Divemedic

Cops Investigate Themselves

The cops in Fort Collins want to give this guy an appearance ticket for trespassing. He refuses to sign it. They tell him that it doesn’t matter if he signs, if he doesn’t show up to court, he will be arrested. You would think that would be the end of it.

Instead, a cop gets angry and tries to stuff the ticket into the accused’s pocket. I’m not sure that “If the guy won’t sign, stuff the ticket in his pocket” is proper police procedure. If it isn’t, then this is battery. Anyhow, that’s when things went south. The guy backed away from the cop, and the cop uses that as his excuse to say he is “resisting.” While the guy is on the ground, they hold a pepper spray container within 3 inches of his eyes and spray him in the eyes. This caused permanent damage to his eyes. He is suing the cops.

Kulas’ attorneys say police officers are trained not to deploy pepper spray from less than 3 feet because of the risk of permanent damage to the person’s eyes. Fort Collins Police Department’s policy does not specifically mention a safe or minimum distance of pepper spray, but does say “pepper projectiles and OC spray should not, however, be used against individuals or groups who merely fail to disperse or do not reasonably appear to be present a risk to the safety of officers or the public.” In other words, pepper spray isn’t to be used to force someone to comply with your orders.

The police investigated themselves and determined that they should be cleared of all wrongdoing. See for yourself:

The man was charged with obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest in addition to the original petty trespass charge. All three charges were dismissed.

Don’t talk to the police. Tell them that you don’t want to make a statement. Then shut up. If they want to arrest you or write you a ticket, then let them. You won’t beat them in the street. Let your lawyer beat them later. Most cops are moronic meatheads who enjoy beating people up in order to gain a sense of power. Don’t give them an excuse.

By Divemedic, ago

How the Sausage is Made

From SocoRuss

Do you think you could do a post about what you see as a medical person and covid. We hear from the govt and CDC we are all going to die and the latest variant will wipe out the world so we should hide and take the next 27 booster shots . We dont get to hear that much from someone like us who who skips the bullshit. But what are you seeing? Are you see large numbers of cases, how severe are the cases, what type of people are coming in? The healthy, the old and weak, the immune compromised? Is the large influx of illegals the cause of the number to rise? The big question would probably be who is getting covid more now, the vaxxed or unvaxxed. there seems to be more and more doctors studies saying the vaxxed are getting covid more now, whats the truth?. Whats you opinion and advice on this? I think a lots of your readers would like to hear this also.

OK. My ED sees between 200 and 300 patients per day. We are seeing about 50 to 60 people who have respiratory complaints each day. The majority of them wind up with cardiac, emphysema, COPD, and other infections like pneumonia and the flu. About 15-25 of those 50-60 wind up being diagnosed with COVID. How does that happen? The following is going to be a bit heavy in technical details, but I will simplify it as much as I can, so that it is more understandable.

We are a protocol driven hospital. Under the law, nurses can’t do anything that they aren’t ordered to do by a doctor. So hospitals using protocols have a set of SOPs that nurses enter into a patient’s chart, and a doctor (or other provider) signs off on it. These protocols can be entered by the nurse that is using their professional judgement, or they can be initiated by the nurse after being alerted by our computerized charting system generating a “best practice advisory.”

Hospitals have something called SIRS criteria, as pretty much every hospital in the nation does. When a patient arrives in the ED, they are initially triaged. The computer (and nurse) looks for the following:

  • Body temperature over 38 or under 36 degrees Celsius.
  • Heart rate greater than 90 beats/minute
  • Respiratory rate greater than 20 breaths/minute
  • partial pressure of CO2 (either end tidal or arterial blood gas) less than 32 mmHg
  • Leukocyte >12000 or <4000 per microliter
  • >10% immature forms or bands

If the patient has two or more of the above, the nurse will enter a standardized set of orders for tests. Those tests include tests for lactic acid, a CBC, CMP, and if appropriate, COVID/Flu tests, urinalysis, and other tests. If the nurse doesn’t enter those orders, the computer will alert them that it is best practice to do so. If the nurse STILL doesn’t do so, the computer requires them to enter a note in the patient’s chart explaining why they didn’t. The system is designed to do this so as to prevent human error from missing something important. Once those orders are entered, a e-note is sent to the provider (doctor, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant) who is in charge of that patient, and they will sign off on those orders. It’s a quick, efficient system that is designed to be safest for the patient.

