{"id":57204,"date":"2024-02-23T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T05:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=57204"},"modified":"2024-02-22T12:20:18","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T17:20:18","slug":"thoughts-of-the-almost-healthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=57204","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts of the Almost-Healthy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am back from the hospital after spending the better half of a week being poked and prodded. They listened to my lungs a lot, and asked if I was a smoker every ten seconds. I am not a smoker, and have never been a smoker, so I’m a little offended I seem to have the effects of smoking without the edgy vice out of it. If I’d known this was going to happen I obviously<\/em> would have been sucking cancer sticks down like boba just for the hell of it, but noooo<\/em>, I had to go the old fashioned genetic way. What was it that landed me in the hospital?<\/p>\n

Covid? Flu? Some new allergy? Nope.<\/p>\n

A cold. I got the old fashioned cold and now I’m glued to a nebulizer like regular air has gone out of style. I didn’t realize I needed to go get me an old Victorian nightgown and candle to go with my historical ailments. Please sir, may I have some porridge, the poorhouses frown upon my cough, sir, but I do my best, sir.
\n<\/p>\n

Whatever, at least maybe people will understand better when I explain the risks of my being immunocompromised. Covid made the phrase a bit of a hot-button topic, but politics or not, I am sick, I am always sick, I will always be<\/em> sick, and no one’s attempts to warn me of the dangers of too much hand washing or wearing masks is going to change it.<\/p>\n

I have three thoughts to give you this week, before I must away to the orphanage for my daily water and stale bread.<\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

If you replace youtube.com with mirrorthevideo.com in any video URL it will give you a version of the video flipped left to right. I am left handed, and just discovered this as a way to learn crochet from right-handed videos. It’s a niche need but it’s hugely helpful and obvious in retrospect.<\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

Experts don’t agree with each other either. Another obvious one, but seeing it in action last week was truly something. A nurse would come into my room and comment that my IV was placed inconveniently and would give them trouble. Another nurse would come in at shift change and comment how glad she was it was so conveniently placed. A third would come in and wonder why they didn’t do my other arm all together. At first I chalked it up to different levels of knowledge and years working, but upon correcting one with the information I had gathered from a peer-reviewed and reputable journal I read trying to research the issue overnight, I unleashed fury. Don’t correct nurses. Every single one of them has been doing this for __ years and knows better than all the others. (Also, in general, don’t do what I did, that was douchey.)<\/p>\n

This isn’t to say I think we should dismiss expert information, in fact, not at all. I think likely each of them were right about my IV in their own way. Some cared about how often the machine complained. Some cared about my comfort. Some cared about ease of access for a resting patient. What I saw wasn’t a bunch of idiots disagreeing with each other. It was different perspectives at odds. It’s good to remember that.<\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

Foley artists for video games need to sit down and record some ultrasounds. My ultasound tech and I discussed at length what video game my blood sounded like. We landed on a half-life game where the player is transitioning to swimming being the best match. But there’s a lot of material there. Swooosh blorp blorp, swoosh blorp blorp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am back from the hospital after spending the better half of a week being poked and prodded. They listened to my lungs a lot, and asked if I was a smoker every ten seconds. I am not a smoker, and have never been a smoker, so I’m a little offended I seem to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilogue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57204"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57209,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57204\/revisions\/57209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}