Tough but honest advice. I can relate to needing this advice but I’ve come to accept who I am. People just like sincerity, too. Organic, not shoehorned comments. No compliment fishing, etc… The group you’re chatting with also just may not be your kind of people; you just may not have realized it yet.

Alternatively chat groups do spontaneously die and you may only be consciously aware when it’s you who commented last; but you may not be so aware of the chat groups that died with someone else’s comments.

This is the Sharia Law they claim to fear lmao.

Back when Rachel Martin hosted Morning Edition Sundays, that was my jam getting ready for work or commuting.

Always liked All Things Considered and Mary Louise Kelly, too. Especially when she demolished Pompeo.

Haven’t listened much these days, though.

Putting aside whether October 7th was a response to ongoing suffering as it was…

At what point does the response to October 7th become worse than than the original attack? Because I’m pretty sure we passed that within months if not weeks of the original attack.

Anyways up is down and war is peace, I guess. This next decade is about to make the 2000s Bush & Iraq days look civil and law-abiding by contrast.

Thank you for sharing. I know it’s tough to talk about. Even my wife whom I can at least tangentially relate to on medical grounds tends to bury the stuff when she comes home. Every single medical worker should have easy, free access to good therapy in my opinion. I have the utmost respect for front-line medical workers such as yourself.

Reading Carl Sagan’s somewhat dated albeit very relevant, “Demon Haunted World” right now, and all his fears have become fully realized. A complete disregard for science and this fringe pseudoscience and conspiracy-theory laden world. I don’t know how to stop what’s been set in motion.

We, with kids and what have you, caught COVID a couple of times unfortunately. If I recall we caught Delta and Omicron variants. The worst part about it was how much it just dragged on and on. I’ve never had that much fatigue. I had an infected kidney stone, early sepsis, pna, and pleural effusion at the same time and even all that wasn’t as draining and achy as covid pre-vaccine for 2 weeks…

They’re pretty good at assessing quickly who is a legitimate cause for concern and who isn’t.

For instance, if you have chest pain, dizziness and confusion, etc. you’re going to be seen faster. If you’ve got a minor laceration or a broken bone or flank pain with all signs of a kidney stone — despite the pain — sorry, you’ll be waiting… Probably because a motor-vehicle crash with brain hemorrhaging in the back just arrived and you don’t know about it and the trauma team was called and literally every major doctor and nurse is in there coding the patient.

People in the waiting-room don’t see what’s coming in as a code from the helipad or ambulance door.

More often than not, if you’re waiting a long time then it probably means it’s not too serious relative to what else is currently there. Which is kind of a good thing for you. Of course, you have anomalies like this one… But honestly, this guy got impatient and should’ve waited longer if he was concerned. He wrote,

Had a bit of a health scare last night, but thankfully it wasn’t a heart attack. Not sure what it was, though, because once they made sure I wasn’t dying I was thrown out into the waiting room and 6 hours later I said f*ck it and went home.

Honestly, that’s on him. He left against medical advice and if he stayed he would’ve received diagnostic imaging eventually and if his vitals deteriorated, they would’ve called a code on him immediately.

One thing we can say is that this generation of boomers is just extremely unhealthy. We’re seeing an increasing number of old people who really don’t know how or care to care for themselves. This is where a huge part of the burden resides. It doesn’t help that medical misinformation is at an all-time high.

I was just talking about this with my wife again yesterday. I showed her the stats right now and the kind of patients the floors were receiving and she said, “no wonder people are burning out; it’s a miracle they get any nurses at all.” And yes it’s true, for the education rate, the benefits and pay are good… But you earn every single penny knee-deep in literal c-diff shit and violent grannies and people drugged out. We lost a lot of good nurses over the course of the pandemic and I can’t blame them. For all the yellow ribbons slapped on suburbans during the 2000s for soldiers, where were the ribbons for healthcare workers? Oh right, laypeople exemplifying Dunning-Kruger and embracing conspiracy theories on a topic they know nothing about while my wife was pushing body bags into the morgue. Anti-vaxx folks with plummeting O2 stats and they and their family suddenly begging for the vaccine now. Too late.

Literally all of our seasoned lead nurses on the ICU units turned over to find a specialty less on the front-line after those days. Again, I don’t blame them. They basically went to war and came back without any support like a Vietnam vet. Just in normal circumstances, the shit these medical workers see is really striking… And in some ways dare I say it might be worse than soldiering because at least with that, there’s some level of separation between normalcy and the battlefield. Whereas with nursing, it’s this constant shock of going to work for 12 hours and 100% adrenaline (especially things like a trauma ER, OR, or ICU) — then come back and jump right back into parenting. Then rinse, repeat. Naturally death isn’t exactly on the line for you; but you’re still responsible for the lives of others.

What drove my wife away from the floors was the constant recycling of the same patients and not seeing the problems get better. The root problems of these people reside elsewhere in society and hospitals end up being the catch-all for mental and physical illness kicked under the rug.

My wife is an RN and I work in a hospital in a non-clinical logistical role that oversees throughput at multiple facilities. USA.

