Another early morning....

I wake up to my phone buzzing on the bedside stand. "1 New Message" flashes across the screen. Pushing the button to view my message, I begin to read through my sleep-squinted eyes: "Sorry about the early call guys. We have a Kasane - Francistown. The patient has lost a lot of blood." Uggh, what time is it? I glance at the clock on my phone and read 3:27 AM. The airport doesn't open till 6 AM so I groggily text back: "Ok. We'll plan on being in the air between 0600 and 0630." I reset my alarm for 4:30 and try to fall back to sleep. Finally, after 45 minutes of tossing and turning, I finally succeed in dozing off only to dream that I sleep through the alarm and arrive at the airport an hour late. I jerk awake feeling mildly panicked and give up trying to fall back asleep. After a cup of strong coffee and some peanut butter and jelly toast I start to feel a little more awake. On the short drive to the airport I down another cup of coffee and start to feel even more human. The hangar is dark and empty when I arrive. I sit down to fill out the necessary preflight paperwork; the briefer at Flight Services sounds just as bleary eyed as I feel but he dutifully logs the flight plans that I read to him. Brian, my co-pilot, walks through the door a few minutes later and asks what still needs to be done yet. He leaves to do the only thing I hadn't yet completed: the preflight inspection on our airplane, MJM. Around 6:10 or so one of our two medics arrives and we load up. After waiting another 20 minutes the other medic finally speeds up to the hangar and jogs to the airplane. We all make the necessary snide remarks about his ability to tell time and then are on our way.

Two hours and 20 minutes later, after bucking moderate headwinds the whole way, the main wheel tires kiss the pavement in Kasane. As expected, the ambulance is waiting and they unload the patient. He is a large man in his 40s who has a bandage under his nose and blood on his face but otherwise appears uninjured. The medics quickly load and secure him and within 10 minutes we are taxiing back out. Now heading SE to Francistown, our headwinds from the way up become crosswinds so we don't make up any time - but at least we aren't losing more either. As we taxi to the loading area in Francistown the ambulance is waiting for us; within a few minutes of shutting the airplane down the patient and medics are on their way to the hospital. While waiting for our medics to return, Brian and I decide take some fuel. Just as we are fastening our fuel caps back into place the ambulance reappears with our medics. Perfect timing. As we are strapping in I turn and ask Shane, one of the medics, what was wrong with our patient. "He had a nosebleed". I snort and reply, "I could see that, but what else was wrong with him?" "Nothing" is Shane's reply. "They simply couldn't get it to stop bleeding and they were down to their last pint of blood at Kasane." I gape at Shane. He grins ruefully and says, "40% of the population has AIDS. Clean blood is hard to come by." I laugh at the craziness of it; we flew all the way across the country for a nosebleed. As we taxi out I reflect that it doesn't really matter what was wrong with the patient, without the job that FMS does people here could die from something as trivial as a nosebleed. I am glad to be a part of this.