Divemedic

Non-Issue

The left thinks that they have a smoking gun because the White House medical unit ordered thousands of narcotic pills during the Trump Presidency, and the Pentagon says that they were not tracked very well. It isn’t smoking, nor is it a gun.

The White House Medical unit maintains a health clinic for all of the staff members of the White House, the Naval Observatory, Air Force 1 and 2, as well as assisting the Secret Service in setting up and maintaining emergency trauma centers everywhere their protectees go. The office also maintains fully stocked pharmacies at the White House, Naval Observatory, Old Executive Office Building, and aboard Air Force 1. There are 1800 staff members of the White House alone. The WHMU also provides emergency coverage for more than 1.5 million annual visitors to the White House and guests of the President, as well as national and international Heads-of-State and diplomats when they are in Washington, DC. So the amounts ordered aren’t really that remarkable.

The same doctor has been assigned to the WHMU since1995, and has been its director since 2000- more than 24 years. He is an Air Force Brigadier General by the name of Richard Tubb.

As an ED nurse, I see between 10 and 30 patients a day, most days. On any given day, I give controlled substances like Fentanyl, Dilaudid, Morphine, Norco, Xanax, Valium, Versed, and others a dozen or more times per day, and I am not filling prescriptions like a pharmacy, I am personally administering them.

The difference here is that our medical staff at the hospital have a pharmacist who checks every medical order for safety. The doctor writes the order, the pharmacist checks to make sure it is safe, then releases it. The nurse retrieves it from the automated dispenser, then administers it to the patient after also checking to make sure it’s a safe and appropriate medication. That’s right- at least three different people check to make sure it’s safe.

Not so in the WHMU. The providers are directly administering the medications without a pharmacist or nurse backstopping them. This makes errors more likely, but it doesn’t mean that the drugs are being abused.

The fact that some drugs weren’t well maintained doesn’t mean that Trump or someone on his staff was abusing them, it just means that government workers, being immune from fines for not tracking narcotics or lawsuits from improperly dosing or prescribing them don’t bother to do so. They track their controlled medications like law enforcement tracks their firearms. That is to say, not very well.

By Divemedic, ago

Stupidity

A woman is claiming that her child’s Easy Bake Oven gave her family carbon monoxide poisoning. This is why people shouldn’t use Google to self diagnose medical problems. The Easy Bake oven uses a lightbulb to generate heat. There is no open flame, thus no combustion. Since carbon monoxide is a product of incomplete combustion, this isn’t the culprit.

The second issue here is that a pulse oximeter allegedly showed 89 percent. This is not caused by CO for technical reasons. See, a pulse oximeter works because hemoglobin that is bound to another molecule absorbs certain frequencies of red light, while hemoglobin that is not bound to another molecule does not. The pulse oximeter shines two frequencies of red light through the body, and measures how much one is absorbed over the other. The result is used to calculate the proportion of bound hemoglobin versus unbound that is passing through the beam.

Carbon monoxide poisoning is caused because CO binds to hemoglobin 200 times more readily than does oxygen. This causes the hemoglobin to form carboxyhemoglobin, which absorbs that red light as readily as oxyhemoglobin, which is formed when oxygen binds to hemoglobin. This means that the pulse oximeter will show the same number whether it is carboxyhemoglobin or oxyhemoglobin. This phenomenon is called the pulse oximetry gap and makes a pulse oximeter useless for diagnosing CO poisoning.

There is a linear decline in O2Hb (oxyhemoglobin) saturation as COHb (carboxyhemoglobin) saturation increases. This decline is not detected by pulse oximetry, which therefore overestimates O2Hb saturation in patients with increased COHb levels. The pulse oximetry gap increases with higher levels of COHb and approximates the COHb level. In patients with possible CO poisoning, pulse oximetry must be considered unreliable and interpreted with caution until the COHb level has been measured. [Bozeman WP, Myers RAM, Barish RA: Confirmation of the pulse oximetry gap in carbon monoxide poisoning. Ann Emerg Med November 1997;30:608-611.]

The fire department found no signs of CO in the apartment, but the couple claims that this was due to the oven having been unplugged 8 hours before.

This entire story is stupidity, and newspapers should be sued for publishing garbage like this with no corroboration other than some moron’s Google search. If you are going to make a claim like this, at least do a little research. Layers of editorial research my hairy ass.

Because I am getting used to providing evidence based resources:

Barker SJ, Tremper KK, The effect of carbon monoxide inhalation on pulse oximetry and transcutaneous PO2. Anesthesiology. 1987; 66: 677-679Gonzalez A

Buckley RG, Aks SE, Eshom JL, et al. The pulse oximetry gap in carbon monoxide intoxication. Ann Emerg Med. 1994; 24: 252-255

Gomez-Arnau J, Pensado A, Carboxyhemoglobin and pulse oximetry.Anesthesiology. 1990; 73: 57

By Divemedic, ago

The IRS War on the Right

Do you remember when Obama used the IRS to target his political enemies? I do. The IRS even settled a lawsuit and apologized. So did Obama.

