Yup, it’s a nice play on words

I suggest salad. With olives

Honestly, the perks were pretty damn intangible. Contacts with other caregivers and providers was the most useful one. Secondary, you build up community connections. There’s people in my area that have gone out of their way to help me decades after I took care of their family member. I’m still friends with some.

At one point, I worked for the home health company that was a branch of the hospital, soi had acces to their medical library, and could attend seminars and lectures that would normally be only for enrolled students (teaching hospital).

The contacts I made, back in the early 2ks, allowed me a chance to interview pathologists, coroners and medical examiners for a book I was planning to write.

So, I guess that’s more tangible than I thought lol.

But for me, I just loved being the guy that got to do the job. I was never happy it needed doing, but if it did need doing, at least I got to get in there. Since other parts of the job were a bit more difficult, having a patient that I was going to help heal was also a major boost and helped stave off burnout. Sometimes, no matter how well you handle end of life care, or chronic conditions, it grinds at you that the case only ends with death, or some other less pleasant outcome.

But wound care? 95%, you do the job and when the case ends it’s because the wound is gone, and that feeling is like crack. You get little hits along the way as the wound improves, where you get to tell the patient how much has improved, that the infection is gone, or that it shrank over the weekend. But that big hit where you get to say “I won’t be here tomorrow because you don’t need me” holy crap is that magic. I’d ride home smiling and elated.

Pandas

x-post from /u/99trumpets (original post)

"Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I’ve spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears.

Panda Rant Mode engaged: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA. Wall o’ text of details:

• In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too.

In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she’s entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It’s only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem.

• Pandas did not “evolve to die”. They didn’t evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the “problems” people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it’s just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don’t. Sun bears won’t breed in captivity, sloth bears won’t breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won’t breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won’t breed in captivity, on and on.

Lots and lots of wild animals won’t breed in captivity. It’s particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding. Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade).

• Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a “thumb” made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda’s Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that’s also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation.

Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn’t ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source. Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as “bulk feeders”, as it’s known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities. Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven’t ruined your food source, of course.

Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges.

• The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the “evolutionary dead end” myth to make themselves feel better: “Oh, they’re pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it’s not our fault.” They’re not “supposed” to go extinct, they were never a “dead end,” and it is ENTIRELY our fault.

Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn’t breed well in zoos doesn’t mean they “evolved to die”; rather, it simply means they didn’t evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes.

Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise. tl;dr - It’s normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it’s entirely our fault that they’re dying out. /rant.

• Edit: OP did not say anything wrong but other comments were already veering into the “they’re trying to die” bullshit and it pissed me off. (Sorry for the swearing - it’s just so incredibly frustrating to see a perfectly good species going down like this and people just brushing them off so unjustly) Also - I am at a biology conference (talking about endangered species reproduction) and have to jump on a plane now but can answer any questions tomorrow."

Isn’t it cool? Evolution takes life into the most complex and amazing places

Reddit. Reddit is why I went and looked into koalas.

The three animal copy pastas, sunfish, koalas, and pandas just pissed me off because people started parroting the shit irl. They’re all funny enough when everyone knows they’re jokes based on bullshit, but people are stupid.

So, I went looking for more information. For the sunfish and pandas, there were already better anti-pastas available that came up after quick searches.

Not for koalas. I did find some later, after I made the initial comment, but when I first wrote up the parts I did, I couldn’t find any. I later edited in links to the better counters when I discovered them.

But, for real, once I started hearing people wanting to charter a boat to go and find sunfish to throw rocks at, I started fuming. Same with the people that started opposing conservation efforts to pandas and koalas because of the bullshit in the copy pastas. Treating some text meme like educational material is just too damn much.

So, for years on reddit, I’d throw down the anti-pastas when they came up. Here on lemmy, I thought they had failed to follow people, but the last few months I’ve started seeing references to them again. I’m glad I didn’t delete the files for them.

