Snus and the Talking Dog

Get out of the way next time, Jerks.

If you smoke you've probably heard of Snus. Here's an excellent 60 Minutes report on it for those of us who don't. Smoke, that is. 

And if you're on the fringes of addiction, there are new products on the tobacco market. Dissolvable tobacco, reminiscent of candy cigarettes. It's never been so easy to get cancer. Just ask this guy. 

Does she really have crystals coming out of her eyes? And if she does, why? Is it magic? Are they worth money? Is it a religious miracle? In that part of the world it is notoriously difficult to track down the real story, but some would say that the father pushed those crystals in there himself. In any case, the magic has stopped. 

Pushing crystals into his daughter's eyes, sure that's nasty, but then there are these Mothers of the Year from our local California desert:

Sheriff's deputies arrested a Victorville mother after she took her 12-year-old daughter to fight another 12-year-old, officials said. Shawnah Foster, 31, took her daughter to a park near Burwood Avenue and Glen Canyon Lane for the fight, according to San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department Victorville station officials. Witnesses at the park reported that when Foster's daughter appeared to be losing, Foster jumped in and grabbed her daughter's opponent by the hair, pulling the juvenile away from her daughter and slapping the victim in the face, sheriff's officials said.

Gosh if only there were a video.

This. Dog. Talks. Amazing.

My Tattoos

I was feeling a little reckless, a little rebellious last weekend, so I went down to the waterfront and got some ink done.

My Dogs

This morning I went to sign my Dogs up for welfare.  At first the lady said, "Dogs are not eligible to draw welfare".  So I explained to her that my Dogs are  mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddys are.  They expect me to feed them, provide them with housing and medical care, and feel guilty because they are dogs.   So she looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify. My Dogs get their first checks Friday.
  Damn this is a great country.

How to Text and Drive

I added these pictures as an afterthought. Dealing with some bitchy daughter who had some problem yesterday, put me in a good mood so to speak. She told me there was no organization on my floor, that she was going to lodge a complaint, that nobody could set up a wound vacuum for her father, the Home Health company couldn't tell her when the nurse was going to come, so she wanted me to call them and then call her back so she didn't spend all day waiting.

Guess what, she spent all day waiting. You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, Madam, didn't you learn anything in school? And while that sinks in, consider this: Nurses are damn tired of being bitched at all the time.

I remember visiting dear old Dad in the hospital when he had his bypass, and I stepped out of the way when the nurse came in. When they announced visiting hours were over, we gathered ourselves and got the hell out. We respected the medical staff.

I didn't know we didn't have to, that I could have unloaded all my anxieties and fears upon them.

Wait, not then. Now. And after we take all this crap, we hand them a survey and a pass for a free Coke. Just don't say anything bad about us, in case Medicare is listening okay?

And go ahead and fill that survey out while you're driving home. Text it to me.

And that's how you say, "Watch out World, I'm tech savvy."



How's that change workin out for ya?

It’s been a fast three years since Obama was elected president, and the Hope has all but drained away. The economy is still in the toilet, people are still out of work, and China continues to buy up US debt, foreclosed homes, and is now flying pregnant women here to give birth for US citizenship.

Why not, everyone else does. Fucking 14^th Amendment. It’s a free ticket to lifelong benefits on the back of the American worker.

Not that Obama hasn’t tried to jump start the economy. He’s got that Cash For Clunkers crap under his belt to help the Auto Industry, and he paid off as many banks as he could with government money, so they wouldn’t feel bad about kicking people out of their homes…

The American, beaten and downtrodden, yet stupid enough to listen to every celebrity, every politician who opens a can of lies. Because, these are our royalty.

Bullshit. If I wanted royalty I’d move to Saudi Arabia and beat women, smoke a hookah and strap a bomb to my chest. This is the United States, and we’re supposed to be better than that. 

