Airline travelers might not constitute an accurate sample.
C'mon, c'mon what was the unintentionally judgmental thing you said?! We want to judge you for being judgmental!
Oh, I probably was just loud and like "REALLY!? Tell me more!" and started asking all kinds of nosy questions. Texas-rude is a lower bar to clear than in other places.
Texas-rude is a lower bar to clear than in other places.
Yah, up here you'd need to aim more for "Are you a fucking moron?!" and it might still be taken for good-natured ribbing.
"Then why can't I see the outline through your shirt? Whenever you look away, I stare at your shirt and I haven't noticed anything."
I caught mine on the corner of a slamming car door once. Blinding pain.
I have been surprised by nipple rings when someone I thought I knew really well has them, but only because I guess I expect them to come up in getting-to-know-you conversations. My best friend at my last job had them, and I was all curious and excited about it, but I guess she'd had them so long that she no longer thinks about them.
I would've guessed the longer they are the more one thinks of them.
I thought the body-piercing thing would have been over a long time ago. I have a vague recollection that at one time i though of it as a 90s fad.
"when it's done well, you never know who is wearing one."
Forgive me for being judgmental, but what's the point then?
I think my friend had it done in the 90's. It does look pretty cute on her.
11: I think you are right. I had it done in the early 90s. Took it out for good in the late 90s.
Piercings were sort of the leading edge of a trend of body art that's currently more focused on tattoos, if I read it right. Nipple rings lead to ass antlers.
I guess I expect them to come up in getting-to-know-you conversations
???
15: I mean at some level of friend-intimacy before taking your shirt and bra off in front of someone.
14.last: well, one can only hope.
I guess nipple rings are compatible with exaggerated performance of gender roles. It's probably one of those things that the magazines let you bring up in those apocryphal bargaining sessions with your hubby. Build a shed and I'll get nipple rings.
Unless you have very large nipple rings, they don't need a special shed.
I think you are right. I had it done in the early 90s. Took it out for good in the late 90s.
Same here for a navel ring, though I had it in through the early 2000s. I wanted it out earlier, but I couldn't get the ring pried apart on my own. Finally a friend who'd had enough of me complaining about it showed up at my house with two pairs of pliers, and we each hauled on one side of it.
When I was getting the piercing done, I looked through the piercer's photo book, and found several that people I knew had had their nipples pierced by him.
Outside of a shed, it's too dark to pierce your nipples.
15: I mean at some level of friend-intimacy before taking your shirt and bra off in front of someone.
(A) that seems a bit beyond "getting to know you".
(B) unless the topic of conversation were specifically "piercings and tattoos we have" or something quite close to it, I'm still not sure why disclosure would be expected.
I am surprised that you can recognize your friends from photos of their nipples.
We often have women in labor who insist that their piercings are not removable, or expect us to have some special talent or tool to remove them.
Anesthesiologists do not like to intubate people with tongue piercings, and obstetricians do not like to do c/sections with navel and genital piercings in place. That smell during the procedure is electrocautery. You want that current to run from the Bovie tip to the grounding pad, and not get distracted.
Also, if your bracelet needs a screwdriver to remove it, take it off before coming to the hospital.
I am surprised that you can recognize your friends from photos of their nipples.
You'd think they'd do the photos without showing the face, right? But a really high number of people were totally identifiable. Not the couple of genital piercings, though.
I guess that was before people assumed every picture was going to get to the internet.
||
If a website (in this case a big teaching hospital's) says that an RA position is temporary, how long might that last? It's doing work with the econ dept of a big school.
Does temporary mean 2 months, 6 months or a year?
I suppose that I could ask, but I doubt that the HR department would know.
|>
Wait, the lady with a lip piercing is judging someone with a nipple piercing?
I went to a discussion panel once that turned into a discussion of nipple rings and breastfeeding; lots of people were curious, but all the people who had done it said that it just didn't seem to have made a difference (They had taken the piercings out to feed, of course).
Wait, the lady with a lip piercing is judging someone with a nipple piercing?
I was just loud and nosy!
So hey, Shamhat, how do anesthesiologists feel about lip rings? Nobody ever mentioned it leading up to or during my labors and deliveries, so I assumed it wasn't a big deal.
Few thinks squicked out ex-wife #2 than nipple rings. That one scene in Silence of the Lambs was among the most disturbing thing she'd seen on film - and she owned an old VHS of Pink Flamingos which I'd thought was cool about her when we were dating.
Ugh, thinks s/b things though I guess that works too. Also, "more than".
When you shoved that spike right through your nipple / I hope you didn't burst it.
33: If it looks like it won't come loose or get in the way during intubation, it won't stress them out. It is a straightforward procedure that they do several times a day, but it must be done quickly and when it's difficult it's a disaster.
Our hospital has a cesarean rate of about 42% so we assume everyone is a pre-op patient until proven otherwise. Nothing to drink etc. Your facility may have different expectations and policies.
