Be Careful What You Wish For

 From a particularly thought-provoking post over at Zero's blog, this response:

"As I type this my wife has been in a local hospital emergency room waiting for a bed for the past 12 hours. She has Covid and is struggling to breath. She has been treated like a leper an not even offered an food. Her ER Doc walked out and slammed the door after she asked to be given a vitamin C IV. He said he wouldn’t treat her with something not proven and she was free to leave."

My reply, which Cdr. Zero may or may not elect to publish there (his choice. And the graphic aids are just for you, Gentle Readers):

My sympathies on your wife's plight. Really.

Just curious: When you take your car to the mechanic, do you tell him how to fix that, too? Or not? If not, how many years of education did your mechanic get, after his college degree?

Have you ever hired a lawyer? Who handled the legal work? You, or him/her?

Just wondering. Let me know if the penny drops.

FWIW, the time to bulk up on Vitamin C was probably long before coming down with COVID, and shockingly, there aren't too many doctors amenable to letting their patients run their own treatment regimen.

It's got a lot to do with losing their own medical license for letting patients practice the medicine. States are kind of sticky about letting passengers fly the airliner, for similar reasons.

So the bigger question is, why did you go to the emergency room in the first place?

My second is, how much is orange juice selling for at the local market?

My third is, where d'ya suppose she got COVID, and how regularly do folks thereabouts wear masks, and how often does she use ordinary hand sanitizer?

And regarding getting fed, did you see a menu at the ER drive-thru window? Or not?

I ask that last one, because as a rule, if you need food, it's probably not an emergency; and if it's an emergency, you probably don't need food. Unless she's been there at least overnight, and/or her blood sugar is less than 70mg/dL, as a rule. 12 hours is largely meaningless, because if there's no food to offer (which is most days, or in my case, nights) there's no point in making such an offer. But if you're admitted and there all day and overnight, we'll generally put in a breakfast order for a tray the next morning. I've yet to see anyone starve to death my entire career for missing a meal or two, but I suppose it might have happened, somewhere.

If being treated "like a leper" is being put inside a sealed isolation room, that's standard of care for COVID for, oh, about 18 months. We're not really big on hand-holding and wet sloppy kisses with infectious diseases, and speaking personally, a COVID patient (I had two more last night) involves getting gowned and gloved up before I enter the Giant Ziplok Of Isolation, and I'm required to wear an N95 at all times in my department. Some people add a face shield or powered respirator. If any of this is news to you, you haven't been watching any since about February 2020.

If you meant they marooned her on an island for life and poked her overboard with sticks, then you have my sincere apologies for the misunderstanding.

But even then, lepers should expect to be treated better than COVID patients: leprosy, unlike COVID, can be cured.

I'm sincerely sorry your wife is sick enough to need a hospital admission.  Ain't nothing good about this bug, and even mild cases suck. But waiting to drive the bus until you get to that point isn't really a great plan, as you're both finding out about now.

Best wishes on your wife's full recovery and return home to her world, rather than spending time in the hospital. I don't recommend it to anyone unless they have no choice, because most people have no wild idea why it isn't run like a billionaire's ski resort or a fast food drive thru, especially for the last year and a half, and are shocked and dismayed that unlike House or Scrubs, or any number of fantasy treatments, things don't all get resolved in 42 minutes, plus commercial breaks, and it becomes very frustrating and disorienting to not be the bright center around which the universe revolves. Illness annoys people, because it rubs their noses in the fact that everything they thought about being in control of their life was pure fantasy. And that's a jarring shock every time it happens.

And particularly among a burgeoning pandemic, short on staff and long on patients, we don't generally have a lot of time to break it down in detail for everyone, every night.

The short story would be for folks to ponder why, going back centuries, it's called being a "patient". All of us in the health care biz are generally working pretty hard lately, but try as we might, we can't be everywhere at once, and we can't make things happen that simply aren't possible. And if people aren't swarming around you in droves, cheer up: it means you're not the guy whose heart has stopped, while we try and bring you back from the dead. So if that's not you or yours, it's a pretty good sign that things aren't really so bad.

And I'm telling you this because you're a good enough guy to be concerned about your wife. (You'd be shocked how many people aren't even that decent.) But what you don't know, not being around nor familiar with the strange new world she's visiting, involuntarily, is that usually the best way to help us do our job, is to let us do our job. Even when and if it makes you feel impotent and out of control.

And if you don't trust us to do that, you probably should leave, and go find someplace where you do trust the people there to do that. As a rule, it doesn't hurt our feelings, especially if you figure that out before you ever walk in. We only get ticked when we waste 5 or 10 hours on someone, who then bails out anyways, wasting the time we could have spent on someone who wanted to be there enough to stay.

