Shit rolls downhill; profits roll up. Source: fellow nurse.

My psych unit is having a pretty severe pants-in-the hall deficiency tonight and I’m definitely not getting paid enough for any of it.

I’ve been waiting for algorithm-senpai to notice me…

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The number one thing I love about Randall Munroe’s particular brand of nerd humor is how genuine he is. His fascination with the natural laws of the universe is just that. It’s not something he uses to hold himself over other people or to create in-groups and out-groups of people who know and people who don’t. Even when his content is too complex for the average person it never has that subtextual “well you just wouldn’t get it because you’re not smart enough” vibe that so much other nerd humor has (looking at you big bang theory). He’s genuinely inviting the reader to learn about whatever it is, whether they ultimately do or don’t. He doesn’t have that weird inferiority complex people get sometimes where people feel the need to defensively push others away from their interests to feel better about the fact that their interests happen to be niche in some way. He doesn’t use it as a vehicle to fuel his ego. I’ve joked before that he’s my “celebrity crush” but it’s really just that he truly, genuinely wants to show you something he thinks is cool (and at least a little humorous) and as someone who’s met a LOT of snobby nerds, I’ve always deeply respected that he isn’t one. - sincerely, a professional vibe-checker (like, actually).

I feel like this is something I knew but didn’t know was something that had actually been studied. I’ll tell a lot of science concepts and stories from history and mythology that normally bore people but I’ve always had a habit of telling them “drunk history” style so I’ll be telling people shit like,“And they didn’t invite discord to the party because why the fuck would you but you also can’t just not invite her because that’s how you piss a bitch off.” and “and Paris, being a dumbfuck who doesn’t know how to think with his upstairs brain-” and honestly I was already somewhat like that but spending a bunch of my formative years on tumblr really honed it.

Honestly this discussion also highlights the issue that what’s considered inappropriate varies widely and often changes both in terms of prejudice and in terms of context. Most people would agree that an image of a penis entering or inside of a vagina is pornographic unless it’s a medical diagram laying out the anatomical and physiological aspects like the one in the anatomy book my otherwise puritanical parents let me read at the age of six. Most people would agree that nudity is sexual except for, again, anatomical diagrams, but also many classical artistic depictions such as paintings and statues. Hand holding isn’t generally considered sexual except to some people if the people happen to be of the same sex but not if you come from a culture where hand holding is a normal level of intimacy for non sexual friends. Breasts are for some reason considered sexual in most of the areas heavily colonized by people from the places where lactose tolerance past childhood evolved but not most other places which is super handy if you like being able to feed infants. Most people agree that kissing for an extended period while rubbing areas close to the genitals is sexual, but often not enough to restrict it from being viewed by teenagers.

TLDR; what’s even considered “sexual” or “porn” can vary wildly and has historically been used to suppress education, various minorities, and general freedom of expression.

That was the whole purpose of tumblr so yeah. I kid, as I did get started on there at like 14 as a part of various Fandoms, but by the time I was 18 I had been using it for porn for quite some time, largely because fandom is also mostly for porn.

It’s not even the "needs help themselves aspect. That screws them, they say most psych nurses are crazy too, it’s whether they’ve done the work on it, and I think you’d find similar levels of low competence from somebody who just didn’t pay enough attention in school (AND they wouldn’t have the life experience to know what they’re talking about).

Yeah to me I see it as the commoditization / paywalling of normal human supportive interaction. Therapy should be there to supplement normal supportive relationships when they’re unavailable to you or you have a large enough stressor in your life that they’re inadequate to help you manage.

I don’t like the idea of moving towards a society where it’s just expected that most truly supportive interactions have a strict professional-client paid relationship instead of a naturally ebbing and flowing give and take between two friends who are close enough. To me that just feels like capitalism further encroaching into my life by tallying up the worth of every interaction I have so they can demand their cut.

I’m already seeing a therapist for my existing severe mental illness through one of those online gig style therapy services because that was the only place I could find any openings, and they’re already taking their cut that way. I can’t imagine choosing this if I wasn’t already someone who had been hospitalized several times. Difficulty sustaining stable interpersonal relationships is literally a key hallmark of my disorder, and if I was better at it I’d much prefer it! (I’m working on it, LOL).

Well I’m night shift so it’s while I’m sleeping. But they can’t just give you a day off either because that would also just solve the real issue. Not that therapy is never necessary, but having worked in mental health 8+ years now, 90% of the time 90% of people just need a damn day off (often more than one). Traumas and chronic dysfunctions will absolutely always exist, but we really need to stop focusing (as much) on the “everybody should go to therapy” side and much more on the “what the fuck are we doing to all of these people that all of them need so much therapy???” side (spoiler: It’s too much work for too little pay, and the rent, as always, is too. damn. high.).

It would be nice to be able to have a view that only tallies the votes from your local server, but IDK about listing all the individuals in an easily accessible manner.

What I really want though is a rolling deletion of my activity that’s older than 3-6 months. I understand there’s no way to erase these things entirely, especially from decentralized servers, but I do wish the internet could revert to being a little more ephemeral. You can also go look through public records and go back years in real life, but it’s not easy.

Honestly we balance each other really well and have some really interesting discussions but I should be clear that it looks like this more than anything else:

It’s kinda like the deism vs theism debate in the final Space Odyssey; at least one god vs no more than one god.

