I love genuine questions and people putting in the effort to love and understand each other better. If you come at me just wanting to argue I’m going to troll you back. FAFO.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve spent my whole adulthood working in hospitals. They’re shitholes, every single last one of them. Do every single thing you can to never be in one.

    Drink water, plain water. Eat whole grains and leafy vegetables. Treat red meat like a dessert (and if you’re morally opposed to meat, make sure you’re still getting all your essential proteins). Find a physical activity you enjoy and do it at least three times a week. Either join an organized religion or specifically curate a group of people you do a weekly activity with who will come check on you if you suddenly stop showing up. And while you’re at it pick a mindfulness activity that you either enjoy or that brings you peace (prayer qualifies but so can yoga or a lot of other things). Avoid nicotine and alcohol at all costs. Go easy on the weed, and avoid anything more interesting without guidance from either a medical professional or some kind of traditional expert on those substances. And if a competent doctor listens to your specific situation and tells you to do or not do something I’ve mentioned, listen to them instead of me.

    Decide who you would want to speak for you on your death or near-deathbed. Choose people both trustworthy and level-headed who will put your wishes over their own emotions. Choose multiple people, because it’s not unlikely that any one person will be in the car wreck with you. Talk to those people about what you want to happen or not happen so they can best carry out your wishes. Sign some kind of legally binding paperwork that cements them as the decision maker, especially if your first choice is not the default the state would choose (parent, spouse, sibling, adult child, etc). You can write whatever you want then to do on the paper, but the chosen person will have the right to override it if they think you would want them to. So sign the paper but don’t forget to TALK to them about it.

    And good luck because while this will give you the best odds, the universe might also just decide to fuck you in particular anyway.









  • Trepanning, or as it’s now called, craniotomy, is where a section of the skull is removed / bored through. It’s mostly done for cerebral edema where there’s pressure inside the skull and on the whole brain (it can even fatally herniate the brainstem which means shoving it out through the bottom of the skull like a play dough extruder).

    It’s wild to think that there was actually a reason ancient cultures did it. They way overused it and for the wrong things during certain time periods and it was horrifying that they were doing it without anesthetic, but I’ve also heard that it results in a basically instant return to orientation. So the few patients it would’ve worked on would have gone from deliriously speaking in tongues (I know it’s not any real language but that kind of confusion does at face value sound like something that would require an exorcism) and would suddenly just… wake up. Possibly with a spray of puss out of the wound.

    There’s a lot of old timey medical stuff we still do, it’s just now we do it with anesthetic and sterilization. Medically sterile maggots are used to clear out dead and infected wound tissue and some surgeons who work on structures with delicate vasculature like hands will use leeches to prevent swelling from blocking off bloodflow to the area while it heals. I’ve spent most of my career working at places that do electroconvulsive therapy (again, under anesthesia) for severe treatment resistant depression and catatonia (like so bad they can’t move or eat and need to be turned, cleaned and fed with a tube), and one time I worked with a patient who had had a frontal lobectomy (used to be called a lobotomy) for a severe seizure disorder that wouldn’t respond to medication.

    Anyway Gage’s case was more on the subject of localized trauma and what injuries to the brain a human can survive. In particular it began our understanding that frontal brain injuries are usually much more survivable than ones to the rear, but that they can effect personality and in particular emotional and impulse control.






  • Oh hi I’m a psychiatric nurse!

    Most important: Pick the three people you trust most in the world, put them in order of who you want making decisions for you the most (you also need to consider who will be the most level-headed & put your needs before their own emotions), then talk to your doctor about what paperwork you need to sign for that. Then talk to those people at length about how you want to die and what would make you feel the safest and happiest day-to-day until it happens. Think about what routines have brought you peace in your life, what things you do for fun / relaxation, what kind of music you like to listen to, etc.

    If you’re up to it, I also highly recommend Wellness Recovery Action Planning. It’s more designed for people who are more likely to recover, but it’ll give you a template to go off to communicate your day to day needs in a written format for your legal decision makers and healthcare professionals to make you feel safe and comfortable as you progress through these next few stages. It’ll also have some spaces for you to mention any specific triggers (a lot of the time we find out someone has PTSD from sexual assault after a trip to the bathroom unexpectedly turns into a cage match and it would be nice to get a heads up instead). And if you do this have a special section just for music; it’s the part of your brain that’s likely to keep working the longest. Make two playlists, one to dance / have fun to, and one to relax / sleep to.

    I wouldn’t fuss too much on the gun thing unless you already have one / have been used to having one for most of your life. If you were never a gun person before you’re unlikely to randomly just go out and buy one.

    Good luck and I really hope you’re able to find trustworthy people to make decisions for you because without them to actually carry out your wishes, literally anything else you decide on now is completely moot.



  • Honestly it’s not even the CPR that particularly bothers me, it’s the intubation and the stuff after. I’ve worked with so many patients who don’t have a lot of working neural tissue left and their family just has them medically tortured for years because they want to see them blink occasionally. Next time I update my documents I think I’m going to add that if my family wants something to happen to me that I have to be held down for, they have to be in the room. If they can’t stand to watch / listen to me while it happens, they’ve no right signing off on it.


  • I feel the same way reading the Bible. Even as early as Genesis I was like damn Abraham I already don’t understand why you tried to pimp out your sister-wife ONCE so why did you KEEP DOING IT? Somebody recently commented that they find the Bible boring and I was like you need to find a modern translation because if you can even vaguely understand what’s actually going on that shit is WILD. Turns out humans have always been crazy AF and personally I actually find that kinda comforting. Makes a lot of modern shit seem less unmanageable. Another great example is the whole Onan thing. It’s wild that somebody decided to make it about masturbation when if you really get down to it it’s a story about a dude who thinks he’s being slick by obeying the letter of the current law to (literally) screw his widowed sister in law out of her rightful property and THAT story is TIMELESS.



  • um. yeah. they do that after regular surgery too. a shitton of sedatives will do that. ect is also associated with temporary memory loss but it wears off just as quick as with a regular seizure, a little faster even. Also every time I’ve been in the procedure room for it the most that happens is the person’s feet wiggle a little for a few seconds?

    idk maybe it’s just that I’ve seen way more terrifying medical shit done when I was sitting suicide watch in the ICU (I’m a DNR after seeing what it takes to keep someone alive at the brink of death) but it was like the least unsettling thing I’ve seen in a procedure room. In my OR clinical rotation the surgeon was literally HAMMERING that Lady’s titanium hip into place for 6 hours.

    Shit sounded like a dwarven mine in a fantasy movie just DING DING DING with a fucking hammer in a sliced open little old lady for 6 hours straight. THAT was disturbing. Feet wiggling for a few seconds is nothing. especially not when you see it bring someone back from catatonia so deep they can’t eat.