_____

I frequently make mention, in my workplace travels, of a salutary tidbit of medical history, from James Burke's excellent The Day The Universe Changed concerning a seminal point about the era when medicine departed from witchdoctory, and became science.

One of the brilliant improvements in the life of the average Frenchman under Napoleon (and there were many such) was that after deposing the king and nobility, there was suddenly a lot of wealth to spend on the peasantry. Consequently, Napoleon set up dozens of free hospitals throughout Paris. And for a real change, they each specialized in one thing. IOW, one hospital treated just gun shot wounds (Napoleon's conquests provided a lot of those too); another might only do broken legs; yet another might do nothing but treat eye injuries, or skin infections, or sick babies.

As Burke points out, medicine before this time was myth and hokum, and if any physician found something that worked, he kept it to himself, lest the other quacks find his secrets out, and steal his best-paying customers.

Under Napoleon's hospital system just the opposite. In the Gunshot Wound Hospital, for example, they might treat 20 gunshot wounds to the legs of as many patients. Five would be treated with boiling tar applied to the wound. Five others might receive a poultice of dog crap and urine daily. Five more would be wrapped, and left to heal or putrefy on their own device. The last five would have the wounds washed daily, and the dressings changed with fresh clean ones. Unsurprisingly, all of the first 15 would get gangrene, and lose their legs to amputation, and the last five - or perhaps only 4 out of 5 - would heal nicely and make a full recovery. But now, the doctors would discuss and publish the results, and tell all their fellow doctors, and the next 20 gunshot wounds would all get the treatment that worked, and the others would be discarded forever. Withcdoctory meets statistics, and transmogrifies into actual science. Voila!

There were only two inviolate rules under this system:

*Everything was free to the patient.

*Anyone who didn't comply absolutely with the doctor's treatment regimen had his sleeping pallet lifted up, carried outside, deposited at the curbside, and given the benediction "God be with you monsieur!" Because the uppity presumption that you, Peasant Scum, knew more about medicine than Le Doctor, brilliant graduate of the medical university, quite reasonably and rationally meant that your ass got kicked the fuck out, with a smile and significant alacrity. You got exactly what you wanted: to run your own case. "Bonne chance, Mssr. Cerveau!"

Fuck off, Bumpkin. We're doing science. And you're fucking up the data.

It's a custom begging to be re-introduced, with a vengeance.

And it's also why people in any science, who lie, or fake data, are the cardinal sinners in the whole edifice, because they're not just screwing the pooch for you, they're dynamiting the entire foundation the whole machine runs on: honest data. Truth.

It's why liars get harsh penalties in courts, and why bearing false witness got its very own Commandment.

You're not just being selfish, or evil, you're crossing the streams. 

And fucking it up for EVERYONE.

Which is why people doing that, for Globull Warmist religious reasons, or COVID Is A Hoax, or the Not-A-Vaxxes Are Safe and Effective, or anything else, should be staked out in the sun all week, then beaten on the back with a dry swim fin, then skinned alive, and lowered an inch at a time into a vat of rubbing alcohol. For openers.

And why people trying to run their own case should be turned loose to do so. At the curb.

Something To Look Forward To

 

I've Got Your "Mandatory" Right Here...

 

No reason. Why do you ask?

Oh, sorry, I was just reflecting on my last "informational" with H.R.

Looks like I won't need to worry about retirement planning after all.

Sunday Music: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)

 

The Proclaimers , which is essentially the Reid twins seen in the video, looked like the kind of guys you'd meet at a computer BBS geek-meet IRL when this song was released in the US in 1993, after being featured in the soundtrack of Benny and Joon. It's impossible for me not to like, and the louder it is the more I love it. It hit #3 in the US. It takes on an even deeper meaning for me currently, as I'm looking at going to work 500 miles or so away from where I am now (not by choice), depending on how things roll in the next month with the Covidiocy Posse. For now, I'm just digging the tune. I hope you do too.

Get Used To This

 

Maybe you can just hire illegal Mexicans at Home Depot.
Let me know how that works out for ya.

Go read McThag's off-the-cuff ER observations from FL at his blog.

And nota bene, at an ER that was anything but overwhelmed by Kung Flu cases. This was just a normal night, in an average ER.

Get used to the New Normal, kids.

It's why I and most of my colleagues (99.9999%, give or take), doctors, PAs, nurses, techs, and all other staff, are all out of fucks to give.

Last I heard, I'm out of a job in perpetuity as of the end of next month, because I won't be getting any not-a-vaxx jab under any circumstances (including not even if they magic-wand-wave one of them into "fully approved" status. This is called "pen-fucking" in the dotMil. It is not a term of approval.) So too a goodly number of my much younger co-workers, including plenty of Never Trumpers.