If any of those tests or a physical exam shows that an infection is also present, the patient is said to be positive for Sepsis criteria. This activates an entire other process. Every attempt is made to identify the particular pathogen involved, but the important thing is to start aggressive treatment at that point, before the patient goes into septic shock. So they get IV fluids and probably antibiotics while we are waiting for the results of testing. Time is of the essence here.

If a patient tests positive for Flu A or B, or COVID, they follow a different path. They don’t get antibiotics. Flu patients get flu drugs like Tamiflu. We check COVID patients to see if their blood is clotting normally (INR, PTT, and other similar tests), they get a chest Xray, and we monitor their oxygen saturation. They get some IV fluids, and oxygen (if indicated) and that’s it.

Does this sound like familiar advice? For decades, we have known that viral respiratory illnesses need fluids and rest. Remember that water is nature’s expectorant. It thins out respiratory secretions so that they are thinned enough to be easy to cough out. If you are sick enough to meet SIRS criteria, you likely haven’t been drinking enough water, so we give you a liter or so of either Normal Saline (0.9% NaCl in water) or Lactated Ringers solution. The vast majority of them get sent home after being monitored for a couple of hours. Occasionally, one will get admitted, maybe one or two a day.

The demographics haven’t changed a whole lot. The ones who are the sickest have underlying conditions like cancer, advanced cases of diabetes, COPD, or other inflammatory or respiratory diseases. My hospital doesn’t see a whole lot of illegals, so I can’t comment there. COVID vaccine status doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other. I really don’t think that the vaccine does anything. That’s why I got the first series back in the spring of ’21, but haven’t gotten anything since. (I had COVID twice just a couple of months after I got vaccinated. I haven’t worn a mask since, yet I have been exposed to COVID at least once every working day, and haven’t gotten shit.)

I haven’t seen a COVID death in at least six months. We admit a few, but the VAST majority are treated and released. I will say that we are getting more cases lately, but I don’t see the cases we are getting now being as severe as the ones from 2020. I think that this is because of a few things:

  • We know how to treat COVID now. That wasn’t true three years ago.
  • COVID already killed off the weakest and sickest.
  • The original strain of COVID was the most virulent, IMO. These new variants are not as deadly as the first one.

We have had a lot of staff testing positive for COVID. We had 15 call ins just in the ED staff on the last day that I worked. It seems to be going around and is more contagious than before, but it seems to be no worse than the flu. I have been beefing up my immune system in the meantime by taking vitamins (especially C, D, and E), calcium, and zinc, trying to be a bit proactive.

Understand that this is the experience of one nurse in one hospital, and we all know that anecdotes are not data.

By Divemedic, ago

Property Appraiser Answer- UPDATE @1350

The county property appraiser has answered my request to increase the market value of the house. They think that I am nuts because I am essentially asking them to increase my taxes. That is wrong in any event. Because of Save Our Homes, my assessed value can’t increase by more than 3% if I stay here, and if I move it actually cuts the taxes in my new home, because it maximizes my SOH credit.

Thank you for contacting our office. I want to make you aware that the value assigned by our office is for tax purposes only, and is not reflective of the resale value of your home. You want this value to be as low as possible. The value we arrived at is what you will pay taxes on. Did this answer your question?

If they had half a brain they would see what we are doing here.

EDITED TO ADD: I told them that I still want my value increased. They replied:

So let me understand your email more accurately: You are requesting that we raise your property taxes?

Now my wife is nervous and says “Are we sure that we know what we are doing here?”

Yes, I am. The Save Our Homes Credit is portable, and increasing the market value on our current home will reduce our taxes in the new house by about $2200 a year.

By Divemedic, ago

Smart Guns, Stupid Reporters

This market report claims that smart guns are the future of firearms. I don’t think that they are. This report can be believed, since the reporter also claims that:

traditional iron sight, which can also help shooters look through an optical telescope for aim, red dot sights project a small light directly onto a target.

So iron sights help you look through a telescope for aim, and red dots project light? How can I take financial advice from someone who obviously doesn’t know what they are talking about?

Then the story goes on to be a bit more misleading.

gun owners overall are 63% male and 73% white, the study found.

Gun owners being 73% white actually means that whites are slightly underrepresented as gun owners, since whites are about 76 percent of the population. Math is a thing.

I don’t see how you can claim that 63% are male, since we don’t seem to know what male or female is any longer.

