i’ll be full of energy, all these ideas and motivation. i’ll talk really fast and have no need for sleep.
hi, am inpatient psych nurse. that is almost definitely not just teenage hormones; you need that psychiatry doc ASAP. until then I recommend working on a safety plan until you can make it to the doc; I’ll see if I can find a template when I get home later this evening.
Update: Made a post of it so I could go into a little more detail
My mother blamed calling it a “spontaneous abortion” for the “confusion” that led my neighbors health insurance company to deny coverage for her miscarriage. Now that I’m older I’m just like no the insurance company just didn’t want to pay and found a reason that would hopefully traumatize a woman out of fighting them on it and were backed by a wider society that just hates women in general. Like I’ve heard people say it’s more humane to call it a spontaneous abortion because “miscarriage” implies the woman did something wrong and idt the wording is actually going to manage to make the experience that much less awful but regardless I also don’t think the wording was actually the issue in that situation. And the word abortion wouldn’t be that stigmatized either if we didn’t consider pregnancy as a punishment for sex that must be meted out no matter the circumstances of the sex itself or the physical, emotional, or social safety of the resulting pregnancy.
That being said, these people were clearly unwell, punishing them for the horrors brought forth by their poor decisions seems gratuitous.
Prostitution and sex trafficking are also pretty common among substance using women. The lower rate of homelessness among women is mostly just because a brothel has a roof. If we were just housing and feeding them in livable conditions and having them attend outpatient treatment while offering birth control you wouldn’t see this nearly as much. Birth control is pretty critical to giving a woman the immediate safety needed to exit any kind of abusive relationship whether it’s a domestic partner or a pimp / madam. Food and housing don’t hurt either, and if you can get them to break the addiction and not need drug money you’ve done pretty much everything possible to help them break the cycle. It’s actually pretty rewarding to see how many people can figure it out with the right supports in place.
Oh this reminded me of this short (trigger warning for extremely dark / gross nurse humor).
This is a big factor. A lot of people conflate less benefits with higher taxes because fear-brain just knows they both equal increased hardship in the end. They’re technically wrong but their statistically slightly more active amygdalas are responding to a genuine threat, just one that they’ve been very skillfully misdirected into helping worsen.
So both the upside and downside of oral THC is the longer onset time. On one hand that makes it significantly less habit forming, but that also means it’s not gonna give you that instant satisfaction of the shower beer or settling into the couch with a cocktail after work. Working 12s that actually makes it more or less completely nonviable; by the time it would hit I’m supposed to be in bed. You can somewhat get around that though by taking a tincture that absorbs sublingually / through the cheek. The other problem you’re going to run into with the longer onset is that addictive tendency to overdo it because in your head you’re thinking that if you don’t take “enough” it’ll take much longer to “correct” / titrate your dose upward to your desired level of baked.
yeah people don’t understand what I mean about the whole sobriety culture being fundamentally broken thing. We’ve built up so much shame as a culture around addictive behavior that we push people into this weird shame cycle instead of addressing the cultural and lifestyle factors that lead to all this. Like if I was going to drink again socially, the main thing I would need is a non-alcohol related social hobby that takes up most of my time. It’s not a question of me having had trouble drinking, it’s that I had too much stressing me out and wasn’t engaging in any other social activities so I was leaning on it way too hard. I’m not actually mentally healthier than when I was drinking and using the gummies, I’m just physically healthier and that’s hopefully going to give me the energy to go fix the mental health problems at… some point I guess. Still working on that one (the other myth of sobriety culture is that sobriety somehow = mentally healthy. It does not).
Last year I got down to roughly 115lb abs 6ft due to a combination of job stress, alcohol related gastritis, then when I used weed gummies to quit the booze I got cannabinoid hyperemesis (1 year no booze now, about 6 months no gummies. Might try one or the other again at some point but I’d need to address my lifestyle and job stressors first).
I went to see a gastroenterologist and their main advice was just to take the opportunity to eat terribly, or at least, what would normally be considered terribly. Normally calorie dense foods are ill advised because they lead to obesity but if you’re having trouble keeping on weight they’re exactly what you need.
I basically wound up living off snickers bars for a few months. Rock climbers actually use them for the same reason; there’s a looot of calories packed into those tiny bars, and a decent amount of it is fat / protein compared to similar options (maybe payday bars if you really wanna up the protein factor). The caveat here is that I also have IBS, so I needed to take Metamucil / psyllium husk fiber as well to make sure my stomach kept functioning well / keep the chocolate and sugar from agitating my colon, which also would have led to malabsorption / not absorbing the calories, which would have defeated the point.
You can get the fiber in capsules to just take with water instead of having to mix up a whole beverage to chug, but if you do that you need to make sure you stay hydrated so it doesn’t constipate you. I recommend getting a water bottle / skein of some kind that sits against your body well so it can stay with you on the move. I used one of those gallon bottles and would leave it on my work computer with a tall straw and just sip at it every time I stopped to chart, but it sounds like you might need something more around the size of a quart to strap to you.
Best of luck!
See this is why I couldn’t work corrections. I love them so much (they’re so creative) and I can’t stand to watch them suffer. Also I already have problems with psych techs charting 170 / bust in the water main pressures and not telling me, I do NOT want to deal with COs “diagnosing” pseudoseizures on the spot and just walking off and leaving somebody to flop without a damn word to anybody.
