when you are restrained!”

Or, stupid things people do, leading them to an A&E and seemingly the mental instructions that led them there!

Anyway, my own dumb moment…

When on FIBUA (fighting in built up areas – room clearing and moving along street etc) training with OTC and get there earlier than the rest of the unit having come in the truck instead of on the bus, do decide to have a look at the central ‘church’ of the FIBUA village. After all, it was the final objective last year and you want to have the advantage over your rival unit don’t you? Having explored upwards floor by floor to the tower roof with your boyfriend’s brother, Lofty, decide that you *have* to see what he can. Despite him having about a foot on you. And you being restricted in your vision by the surrounding wall. Never mind, just boost yourself up onto the wall (just up onto straight arms, not actually on top of the wall – you wouldn’t want to fall now, would you?) . Having seen, push yourself down. Backwards onto the floor. With the rifle slung in front of you. When this rifle catches on the wall and bounces onto your hand, realised your intelligence and follow Lofty back down without complaining about it. When it is extremely painful and swells instantly, don’t ask the trainee paramedic Captain you know and have been chatting to – you wouldn’t want to make a fuss, would you? Proceed to ‘check’ the hand yourself by checking when you move your fingers, you can still see a straight line moving under the skin. Decide this is, in fact the bone and not the tendon over the bone and this mean’s it’s fine. Even when asked by Pagey to clip his helmet on his webbing, when you twist your fingers round, it becomes so excruciatingly painful that you can’t move or touch it. Don’t mention this for the whole exercise. And put maximum effort into FIBUAy stuff like climbing grappling hooks, diving over walls and clearing rooms. Realise about a month later that that line is, in fact, the tendon. And that hard thing with a painful lump on it is the bone. In your dominant hand. And you play the clarinet. And have your friend with a brittle bone disorder, so many breaks, take one look and go ‘what did you break it on?’.

F***!

Just a thought.

An idea that’s been floating in my head for a while. How much can you tell about someone when you look at them? How can you tell what makes them laugh and cry? What makes them them? What’s happened to them to make them do that? Everything wonderful and complex, the bits in time that make a person… Some drawings, a work in progress (my drawing always is – it never looks like it should!).

Hello World, this is Libby…

I’ve had quite an eventful end of last term, hence the quietness online.

There’s been battlecamp, briefing, then 4 days at home (in which I did almost nothing!) and then skiing.

And then almost immediately back to uni (not quite immediately because I crashed…) and then trying to work and  sleep and that was quite hard and tomorrow I go on a FIBUA weekend with OTC and have to be down there for 0630 and…and…and this is just to say I’m still alive!

Define St John!

I think this defines the Saint John Ambulance as I know it…”Can we make a funny video and mess around?” “Not without asking the district commander and possibly several other people!”

Observant bunch this! !WARNING! Medically interesting pictures !WARNING!

If I want to be in the OTC and if I want to be a soldier, I have to be physically fit. And I have come to university and my fitness has fallen amazingly. I can still do the standard test fairly easily, but that’s not good enough for an officer, so I’ve started proper running training again. I don’t like running in public, but I don’t have much of a choice now that I’m in a city, so I ran around the main park for 20 minutes on Tuesday. This would be fine, but I tripped and fell near the start, stood up embarrassed and carried on. A little later the leg of my trackies felt wet. I glanced down and it was dark. By this time I got the idea that my knee was bleeding. And because I hadn’t stopped to let it clot, it had got blood on my trousers. Quite an amount of it. When I finished my run and looked down at it, it looked quite dramatic. My leg underneath looked arguably more picturesque. I didn’t really have anything with me that I could use to stop it bleeding or hide a bloodstain that big without looking silly, so I had to walk home with it like that. A mile and a half. Through the main student area. As I walked, had you walked past me, you would’ve seen this:

Notice anything unusual?

How about this?

As I walked back, I only got one girl giving me an obviously horrified look…most of the rest of the students just wandered past. My grazes were nothing, but if I’d walked past someone with this much blood on them? I’d like to think I’d at least notice!

                                                                         This is the mess that greeted me when I got back:

   The blood one my leg washed off easily enough, however I recreated the Hitchcock shower scene trying to clean my trackies. The shower ran red for a bit. I didn’t know it was possible for trackies to contain so much blood! Interesting though, to see how much a cut can bleed when not clotted. 

Amazing.

From a girl on YouTube who said she’d been bullied all her life.

“my birthday is 11/11 and i don’t celebrate it cause i celebrate the soldiers”

Wow.

Just like on Remembrance Day I posted the Ode of Remembrance from For the Fallen on Facebook, and underneath person after person commented. No smilies, no silly comments, each one the same.

We will remember them.