The first screwed-on bracelet I noticed was a woman who ended up having a cesarean, bleeding heavily, and receiving a variety of blood products. As a result she was so swollen that once someone found bolt cutters to get that damn thing off, we couldn't get them under it. I guess it would make a really funny sitcom scene. It was not funny to us at the time.
Nah, ours has a 50% c-section rate. We're definitely considered pre-op.
Years ago there was a woman who died (OD'd) in a house I used to live in. All my friends still lived there. The police came, but said that the coroner couldn't take the body with body piercings in place. Therefore my friend (who still lived there) had to remove the dead woman's piercings (including genital ones) before they would take her away. Perhaps the most fucked up part of a very fucked up story.
That is bizarre. I can't imagine they level that request very often to the poor elderly grieving widow whose wife wore earrings.
Yeah I have no idea what they were thinking or why.
Speaking of surgery, it occurs to me that Von Wafer is under the knife as we speak. I feel like we should have a fruit basket or something for his return.
A fruitbasket, why not, though he's owed us all baked goods for a very long time.
39: 50% seems crazy high to me. Not that I know anything about the subject. It just seems insane that half of births would be so troublesome as to justify chopping someone open.
That's just the figure in the hospital. The uncomplicated births take place in pools with dolphins.
That is bizarre.
Not that I have any experience, but I expect that "have the family remove all valuables such as money and jewelry" is probably standard operating procedure for avoiding potential liability. Anything you'd want them buried with, you'd take to the funeral home.
45: It is completely insane. It's because there are a lot of factors which drive up the frequency of c-sections, and unless you have someone conscientiously monitoring it, it just grows. Mainly:
1. cascade of interventions. Some OBs like to encourage their patients to get induced. Once you're being induced, your chance of a c-section goes up. Many women like to be induced, because they can pick the day. And there are some non-trivial reasons to do so, ie scheduling time off work if your spouse has a shitty, inflexible job, or parents coming in from out of town on a tight schedule to take care of siblings, etc.
2. If you're being induced, your contractions are way more painful and intense than they'd otherwise be. So you're more likely to get an epidural earlier. The earlier the epidural, the greater chance of a c-section.
3. C-sections are CYA for the doctor against liability, which is monstrous when something goes wrong in childbirth cases (or at least this is conventional wisdom. I don't really know.)
ie scheduling time off work if your spouse has a shitty, inflexible job
Sometimes women have jobs too.
Sure, but a shitty job for the person giving birth means no paid time off, not that you have to notify them ahead of time for the exact two weeks you want to have off.
47: I think it was something like that, like so nobody tries to sue when an earring goes missing or whatever. But I feel like it's a pretty big jump from "have the family remove jewelry" to "have the roommate of the guy who brought the woman home from the goth club last night remove clit ring".
Sometimes women have jobs too.
The most important job of all!
But I feel like it's a pretty big jump from "have the family remove jewelry" to "have the roommate of the guy who brought the woman home from the goth club last night remove clit ring"
Seriously. Although if he had just refused, somehow I don't think the coroner would have just left the body in the living room to rot.
||
My goal of writing Haskell in Clojure is getting closer and closer to realization with the line (fapply (fmap #(partial <> %) self) other).
(It was only monumental self-restraint that kept me from naming fapply "<*>".)
No, probably not. And upsetting as it was, knowing this guy, I think on some level he was happy enough to have the story to tell.
(He now lives in SF, has facial tattoos, bartends at a leather bar and is going for a criminology degree.)
"fapply" should be an adjective meaning "masturbatorily".
In my limited experience, scheduled delivery is a fairly common metric wonks are identifying to get hospitals to track and try to reduce. It'll be tracked within each state's Medicaid program starting January.
Once neb can write Haskell in Clojure he'll live fappily ever after.
A truly novel human writing act.
62 sounds like a really positive step, IMO.
42-50% C-section rate? Yikes.
The hospital we used touted its low, low 25% rate, which seemed pretty terrible all by itself.
Fippily fappily
That Simon Peyton-Jones
Created a language that's
Lazy with class,
And knows all there is about
Categoricity,
Zippers and finger trees,
And tapping that ass.
Yes, Mt. Auburn. It's actually the only local hospital I've spent any time in, oddly. My PCP is also in their associated medical office building.
I think Shamhat's hospital might be the one O was born in.
I'm so annoyed generally by the world of doulas/natural childbirth shaming that I'm inclined to overreact and be pro-C-section, but that's probably a mistake.
66 OMG. I am so glad I get massages at the chill place owned by lesbians.
Women also often like to schedule so that their prefered doctor is the one at the delivery.
It isnt too surprising that doctors do C-Sections bc they are going to get sued whenever there is a bad result, so why not do it the easy way?
66: Haha. I'm like, "Lucky bitch, you could eat *Saltines* with your gestational diabetes???"