Latest polls show that the smarter and/or more highly-educated a person is (they're not the same thing, believe me), the less likely they are to want to experiment on themselves with Not-A-Vaxx therapy. Hmmm. How curious.

We'll see how hard TPTB want to play chicken. 

The company, for their part, and apart from governator's and pretend-presidents' medical dicta, appear to be willing to compromise on the point, and allow me to simply be tested for Kung Flu, weekly or so. I'd sit still for that, barely, but I'll tell them why they're fucking the pooch every time they do it, as I've manifestly managed to use N95 masks and hand washing flawlessly without a jab for 18 months and counting, without missing any time for so much as a sniffle. Time will tell on that score, and we'll see if I'm working at an ER in a state next door, or at Target, etc., in short order. (FTR, Gropey Dopey's remarks mandating Not-A-Vaxx for all staff "in any facility that receives Medicare funds" is a de facto nationwide jab mandate, for everyone in a hospital from janitors to the CMO. IMHO, it's a good way to start a nationwide medical strike, at a guess. But we'll see if he can make it stick.)

I also observe that the number of my female colleagues, single and married, who've suddenly become pregnant to avoid the jab has hit record numbers, including some doctors old enough to qualify as "high risk pregnancies".

That's commitment to a position, kids.

And we've been short-staffed since ever, everywhere I've worked, my entire career, since before this latest batch of sh*theaded utter foolishness over the experimental Not-A-Vaxx.

So you're going to get even slower and shittier medical care going forward, most places, to a certainty.

Best wrap your heads around that, for several years, if not indefinitely.

If I told you what I now make per hour, you or your kids would rush the nursing schools to get in (too late; the current wait for entry is accounted in years to get in, statewide, and has been so for decades.) And then 3-6 years more to get out, if you make it. And that's to not even keep up with bare replacement numbers due to normal retirements. So things are only going to get worse everywhere, not better.

YOYO.

This, Right Here.

h/t WRSA

This.

Or this.

Dealer's choice.

Some people just have to Fuck Around and Find Out.

Fair enough. Satisfy their curiosity.

And to drive the point well home, these can be made as a craft project in about 10 minutes. Ask me how I know.

And if asked to leave, be polite. But be sure to give the proper Vaxx Nazi salute, loudly and continuously, on your way out.

Holding your left index finger under your nose in a fake moustache, right arm held extended, and goose-stepping out optional, but highly recommended. Bonus points if you and your party hum a suitable Teutonic air on the way to the door.

And then, always, show them what to do with their jab:

You're not out to make friends, you're making a point.

They want their noses rubbed in what they're doing? Oblige them.

It's possible you may shame some of the more pliable sheep, if this becomes more common than traffic lights from sea to shining sea:

First guy to sell that as a stencil
in 8"x10", I'll take a dozen.

It would be a real shame if those started showing up, not just on walls and flat spots everywhere, but on store windows of the offending parties, wouldn't it? The Kristallnacht othering of people can cut both ways. And it should. It's probably time the Vaxxholes found that out, personally. And I'm totally not responsible if someone spray paints a swastika over the word "Vaxxhole!" on anyone's ride. The "Just following orders..." crowd needs to feel the pain as much as the ones pulling the strings at the top, and their staff cars should be properly marked. Tyranny gets a lot less fun that way, don'cha think? By all means, make them own it.

Screw Godwin's Law: The Vaxxholes want to go there.

The hardcore Nazis will require something a bit more kinetic to get their attention. But every little bit helps.

If not you, Who? If not now, When?
Just do it.

And let no one alive ever say again, "I can't understand how Nazi Germany happened."

Now you know.

Two Weeks

h/t John Wilder

There is no idea so simple that government cannot bugger it up
by the numbers. And no government bad idea was ever stopped
by anything less than flamethrowers and beheadings.
Well, okay. If they insist...

 

Arbeit Macht Frei

 h/t WRSA

No doubt for their own "safety and protection", in their ceaseless efforts to improve the lot of the proletariat there,  the OzCom government will ensure that the first people rounded up will be all those pesky "unprotected" folks who won't get the Vaxx, and protesting same, rather than go get all the people who are vaxxed, and still spreading COVID - and the ADE variants thereof - like Johnny Appleseed with a backpack leaf blower and a sack full of LSD. The odds they'll get to actual infectious people are probably slim.

And when 500 beds is far too small, they'll need someplace bigger. Of course. Like night following day will the logic and calculus play out.