Koalas

a small overview about the chlamydia

and it isn’t even something they causedit was from invasive species.

One brief overview

with some extra info

The reason koalas eat only eucalyptus isn’t stupidity. It’s niche evolution. They live in a place with high competition for resources. Having specialized digestive tracts and gut flora allows them to have a food source that isn’t under competition. this is a benefit, not a failure. They literally eat something that is poisonous to pretty much every other species. That is an incredible evolutionary adaptation.

Their joeys eating pap is not exclusive to koalas either. It’s not only found across the world, the exposure to the gut flora of the parent happens with most mammals, if in a less direct manner. You can even find a ton of information about what happens when human gut flora becomes unbalanced, and it isn’t very pretty. It’s just worse for koalas.

Not every species is a generalist, and we don’t want them to be.

a note on why koalas bellow so much

The source may be a crappy blog, but the information in it matches more detailed data from better sources, and keeps it short enough for this.

As with most behaviors in other species, attributing human judgement and definitions tends to be misleading. While koalas are pretty unique in the lack of mating rituals, they’re not doing it for human reasons. Nor are attempts to copulate outside of season as common as the pasta makes it seem. Besides, that’s something humans actually do share with them besides the presence of fingerprints. It also isn’t so rare in animals as to be remarkable. Copulation behaviors are used outside of mating by plenty of species for social reasons. It isn’t in koalas, but since it does increase the chances of mating, it isn’t a bad adaptation.

And the extra cerebro-spinal fluid isn’t a special ed helmet, it’s another adaptation found in other tree dwelling species. Why would an arboreal species having adaptations to mitigate risk from falls be a negative?

Yeah, I get it, the pasta is meant for entertainment, but it also spreads half truths, outright incorrect or outdated information, and skips over facts for the entertainment value. Then people read it and spout it out later as fact.

It’s just a crappy copy pasta, not anything meant to be taken as truth, but people are more dumb than koalas.

This pasta in particular isn’t the worst (the sunfish one takes the prize for being the most full of bull). Nor is it a bad thing to enjoy as entertainment. But for crying out loud people, don’t take random, unsourced copy pasta as an educational tool.

Also This comment covers some things I missed

Then there’s this one that is even better

Not much tbh.

My mom is probably the dumbest story.

See, she was a hippie back when that meant something. But after she married and settled down, she didn’t smoke weed for a long time.

I got old enough to know some people, despite not being able to smoke it myself, and she wanted some to kinda relive the old days post-divorce. So I got her a quarter.

Welllll, she decided to roll herself up a fat fucking joint. Nice, right! We’re talking a joint of the best hydro in three counties. She then proceeded to smoke the entire fucking thing. It was as thick as a pencil.

She’s giggling, and then laughing at everything.

And then it really hits. She crawls to her bed saying “I don’t know what to do-hoo-hoo-hoo” because she is so fucking greened out that the whole world is spinning every time she breathes and her rocking chair moves because of it.

She’s laying on the bed eventually, and has to keep one foot on the floor because if she doesn’t, the world is going to speed up and fly away. So she keeps hitting the brakes with that foot.

There’s about an hour of that, mixed in with moans and me trying to keep her calm because every time she makes the mistake of moving, she panics. She didn’t want to fly away into space.

I actually called the guy I got it from and asked if he put something in that shit. I’d been around stoners and had never seen anything like that. He asked some questions and eventually started laughing himself because nobody smokes that much of weed that potent and doesn’t get their face melted. He explained that one toke would have been plenty, even for regular smokers.

But, yeah, it took her about five hours to get back to the point she could just pass out and sleep for twelve hours.

How the fuck was I supposed to know it was some kind of crazy shit, or that she would react like that?

Now, when she’s being twatish, I just ask her if she wants to fly off into space, and she gets all pissed off and splutters

Me either!

Oh, fuck, the Taliban bit got me. That was hilarious. I’m having trouble typing from laughing.

