So that was quick. The job that I applied for two days ago? They called me while I was at work on Thursday morning and had a telephone interview. Nothing like interviewing for a job while you are at work.
Two hours later, they called and offered me the job. The offer was laughable. The woman said “We are making this offer in consideration of your four college degrees, as well as your 22 years of experience.” Then she told me what they were willing to pay: $16 per hour.
I told her that this was FAR too low. An entry level job running a cash register at a convenience store in this area pays more than that. I know, because my high school students were getting jobs at that rate of pay. I don’t know what kind of medical employee you think you are getting for that, but it won’t be me. I would sooner not work at all.
We see how a large group of feral blacks conspired to illegally enter an occupied building of a school, where they entered a classroom and attacked a 14 year old girl, causing her injury before attempting to flee the scene.
I can’t tell you NC law, but in Florida:
Entering a school without permission and with the intent to commit a felony offense is burglary: a felony in the first degree, punishable with life in prison.
Trespassing on school property is a First degree misdemeanor.
Attacking a person with the intent to commit a felony is aggravated battery, a felony of the second degree.
The victim is a child, so the adults are guilty of aggravated child abuse, a first degree felony.
The fact that they planned and conspired to all of the above is another first degree felony.
If black lives really matter, the BLM group will support hefty sentences for this, but you know that they won’t.
A website is being used to produce and distribute child porn. I assume all of the web hosts like AWS will deplatform them. Or are they all to busy trying to keep Donald Trump from saying that China caused COVID, that the election was rigged, and that Biden is a senile fraud?
An armed teacher stops an attempted abduction. This should serve as a lesson for those opposed to armed teachers and to those who claim that there is no such thing as a good guy with a gun .
Guess who came to see me today? The doctor from this post. Yes, he is still wearing two masks. No, I was not wearing one. Also no, he didn’t say a word. Now that the CDC has declared him to have been wrong the entire time, he is being much nicer.
He was actually really nice and even thanked me for helping him with a few of his patients today.
President Biden has ordered the USS Ronald Reagan out of the Pacific theater and into the Indian Ocean to support the Afghanistan withdrawal. For the next four months, there will not be an aircraft carrier battlegroup in the Pacific.
ANY substance has an LD50 dose: Aspirin, Tylenol, salt, sugar, Nicotine, even water. Contrary to what stoners would have you believe, there is a way to overdose on marijuana. The people who advocate for weed are either making money from it, getting high from it, or are just plain uninformed on the subject, and will claim that it is harmless. While marijuana is safer than most other recreational drugs, there is still a risk there.
Before we begin, in the interest of full disclosure: I feel that the war on drugs does more harm than good, and I think that marijuana should be legal. I also think that people who smoke weed now are mostly inconsiderate assholes who force those of us who choose NOT to use marijuana to put up with that horrible smell AND their juvenile antics.
Let’s begin with a point that is almost never talked about: smoking marijuana carries all of the risks of smoking: lung cancer, emphysema, etc. The lungs aren’t helped by deliberately inhaling large quantities of smoke. This makes smoking marijuana more dangerous than ingesting it.
How about the reason why people smoke: the THC?
Years ago, I was the first paramedic to treat a patient who had overdosed on what the patient referred to as “legal weed,” which later turned out to contain a synthetic form of THC called “Spice,” which is 40 times more potent than natural THC. It caused me to do a lot of research on marijuana and the possibility of overdose.
Benno Hartung et al. (2014) report that the lethal half dose (LD50) for THC in humans is estimated to be around 30 mg/kg. This means that approximately 2 grams (.07 ounces) of pure THC has a 50% chance of killing a 150 pound man. This is the amount of THC found in 10 grams (.35 ounces) of high grade weed with 20% THC content. Moreover, the DEA reports that concentrated THC derivatives known variously as “wax,” “dabs,” or “butane hash oil” consisting of up to 80% THC are now available on the streets; one tenth of an ounce of these would contain a lethal half dose of 2 grams of THC. Robert Gable (2004) also reports that the lethal half dose of marijuana is about 15 grams or one half ounce; however, he does not specify the THC percentage of the marijuana.
The reason why marijuana gets this reputation for being impossible to OD on is the relationship between the amount of THC it takes reach intoxication, versus the amount it takes for a fatal dose.
The issue here is not so much the total lethal dose, but how close you must be to the lethal dose in order to get the effect you are looking for. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (often called “ecstasy”) and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or “roofies”) and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. This makes marijuana safer than alcohol, MDMA, and other drugs, but it is not proper to say that there is NO risk.
I’ve found no published cases in the that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. Smoking marijuana is less risky than eating it from an overdose perspective because not all of the marijuana smoked is absorbed.
So now you know.
However, whenever I have posted about weed in the past, I always get tons of uninformed pro weed stoners coming by to tell me how wrong I am. I am not interested in that debate, so comments on this post and the earlier one will be closed. It just isn’t something that I want to debate, nor do i want this blog to become a blog about the risks and benefits of marijuana.
This news story is right in line with what happened in my family. I got a panicked phone call from my brother. It seems that his son, who still lives with his parents, has a medical marijuana card. He heard his mother say that she was stressed out, so he decided to use some of his weed to make her some brownies.
She ate five of them before her son told her to slow down and confessed to what was in them.
She began freaking out.
So now my brother is calling because she is worried that she is going to overdose. I explained to him that the best thing that they can do is wait for it to wear off. He asked if they should go to the hospital and I advised them that there is nothing they can do for her at the hospital.
They decided to go anyway. Soooo, after a $1,000 copay and 6 hours in the emergency room, she was again sober. They didn’t do a thing for her apart from letting her sit in the waiting room while the effects wore off.
On a side note, my hospital has four COVID patients being cared for by a single nurse. The “COVID hall” has 28 rooms with a possible capacity of 56 patients at double occupancy. There are FOUR patients in there.
This is more on my issue with the job. I am writing all of this down because it will help me think this through. It also makes for a great post.
This supervisory position where I am working was created a year ago after some patient safety incidents, one of which ultimately resulted in the death of a patient. There was a big management shakeup because of it. This resulted in the old department head for my department getting replaced with the one that is my current boss.
The new boss decided that this unit needed more direct supervision. That is why the supervisors were hired- all within the last year. I was the last of the four who were hired. All of the other three have since moved on. What does THAT tell you about the work culture of this hospital? I don’t know- no one is talking, but the turnover tells me a lot. There is a HUGE morale problem in the place. Keep in mind that my unit is currently at half staffing. **
After I was hired, my boss told me that if we didn’t change how we were doing business, it was likely that state regulators were going to shut us down. It was crazy. This unit had been operating without written policies or procedures for over a decade. That is right in my wheelhouse- one of my Bachelor’s degrees is in EMS systems, and another one is in Public Safety and Health Management. (The other two are in Fire Science and Emergency Medicine)
So I spent my first two weeks there learning how this place did business. Then I wrote an entire policy manual over the next two weeks and submitted it to administration for approval- keeping best practices, and discarding ones that were inefficient or dangerous. Then I went out and took the boards to become nationally certified for this particular job, passed them, and turned my new certs into the hospital. None of that was a part of my job description. I did it because it needed to be done.
The people at HR told me that none of that matters. THAT is what upsets me. The job seems like a good opportunity, because it is badly in need of leadership. However, this issue with the pay and with HR seems like the place may not be salvageable.
The CFO was walked out by security on Friday. It may be that this was not the opportunity it seemed to be when I took the job.
Anyway, I wait and see what the application to the other hospital looks like.
