As a Minnesotan, I am very confused. Like, yes, we obviously have the rural red parts of the state that exist everywhere in the country, but our government and institutions are actually quite LGBTQ+ positive and supportive.

They’re probably having a better time than the ones that aren’t intubated. The intubation is to make sure they’re still breathing while they’re anesthetized. The ones without tubes are just awake and angry/scared.

The crossovers between veterinary medicine and pediatric medicine are a lot more significant than most people like to think about. The Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle…but it’s close.

The problem with looking at “average wages” is that you’ve got outliers like “Spiders” Elon over there fucking up the numbers.

As an ED tech, I had to clean up C diff and chemo diarrhea off patients, beds, floors, and commodes multiple times. ED boarding meant that patients that should have been admitted to hospital rooms that had a bathroom attached were stuck in the ED for hours or even days.

I worked as an assistant in a plastic surgery office for a while as well, and I had to clean lipoaspirate out of the suction tube/syringe and the erlenmyer flask it was emptied into. That was still preferable to the time it got splattered on my scrubs because the surgeon emptied it into a kidney basin the first time. (The flask was my idea to prevent getting splattered again.)

As a former ER tech that had to hold up a belly that size for 30 minutes for a doctor to put in femoral central lines…I feel your pain. (literally)

I have a number of complex chronic health problems and I usually hit my out-of-pocket limit around April every year. I find spiteful glee in costing my health insurance tens of thousands of dollars every year. (And every penny of it is actually medically necessary.)

I’m assuming folks aren’t paying a mortgage’s worth of tuition each month though.

As a woman who has been trying for literal decades to exist in traditionally male nerdy spaces, there are a LOT of asshole gatekeeper guys that keep the women away. I’ve gotten everything from inquisitions into my “nerd cred” to outright rape threats from guys in nerdy and gaming communities.

I was fairly young, but I do remember using Windows 95 or 98 with Netscape and there were popups that had to be killed through the task manager (or equivalent, it was 30 years ago, so I don’t remember precisely).

Back on Windows 95 through XP, each individual window was a process that could be killed in Task Manager, and popups opened in a new window.

As someone with experience with emergency medicine and related areas, the idea of bulletproof windows on a car is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard of. If the windows are bulletproof, that means they’re also window-breaker-proof, and in a car that has doors that don’t work and likes to catch fire, that’s a recipe for a death trap.

Brains are very finicky things and they get very upset if there’s any disruption in their supply of glucose and oxygen, but anesthetics are carefully selected to not disrupt that as much as possible. Anesthesia might paralyze the muscles you use to breathe, but that’s what the intubation and ventilator is for. The anesthetics we use don’t affect the heart muscle because it uses different ions and chemicals than every other type of muscle in the body to generate contractions. However, open heart surgery will absolutely mess with the heart which will disrupt circulation.

I would wager that it’s more to do with the surgery itself. Even transient hypoxia from blood not getting to your brain for a little bit can make a big difference. Anesthesia is used very frequently with rare complications, but complex heart surgeries have higher complication rates.

Occupational therapy is a thing, but it is a very different thing. Occupational therapy is part of rehab that helps patients regain or retain activities of daily living like dressing, bathing, and feeding themselves, etc.

Yeah, my old desktop computer is getting turned into my first dedicated Linux machine and my current desktop isn’t getting updated to 11 until October 13th.

Time to prepare is very important because we have crap labor laws. It can be very hard for people to get time off work and missing a day can be very painful. For folks living paycheck to paycheck, missing a day of pay means missing a rent payment or not being able to afford food. In a lot of jobs, time off is very limited, even for illness, and is highly likely to be unpaid.

The robber barons have done an extremely good job at nailing our bootstraps in the pits of Tartarus through debt and indenture.

This looks like a great recommendation, thank you!

I have to know all of the medications for my board exams, but knowing what bullshit the pharma companies are advertising would be useful. There’s a lot of people who will ask for Ozempic and then be horrified when they learn about the side effects (or the price of the medication). I worry a lot about the “compounding pharmacies” that will mail people knock-off Ozempic with minimal medical oversight. It’s just a matter of time before someone gets killed by the pancreatitis or something.