This, in a country with fewer cases of COVID in 18 months than the state of Hawaii (which unlike Oz has yet seen no need to build multiple quarantine facilities), and with nearly as many deaths in Oz from the vaccine as from the disease itself. (You could look it up.)

So why, now, start building "quarantine" lock-ups?

Having been helpfully disarmed, by law, by their own government a few years ago, what could possibly go wrong with the socialists running OZ when they start rounding up their fellow citizens and putting them into camps???

One can but hope the disarmed gespodin of Down Under show their usual 'strine respect for officialdom, and refer to the planned camp as Ozwitz.

And that they further demonstrate their political reliability by burning it to the ground, and hanging their leaders from the gates. Or at least, those body parts they can find.

At any rate, they made their bed, and now they'll assuredly lie in it.

Hopefully not via bulldozer-dug trenches, but there's where the smart money would bet.

Nap time at Ozwitz. Soon.

Dealing With Kleine Nazis 101

h/t Phil

 

A close runner-up:

There's a lot of people in Ireland still walking with a limp, and no enthusiasm for ever phoning in tips on the PIRA.

Don't believe me. Just ask Moldylocks.

You Must Remember This

 

Run By Morons

 

I'm thinking that thousands of years in the future archeo-anthropologists
will determine that "the Hairless Ape species went extinct shortly after
they ran out of these round thingies to sharpen their primitive tools..."

You can tell a company is run by absolute morons, when they have two 50' aisles of garden implements, including axes, hatchets, machetes, hoes, pulaskis, mattocks, cultivators, shears, etc., not to mention about thirty different types of gas and electric chainsaws, weed whackers, lawnmowers, and all manner of high-spendy, gee-whiz devices for rendering excess shrubbery into compost at the speed of dollars.

But cannot, for love or money, be bothered to stock (nor even have a dedicated space to peg them) so many as even one $10 Lansky puck, pictured above, nor any equivalent device, with 120- and 280-grit sides, for sharpening damned near anything with an edge, probably longer than you'll be alive on the planet to use it, even if you're 2000 miles from the nearest power outlet or gas station, and which even works at night, next to a campfire! Mirabile dictu!

Three different big-box retailers, stores bigger than Noah's Ark, two with actual store help who knew what I was describing without a crayon sketch and a YouTube informational video to make it clear to them, same story. Zip. Nada. Bupkus.

"Hey Pops, maybe you could ask your manager to create an aisle labelled Common Sense or maybe even 1960? It'd give you a place to stock incandescent bulbs and normal-flush toilets, right next to the metal screw-in Jerry-can spouts. Just a thought..."

Short those companies' stocks, because both their hardware managers and their general managers obviously couldn't find their asses with both hands and the pole off a pruning saw, with 10 wetbacks document-challenged day laborers from the parking lot to help them, and a three-day head start.

Fucking clueless incompetent morons.

Found it the fourth place I looked, saving me the PITA that is anything Amazon, at Mr. Drucker's* mom-and-pop hardware store in downtown Hooterville, in about 15 seconds, right next to the axe bin, where they've probably been for 40 years. Still got last year's retail price on them too.

Lesson learned.

But then, I figured civilization - at least as far as intelligent life and  IQs above 80 - was doomed when they started printing "Remove Shirt Before Ironing" on the care tags.

Just saying. Now I've got some sharpening to do.

Probably time to get a self-powered grindstone wheel, too, now that I think of it. While I still can.

*Not their real name, or real location. Also not to be confused with Mr. Haney's Snap-On Mobile Tool Truck either.

Silver Lining

 

Is there any way we could send another 50,000-100,000 virtue-signalling DNC do-gooders to Kabul? Today?

On Going To War Half-Assed

 

And the Robert S. McNamara Memorial Award Goes To:

 

There's been a lot of yakking and babbling about "Who Lost Afghanistan?". It's all wrong. And it's not because we "lost" Afghanistan. It's because it never should have begun, as any sort of "nation-building". Any idea of such is now manifestly and properly discredited as one of the Stupidest Things Ever Thunk. Allow us, therefore, to lay proper blame at the true and rightful owner's feet:

The Raconteur Report takes pride in recognizing the monumental fucktardation of the man most single-handedly responsible for everything that's gone wrong in US SWAsia policy for the last 20 years, by awarding him the Robert S. McNamara Award For Epic Stupidity By A Senior Official.

Just as you knew the train had gone off the rails when 9/11 got us the KGB-esque Patriot Act with our own Homeland Security cheka, instead of a couple new Hiroshimas over Mecca and Medina, you knew Iraq and Afghanistan had gone far beyond Full Retard when this jackass, promoted hopelessly beyond his intelligence and abilities to SecState by epic presidential-level boob Dubbya, in order to provide the illusion of adult supervision, announced that we had to fix things in those shitholes because, and I quote his Pottery Barn rationale as verbatim as I can recollect, "You break it, you bought it."