Well, he was paralysed, so he didn’t feel any of it. One of the rare upsides of paralysis.

Some patients though, me geeking out over what was going on helped. They’d be scared and hurting, and then some guy comes in and is just chatting casually and talking about what’s going on, giving a play by play, and is happy to be there, it makes it harder to dread what’s happening. If I’m not upset and worried, it must not be that bad.

I definitely had to learn what not to say though

Hmmm

I think I have a good one, though it didn’t bother me much, and anyone in the same line of work has done similar, so it isn’t as big a deal to us.

But!

Back around the turn of the century, I had a patient that developed a pressure sore on his hip.

This sore broke down fast, and wasn’t responding to treatment well. So it progressed brutally. It then got infected.

By the time all was done and said, the wound was about four inches around, and tunneled from the hip socket down the femur about halfway.

Despite being freshly discharged and on oral antibiotics, the IV antibiotics hadn’t eradicated all of the infection, they just got it under control enough to continue treatment at home.

Enter the wound-vac. Basically, it’s a pump that sucks wounds and makes them heal faster. Amazing fucking devices, totally changed wound care. But I digress.

Part of the way a wound vac works is packing the wound with fancy sponge material. Otherwise, it’d just suck the wound’ sides in and that ain’t good.

Every morning, I’d take the container full of blood and pus to empty it and clean it. Then I’d get busy pulling out the old packing materials, also covered in blood and pus, plus chunky bits. Then I’d irrigate with saline, followed by using pads to pull most of that back out. So, about a half hour of dealing with body fluids that smelled exactly as bad as you’d think infected body fluids would smell.

Then came the fun part! Fifteen minutes of packing the wound.

Now, during all of that process, im wrist deep in this man’s leg. Guess how far gloves go up the arm. We did eventually get longer ones, but guess who has two thumbs and hands that tear regular sized gloves apart.

Exactly, 👍 this guy 👍

So, my choices amounted to refusing to do the job, which was not happening because that ain’t how I roll; using the shorter gloves while the wound shrank, and just taping them up as best I could to keep human juices out of the gloves (or, rather, to a lesser degree), or wear the long gloves and hope they didn’t pop while I was in there.

Truth be told, I had better sensitivity with the popped gloves since that amounted to not wearing any at all, so I probably should have just gone that route, but that’s whatever. I went with regular gloves and tape.

So, every day, by the end of the process, I’d have to pull off gloves that had sweat, blood, and pus in them. Not as much as I’d have had if I went in bare handed, or had a glove break, but enough.

Then I’d scrub my hands for the third time of the morning and think hard about my life choices while drying them.

It may help the description to realize that I can palm a basketball (if I’m careful), or could before arthritis. And, my usual glove size is xxl. So when that hand is in someone up to the wrist with room to spare, you know it’s a party!

I tell this story in person sometimes. I include the sounds of my hand schlucking in the wound. Psshhhsslllccck going in, and thhpppthck coming out. I have seen people almost pass out, have had one person vomit, and many leave the area with haste. It may or may not be the most disgusting thing anyone has ever done, I’m confident it isn’t. But as stories go, it hits hard in person, with all the sounds and hand movements.

Now, old wound care stories abound, but most of them weren’t disgusting on my end. I’d see disgusting things, and do stuff that was disgusting to see if you were standing there, but I’d be gloved up and clean the entire time. Like, if you’ve never seen anyone cutting necrotic tissue out of someone’s body from a wound that covers essentially their entire ass down to the bone, well, you don’t want to see that. It didn’t bother me at that point, but it was definitely disgusting by usual standards. But I find it more sad than disgusting what with the reason it was that bad. She was slowly dying, and her body just couldn’t recover, so she was rotting away. That’s some fucked up shit, and is one of hundreds of reasons I will always advocate for the right to death via assisted euthanasia.

