Chetzemoka

Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.

There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.

And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.

I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha

I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the [email protected] community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @[email protected] makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.

Critical care nurse here. The answer is esophageal varices.

It’s the same physiological anomaly as hemorrhoids, except in your esophagus. Swollen, fragile veins caused by increased internal pressure. In the case of hemorrhoids, that pressure inside the veins is caused by straining too much when trying to poo. In esophageal varices, the increased pressure inside the esophageal veins comes from blood backing up from a swollen, scarred, and damaged liver. So we often see esophageal varices in end stage alcohol use disorder.

Horror stories abound in emergency departments and ICUs of having to do CPR on a patient massively hemorrhaging out of their mouth from esophageal varices. As soon as nurses I know saw this report, our immediate thought was, “Yep, varices.”

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15429-esophageal-varices

Oh, you think I only steal hoodies from people I boned. Joke’s on you, no hoodie is safe in my presence.

The onshore tax havens Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada are vastly worse in scope than any offshore country. They push the narrative about those “terrible foreign countries” to distract us from this fact.

The problem is US tax code, not offshore financial centers.

Damn, what a great reference. I really wish I had this during our 3.5 month unionizing drive because those motherfuckers tried ALL OF THIS.

I’m proud to report that three weeks ago we won our union vote by a margin of 5:1. Our union organizers all said they’ve never seen a success ratio like that in their careers. We’re a very spirited community hospital.

🎵🎶There’s an owl in a hole in the log on the floor of the forest over by me 🎶🎵

(Reference for anyone who doesn’t know lol: https://youtu.be/uZztvSt4Cp0)

Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪

Bullshit

I’m born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.

I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I’ve never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.

OP, you need to learn what a redneck is.

What a gorgeous creature

The character’s name is Boromir.

What do you think would be the mechanism of death when he gets hit by an arrow? Even bullets rarely kill instantly. Bullets stop people because they hurt and people go into shock. A properly trained soldier absolutely is capable of continuing to fight through this. Short of a head shot, the most likely mechanism of death is blood loss, which takes a little time. When. Boromir dies, he is ashen pale the way a person with catastrophic blood loss would be. I think that death scene is more realistic than you realize.

As a critical care nurse, the miraculous CPR recoveries are such a horrible disservice to our patients and their families. CPR is not two minutes of some light exercise and then the person wakes up and is ok forever.

It’s 20-30 mins of intense, brutal, scary, undignified activity followed by best case scenario, we put you in the ICU, deliberately make you hypothermic for a day or two, and hope you wake up. That increases your chances of surviving the incident to a whopping 64%.

Surviving to discharge and having a meaningful recovery is a whole other ballgame, and depends a lot on the condition you were in when you had cardiac arrest in the first place. Your elderly grandpa with cancer, sepsis, bad kidneys, etc. is probably not going to go home. Your middle-aged wife who came in because she was having a heart attack actually stands a good chance.

Movies like to show people shocking a flatlined patient who just pops up and walks away when in reality presenting fully flatlined means you’re 2-3 times less likely to be resuscitated at all.

I’m happy to leave some leeway in fictionalized depictions of medical care for the sake of story progression. But the complete ignorance currently common in fictional resuscitation scenarios feeds a really malignant sort of magical thinking that keeps us torturing elderly people. I’d really appreciate less of that in my job.

This is the one they were waiting for. There are several live cams trained on the area, and one of them caught the exact moment it erupted:

https://youtu.be/QcxaqCIon_Y

I’m in the middle of book 7 and holy what a shift. I’m in the part where it’s so overwhelming, you can’t even begin to imagine how this will get resolved. Very excited to read the last two books.

Ah yes, that notorious occupation where Denmark systematically raped and murdered all those Norwegians, installed a corporate kleptocracy to ransack their natural resources for the profit of people half a globe away, and then spent the next 400 years funding coups and dictators to maintain that corporate control.

I don’t understand the level of ignorance required to even begin to pretend like these were equivalent situations.

Which is a problem that pre-employment drug testing does not correct in any way, shape or form.

Yeah, working on yourself makes you resilient, but it definitely doesn’t make you unstoppable. Like Picard said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”

In the context of modern times, women are six times more likely to be abandoned by their spouse after receiving a devastating medical diagnosis like cancer than men are.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm#%3A~%3Atext=A+woman+is+six+times%2Clonger+the+marriage+the+more

Injecting medications into necks.

Medical things are rarely accurate, but Jesus this one is absolutely infuriating. There’s no anatomy in a neck that you could even inject anything INTO. You’re not aiming for a jugular vein on the fly and there’s not enough tissue in a neck to receive an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. If your needle is too long, you’re definitely hitting something critical. It’s feasible that you could squirt medication into someone’s trachea or esophagus or - god forbid - spine if you actually tried this nonsense.

Arms, people, ARMS. This is where we inject things into people who are not interested in receiving an injection. Arms or butts, right through the clothes. You’re aiming for the deltoid muscle or the glutes. I’m even willing to concede the inaccuracy of a medication affecting someone instantly (they don’t), if Hollywood would just stop having characters inject things into people’s necks.

On our next episode of medical things that make me crazy: People getting shot through the shoulder with zero consequences.

I’ll just copy my comment from another post of this article:

History lesson time: This wasn’t done on purpose. It’s an artifact of decisions made by Congress during World War II to support war production.

So many young men were away at war that it created a labor shortage, even with some women entering the work force. This led to spiraling increases in wages that were threatening the viability of critical war manufacturers.

In an effort to protect this manufacturing sector, Congress capped wage increases. But those corporations were still competing for workers and now they were no longer able to offer them higher and higher wages. So instead, they started offering them “perks” like health insurance, pensions, and paid time off.

THEN:

“In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls.”

Emphasis mine. And guess what? When those young men returned from war and re-entered the work force, they wanted those perks too. So which company was going to be the first to deescalate the arms race and NOT offer health insurance?

And those perks being so ubiquitous meant the government never had an incentive to provide health coverage directly to anyone of working age, so we only have Medicare for retirees.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/#:~:text=In 1943 the War Labor,of maneuvering around wage controls.

Well, it better have some kind of mechanism in place to keep the grocery stores full or it’s going to fail on its face.