This is logic from four-year-olds and store clerks, not geopolitical strategists.

The correct answer would have been to carpet-bomb both nations from 30,000' until nothing worth bombing remained, and then detail a BDA team to put up a sign saying "Don't make us ever come back here, or you'll need lead-lined underpants."

_____

The Award's Namesake:

Robert Strange McNamara *spit!* was a dedicated public servant. Which was exactly the problem with him. Before entering government service, he was a Harvard Business School grad, and the president of Ford Motor Company, back when they were a great American company.

His crowning achievement there was to unveil the Edsel.

For Millenials and Common Core grads, the Edsel was the most colossal brand flop in automobile manufacturing history.

Brighter lights would call that little misadventure a "clue".

But then, Camelot, and suddenly, JFK wanted the bumbling business idiot - who shared his Harvard roots - to head our defense establishment as SecDef.

While occasionally stumbling into success there with the reliability of a blind pig hunting acorns, his most notable achievements there involved him trying to do things far beyond his knowledge or capabilities, which lack was vast and wide, as befits a man of very little brain and worldwide responsibility. 

A few spectacular career highlights:

*Convincing LBJ that we could win in Vietnam, and ought to play there.

*Adopting the M-16 service rifle. Which only took from 1965 until 1983 to properly unfuck.

*Forcing the Air Farce and the Navy to use the same airplanes for completely different missions, particularly the horrendously complex, over-tasked, overweight, and under-performing F-111. (F-35 Thunderjug program aficionados, stop me if you've heard this one.) Eventually, when it became apparent even to blind retards the idea would never work, the CNO and SecNav told him to go fuck himself.

*Enlisted and drafted 100,000 literal retards to fight in the Army in Vietnam. (cf. McNamara's Retards). Now, we only use them as generals and admirals in the Pentagon.

*Told the Joint Chiefs that technology could win the fight to stop supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, forgetting that the North Vietnamese had pushed howitzers by hand uphill through the jungle to defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu, and utterly unaware that the NVA were pushing thousands of tons of war supplies from the North to the South by strapping them to bicycles with bamboo poles tied across the handlebars, and which didn't show up on radar or ground sensors looking for trucks.

*Was thus totally unprepared for the 1968 Tet Offensive, in which the entirety of South Vietnam was attacked simultaneously by thousands of VC McNamara's numbers crunching told him couldn't actually be there, which coupled with Enemedia action on American TV, convinced all of America that the war was eternal and unwinnable. He left DoD at the end of February, just short, unfortunately, of doing the honorable thing and shooting himself in the head.

*In return for cutting a campaign ad for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, he failed upwards to head the World Bank, where he spent the next thirteen years bankrupting one nation after another with loans they could never repay, at rates they couldn't afford, and spawning a chain of failed states, poverty, hunger, famine, disease, and worldwide chaos so gargantuan that the Soviets, Chinese, and Clinton Family Crime Syndicate were left green with envy.

_____

Colon Powell has now risen to those heights, whereas had he contented himself with being Chairman of the JCS, he could have died remembered as the architect who destroyed Saddam Hussein's Sixth Largest Army In The World in six weeks, from behind his desk.

Award of the Peter Principal Ribbon with oak leaf cluster and Fucktard "F" is also authorized.

Success has many fathers, but epic failure is never an orphan. It is, in fact, the love child you always get when you screw the pooch this hard. We are happy, in this case, to correctly and properly identify the father.

Welcome To The Gulag

h/t Old NFO

Get your pdf copy here, while you can.

Might come in handy in case someone wants to take you internment camping.

Here's your new polling location:

Stardate 2108.18 : The Assclown Maneuver

 

Why So Clueless?

Milley Vanilli Cyrus

 

I'm Sure It's A Total Coincidence

 

You could look it up. Kuwait, 1990-1991. Entire Army is in Saudi Arabia, war in Kuwait is over in 6 weeks, ground war over in 3 days, and General Malfunction was conspicuously nowhere within 8000 miles.

Too busy climbing the ladder and punching fruit salad tickets far from the battlefield. Probably finishing up his Gender Studies position paper, or inventorying mess kits stateside.

And this is the assclown who burped out that he "feared Trump would stage a military coup" in January, to stay in office. Rope. Tree. Chickenshit Pretender. Some assembly required.

That little black hole in his resume - avoided in every single one - is glaringly conspicuous in looking over his official bios to anyone with 5 minutes' time in the dotMil.