What happened? Is it that we’ve mixed our population so thickly with Third-World shithole dwellers, that our gross intelligence has dropped? Probably. Is it that technology has so removed us from actual interpersonal, face to face communication that we’re more likely to believe anything in print, even if it just tweeted from some twelve year old playing in his room? Again, probably. 

Which brings me back to Obama. When Oprah said this guy should be president, the race was over. You can fight it, you can gimmick your own run with the likes of an idiot like Sarah Palin, but as we all know, 

 Oprah said it 

 You believe it 

 And that settles it.



I'm chillin on your money, 'kay?


So the recent revelation that Obama is okay with being a one-term president, is very okay with a lot of Americans. Not the, He can do no wrong because he’s the first black president crowd, nor the, You don’t like him because he’s black crowd. That is being simplistic and shall we say, stupid. People who dwell on that are racists of any color. The problem is, he’s a mundane president. Because he for sure didn’t have any goddam plans for making America better. Just Oprah-spewed bullshit. And any president who doesn’t want the job for another four years, doesn’t believe in what he’s doing anyway. 

The five-star Villa Padierna, 'Millionaires' Playground', where Michelle-O and her huge entourage stayed in Spain - 60 to 70 rooms had been rented for the First Lady. President of the People?

So go, Barack, have happy vacations with your happy children and Michelle who loves traveling on the US tax dollar while us regular Americans, your countrymen, are losing our homes and jobs. 

Maybe sooner or later we’ll get someone in there who cares.

Click the Purple Button

Can you swim? Summer is coming and you'll be at the beach. Maybe there's a lifeguard, maybe not. You may be asked to be the hero. You know your CPR, but what about when their lungs are full of water?Do you remember what to do then? Or, will you look like this. If you do, look for a quick exit when it's over. Like that guy did.

I'm kind of sick of ER. Seriously. They tend to think there's only one place and that's the emergency room. Well open your minds and hearts, kids. It's not all about you.


SuperNurse: About a year ago Reader's Digest published an article "50 Secrets ER Doctors Won't Tell You." Okay so in the middle of the magazine they changed that to ER Staff, not Doctors. So get to the point. One RN's quotes kept appearing and reappearing, making her at least in my mind, a Super Excellent Nurse. Let's look at some of her genius:

  "The busiest time starts around 6 p.m.; Mondays are the worst. We're slowest from 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. If you have a choice, come early in the morning."
 
Okay, sounds reasonable. Mondays are the worst, nobody wants to work Mondays, I can tell you that. Or Fridays. Another: 

       "We like the rapid turnover, so we don't want you stuck in the ER while you're waiting to be admitted. If we wanted to care for the same patient for hours at a time, we would work on an in-patient ward."
 
Whoa, cutting a little close to home there, SuperNurse. Sounding a little smug. One more for you to get that foot out of your mouth:

       "Some of us are pretty good at spotting people who come in to score pain medication- especially if you're specific about the drug you want or you don't look like you're in that much pain but you drove an hour from your home to get there."
 
Brilliant. Thank you for stating the obvious; then again, it's the Reader's Digest. SuperNurse has been played today by Denise King, RN, of Riverside, California. If you pass her in Wal-Mart, say hey.

  And as always, don't forget Japan. Or their little furry friends. With their radiation leaks we all have something to worry about.                           

   
   American Red Cross for Japan

                        or maybe International Fund For Animals  

Your choice, but make one.

Live Infarction

A man has a heart attack in front of you. Do you know what to do? In the hospital, sure, you get on the phone, dial 3737 and get busy. But this time it happens when you're off work, out shopping. Or watching your kid at a sporting event. This man had a fatal MI on live TV and as you can see from the video below, nobody knew what to do. Confusion reigned, he didn't get the help he needed and the next day there was a moment of silence.  

