Well, I hardly thought I would be sitting here at home
writing a blog post at this time. I thought I would be sitting in my squad bay
with my platoon or maybe conducting some drill outside in the humid Virginia
heat. But alas, here I am at home just as I was before leaving for OCS. As most
of you know, for the past 6 months I have been working everyday preparing
myself for the rigors of Marine Corps OCS with the hope that maybe one day I
could pin on that Eagle, Globe, and Anchor and become a Judge Advocate. But God
had a different plan!
In this post I’ll try to give a quick rundown of what
happened while I was there. In the next post, I’ll talk more about how I’m
dealing with what happened, spiritually and personally.
When I arrived at
OCS, I felt more than ready for the challenges that lay ahead. I was in the
best physical shape I’ve ever been in, in my life. I set a new personal record
on the PFT during my first week there. Other candidates were dropping like
flies all around me due to injuries and poor performance during daily PT sessions.
But I felt pretty good overall. I was actually above average in my platoon as
far as my overall scores go. Don’t get me wrong, these were the toughest 4
weeks I’ve ever experienced; physically, mentally, and spiritually, but I’ll
get into more of that later. About the end of week 3, I got what we call
“candidate crud”. Basically, it’s just a cold but everyone gets it so we’re all
coughing up crud and doing snot rockets during PT so that we can breathe. It’s
pretty nasty, but it’s all part of the experience I suppose.
Around the end of week 4, I noticed some pain in my chest,
but I waited to see how it would feel after the weekend since we had our first
Liberty that weekend. Monday morning comes, and my lungs are really hurting
when I’m breathing so now I’m starting to think that I probably want to get
checked out by the corpsman (Navy doctor). I go see him that morning before our
day starts (at 0315), and he says that I should probably get looked at, but
since we had the combat fitness test (CFT) that day, he recommended that I wait
until afterwards to get looked at. So I do the CFT, and I could just barely
breathe the whole time. After finishing, one of the officers came by and
grabbed me and took me to the corpsman. Apparently I wasn’t walking straight
LOL. That’s when they diagnosed me with pneumonia, told me I had a lot of fluid
in the lungs, and that I needed to rest. They gave me meds and put me on SIQ (sick
in quarters) for two days where basically I just slept all day. And trust me I
slept ALL day. Each morning (that’s 3:30am) I had to go to the medical clinic
to be reevaluated to see if I was ready to return to training. For the next 3
days the doc kept me on light duty, which basically means I can walk around,
but can’t do much else. On top of this, I started to notice that I was having a
hard time putting weight on my left leg and that there was some pain on the
bottom of my right foot. Oh and this had already been bugging me, but my
Achilles' tendon on my left leg was also swollen so the doc also made me go
over to the physical therapy section of the clinic to get those looked at. Sure
enough, I had a strain in my gluteus medius, Achilles tendinitis, and metatarsalgia
in the foot. So the PT doctor also put me on light duty, and had me do some
stretches and icing on the affected parts.
Now, one thing you have to know about these doctors; their
goal is to get you in and out as fast as possible, which makes sense because
you can really only miss about 5 days of training before they start talking
about sending you home. I was on day 4 when the doctor told me that I was “good
enough” regarding my pneumonia to go back to training. However, the PT doctor
did not think I was ready due to these other injuries especially since there
was a 6-mile hike aka a “hump” planned for that weekend. Oh and just a word on
the “humps”. These are not like your everyday, relaxing hike. We’re talking
about having 60-80 lbs on your back, and the pace is like a speed walk although
now and then you’ll have to run because somebody ahead of you is falling
behind. They’re doable, but man are they a butt-kicker. Anywho, the doc didn’t
think my lower body would sustain me so I was light duty over the weekend as
well. So now, I was looking at 6 days of missed training, and I started to
sense that they would probably send me home. On Monday morning (week 5) I went
to the clinic as I had been doing for the past week. And sure enough, the PT
doc didn’t think I was fit to return to training. So I went back to the squad
bay and informed my sergeant instructors. Not 20 minutes later, they were
telling me to get all my stuff together because I was going home.
In the next blog, I’ll talk more about my personal feelings
and what I’ve taken away since coming home.
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