There's some chickenshit you can't cover up with fruit salad and shiny qual badges.

A guy could get killed leading troops in a shooting war.

Had Enough Yet? Or Are You Thirsty For More?

 

But it's not a total loss so far.

And hey! Only 41 months of this term to go!

And remember kids, this epic clusterfuck is Gropey Dopey on vacation! Imagine how much worse it gets when he's actually sitting behind the Resolute desk, pretending to be in charge.

Now, it's time to unveil the only song appropriate to replace Hail To The Thief :

See if I don't send a copy of the sheet music for this Biden anthem to the Marine Corps Band.

Then again, they're Marines; they probably already have it fully rehearsed and ready to go.

Today From The White House

Too Soon?

 h/t BCE @ Cold Fury

And hey, let's not forget who owns this:

Thanks to BCCL in comments:

Since You Asked

And note that for brevity, I didn't even talk about getting all geared up,
entering the COVID-pit patient's bubble, doing my thing, and then
peeling out of it to care for any non-Covid patients.
Or worse, living in the hospital equivalent of MOPP Level IV
(military guys know what I'm talking about) for hours upon
hours all day or night. Braying jackasses that think
I have time to deal with bedpans are morons living
in the 1930s, with IQs in the low 40s.
"Hey Maverick, what was the name of that school? Truckmaster??"

Adaptive Curmudgeon at Middle Of the Right blog asks, Do They Really Need ICU?

Fair question, and I assume he's genuinely asking it.*

And thank a merciful deity, what I'm describing below was mostly how it was where I am last February, Not how it is is where I am , now. Yet. At least most nights. But sometimes, it is.

But it may be exactly what's going on in Florida or the Gulf Coast states today, or anywhere where things are getting congested.

What follows, it needs to be said for the small-minded, is not me bragging nor complaining. I knew the job was tough when I took it, I'm damned good at it (after 20 years, I'm starting to get the hang of it) and I sincerely love what I do, just as much as Lebron loves dunking, or a fighter pilot loves sending his opponent down in streamers of flames. (Now see if you can guess, when busybody lackwit 40-IQ governors want to prevent me from doing that job, in order to get injected infected with the poison not-a-vaxx, why I want to give them a few hundred raps to the forehead with a 12-pound sledgehammer, to jar their heads out of their own rectal exhaust pipes. I may or may not be speaking metaphorically.) But what I'm telling you here, and why I'm telling you, is for the benefit of those who have no wild idea, how it simply is. Neither more nor less.

Yes, they really need an ICU bed.

I’ve been a nurse for 25 years, 20 of them in Emergency, and not just “I don’t feel good” Emergency, but the busiest trauma centers and mega-hospitals in not just Califrutopia, but the busiest ERs in the entire civilized world, in the most densely populated region of the United States. Depending on where you ask, between 10-15% of the entire US lives in my county or the bordering ones.
120 hospitals in L.A. and Orange County. Almost as many as there are in the entire states of Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, combined.

What happens to that system which usually runs right on the ragged edge of capacity 24/7/365 in normal times, when you throw a pandemic at them?

In the ICU, they have an intensivist MD right there, most of the time. (The floors seldom have a doctor anywhere, for anything.) The patients are either 1:1, or 1:2, which means the nurse can handle 1 patient, and at most 2, at once. I do 4 in the ER normally.

But If I have ICU patients, and there’s no bed for them there, I can now only do 1 or 2 as well.

I had one last month, who was on 7 different medication drips, which all had to be titrated multiple times per hour to fine tune keeping the patient alive, and in certain parameters of vital signs.

I set my monitors to go off on the dot on the hour, and at :15, :30, and :45.
On the hour, I logged my vital signs. Then began doing the literally 57 things for that one patient I needed to be doing. Including not just doing everything I had to do, but charting that it was done. Picture Han Solo flying the Millenium Falcon through an asteroid field. Blindfolded. By the time I was finished, it was usually :50 minutes past the hour, or more. Meaning I had 2-10 entire minutes to do all the less-than-immediate tasks for that one patient that needed doing. Then it was top of the hour, and start all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For an entire shift.

I wasn’t the only nurse so burdened with ICU patients who couldn’t get to the ICU. Which means if anything happens (like someone’s heart stops) there’s no one free to help anyone else. (A cardiac arrest or a major trauma can suck in 3-6 staff members just from the nursing staff alone, for an hour or more). But with all of us being ad hoc ICU nurses, that ain’t happening.
So a nurse is supposed to bag the patient, do chest compressions, start an IV, pull meds, give them, record all the interventions, all simultaneously and single-handedly? Sh’yeah, when monkeys fly outta my butt. That patient? They came in dead, and they’re going to stay that way. And even if, by some miracle, you get a pulse back, that’s another ICU patient, which you don’t have a bed for, or a nurse for, who’s shortly going to be on 2-7 medication drips, and on a ventilator, leaving the nurse scrambling to keep up the rest of the night…stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Which means my other 3 beds were empty, because there was no one to staff them. That turns a 32-bed ER into an 8 bed ER.