Hell, I’ve seen nastier wounds than either of those. Infected burns are horrifying to see. But I’ve also had to clean diarrhea out of wounds, including that specific one on the lady with only half an ass left. Which, on the scale of things is pretty disgusting, but it was also possible to get the job done without getting anything on me. Well, other than trauma lol. That lol isn’t making light of it. It’s whistling in the dark.

I tell you though, once you’ve handled a few infected wounds, you either adapt to it and do it clinically distant, or you run screaming and never come back. Luckily, I came into this world with a strong stomach, a pervasive curiosity about medical matters, and a stubbornness about retreating from challenges. So it was always easy to turn off the “yuck switch” and just do what needed doing. Most of the time, wound care was awesome. I loved it, and struggled more to keep my enthusiasm for the work hidden than any kind of reaction to the gross parts.

Patients tend to not enjoy you saying things like “okay, that is so cool, I can see your femur”. Or, “oh wow, I can feel bone in here”. So I learned to keep my mouth shut while working. Being gleeful during wound care will get you a visit with your supervisor. Telling said supervisor “but it’s so cool! Nobody else gets to see this kind of thing” is surprisingly not going to be met with shared enthusiasm most of the time.

In general, I didn’t much. I did occasionally wish the money was not taken because I needed it, but I’m fine with the point of taxes. We all chip in for stuff we all use. No big deal.

I definitely have objected to what the taxes were used for, and definitely cared about tax disparities, but I never minded paying my share.

I have objections to how property taxes are assessed, though I’m okay with the fact of them for the same reason I’m okay with income taxes. In a monetary world, there has to be some degree of shuffling the money around to keep roads usable, in essence.

Even now, when property taxes are a much bigger proportion of my income, the numbers make sense to me based on the tax valuation of the property. I disagree with that valuation, but not so much I would complain about it. I could, in a perfect world, sell for the price they think it’s worth, so I’m not storming city hall.

But, I have heard people complain about their tax amounts rather than the fact of them. Particularly here in the US when someone moves to a new tax bracket, it can be a very upsetting thing to realize that your raise isn’t going to all go into your pocket.

Not cured, but garlic does cause a great deal of pain, and can reduce their healing.

Oh, Jesus, never, ever grab or touch me from behind. I will lose my shit, and have hurt people before.

Tbh, since I have a strong brief belief you shouldn’t ever touch someone you don’t know without a damn good reason, and never from behind, I don’t even try to get rid of it entirely. I just work at not hurting the idiots that do it. And it ain’t easy. I’m lucky that where I live has a pretty generous self defense interpretation; if you lay hands on a stranger at all, as long as they don’t go excessive, it’s your fault. Otherwise, I would have a record.

Like, I’ve worked hard in therapy too get to the point where if I’m at home or in “safe” places with people I trust, I don’t do anything more than tense up. And I haven’t really injured anyone in over a decade. Only minor stuff, and I stop as soon as I know they’re not going to do anything else stupid. But I swear to fucking gods, I want to just start barking and growling and go ape.

There’s nothing else that will set my PTSD off like that. Shit, it’s only been a month since I got a proper death threat, and I was chill as fuck about that. But don’t fucking touch me if I can’t see you coming. If I can see you coming, I’ll have a chance to tell you to back the fuck off, and it’ll be okay as long as you listen.

But if I’m just bebopping through the world, I’ve worked very fucking hard to not have my head on constant swivel, to be able to just fucking shop for groceries without sweating and watching for every fucking movement. So, when some jackass startles me without even saying anything before the touch, fuck them. Fuck them right in the fucking ear with a stolen dildo. If I happen to swing around and they get knocked the fuck out, that’s what they get.

Like, legit, even a simple “hey” right before the touch, and I won’t attack. I need that extra second of warning to put a leash on the rage and panic. I can do it, I can hear the warning, and just step away from the person instead of going right at them. I can put the leash on and not lose my shit.

