Trees and cars and roads, oh my!

July 27

It sure has been a busy couple of days. For about a week or so my ear has been blocked of because I was blessed with excess wax production (gross, I know, but integral to the story). Because of this, I occasionally have to go to the clinic and get my ears flushed with saline. Usually a blockage will last only a day or two, but since I was in camp, I couldn't do anything about it. As time went on, it starting hurting quite a bit and eventually the guy in charge of first aid in camp decided that I should head out on the plane coming in on Friday to get things looked at because the next plane wasn't for 5 days at which point it could be infected and such. Infection that close to your brain is apparently a serious thing, so I took is advice and headed back to the big city (aka Yellowknife) on Friday night. It was very strange to see trees and cars again. I felt like the old guy who got let out of prison in the movie Shawshank Redemption (Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins star- if you haven't seen it, its very good). He spent his life in prison and then when he got out on parole as an old man, the modern world was overwhelming to him. Okay I guess it wasn't quite that bad, but I sure did enjoy walking around outside without a bug net. Utter bliss!

Anyway, I show up at Emergency at 8am Saturday and only have to wait about 45 minutes, which I believe is a new record... the nurse spent another 30 minutes flushing my ears and (just a warning, because this part is gross) washed out a plug of wax from each ear the size of a jellybean... and a blackfly. Apparently my other ear was on the verge of being blocked off so it's a good thing I got there when I did. Then another 45 minutes to get the doctor to check me (about 30 seconds of inspection and a thumbs up- sure glad I waited for him). I spent the rest of the day doing errands around town- getting some Tim Hortons, buying overalls, longjohns and work gloves, going to a movie, etc. By the way, "The Dark Knight" absolutely blew my mind- freaking awesome!!!! Okay back to my story. I get back to the crewhouse after picking up some groceries because the camp didn't know when they would be able to get me back, and there is a message for me saying my flight leaves at 7:30. I was rather surprised, but got all my gear packed up again and headed back to the float plane base and I was back in camp by 9:30 and out in the field again this morning. I must be important now, since I have planes chartered just for me- all hoity-toity and such. It was a fun little break- I managed to have a beer (VERY delicious) and by some much needed new field gear, and I didn't even miss a day of pay since I get paid for travel days. The icing on the cake was that Sundays are half days, so I only worked until noon and then did some mapping after lunch AND I saw some caribou! We saw a herd from the helicopter today and a few of the strays who wandered to within about 500m of camp tonight. Did I mention I love my job?

-A.