Which closes the hospital to ambulances.
Which sends the ambulances to other hospitals, which closes them.
You understand how one overload takes out a sector of the power grid, which can cascade into taking out an entire region over multiple states, right?
So now, imagine that with sick and injured people.
Except now, a blackout means people die waiting for care they cannot get.
And makes people wait in the waiting room until they’re literally trying very hard to die too, just to get into a bed.
If you’ve just sunk the Titanic or anything like it, and you have lifeboats for 2000 people, but 3500 on the ship, at least 1500 are going to die. But if, each time a lifeboat gets overloaded, all those people swim to the next lifeboat, you swamp each next boat in turn, and everyone dies.
That’s where we were headed when the last COVID wave broke, just about exactly 3 weeks after people all got together for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day get-togethers, and until they started acting like maybe we weren’t fooling about this thing being a problem.

And with my decades of ER experience, I’m a critical care nurse. I don’t like ICU, but I can pull it off, rough around the edges (meaning it isn’t pretty, but I don’t kill anyone or let them die through negligence or inexperience), for a shift or three.

But there were ICU patients on telemetry floors ( a lot less intense than the ED, and two levels of severity below the ICU). And ICU patients on Med/Surg floors (three levels below ICU). Where nurses never titrate a single drip, let alone 7 simultaneously, for an entire shift. And almost never manage ventilator patients in any way. They literally don’t know what they don’t know. Because they’re not supposed to be doing the most critical patients in the entire hospital on the least severe wing of the hospital, with the newest nurses.
Some of those nurses were freshly graduated nurses weeks before COVID kicked into high gear last fall.

And they normally handle 6 or 8 far less serious patients, not 4, 2, or 1.
So now their 40-bed floor ward can handle 5 patients. That means you’ve just wiped 80% of the hospital’s capacity on those floors out, from the get-go.

1,000 beds is now 200 beds.
200 beds is now 40 beds.
And it’s put the most seriously ill, critical patients, into the hands of the least-experienced nurses in the hospital.

Imagine throwing 5 year-olds into the 40-foot waves on Oahu’s North Shore with a pool noodle, and you’re not too far off.

Now see if you can figure out why some of those 600,000 people died from COVID in the last 18 months or so.

The nurses who regularly care for the sickest ICU patients are freaking rock stars, and they can only handle at most, 2 at once.

In the last serious COVID wave, from about Labor Day to the end of last February, half the nurses who worked in our ICU said “F**k it, I’m out!“. Forever. Burned out by 1 or 2 mega-critical patients like I had, every shift, every day, for weeks and weeks on end, understaffed, under-equipped, and under-supplied with basic equipment and supplies. No lunches, no breaks, just a 12-hour endless slog from 7 to 7, every day or night, and the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, ad infinitum.
The ER and other floors lost upwards of 1/3 of our staff, for the same reasons.
Replacements can’t be whistled up, and they can’t be trained in less than years, to a minimum level of competence.

So hell yes, people die because we’re out of beds, out of supplies for the patients, out of PPE for the staff, and out of the staff to even show up.

In simple terms: how many games are the Dodgers or Yankees going to win in a season if they can only put 6 or 4 players on the field?

And what you’re asking, I assume legitimately, is “But do they really need 9 guys on the field? Do they really have to be major league players? Can’t the kids from Little League, high school, or maybe even Single-A suck it up and pull the load instead?”

So, my sincere question back to you is, what do you think the answer to that question is? 

{And I didn't send this to my reply at that site, but I forgot to mention: In the ER, as in the ICU, I have a critical care monitor over nearly every patient bed in the department, so I (and others) can see my patient's heart beat, oxygen level,  blood pressure, and respirations instantly, in real time. The telemetry floors are only monitored at the main nursing station, NOT the bed side. The Med/Surg floors have no monitoring anywhere, just portable vital signs machines, usually 2-4 for 40 beds. That's flying a plane at night, without any instruments installed, in the mountains. With a student pilot. You guess where the pitfalls in that approach are, and how well it's going to work, and for how long.}

*But I was wrong: he was just being a jackass, and virtue-signalling his Dunning-Kruger credentials.

Here's his reply to the above at his site:

Aesop: I let this get posted so others would understand why I hold you in such contempt.