I thought your comment was satire at first but what the fuck. There’s really no denying they own us at this point.

Actually it is. There’s not actually a nursing shortage if you look into the numbers, there’s just a shortage of nurses willing to get screamed at by delirious people while doing backbreaking work without backup or enough people to distribute that work among while getting paid pennies. If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around. It always comes down to pay and ratios (which are inextricably intertwined) and everything else is fractions of percentages of the problem that get overemphasized so that the people siphoning money out of this system never have to address the elephant in the room. Don’t let them deflect you away from focusing on their greed. A bunch of nurses are also out there pushing themselves through degree mill nurse-practitioner schools to become wildly unsafe prescribers for the same reasons as those leaving entirely, which also reduces the bedside workforce.

Right now we’re just trying to keep the ANA from making functionally illegal to go on strike in the first place by making it our fault for “patient abandonment” if the hospital doesn’t hire (usually extremely expensive) travel nurses to cover strikes.

The way strikes work for nurses is that hospitals are essential to a community, so you have to give notice, then the hospital has to find temps to cover (again, I’m fine with this, I don’t consider them scabs, their wages alone are punishing the hospital, but this is also why they shouldn’t be capping travel salaries). The issue is they’re trying to make it so that it’s the responsibility of the nurses going on strike to find that coverage, or they get charged with abandoning the patients. They’re literally just trying to make it functionally illegal to even go on strike without ever saying those exact words.

They’re taking comments right now, let me find the link. Here’s the r/nursing post that person said it all better (I’ve been trying to get more hcw communities going over here but it’s slow going and feels like it’s only me sometimes. Here is a sample comment (but it’s written from a nurse perspective, it may need to be shuffled around into “concerned citizen” language) and here is the direct link to the survey. If one of you wants to draft a solid “concerned citizen statement” I’ll add that too.

Could also make a good post on c/medicine or c/antiwork but idk I’m still waking up and have a lot of unpacking from the move still to do this weekend. But it may actually help them to know people outside the Healthcare sector are starting to notice their bullshit. Or that Healthcare CEO money will still be too good, idk.

They have badge attachments now that beep and tell your supervisor if they don’t sense a nurse washing their hands or using hand sanitizer when they enter a room. I get the idea for how this could lower infection rates in hospitals but I wonder if maybe it’s not just more humane to just hire more nurses and encourage us to take time to do things correctly instead of essentially fitting us with a shock collar that does everything but the actual shock.

They’re doing shit like this and people still ask why they have to put up nets to catch people jumping off the parking garage like it’s some kind of mystery.

They also have little wand sensors that you have to go into a room and put up to a receiver for psychiatry to ensure we’re actually physically going into all patient rooms every fifteen minutes 24/7 even while they’re sleeping to make sure they’re not hanging themselves in there. Honestly sometimes it feels like we’re just making sure they want to hang themselves by the time they leave.

Disclaimer: I’m a psych nurse not a dental professional, but I’m commenting because my patients are a high-risk demographic for dental disease for a bunch of different reasons including poverty, decreased self-care, and medication side effects (particularly dry mouth and teeth grinding but I’ll get to that) so these are the tips I give to my patients.

Brushing and flossing, obvs. I’m not going to elaborate on this one too much because there’s plenty of actual experts on this that you can find that will explain the ideal techniques much better than I ever could.

Chewing gum and tic tacs / mints that have xylitol (and NO real sugar) in them because xylitol is particularly known to stimulate your salivary glands. Normally we associate increased moisture with bacterial growth, but your saliva is actually slightly antimicrobial and an important part of your oral immune system, so the dryer your mouth is the more hospitable it actually is to bacteria. So while you don’t want to be drooling everywhere, you do want to make sure your mouth is nice and wet most of the time. Both stimulant medications (often given for ADHD) and antidepressants can cause dry mouth.

BUT if you’re straight up eating the xylitol it can have an osmotic laxative effect (pulls water into your gut and makes your shit watery, pretty much all fake sugars do that) so you definitely want to select a xylitol product you can suck on or chew on for an extended period (as opposed to just eating and immediately swallowing like gummy bears or something) to maximize salivary stimulation with the least laxative effect.

It also helps to practice breathing through your nose (which has the added benefit of reducing anxiety), and they even make little sticker thingies to help your mouth stay shut while you sleep. Speaking of which, if you grind your teeth, you’ll also want to wear a mouthguard while you sleep. Grinding your teeth can be caused by a lot of different things but the two biggest things I see are anxiety and certain medications (particularly stimulants and antipsychotics).

And lastly this is kind of anecdotal but the biggest thing that helped my oral hygiene was having to mask at work during the pandemic because I could smell my breath all the time. I had never really been good about routine oral hygiene before that, but I started having to brush my teeth before I left the house every single day to be able to tolerate wearing a mask, and for a while I was even brushing my teeth after lunch, but eventually to save time I switched to mouthwash then I’d head back out on the floor while chewing a sugar free xylitol gum behind my mask.

Personally I find them a lot more tolerable if I make sure everything is bubblegum flavor instead of mint so it doesn’t burn.

my vagina endorses this message (fwiw)

This libertarian redneck does! I also like taxing the ever loving fuck outta billionaires so they can’t mess with muh freedums. I also absolutely love this bit because a) it’s 100%FAX and b) my neighbor across the cul-de-sac actually did get caught breeding illegal reptiles.