IRS leaks have targeted Democrats’ political enemies, such as the National Organization for Marriage, to which the IRS was obliged to pay a settlement after leaking the identities of the group’s donors in order to enable political retaliation against them. For some reason, Barack Obama’s Justice Department never got around to prosecuting that case. Or the case of the IRS director lying to Congress about targeting conservative political groups, or … well, you get the picture.

That was before the Treasury Department investigated itself and found that it did nothing wrong. So now the left is claiming that it was all fake news. Next they will say that the Russians did it because Trump asked them to.

So why am I posting about things that happened more than 7 years ago? Because it is still happening. The House Oversight Committee is looking into allegations that the IRS is selectively not enforcing its tax-exempt rules against liberal nonprofits.

By Divemedic, ago

Don’t Be a Victim

This is why I have video cameras covering my property and a video doorbell. I don’t answer the door in person, especially at night. I might be home, or I might be on a different continent. This cop mag dumped on a woman for having the audacity to be armed in her own home.

Under these circumstances, some return fire from 5.56 green tip would be appropriate. Aim for the belt buckle when you clap these assholes. You might as well take 3 or 4 of them with you.

By Divemedic, ago

Enemy of the State

Leticia James has announced that NY will confiscate all of Trump’s NY property, including Trump tower, if he doesn’t or can’t pay the $354 million fine. I don’t see how they can do that, since Trump only has a 30% stake in the building.

The interesting part here is that Trump tower contains 2.1 million square feet of floor space, with 98% of it currently leased at about $100 per square foot. Trump’s 30% stake in the tower nets him $62 million a year. So overall, the building brings in $210 million a year in rent. The judge in the case found that Trump lied about the value of the building, which Trump claimed was $806 million. The judge claims that the building is worth only $40 million. I am not a billionaire tycoon, nor am I a NY judge or a NY real estate expert, but I think that a building that brings in $210 million a year in rent is worth more than $40 million.

Similarly, the judge in the case claims that Trump’s Mar a Lago in Palm Beach is only worth between $18 million and $27 million. That’s bullshit, and I can easily prove it. Just a block away in Palm Beach is 1200 S Ocean Blvd. That house is a 12,000 square foot home located on 3.4 acres with 9 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms. The lot borders on the Atlantic ocean on the east, and A1A to the west. It’s estimated value is $110 million, or about $9,100 per square foot. Another home which just sold in 2022 for $9.5 million and located less than a mile from Mar a Lago is a 1900 square foot 3/3 home on a third of an acre that doesn’t border the water at all. It works out to $5,000 per square foot.

Contrast those two homes with Mar a Lago- a 16,500 square foot home located on 17 acres of land. If we are to believe the judge, this resort is worth 5 to 10 percent per square foot of the two homes above?

Or you can instead view it as the commercial property that it is. The Mar-a-Lago Club had $29.7 million in gross revenues in 2015, $25.1 million 2017, $22 million in 2018, and $21.4 million in 2019. So it brings in $20 to 30 million a year in revenue. Again, hard to claim that a business brings in 100% of its value each year.

As I have been saying- the left is going to destroy Trump. I don’t think that simply making him a pauper is going to be enough. He will wind up in prison, where he will be killed pour encourager les autres.

By Divemedic, ago

Facts Coming In

This is why the gun banning left tries to get the narrative going on shootings as soon as possible, before the facts are in. With regards to the shooting at the Kansas City Superbowl parade, the shooters were two juveniles and two black adult males with criminal records who got in an argument when one of them made eye contact with another, who began firing.

An account of the bloodshed pieced together from witnesses and video footage found that the violence started when Mays and a group of individuals who confronted him “began arguing about why they were staring at each other.”

Not only that, but at least one of the guns was stolen.

I’m willing to bet they were gang members, but we will never know, because now that the shooters wasn’t a white male wielding an AR-15, the lefty antigun press no longer cares. Now it’s just black dudes participating in their culture.

By Divemedic, ago

Smaller Government, My Hind End

Republicans in Tennessee have just declared to the entire state that they want to lose the next election. Jesus, leave it to the Stupid Party to make Joe Biden look smart. They are trying to pass a law that would make it illegal to serve cold or chilled beer. (Hat tip to wirecutter)

I have said it before, and it bears repeating- “Just because the Democrats are your enemy does not mean that the Republicans are your friend.”

This is why Trump is so popular- he isn’t like all of the other politicians. Was he perfect? No, but remember that he isn’t an expert on everything, because no one person can be an expert in everything. The largest complaint that I have heard about him was the banning of bump stocks. He isn’t, and never was, a gun guy. Not a part of gun culture at all. So he did what any outsider would do- he went to the people who he believed to be experts in gun rights. He consulted the NRA. Everyone in the country who isn’t part of the gun culture assumes that they are the progun experts. Those asshole Fudds over at the NRA told him that bump stocks were useless, and therefore throwaways in gun culture. Not knowing any better, he went with that.

The enemy here wasn’t Trump, it was the NRA.

To me, Trump’s biggest problem was taking people at their word. Being an outsider, he didn’t understand that members of the swamp and of the Uniparty only care about two things: money, and power. They use one to get the other interchangeably. Being a babe in the woods when it came to politics, he frequently made bad choices in adding people to his inner circle, and that naivety cost him possibly everything, including his life.

By Divemedic, ago