Antifa Organization

The reason for all of the medical posts is that I have been under the weather for a few days, and I had those on deck in the event I couldn’t post anything. I have some kind of respiratory infection that has knocked me for a loop. I was working last night and had to leave work early because I just couldn’t do it. I’ve been sleeping for the past 14 hours, and now I am going to try to go to work again tonight, fortified with more drugs than Motley Crue.

For the moment, take a look at this post from Matt Bracken which is a photo breakdown of this video. You can also read Peter’s comments on these events here. Now ask yourself (and be honest- there is no point of lying to yourself out of bravado)

Do you and your prepper friends have this kind of command and control? Drones for recon, fast reaction ATVs, radio coordination? These guys are effective because they are willing to do whatever it takes to win, and they are obviously getting training and equipment from somewhere. Look at the ambush tactics here. Even two years ago, they were well trained, funded, and equipped. They have a nationwide organization that is operating like a CIA led operation. Think about the implications.

Tons of people responding on both threads, complete with chest thumping about how “If that had been my car…” derp, derp. Watch the video. There is a woman in the crowd yelling “shoot him.” You can say that we have guns all you want, but most people are not willing to take the actions that will be required of them. Most don’t even understand just how savage they will have to be in such a conflict. Don’t underestimate these people. They’re not fucking around and they’re zealots. It’s time to stop with the chest thumping and bravado. They are preparing, while we are sitting around talking about how the war will be short.

Election season is underway. There will be more and more violence leading up to that. Know where the cells in your area are.

Get ready for what is coming.

Nursing

A little known fact outside of the nursing profession is that there is a lot of infighting and mudslinging in the nursing field. Nurses who work in different areas of the hospital have this “circle the wagons” mentality.

Each of the units in the hospital views themselves as being better than the rest: surgical, endoscopy, the ICU, all of them.

The medical floor is where many nurses get their start, and it is viewed as one of the areas of the hospital that require the lowest level of skill and proficiency. It’s for this reason that they struggle to be respected by other units.

Labor and delivery are seen by most of the hospital as simply wanting to play with babies. The ICU are seen as the neat freaks, the ones who have OCD and simply MUST have everything perfectly in place.

However, there is one almost universal truth- the Emergency department is seen as being the cowboys. They aren’t as methodical, often improvising, adapting, and overcoming obstacles with little regard for tradition or propriety in their quest to stabilize patients. That’s why this is funny:

To say that some nurses simply HATE nurses in the emergency department is an understatement. An even larger sin amongst those particular nurses is to have begun your career as a paramedic. The nurses who dislike the RNs in the ED reserve an all new level of hate for nurses who used to be paramedics. They (paramedics) are viewed by these nurses as being knuckle-dragging Neanderthals’ who have no business in a hospital.

The odd part is that many nurses (25% to 80%) in the ED originally started their careers as paramedics. It’s a natural progression for them, because the same skills that make them good paramedics also make them good nurses. These former medics are known as great critical thinkers, improvisers, and they usually excel at starting IV lines that other nurses can’t get. Beginning your career starting IVs in the back of a moving truck, it’s a skill that isn’t unlearned.

I had a nursing instructor tell me that REAL nurses start IV’s in the hand, and never in the crook of the elbow, because it’s uncomfortable for the patient, and movement of the elbow can cause issues with IV pumps. I pointed out to her that some drugs like IV contrast dye, and Adenocard must go into that location, so saying “never” is not correct. The unfortunate thing is that she was one of my nursing instructors, she’s a screaming liberal, and since I apparently have a biological inability to shut my mouth when I think I’m correct, it cost me some grief during RN school. The same issue is what chased me out of getting my masters degree a decade ago.

It didn’t help that we had to write a paper on this cartoon, microaggressions, and how vulnerable populations must feel in the face of white privilege. I hate it, but liberal professors are the gatekeepers. There were two things that made life hard for me. Being right, and not being able to back down when I know that I’m right. That’s why I am struggling to finish my BSN. I already have Seven college degrees, with two of them being Bachelor’s degrees. It’s the nitpicky BS that I struggle with.

Misplace a comma in ONE of the APA references in your bibliography, and you just handed them the excuse to take the paper you spend two weeks on down to an 88% ‘B’ grade. I just don’t have patience for that kind of ticky-tack BS. It doesn’t help that I am in classes where I am decades older than some of my instructors.

I will make it, because I learned my lesson ten years ago, but it still burns my ass that these professors make mouthing the commie line a required rite of passage to get a degree.

