March 2 — I cared for a little girl who is about 2 years old. She’s a below-the-knee amputee from that blast. We don’t know her name, so we call her Princess. She cries a lot and needs to be held constantly.

    That’s all I’ve done for these two nights is hold this baby...

    This was just one of the stories Lt. Col. Marcia Potter shared with nurses and doctors at Bayhealth-Kent General Hospital as she read aloud from her journal.

    Potter, a nurse practitioner and commander of the medical operations squadron at Dover Air Force Base, spoke Nov. 20 about her 2007 four-month deployment in Iraq caring for the wounded at Balad Air Base.

    Working as a woman’s health practitioner at the base’s clinic, she also volunteered at the Air Force Theatre Hospital, which she said gave her some of the most rewarding experiences of her life. The hospital, made up of a series of tents, would receive 1,250 causalities a month, 750 of those massive trauma cases. Potter said once they got 35 patients in six minutes, all victims of a mosque bombing.

    A large portion of her experience at the hospital was treating civilians, although Potter also had 30,000 women, whether in the military or contractors, as potential patients at the clinic.

    “It was easier for them to get to me than for me to get to them,” she said. “They were taking helicopter rides all over the country of Iraq to come and see me for their women’s health care.”

    Potter also said jokingly she volunteered at the hospital because her living quarters or “hooch” was approximately 300 yards from the world’s busiest flightline, where two F-16s took off every 20 minutes.

    However, on a more serious note, she told the medical staff listening that she wanted to share because what they do is very important.

    “A lot of times you don’t see it in your day to day life, but I want you to understand that we are all part of a community that does this work and I want you have that pride….”

Something missing
    Potter said she spent four years, right out of high school, in the Air Force as a turbo prop mechanic, meaning she worked on the engines that power C-130 cargo airplanes.

    Later she worked for 20 years as a civilian nurse in intensive care and later as a family nurse practitioner.

    She had it all except the picket fence – children, house and husband.

    “It’s very funny because you can come to a place in your life where you have everything that you dreamed of – everything you’ve looked for and planned for is right there. You’re living in the midst of it and something is missing,” Potter said.

    For her that day came on Sept. 11, 2001, when she was getting her children ready for school, watching the news and saw that second plane hit the tower.

    “I didn’t know how exactly my world was going to change at that point, but I will tell you I knew it was gonna,” Potter said.

    After a year and a half of thinking, she saw a news conference given by the commanding general at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he said, “We need people in our military to take care of our soldiers — body, mind and spirit.”

    And then she knew what to do.

Quality care
    Since returning to the Air Force, Potter has served two deployments and will be heading to Afghanistan on Jan. 1 for six months.

    While speaking at Kent General, she praised the people she worked with, describing medical evacuation pilots and crews as some of the bravest people she’s met and saying she made some great friends, including a Iraqi liaison captain who worked to reunite families.

    Potter said what’s amazing is how the tented hospital has a 98% survival rate and a less than 2% infection rate. It’s not the facility, it’s the nursing and medical care, she added.

    “I don’t want you to think that we do things any differently, we just do them in a different kind of context,” she said.

    In 2007, in Iraq, there were 200 murders a day and at least 1,800 sinjuries every month, Potter said.

    “There’s no medical care system in the entire world that has an infrastructure designed to take that volume of patients, every day, day in and day out,” she said, adding “It’s gotten a lot better.”

    The fact that the country has no long-term care facilities or dialysis changes the way they treat patients, she said. No only do they have to preserve lives and limbs, but also all the functions of vital organs because otherwise once patients are released they won’t live.

    “There is no ‘no more room,’ there is no ‘I can’t take another patient,’ there is no ‘I can’t do this’ because those words are the difference between somebody living and dying, and you don’t have the right to say them, so we didn’t,” Potter said. “We simply did. We moved cots. We moved everything. We did whatever we had to do to get those patients in.

    “We used to call these mass causalities, but now we call them patient surges because they happen every single day, every single day.”

An affected audience
    Kathy King, a registered nurse who attended, said it was incredible to listen to Potter, especially the readings from her journal.

    “They are a wonderful thing to have and share,” she said, adding that she was watching how the people in the audience were really affected.

    Potter is used to sharing her stories. She was chosen last year as one of two Air Force representatives for the Why We Serve tour, sponsored through the Department of Defense. The eight speakers spent three months touring the United States talking about their experiences in their combat situations.

    Dr. Martin Begley, the medical director who organizes the monthly Interesting Case Conferences at the hospital, said he invited Potter because many of the procedures medical staff use on those injured or ill were first developed in the military. However, he added, more importantly, every citizen supports the military completely, regardless of whether they support the war.

     Email Jayne Gest at jayne.gest@doverpost.com