The first medical flying....

Well, this last week has been an eventful one. My Botswanan license was approved by the DCA and issued. Naturally, it was issued as a Commercial Pilot's license and not an Airline Transport Pilot's license so it had to be sent back and reprinted but in any case I got my first taste of flying the line here in Botswana. On Tuesday morning we got a call from the Maun hospital. They had a patient with a ruptured appendix that needed to be transported to the Francistown hospital. I headed out to the aircraft to pull the covers and do the preflight inspection while the other pilot filed the flight plans and got our paperwork ready. At the same time the flight coordinater was calling the paramedics and arranging ambulance transport on both ends. As soon as the paramedics arrived we closed the doors, started the engines, and blasted off towards Maun. Maun is roughly an hour and a half away so once we were in the air, the paramedics promptly fell asleep and we settled in for the flight. On arrival in Maun, the ambulance was waiting with a surprise...a second patient! I never caught exactly what was wrong with the second guy but in the end we were only able to take the appendix case since we only have room for one stretcher on board. (There was discussion of us going back for the second patient once we had dropped the first off in Francistown but the Maun hospital eventually decided he wasn't critical enough to justify another trip.) So, from there we flew to Francistown and dropped off patient #1. The paramedics needed to accompany the patient to the hospital so Dan (the other pilot) and I fueled the aircraft and then wandered over to the tiny terminal to see if there was any food to be had. We got the very last of what the lunch lady had left...beef, rice, beets, and coleslaw. Quite a meal for 15pula (about $2.25). Dan got his food first and headed back to the aircraft to eat while I waited a few minutes for mine. Finally, I got my food and headed back to the aircraft to enjoy. When I got there, Dan eyed my styrofoam container and asked, "Is that still hot?" I replied that it was and he said with a smile "Then you better hurry up and eat it. The fat coagulates when it gets cool." I snapped open my lid and satisfied that it hadn't coagulated yet ate a very tasty if not a little greasy meal. About the time I was finishing my last forkfuls the ambulance reappeared with the paramedics who looked a little annoyed that we had gotten food and they had not. However, even if the lunch lady had had more food we didn't have time to wait. The paramedics informed us that there was a patient in Gaborone that needed transport to Johannesburg. So, we fired up and head back to Gaborone. On arrival there, we called for fuel while we went to the terminal to clear customs. By the time we returned, the aircraft had been fueled and the paramedics were loading the patient, a South African motocross racer who had badly broken a leg in a race in Botswana. As soon as he was loaded, we were off again...this time to the Lanseria airport in the Johannesburg area. I found that flying into South Africa wasn't very hard until it came to the mountains of paperwork. On arrival in Lanseria, we headed into Customs and Immigration. Both Customs and Immigration had a fairly substantial form that had to be filled out in duplicate for both entry and exit. (Someone should tell them about carbon paper!) In any case, with the paperwork finished and the patient safely in his ambulance and on his way to a South African hospital we were able to turn around and head home. It had been a very long but enlightening day.