You’re my favorite commenter in this thread. Please enjoy this squid as a token of my affection: 🦑
no such thing when you grow up fundie, LOL. So glad I knew what birth control was and a sketchy man looked like on my own from internet research. I went full blown HOE the second I got the chance and that could’ve gone a lot worse if I hadn’t had the knowledge to keep myself safe because my parents sure as hell weren’t gonna teach me.
ICE detention space limits
I’d be interested in knowing what psychosocial developmental stage this person was experiencing during COVID.
I’ve gotten used to saying,“I continue to be blessed with gainful employment” in my usual flat sarcastic tone. At a surface level it’s gratitude focused, but the context of my high-stress job and my deadpan delivery accurately communicates my stress level but in a way people find just humorous enough that it doesn’t stress them out further in turn. Communicating my inner emotional state in a way they don’t find stressful also helps create that very slight emotional intimacy that they’re seeking by inquiring (but that also benefits the highly team-oriented nature of my work). On the other hand it allows both of us to maintain a comfortable emotional distance because it doesn’t really prompt any in-depth response or further inquiry into my well being, just an acknowledgement that I said it such as,“I know, right?”
So I would maybe see if you can find a similar scripted / canned statement that communicates your actual emotional state in a slightly humorous manner. For instance “They’re gettin’ their money’s worth outta me today!” or if you work in a 9-5 office job people might respond well to “Whelp. It’s Monday alright.” You could even go extra catch-phrase-y and say something like “maybe not thriving, but definitely surviving!” Exactly what sounds good with your overall “vibe” in the context of the “vibe” of your workplace will vary and might take some experimentation to find. My above canned response suits my personal vibe because I’ve got that hyperlexic autism thing going on so the relative complexity of my phrasing makes people go,“Yup, that’s Apy alright!” (again, slight emotional intimacy) but also fits well in the context of a job that’s expected to be stressful.
You can practice saying it in front of a mirror or under your breath and after a while it will just start rolling off your tongue with very little emotional or cognitive effort on your part. It’ll also require less emotional or cognitive effort than ruminating on your inner emotional state and feeling like you’re having to make a conscious decision about whether or not to lie about it or worse opening yourself up to dumb questions and statements from people who know next to nothing about how to actually discuss mental health concerns.
Source: am high acuity psych nurse with a borderline personality diagnosis. I’ve had a lot of social skills training as part of my own diagnosis / treatment plus I’ve observed a lot of people’s behavior and had to learn a lot about team dynamics to do my job.
Best of luck!
At this point the trolley problem is "would you like to vote for killing 1000 per year for the next four years or would you like to vote for killing 4000 people this year with the hope that maybe it’ll cause the whole trolley system to self destruct…? (The numbers are purely illustrative).
Edit: apparently it’s not obvious that I think these are both horrible options, and I voted for the limping painfully along for an extended period.
All of his vids are like that. A really common one is people that don’t realize you have to show the cat what a scratching post is and that that’s ok to scratch vs the couch. Just because animals don’t talk doesn’t exclude them from the communicative requirements of any other relationship. I’ve also communicated to my cat that she may receive single finger strokes to the cheeks in exchange for a nice wet nose to nose snoot boop. It’s all about communication folks.
As a side note I use it as a metaphor to explain the importance of creative expression to my psych patients. Dogs gotta chew, cats gotta scratch, humans have to express creativity. If any of us aren’t given healthy outlets to meet those natural drives we start doing them in the wrong places in ways that harm ourselves and others.
I’m actually feeling ok for just this one last night. I had a patient get more physically ill than they really should be on a psych unit but not so much I completely couldn’t handle it workout the charge nurse making all the phone calls. The patient was actually super grateful the whole time and their condition improved a lot which was a nice change of pace. Dayshift was pissed but not at me, and there’s just something deeply satisfying about knowing the hospitalist is about to get verbally fisted for not admitting your patient to medical (as they should, there was a lot more luck involved in my success than is generally advisable in a hospital setting). I’m really, really good at holding a crisis together until sunrise, but at my last job they forgot how good I was to the extent that they stopped realizing it was me putting all the fires out, and eventually they forgot the fires even existed. It’s only been six months so we’ll see but so far but them telling me the hospitalist boutta find out about our unit manager is… nice. It’s just nice.
I was gonna say I wonder how advances in dna / rna manipulation will affect that but now we’re getting into a topic that I last interacted with in like 2-3 101-102 level college courses 5+ years ago 😅
I remember reading a paper on phage therapy ages ago. Iirc the implementation difficulty was that you have to culture the bacteria from the patient then use that culture to breed the phages. Culture & Sensitivity testing alone is already usually a 24h+ process and even a tricky sample collection process; at least when I was a phlebotomist 10 years ago it was the most complicated process I was qualified to perform.
On the other hand phage therapy is great because you don’t really have resistance issues and they’re not going to be harmful to the person. Viruses are extremely host specific compared to bacteria so if they feed on a certain type of bacteria they’re unlikely to be or are even incapable of hurting a human. Vancomycin on the other hand requires regular peak and trough testing to make sure the person is getting enough to kill bacteria but not enough to kill the person.
The issue being that in addition to the culture they then have to breed the phages with a sample of the bacteria collected from the patient. You could maybe develop a “library” of phages to try but I feel like you’d need to keep getting population samples because they’re that host specific. I’m also not sure how long breeding the phages would take vs how long it takes to test antibiotic sensitivity.
Update to my earlier comment: Made a post of it so I could go into a little more detail