Working

Working a tough shift this week because I get home just in time to go to bed and get up to do it again. Makes posting tough. I’m working with pediatric patients this week. My last shift looked like this:

  • a 14 year old with developmental delays who admitted to being sexually active. Her mother knew and was OK with it. She was my sickest patient of the day.
  • an entire family (2 adults, 3 kids aged 9 months to 8 years) who came in with body lice because they are homeless
  • a 15 year old and her mother who came in with bed bugs from the long stay motel they are living in
  • A 3 year old who fell out of bed and broke her collarbone.
  • A 17 year old who had a bruise across his abdomen from a dirtbike accident
  • a 16 year old with chest pain that gets worse when he breathes in
  • plus a parade of sniffles, fevers, and sneezes that cause screaming children, which are the reason why I don’t like working pediatrics, but it’s my turn. I think I had around 25 or 30 patients overall, but I lost count. Most were easy- in and out in about 90 minutes or so.

One of the things that makes pediatrics hard is that all of the medication dosages are weight based. Because of that, it’s easy for people to screw up. Last night, 5 minutes before my quitting time, a Doctor ordered medication and discharge orders for a child. The dose appeared to be too large. I sat down and did the math. This is what my day was like:

The Drug Reference says that the dose is supposed to be 20-50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, divided into three doses. The ordered dose was 1080 milligrams to be administered to a 5 year old child who weighed 27 kilograms. It required calls to the pharmacist, messages to the doctor, cancelling the original order, getting a new order, administering the medication, returning the excess to the pharmacy, processing the discharge, and I finally got off work, 30 minutes past my scheduled time.

Nursing.

New Tenants

The tenants who have been renting from us since before COVID just informed us that they have bought a house and will be moving out. So now we begin planning for new tenants. There is some work that needs to be completed. The kitchen counters need to be replaced, pest control, painting, landscaping updates, and other maintenance items need get taken care of.

They haven’t given us a date for the move out yet, but wanted to give us a heads up. They were guessing that they will be moving out a month or two early. Depending on how early, I may or may not hold them to the early termination clause in the lease. We will almost certainly work something out, because they have been there for nearly four years and have always been on time with the rent. (The only time they were late was my fault, so I don’t count that one. I screwed up the electronic billing.)

The flip side is that we have been renewing the lease for about 10 percent less than market because I wanted to encourage the current renters to stay. We will adjust the price so that we are getting close to market, which means a 10% increase in rent. I hope that the place won’t be empty for more than a month or two.

Lawyer Comes Unglued

I was giving a deposition a few years ago when I sued my mortgage holder, SunTrust bank. I had gone through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and it had been discharged. There was a court order, so they weren’t allowed to do anything to collect the debt. All they were permitted to do was foreclose on the house.

Here is the problem- it turned out that they were NOT the mortgage holder. They had lied to the bankruptcy court. They tried all sorts of tactics- they forged a note. They lied to the court. None of that worked, and they were unable to foreclose on the house. So they resorted to sending collection agents to my house, and calling me repeatedly on the phone. I wound up suing them 5 times in 4 years and collecting more than $40,000 in damages. They still kept it up, with a collector calling me a deadbeat who doesn’t pay his bills, so I sued them again.

So that’s how we wound up in the deposition. I brought my attorney. One part of the deposition went like this:

Divemedic: I have a tape of your client’s collectors harassing me on the phone and calling me a deadbeat

SunTrust Lawyer: Did you ever think, even once, that if you paid your bills, the calls and visits would stop?

DM: Are you telling me that you and your client are knowingly violating the orders of the Federal Bankruptcy court to collect this debt in violation of Federal Law?

STL (to the court reporter): Stop recording this. This is off the record. (To my attorney): You need to remind your client that I am an officer of the court, and he needs to be civil, or we will ask for contempt charges.

My Lawyer: (to me) You heard her. You have to be civil.

DM: (to my lawyer) This is still off the record, right?

My Lawyer: Yes.

DM (To STL): Kiss my ass.

The SunTrust lawyer came unglued and ended the deposition at that point. On the way out, my lawyer told me that my comment was the funniest thing he ever heard at a deposition. We wound up settling the lawsuit for five figures, but I can’t comment on how much because of an NDA. That was almost ten years ago, and I still laugh about it.

Night Shift

I am on night shift for the next 10 weeks. Getting used to this is a bear. If any of you have noticed my posting quality dropping off, that’s why. They have me on the 4 pm to 4 am shift. The extra $6 an hour in shift differential is nice, but it’s been awhile since I worked nights and is taking some getting used to. I’m just getting to bed while the wife is getting up to go to work. I worked on Labor day, which gets some good bonus money. Time and a half, plus the $6 an hour for shift differential. Still, tired.

