The Guinea Pig

This week has been one of mixed weather and not much action. For the first three days we awoke to a thick blanket of freezing fog. You couldn’t see Carse House from Everson house. It was quite dramatic seeing the bones of our world (which I have grown to recognise almost as well as those of home, after seeing and studying them every day for 5 months) covered by a veil of fog which was slowly drawing back to reveal more and more of the landscape. At some points it was almost like those incredible statues (I think by Leonardo)  of veiled women, where he has managed to capture not only the features of the woman but also the way the veil falls over her face,  in stone! Usually in the afternoon the fog would have burned off and one could only see guncrack wisps in the valleys. Since Wednesday afternoon till last night it has been unbelievably beautiful. Bright sunshine, painfully blue skies and a thick frost on the ground in the morning. Howeve,r as you walk along the track to Grytviken there is a stern reminder that when we have no direct sunlight on the base it will be much colder. No matter how many of the buildings were steaming on base there were sections of the track which were still locked in ice as a harbinger of cold. 

A looming Mount Duse

 While the weather was doing odd and wonderful things life on base continued as ever. This week however I did begin to feel slightly like a guinea pig. Hazel had to check someone’s eye for a foreign body in it last weekend and afterward asked me if I would be willing to come and sit while she reminded herself how to use a slitlamp. This is the optometrist’s tool where you put your head in a cradle and the doctor can shine a light of varying strength and/or colour,  to be able to look steadily into an eye to check for problems. We spent half an hour with coffee, fiddling with knobs and levers trying to figure what did what,  but by the end she had got the hang of it. We then swapped places so I could have a look at her iris. If you can, get a willing volunteer, the strongest magnifying glass you can find and a torch. Make sure you don’t blind your volunteer but look at their iris. It is one of the most amazing, beautiful structures I have ever seen. It is incredible. The only thing I can liken it to is a galaxy, or perhaps a solar storm. It is so extraordinary-looking one could just fall into it forever. 

A couple of days later Hazel asked me if she could check whether I would make a good teaching tool for Doc School. She just wanted to check that there was someone who would tolerate having their eyelid everted (turned inside out) so that she could demonstrate it to everyone. It is not the most pleasant sensation in the world but not too bad and in the end we were all able to do it on each other  so we could check if there is something in someone’s eye if Hazel is not here. The reason for Doc School is twofold: 1) to learn for our own benefit and 2) to be able to do simple things so as to be able to either help Hazel if there is an accident or to do simple things like get something out of someone’s eye if she is away from base. I just enjoy learning all of this stuff. 

On Tuesday we had a tabletop Search And Rescue (SAR) exercise, then had a play with the comms and then the stretcher and methods for getting a casualty off a hill. We have something called a cascade stretcher which can have a wheel fitted to the bottom so we can roll people off a hill. We then had a look at how we would get them into the jetboat. If the accident happened on the other side of our peninsula, or on another peninsula, the only way they would get back would be on the boats, so we have to make sure we can easily put the stretcher into and out of the boats without too much hassle. [As a current affairs aside: our peninsula is called Thatcher Peninsula after Margaret. I thought, considering the recent news of her death,  that I would just mention it] After lunch Paula, Hazel and I played a little more with the stretcher and we made some modifications to the system which we think will simplify things and make them better. After that it was such a beautiful day that we took the afternoon off and Hazel and I walked to Penguin River. We chased the sun and sat on a bluff overlooking Hestesletten and over to the Hamburg lakes. It looks remarkably like the African savannah (as long as you don’t look at the icebergs) or the lost world. 

Hestesletten

The Lost World

 In addition to all the science we do on base we are also acting as guinea pigs for a groundbreaking piece of research. The doctors with BAS often do some research on the winterers since we are a captive audience. This year in conference (all members of BAS who go South meet in Cambridge for a week of talks, First Aid courses and field courses) they took blood and did other things as part of their research (we filled out a lot of questionnaires!). As part of the human genome project they are now also looking at mapping the human microbiome. This is made up of all the organisms that live on or inside the human body. Vast, vast numbers of organisms live on or in us and in fact they make up a huge amount of the weight of your body. Some of these organisms are harmful but the majority either have no effect or are beneficial to us. For example bacteria in our stomach help us to digest our food properly. It is thought that by transplanting these organisms several major illnesses can be helped such as Crohn’s disease. We have no idea how they really affect us, this is a completely new science but one that could have extremely wide ranging uses. Hazel (who will start her gastroenterology training when she returns to the NHS) has teamed up with a research group in the UK who are interested in discovering if the stomach organisms homogenise (become the same) in a group that all eat the same food. This is very difficult to study in the UK but on a BAS base where everyone eats the same food everyday for a year.... So (if squeamish move onto the next paragraph) all we have to do is provide her with a stool sample and a questionnaire a couple of times through the winter. We provided a control sample at conference. The results won’t be known for a year or so (the samples won’t be sent home till next year) but should be fascinating. 

After a quiet week we of course had an extremely busy Friday. I was on earlies and saw a wonderful dawn. 

Dawn

 I then did the prestart checks on the jetboats in the dark while trying to time the rising times of the bread I was baking. By 0800 Hazel and I had a RIB in the water and were ready to act as linesboat to the JCR. We duly did that (it can be rather tricky driving through kelp dragging a heavy warp so that if the kelp stops you, the boat actually goes backwards.)  By 0845, while I was still dealing with lines, Paula had taken GO Jo to the Polarstern (a German research vessel that had just collected a group which had been doing lake coring in Jason Lagoon) for a landing briefing and then at 0915 when Keiron had finished the briefing for JCR he and Sue went out with Paula to collect Jo and then they went to the fishing vessel Tronio for an inspection. With three ships in and around the cove it really was like working in a harbour. Very noisy and distracting. I spent all of Friday afternoon learning from Erny (the mechanic) how to replace a wheel bearing (onto the trailer that had lost one). Paula and I then swapped the RIBs around so we now have two RIBs on their own trailers and no RIB on the floor of the boatshed which is a massive bonus. At the same time as all of this a rat team helicopter came in for some maintenance. It was all a bit manic. We had a BBQ for 70 people (51 from the JCR and the rest of us) and it was a delicious BBQ as well. Paula, Joe and Mickey (one of the builders) were stars and gave me a hand otherwise I would have been swamped with the cooking and it was great fun. We provided some reindeer and the JCR kindly provided everything else. On board the JCR was John who was Doc here before Hazel. It was great to see him but he looks very ready to go home. 

The JCR left again on Saturday morning leaving us to the peace and solitude of our base again. Saturday was the last Saturday night for the builders and Pat and Sarah. Their departure this week will leave only 10 of us on base for winter. What with that thought in our heads and the cold nights that we have been having, the idea of winter is creeping up on us rather faster than it had been for the past few weeks. Soon there will be snow and the track will be closed. The cold will creep in and the nights will be longer than the days (it only gets light about 0700 at the moment and gets dark around 1830), we will hunker down and start feeding up for midwinter. I for one have mixed feelings about this but am mostly looking forward to it. 

“Winter is coming”

Abstract art

 

I believe I can fly!