You told us all how important you were, and how much smarter and better trained than everyone else but you really didn’t say all that much.
Nor did you really answer my question.
But hey, you got to blow your own horn again, so I guess you made yourself feel special.

Please, next time you comment, let it be either in answer to the post, a useful comment to the post, but please not so self serving, MMKAY?

No, I told you about 40 different ways that the patients who need ICU are sick as hell, and need the specialized care that only the ICU, and nurses trained to operate there regularly, can provide, which AIN'T ME, and that this is already kicking THEIR asses. But Reality doesn't comport with your ignorance or prejudices, so you honked your own horn and blew all that information right out your ass. Which was why I didn't wait for your gracious permission, and posted it myself.

Your disingenuousness is noted.

Don't waste time asking rhetorical questions you're manifestly too stupid to process when you get the answers. And good luck with that plan for the rest of your life. Like with undertakers, and for the same reason, that sort of intelligence is why I've been fully employed for 25 years, and people like you are my best customers.

Sorry to disturb your navel-gazing with the answers you couldn't handle. Go back to your beer and chemtrail websites. And by all means, don't wear a mask, lick the handrails, and pee on the electric fence. What could go wrong with that life plan?

Thanks again for reminding me why dealing with you honestly and giving you the benefit of any doubt is a complete waste of time, except as an object lesson to others.

Not having learned his lesson, and after getting picked on in Comments, he now doubles down, and takes another swing:

Bon 08/17/2021 at 17:04 said:

So far, Aesop’s record is slightly poorer than Fauci and the CDC. Remember the Ebola thing? And many other of his predictions?

I mean, he makes a TV weatherman look like a prophet…

You mean, when Fauci and the head of the CDC both said Ebola would never get here, and I said it would?

When Fauci and the head of the CDC said we had protocols that would deal with it, and I said we didn’t?

When Fauci and the head of the CDC said our first world medicine would triumph and stop it cold, and I said it wouldn’t?

When Fauci and the head of the CDC told you any hospital could handle Ebola, and I said that only the four BL-IV hospitals were trained or equipped to handle it?

You mean when, after they were both 100% wrong, and I was 100% right, on every one of those predictions, and Ebola in a Dallas ICU, using the CDC’s protocols, multiplied at the exact same rate it does in the wild, with no precautions, they ended up moving every Ebola patient in America – including the two ICU nurses they managed to infect with it in exactly 21 days, just like it multiples in the wild – into those exact BL-IV beds, taking up all but one of the only 11 such beds in North America, leaving us a red hair away from becoming West Africa?

Yeah, I remember that pretty well, since you mention it.

Everything I posted then (summer to winter 2014) is still up on my blog, in case you care to check it.

Now, tell me about your local weatherman with a 100% accuracy rate on his predictions and prophecies.

I haven’t made many predictions, as such. But the ones I have have panned out pure gold.

Please, B, for the love of God, stop stomping on your own junk with sharp cleats on. 

Pisser.

h/t Phil 

Sunday Music: Lonely Is The Night

 

This was anything but a one-hit-wonder Billy Squier's Top 30 masterpiece.

Herr Fauch Dons His Work Uniform

 

Mike at Cold Fury  lives up to his blog's name, and has a few well-chosen words about Herr Fauch's latest führerbefehl:

"This pig-ignorant little Nazi, remember, has held a powerful and remunerative position in the federal government for his entire career, since 1968. The poisonous dwarf has “served” under five Presidents—two Democrat-Socialist, three Repugnican. And in his view, the mandate of freedom and individual self-determination upon which this nation was founded can be flippantly discarded with no more than a casual wave of his mighty hand, the US Constitution be damned. He knows virtually nothing of the most fundamental American ideals, and cares about them even less."

Don't hold back, Mike. Tell us how you really feel.

We've been telling anyone who'd listen, since at least 2014, that Fauci was nothing but a substandard intellect foolishly given a whiff of authority by a government posting, but he's really outted himself here, and Mike goes on from there, succinctly and thoroughly painting Herr Fauch as exactly and completely the man you see pictured above. It's magnificent, and recommended unreservedly and enthusiastically.

By all means, RTWT.

It's a masterpiece.

Comedy Moment Of The Week

 It's been a tough week, and everyone deserves a good laugh.

Head over to this post at Moonbattery.

Watch the video (obviously from some months back).

{Level Two Beverage Alert!}

Made my day. Way the dude racks the charging handle, he's prior service, to a certainty.

"You dun lost yo muthaf***in' mind!"

The would-be getaway driver wising up and pulling out at 0:09 was a nice touch.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before...

It's coming.

Like a freight train. (You should pardon the expression.)