By Divemedic, ago

ED Report

When I got to work yesterday, we had a significantly larger number of COVID positive patients in the ED than usual. Usually, we will see somewhere around 2 or 3 percent of our patients testing positive for COVID. Yesterday, it was hovering around 12 percent.

One of my patients was a 20 month old who came in because she had what her father reported as a seizure, the third one in the past three months. Apparently, no one before had tested her for drugs. I asked the Doctor for a urine drug screen because the entire family smelled like weed. Her urine came back positive for Cannabis, Fentanyl, and Methamphetamine. When we called DCF, they weren’t surprised. Apparently, this family is well known to them. Go figure. Because of having to wait around for DCF, I wound up working 14 hours yesterday.

My patients yesterday? Two homeless people demanding to be admitted (I guess looking to ride out the storm in comfort). A couple of broken feet from falls, a dude with chest pain that he got while clearing debris ahead of the storm, two drug seekers trying to score some pain meds, a 20 year old with nausea, and a woman in heart failure, you know the usual. We were 4 to 1 yesterday, which is better than my old hospital. I think I treated 15 patients overall.

By Divemedic, ago

What is Save Our Homes?

In 1992, Florida voters were worried about runaway property values causing drastic increases in property taxes from one year to the next. With so many people wanting to move here, property values were climbing rapidly, and this was causing property taxes to skyrocket. Amendment 10 was proposed, which is a benefit of the homestead exemption that provides homeowners protection by limiting the maximum that the assessed value of their home for tax purposes can be raised to 3%, or the CPI, whichever is lower. The Amendment to the state constitution passed, and it became the law of the land in 1995.

How does it work? Like anything that relates to taxes and the government, there is a lot of confusing math involved. Let’s say that you live in a taxing district that taxes your property at a rate of 10 mils, and you bought a starter house at #1 First Ave. for $75,000 in 1993. At the time, the state of Florida had a $25,0000 homestead exemption. You would then owe 10 mils on the $50,000 taxable value of the home, or $500 in property tax each year. Your house was valued at $80,000 in 1994, and you paid $550 in taxes for 1994.

A housing boom hits, prices go way up, and by 1995 your home is now valued at $100,000. Your tax bill would have been $750 (a 50% increase from just 2 years before), but save our homes had gone into effect, so the increase in your home’s assessed value only went from $80,000 to $82,400. That means your property tax was only increased to $574.

Eight more years go by, and you decide in 2003 that you want to sell. Your home is now worth $145,000. Of course, save our homes only has you paying taxes on the assessed value of $104,000, minus your homestead exemption, making your tax bill $790 for the year. Anyhow, you get $150,000 for the place. The tax assessor still says it’s worth $145k, and the guy who buys it will have to pay $1200 in taxes in 2004, assuming the value stays at $145k. (you already paid 2003’s taxes)

You, however, bought your second house at #2 Second Street. You were able to get this one for $240,000. Your portable SOH credit was (145,000-104,000=41,000) so even though the tax guy says this place has a market value of $220,000, you will only have to pay taxes on (220,000-41,000-25,000), making your tax bill $1,540.

Then in 2008, voters approved an amendment that increased the homestead exemption to $50,000 for the non-school portion of property taxes. This complicated things even more, but that is a different topic.

Why do these Amendments keep getting voted on? Whenever the Democrats want more voter turnout, they make sure that something of interest to Democrat voters that will drive voter turnout is on the ballot. Tax cuts in property taxes, legalizing marijuana, increasing the minimum wage, saving baby pigs from the slaughterhouse, things like that.

By Divemedic, ago

Hurricane

I don’t typically concern myself with hurricanes unless they are Category three or higher. The reason being that I am more than 50 miles from either coast, and hurricane damage with smaller storms is pretty much restricted to a mile or two of the ocean. Honestly, Florida gets thunderstorms every afternoon in the summer, and they often have winds of tropical storm strength. This far inland, it just isn’t a problem unless you live in a flood prone area or a mobile home, which I do not.

With that being said, the forecast on Sunday night isn’t looking good, and it looks like this hurricane will be a Cat 3 when I arrives in a couple of days. I spent Sunday before bed picking up all of the outdoor stuff. I am working for the next few days, so the wife is on her own.

At the hospital, we clear out a section of the hospital normally reserved for elective surgeries, and make it into a dorm of sorts for the staff who must work during the storm. That’s where I will be staying for the next three days. There may or may not be any posting. I have a couple on deck that I have already written, and they will likely be the only posts for the time being.

By Divemedic, ago