Sara Burdash, M.D.

BURDASH: I’m Sarah Burdash, and I’m an emergency medicine physician at the University of Minnesota, but I’m also a captain in the Minnesota National Guard. Most of my hours in the emergency department are in the afternoons and evenings, so the earliest shift I usually work starts around 1 p.m. The later shifts start around 4:30 or 5 p.m. Tonight I’m going to have to get all packed up, and tomorrow morning I leave bright and early. We’re going to be driving up to Camp Ripley in Minnesota; it’s about two, two and a half hours away. This particular drill weekend, we’ll be doing our periodic health assessments, we’ll be doing training. Oh, Hi guys! Hello! Hey. AARON: How are you doing? BURDASH: Good. We should eat, I’m hungry. AARON: Yeah? I can get it started for us. BURDASH: OK. The other thing we get to do tomorrow is the aviation unit’s bringing the Blackhawk over, so we’ll be able to practice hot loads, cold loads, and get the medics in on that. So that should be good. So we’re doing that, we have some PHAs to do. And we should be able to do some medic classes. So. AARON: That’ll be fun. BURDASH: Yeah. AARON: That’s good. Do you teach them also, or? BURDASH: Some of them. Yeah. So some of the NCOs are teaching some of them, and I’m just adding on. So we’ve finished dinner, and now I’m going to start getting ready. I am notoriously not a morning person. It’s the advantage of those evening ER shifts, but I like to pack as much as I can the night before a drill. All right. So, we definitely want to make sure we get this in the vehicle the night before. So this little bin here, I actually keep out in the garage, it’s got my tactical stuff in it. So this way, with it being all in one spot, got my helmet, my vest, I don’t have to go looking for all the individual pieces each time that I need it. So, I’ve got this already all loaded in here. Basically at this point, all I’ve got to do now is get a good night’s sleep so we can get on the road first thing in the morning.

BURDASH: All right, so we just got here at Camp Ripley, that’s the area where we’re going to be doing our formation, and so we’re going to walk over and meet the rest of the crew, and get ready to start the weekend. Being in the National Guard has its own sense of community, and you go through some hard times, and you go through some great times. And so you really do get to bond, and it’s almost like a little family, really. MALE: Stand at. CROWD: Stand at. MALE: Ease. Morning 204. CROWD: Morning sir. MALE: All together again. Thank you for your performance and exemplary representation of our unit during annual training. So, nice job. BURDASH: I think the formation does two big things. The first one is that it’s an accountability situation. And so, we’re able to verify that everybody got here safely, everybody’s here when they should, so that we can execute our missions. But the other thing that it lets us do is I think it reminds us that even though we’re a medical unit, is that we’re still soldiers. MALE: Company. MALE: Attention. CROWD: Heal the warrior.

​BURDASH: All right. So, just head on in. Here in one of, actually one of our kind of one of the buildings where the officers stay often. Just a little bit more space than the usual barracks. And so we’re coming in, and we have to find out which room we’re in this time. Think it's in room seven. All right. Well, here we go then. Got a microwave and a TV. And here’s the sleeping quarters. Not too bad. I’ll take it. Better than a twin size. Always hard to do Army hair? There’s a little bit more space than the barracks. A little bit more to work with. And extra uniforms, just get some of these out so we’ll have them ready in case we need them. OK.

​BURDASH: We’re going to do some drills with our medics with helicopter loading and offloading. We have physicians that help lead classes; we have PAs that help lead classes. We actually rotate a little bit who gets to teach the classes, and then it lets everybody use their expertise.

This is so important, especially for us as our role in an area support medical company, because we may be in a position to both be sending and receiving patients. Our role is a little bit versatile in that regard. And so, our team may very well be loading patients on helicopters. Maybe taking them off.

We’re going to be practicing our hot loads. And so basically practicing loading with the helicopter blades going, just as if it would be in real life. So they’re moving now to the bird, to the helicopter. Moving as one. Once they get instructions from either the crew chief or the medic who’s in the helicopter, they’ll be able to load the patient in. They’re just trying to slide the litter into a safe position so that the helicopter crew can safely take care of the patient. And then they’re all going to hold onto each other to make sure they can move as a unit away from the helicopter as a safe group, and they don’t lose anybody in the process.