Right now for the past trending weeks with respiratory illnesses rising through the holidays given travel, family gatherings, shopping, etc. — our average length of stay has been 10+ hours. Unfortunately when we’re practically in a triage situation, it’s extremely difficult to see every single person in a timely manner — especially when vitals are stable.

All this recent talk has brought back up all the research I did around a decade ago on healthcare in America. The bottom-line is this:

• We spend upwards of 2x the amount of money per capita on healthcare than competing OECD nations.
• We achieve worse or at-best equal results (depending on your quality of insurance; most people believe their insurance is good when it isn’t).
• Somewhere around half of Americans forego seeking medical attention for fear of medical bills. Naturally this causes problems to snowball and, getting more complicated and costly to fix in the first place.
• The vast majority of bankruptcies in America is a result of medical debt; the majority of whom had health insurance at the onset of their illness.

At the end of the day, I’d still rather have Canada’s system than ours.

I hope I am one day a sort of Patronus Charm that my kids can utilize to ward off crippling thoughts.

I hear what you’re saying but I’ll just note a few things: He’s not highly educated — at least not formally. And his socialist origins to me speak more of this “fight the man” anarcho-nihilist mindset more so than anything. As you said, people are content with Pyrrhic victories if they can pat themselves on the back and say, “I didn’t vote for Hitler,” — but they leave out the part where they didn’t vote against him either. (I know he was appointed, but just for the sake of argument). There was no rational argument to not vote for Harris if you truly cared about Gazan lives. At the very worst, Harris was equally bad on Gaza (she wasn’t); but on everything from women’s rights to protecting Ukrainians against their own genocide they face… The choice couldn’t be more clear.

At the end of the day we all have core values and those serve as a filter to how we perceive events. In the wake of dissonance and contradiction between your actions versus your core values, that to me would suggest someone was led astray like being trapped in Plato’s Cave. If perception is reality, then their values can only be applied within the framework of that cave.

Which means they’ve been duped by disinformation. If you have time and formal critical-thinking skills, this can inoculate you to this to a considerable degree.

Shitty physical therapist twice raised what I owed per visit because of their clerk’s incompetence. Not just for future visits but retroactively for visits I already had. (Edit: I should say this was possibly fraud and if I had a lawyer it may have been worth pursuing).

I knew I was screwed when the clerk pronounced tier as tire. Oh well, lesson also learned for me: Always conduct a three-way, recorded conference call with provider and your insurer before provided service.

Another fun fact; Per KFF, 50% of Americans forego medical attention for free of medical debt. Naturally, this snowballs leading to them inevitably going anyway for a more costly, complex procedure. Our system is top-heavy with specialists for this reason, lacking adequate preventative care and rapid accessibility.

“They’re all the same!” my FIL equating Harris to the convicted felon and conman who flew with Epstein.

“I didn’t vote” said my socialist relative who ignored the myriad policies Harris was objectively better than Trump on because of a right-wing wedge-driving message about Palestinians (haven’t heard a peep on Gaza since election, curiously).

Poorly educated minds led astray by disinformation.

Single biggest determinant as to how people voted was education attainment.

GenZ and presumably Alpha are more education averse, too. I thought they’d better navigate disinformation online but alas…

I appreciate your thoughtful and honest comment. Yeah, I don’t know… I’m really close with both my parents. That certainly makes it worse. We’ve been through a lot of shit. My parents separated once in my teens, then fully completed the divorce under COVID under my house with my wife and our first kid. Was a nightmare that made covid orders of magnitude worse — but we got through it. I got my dad out of his suicidal/homicidal mania; I got my mom clean off alcohol with the help of my sister and wife… They’ve both still got a lot of flaws, but at least now my parents are at least on speaking terms for the sake of their grand-kids and us. In some ways, despite all the turmoil of the world, I know these are going to be some of the better years where I can enjoy their company and see the nostalgia in their eyes as they spend time with my kids. We grew up religious but my whole family shifted toward agnosticism over the years, so yeah, I don’t expect much after death but it’s hopeful thought despite my better judgement I suppose…

I’m sorry, friend. Hope you’re doing well.

Yeah I honestly love the stories. Heard them all a thousand times, of course, but they never get old — especially knowing…

Anyways I can weather a lot of pain, but when it comes to my loved ones I’m a wreck.

The mortality of my parents. My mind is often stuck in the future of what ifs; but this is an inevitable event that will come sooner or later and it terrifies me. I do my best to cherish the time I’m fortunate to have with them while channeling energy into my own kids. I know it’s the natural cycle of things, but still… Life is hard man.

That will be one piece of good news this year if he is dead. Fuck that piece of shit. We should’ve listened to our Syrian ambassador Robert Ford and fully supported the FSA.

Oil, tobacco (I guess you said drug) companies, Monsanto/Bayer, nursing home and hospice admins…

It’s almost like these folks are the real “enemy from within” (Trump’s words, not mine) the whole time.

“It could be anyone. Anywhere. Any time! God forbid my picture is plastered everywhere. All the bodyguard protection barely Donnie, protectafter all!”