Some days, all I’ll do is jump away, which isn’t any better for me, because my back can’t take sudden movements like it used to; I’ll need a day or two of recovery and/or muscle relaxers. But those are the good days, and I can’t always guarantee that I’ll be able to choose to jump away instead of going after the threat.

And, wtf are people thinking? I’m damn near six feet tall, with shoulders that have trouble getting through narrow doors. Why the fuck are you going to just grab that guy’s arm? Like, fuck people, think a little. You shouldn’t even be doing that with a friendly grandmother looking person, but when it’s fucking sasquatch? How stupid do you have to be? And that fucking arm you’re grabbing is as big as some people’s thighs ffs, so why? Why the fuck would you risk grabbing it?

Luckily, kids never grab that high. They tug a shirt or something. And older folks still remember good manners and don’t just grab strangers. So I’ve never really fucked anyone up that I would regret. Did, however, break the arm of a guy that was a friend because he didn’t believe me when I told him I was touchy. That was before therapy though. I’ve knocked a couple of people out, knocked them down, left bruises, and one dude was concussed enough to need an ambulance.

So, you might think, “oh, south is talking about something really rare”. No! People are fucking stupid! A lot of people on the scale of things. Maybe a dozen or so is plenty, but it’s been more than that. I’m trying to count up in my head, and it’s close to twenty where someone got some degree of hurt. More where I was able to control things.

Why do people think it’s okay to touch strangers? Fuck! I’m stressed as fuck just remembering it.

Like, I’m a pretty friendly guy in public. I don’t like people, but I do my best to not let them know that unless they give a good reason to show it. Someone needs help, I’ll help. They want to talk, I’ll talk. But you don’t touch strangers. You can offer touch, like a handshake or even a hug (and thank you so much to that sweet lady that hugged the hell out of me after one of the times I’m talking about. Saw me lay a guy out and still came up to where I was crying and wanted to help me get myself together.), that’s just being a decent human.

Holy shit lol. PTSD is no fucking joke folks. I’m laid in bed, with people I love around me, and I’m still shaking a little and trying not to cry just remembering this stuff. People like to joke about being triggered and such, but it can sneak up on you when you aren’t expecting it, when you think it can’t. And then the whole cascade starts up.

What’s really fucked up is that the whole being grabbed/touched from behind thing wasn’t even from major events. Like, I was a bouncer for a while, and got hurt doing it, which didn’t help the PTSD. But this shit goes back to Jr high where I wasn’t dealing with people trying to kill me, just fuck with me and hurt me. Not even bad hurt, “just” punches and such. I can deal with someone coming at me when a knife and stay controlled. Hell, part of me likes the possibility of a fight where I don’t have to be nice and hold back. But some rando grabbing my arm lets loose those old memories that got ground into my brain over years, and I don’t think that’s ever going away entirely.

That’s what she said ;)

No, they were just sweet on each other.

Totally fucking adorable tbh. The parents supposedly started out thinking it was one of those puppy love crush situations, and went with it. By the time they all realized the kids were serious, they had also shown they were willing to obey rules around it, so the parents just shrugged and let it be. Again, that’s supposedly; I didn’t know either of them outside of school beyond the occasional birthday party with the girl back before that.

In my home brew ttrpg setting, it’s viral. A magical virus, but a virus.

I knew a girl in elementary school that would always say she was engaged, and that her fiance went to a different school. Needless to say, nobody believed either claim.

Until high school, when it turned out to be true.

There was no telling if it was originally just kids playing pretend and turned serious, or if they were serious all along, but they stayed together all through school, and got married not long after graduation. Still together, last I heard.

I want to say she first mentioned it in the sixth grade, but it could have been fifth. I know it was sixth when she would show off her ring, which was a silver band with a tiny little stone in it. Again, nobody really believed her, and there’s no way to know if that really was an engagement ring, or what.

So I believe it realistic to say she was engaged at 12, or was at least claiming to be.

Long and hairy, hard to carry. Grumpy but tolerable in small doses. Absurd at any dose.