Helicopter crews are very good about giving us the sickest patient first. So they’ll usually bring the patient into our facility, where myself, a team of medics, will receive them, assess them, and get the sign out from the helicopter crew about what’s happened, what’s been done. What needs to be done, and take care of the patient from that standpoint. ​

BURDASH: All right. Next topic, who’s got one? FEMALE: Things that you would suture of staple, and why one versus the other. BURDASH: Sure. Yeah, that’s a great one. The idea is, is you want to do the best to help the body heal without doing any harm. That's key. You know, it’s the first rule of medicine is first do no harm. Primum no killum. I like to do stitches on almost all things, unless they are very big, or sometimes scalps are a nice place to do staples. Or if you’re in a situation where speed is of the essence. So if you’ve got a cut like that, all we want to do is bring these edges together to be able to let the body heal itself. And so, we can do that with staples, where we’ll push the skin together, so we’ll push it and hold it like that, and then we put staples in to hold the edges together. Or, we can kind of bring the skin together, and we put a needle in here through this part of the skin, out through this edge, on this side, into the skin here. And out on the other side. And we get to tie it in a knot. So we just finished some hip pocket or just in time training where we had a little lull while we were waiting for some additional equipment before our next class, so we basically just talk about whatever the soldiers want to talk about. Or whatever would be helpful at the time. We’ve talked about all kinds of things in the past. This time we just talked a little bit about wound cares, and respiratory infections. But we’ve just been informed that our equipment has arrived for the other class that we’re going to be doing, so we’re stopping this as needed type training, and we’re going to be moving over to our actual next class.

BURDASH: So, let’s come on down here, and now we’ve talked about those wound cares a little bit. So, let’s give a quick demonstration. And then we’ll break into stations here and you all can give it a try. Simple wounds like this are so, so common. They don’t have to be combat-related. This is, you know, somebody cutting themselves trying to open a package, this is, you know, falling out of a truck, you know, you stumble out and you scrape your leg. So this is something that’s very common, and something we’re guaranteed to see at some point in our careers. Needle at 90 degrees. And then you go through the skin, and try to come out on the other side of your wound, about the same distance that you went in on. Yeah, and that’s great, what you did right there. We have a nice partnership actually with a local butcher who gives us a good deal on pig’s feet. We’ve done classes where we do a cricothyrotomy, or cric, and so you have to make a cut into the airway, and place a breathing tube through that. So we’ve bought pig tracheas before, and we’ve also bought racks of ribs to practice doing chest tubes, as if we would between human ribs. And so, I think the butcher gets good business out of us on things that maybe nobody else is buying, so he can’t be wrong with that. But it gives us a really good, tangible experience because a lot of the stuff, you just can’t learn unless you feel it. To put a chest tube in, you have to feel what it feels like to go in between the tissue of ribs. To have the confidence to do a procedure where you have to use a tool on another person, it’s helpful to have done it at some point before, so that, you know, the first time that they’re doing some sort of lifesaving procedure, and they’re realizing they’re going to have to make a cut in somebody’s throat, they aren’t having to do it for the first time just brand new, having never actually held a scalpel and cut something. And so this is what we try to do to prepare them to be safe to be able to do their jobs.

BURDASH: Right now, we’re at our nine millimeter weapons range. So we’re getting ready, we’re getting all set up for the day. All the safety staff are getting here, and we’re starting to get all the ammo ready, and what we’ll be doing is firing at these, actually. They’ve changed the regulations, so now the way we fire, not only we’ll be standing and firing at the targets, but we also get to walk towards them and fire that way. So, that’ll be a new adventure. Like you see, you can see all the range; these will actually pop up and pop down. And then we’ll have multiple firers going at once. So I’ll be one of those firers. We’ll actually be changing magazines while we walk forward towards the firing line, from the back. So it’ll be a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more realistic. This is part of our annual qualifications. We have to make sure that we are proficient in whatever our assigned duty weapon is. Last time I shot, I shot expert. So, that’s my goal. And if not, at least we’ll have a good time, and try to hit as many targets as we can. MALE: Firers, at this time, go ahead and move out. Cease fire there, cease fire. Clear off make sure that it’s clear. BURDASH: So, not quite as good as I did last year, but still not too bad. You know, sharpshooter is OK. I would have preferred expert like last year, but considering it was the first time doing walking, not too bad. Next time I’ll practice up and try to beat these guys.

BURDASH: During the drill date, if we have little moments to kind of sneak away and go get a soda, or go get a coffee and catch up a little bit, we’ll do that. We’ll sometimes have time to grill out, watch sporting events if it’s a big sporting event weekend. We have holiday parties, we have usually one in the winter, and then a family day kind of in the summer where we’ll get groups together, and we get to hang out with everybody’s significant others. A whole bunch of these guys came to my wedding. We’ve got a whole crew here we can introduce them to. We’ve got Captain Ellenbos here, he’s one of our nurse corps. So, he keeps us grounded and keeps us moving and efficient. We’ve got Lt. Samberg here, he’s our -- yeah. So, he’s our fitness guru, physical therapist. Tentis, who works at urgent care down at Mayo Clinic, fancy. Then our good major, fearless leader. He’s a PA at the emergency room at the Mayo Clinic so good, smart guy. Quality gentleman. And then our wonderful dentist we told you about. Hey! FEMALE: Hey. BURDASH: Captain Miller, Captain Hunter, they try to keep me from losing all my teeth. So now we’re just enjoying our chance to have a little time off before finishing up our work here at drill.​