So okay, Representative Caycedo was older, more than likely sedentary, and prone for an MI. But what about the kids? This young man had a fatal heart attack at a martial arts tournament, and the response was just as slow and clueless. Nobody expects young athletes to have heart problems until the stress of the sport exposes a previously undiagnosed condition. What may have triggered the MI in the martial artist was a blow to the chest, unfortunately not unheard of in children's sports:

Commotio Cordis  is the disruption of the heart's cycle due to blunt force to the area surrounding the heart. Of the 1000 milliseconds in the average cardiac cycle there is a small window (10-30 milliseconds) where blunt force will cause this to occur. It basically puts them into Ventricular Tachycardia or Ventricular Fibrillation. Both deadly heart rhythms. 

So be ready. The American Heart Association writes that though there are few studies on survival rates for bystander-assisted CPR, cities like Seattle have a survival rate of up to 30% with witnessed cardiac arrest. A city like New York however, has a survival rate of 1 or 2%. 

Praying, or in dire need?

 Partly to blame for this is a phenomenon known as the Bystander Effect:the more people there are, the less someone is likely to get help.

You know your business. So help.

Don't Get All Huffy About It

Getting huffy, as it were, can be a real problem in the workplace. You would think we're all in this together working for the common good, wouldn't you? Unfortunately many of us never left the schoolyard, where that toothpick chewing, cuffed-jean wearing bully owned the playground.

Bullying has been mentioned before in these pages but it deserves a revisit if for nothing else but posterity. There's a difference between a bully and a difficult person, believe it or not. Some people are just irritating, because, well, they're born that way. A bully is someone whose wish is to exert power over you. He is habitually cruel and overbearing, and makes the work environment difficult. A bully can be a jerk, but a jerk doesn't have to be a bully.

In any case, workplace bullying is way against most hospital policies. If you have an issue with someone, please see your supervisor before it devolves into something unfixable. Horizontal violence makes for nothing but a long day, in addition to raising your blood pressure, making you use all your sick days, and increasing your risk for migraine- or stroke. Calm down for goodness sake. Take a Zumba Class. 

And don't be a bully. 

Don't Have a Stroke

Workplace policy, what's that? Well, for reasons unknown you've been hired to work at your job, not play internet games, update Facebook, or harass your fellow man. Yet as we know, this is common behavior in the workplace. Nonetheless, it's against company policy in most every work environment. But you do what you want, you're an adult. 

The little brain up there is to raise stroke awareness. A lot of people were made aware after the Grammy Awards with Serene Branson's live TV report:

Of course the news was that she hadn't actually had a stroke, rather, it was a migraine attack that mimics a stroke. The fear though, was very real. 

Remember the patient isn't just the heart, as if any of us need that fact drilled into us. But to whit: procedures like hip surgery can make for clots, which make it up to the brain to block oxygen. If your patient starts having difficulty speaking or feeling parts of his body, don't hesitate to call for help. Most hospitals now have some sort of response team to try to avoid a Code Blue. Just don't get huffy if your coworker does it for you if you're not around.

More on that subject tomorrow. Remember to protect your brain. It may be the only one you get.

THIS IS NOT A PYTHON!
 
This is a 15 foot Eastern Diamondback 

rattlesnake - the largest ever caught on

record, in fact. 
 
This snake was found Near the St. Augustine outlet, 

in a new KB homes subdivision just south of  Jacksonville FL.  

 
One bite from a snake of this size would contain enough venom to kill over 40 full grown men.
 
The head of this snake alone is larger than the hand of a normal sized man. 

 

 A bite from those fangs would comparable to being stabbed by two curved, 1/4 inch diameter screwdrivers. 

The knife being used to draw out the fangs for the picture has a blade around 4 inches long.
 
This snake is estimated to have weighed over 170 pounds.
Notice the girth of this snake as compared to the cop's leg.
 
A snake this size has an approximately 5 1/2 foot accurate striking distance (the distance for an average size rattlesnake is about 2 feet).

  This snake has probably been alive since George Bush Sr. was President.