Since I have been dragging, I didn’t get a lot of time for researching the news today, so instead I will tell you what’s up in emergency medicine. This week, we saw some interesting stuff. Here are some of my more notable patients:

  • A guy complaining of abdominal pain and constipation. He had a large blood clot in the main vein that runs from the digestive system to the liver (Portal Vein). It was 85 percent blocked. Because he was so big and the clot so large, he got the largest loading dose of Heparin I’ve ever given- 10,000 units.
  • A man who came in with groin pain. We had to let him know that he has testicular cancer.
  • A woman with congestive heart failure. She damned near died when her lungs rapidly filled with fluid. She was joking with me and fine. I left the room and 10 minutes later, she was gasping for air and needed BiPAP, a nitroglycerine drip, and Lasix. At one point, I thought she was going to code.
  • A guy who did code. Wasn’t my patient, but a code is all hands on deck. He used the bedside commode, passed about 1 liter of blood, then went into cardiac arrest.
  • A woman who stabbed herself 10 times because “I was sad.” She remembers feeling sad, and said the next thing she remembers is seeing the knife on the floor and being covered in blood.
  • A woman who took some penicillin and had an anaphylactic reaction to it.
  • A woman that had been trapped in a burning vehicle who had a hoarse voice and a cough.
  • Interestingly enough, I didn’t have any COVID patients this week, but other nurses did.

We have been mostly at 3:1 nurse:patient ratios until 9pm when the mid shifters leave, then we go to 4:1. That means I see anywhere from 10 to 15 patients per day. One thing that gets me is how grown adults who are covered in tattoos can be afraid of needles. I’m talking people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who cringe, and even cry when you start an IV on them. Three of my patients in one night were actually SCREAMING at the top of their lungs because I started an IV on them. In one case, a woman’s heart rate went from 90 to 150 while I was getting her IV.

Anyhow, since my work week is done, I now have 5 days off in a row. That means I have work to do around the house.

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.

Unretirement

I retired from the Fire Department back in 2011. After a brief journey to grad school where I majored in Physician Assistant Studies, I left because I couldn’t handle the leftist professors telling stories about how Ronald Reagan deliberately engineered AIDS as an attack on women and gays. You can read about this nutcase here. I highly recommend reading it. It’s enlightening. Anyhow, the liberal indoctrination and constant bullshit made me want to leave, so I did.

My first job when I got back put me in a position of working for a boss that was deliberately keeping people sick so that he could make more money. He insisted that we falsify documentation and lie on paperwork. He told me “We are making money, the nursing home is making money, and the patient doesn’t even remember his own name. We all win here, so don’t rock the boat. You want to keep your job, don’t you?”

I didn’t. I wound up being shown the door because I had ethics.

I took a couple of years and enjoyed retirement. That was when I met my wife. She told me that we could do so much more than what we had. We could travel. If only I got a part time job, we could use the money to travel. I was bored sitting around the house, so I got a job teaching just three classes a day. We used the money I made to see the world. We have been to 14 countries and 48 states. During the seven years I was teaching, I went from part time to full time, and realized that teaching wasn’t for me.

Then COVID came along. I went back to health care. That’s how I came to be unretired.

Nostalgia

Last night, I was watching some of the streaming offerings on PlutoTV. It got me to thinking about the America that existed when I was a kid. The shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the Wonderful World of Disney, Six Million Dollar Man, Happy Days, Barney Miller, Mork and Mindy, The Love Boat, Three’s Company, and Laverne and Shirley. During the day, we grew up on old shows like the Dick van Dyke show, Andy Griffith, and The Beverly Hillbillys.

Watching music videos on television.

All of it seems like it was so corny, and so wholesome. I know that life had its difficulties. We had the Carter years, the Cold War, and my young adult years were filled with my time in the military, but being young, the world seemed so much better in those days than it is now. Things made more sense then. Perhaps its due to the state of the world today, or perhaps its due to the youthful optimism that we all have when we are in our teens.

Still, there are times when I live in the nostalgia of the years between 1976 and 1996, and long to return to those days. So I think I will sit here for a couple of hours, watch some nostalgia TV, and remember a time when I was young, and the world seemed to make sense. Then I have to go to work.

Masters Degree

As I rapidly approach my seventh decade, I realize that I can’t work as a bedside healthcare worker forever. I can’t wrestle with meth heads forever. It’s time to start thinking about what comes next. My new employer will pay for my classes and books, so I have decided to get my Masters degree. There are two real choices: Nursing Management, or Nursing Education.

I have already gone down the road of education- I was a high school science teacher, I have also had jobs teaching Paramedic, ACLS, PALS, and other classes. I also don’t have a very high opinion of nurse educators, so I don’t want to do that.

That leaves Nursing Management. If you’re gonna be in the band, it’s better to wave the stick than to carry the big drum. That requires a couple of undergrad prerequisite courses that my previous degrees didn’t cover. Classes begin this week.