I may end up sorry I asked this, but why are you so annoyed by that world, Halford? Is it the general level of woo that can tend to come along with it, or something else?
66 is just horrible. The narrator sounds fabulous and graceful under a terrible situation.
A friend had an unfortunate incident whereby the same substance landed on her back, only to quickly be cleaned, followed by a zipping sound.
She didnt realize what the substance was until she realized the smell.
76 -- super-woo combined with the weird competitive aspect of natural childbirth and implied shaming for women who don't go that route. Obviously not every doula is guilty of this but the scene generally kind of a vortex of judgmental-ness and competition. Also like many problems this is a problem specific to hippie/SWPL-dominated areas, I'm sure that there are still parts of the country that need a more aggressive natural birth movement.
A friend sent out postcards (like, quite widely) after giving birth to her second child that were provided by the birthing center. They said "ANOTHER VBAC SUCCESS!" at the top, had a picture of the baby, and then in much smaller type at the bottom had the name of the baby and parents. It was odd.
Speaking as someone very anti-woo, avoiding unnecessary surgery is a very good thing, for both health and cost reasons.
Oh, sure. But pain medication doesn't mean you've failed to be tough or natural enough at giving birth, and having a healthy kid at all is about 10,000x more important than whatever manner in which the kid is born.
I have a FB friend who unschools and is a doula, and I have to admit to halford like reactions to all her postings about factory schools and factory childbirth and weak/ignorant women who end up with c-sections and lazy, self-indulgent mothers who "use schools." I want to have six c-sections and send the kids to military school.
11: Far from it. The body-piercing thing is way more "normal" now than it was in the Nineties. That's just when it started. But it's a game for the young or the very dedicated.
Oh yes, I'm very pro-pain-med. I don't know how to get around the pattern that all evidence based medical guidelines surrounding maternity, justified or not, get moralized out of proportion - alcohol, breastfeeding, etc. Other than wholesale social change, of course.
Also like many problems this is a problem specific to hippie/SWPL-dominated areas, I'm sure that there are still parts of the country that need a more aggressive natural birth movement.
This is what I'm thinking. Because while my doula's own midwife sounds like a total wackjob, that is not very common here.
Frex, see the: Lipo, Labiaplasty, Trying to Find an OB Who Doesn't Promote files.
Oh yes, I'm very pro-pain-med.
Me too, even if you aren't in pain. Hell, especially when you aren't in pain so you can actually enjoy them.
62: Our local hospital now has a policy of forbidding elective C-sections before 41 weeks, probably in response to those medi-wonkish concerns.
I'm pro-pain meds, too, but labor tends to stall out and stop progressing when women get epidurals really early. It's a balance and blah blah blah.
88: wow. That actually seems extreme.
66: holy god. that is terrifying.
92: Here all the papers advert the "mommy lift" or "mommy makeover," and sell a package tuck/lipo/breast job
93 cont'd: Well, there seems to be a sort of marketing agreement. Dunno about the OBs doing it themselves.
Dunno about the OBs doing it themselves.
"As long as we've got you on the table, ma'am..."
88: wow. That actually seems extreme.
I guess it depends how you define "elective"?
At my job I sit near some abstractors who have spent days going back and forth about whether individual cases meet the standards of the measure mentioned in 62.
I guess it depends how you define "elective"?
True. Anyone with pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes would probably be excluded.
Fippily fappily
That Simon Peyton-Jones...
I suspect this of being very funny but, of course, don't get a word of it.
Our local hospital now has a policy of forbidding elective C-sections before 41 weeks, probably in response to those medi-wonkish concerns.
Huh, do people really ask for C-sections when there's an alternative? I thought "elective" tended to imply induction. But yes, that kind of indiscriminate policy doesn't surprise me considering the endemic difficulty in bring doctors to consensus around basic goals.
The hospital we used touted its low, low 25% rate, which seemed pretty terrible all by itself.
In California, the lowest measured rate of any hospital in 2011 was 13%. (That's a rate excluding the complex cases.) The lowest rate in any hospital with more than 100 deliveries in the year was 16%. 25th/50th/75th percentiles: 25%, 29%, 34%.
Wait, that's with more than 100 cesarean deliveries, not any deliveries.
Of the people I know who really wanted c-sections, there's always been some pretext, sometimes totally valid but sometimes blurry.
But yes, women sometimes want c-sections because (IME) labor is super scary and unknown, especially the first time or if your previous experience was awful.
I don't know the details, but I think it precludes "schedule the birth on this day" but not C-section in response to an emergency (which is not elective.) The rate at my local hospital is 21% which sounds to me like a ridiculously high chance of being sliced open but is actually pretty good, from what I hear.
But it must allow scheduled inductions then?
I think our hospital semi-recently imposed a rule that you can't induce before 37? weeks electively.
self-indulgent mothers who "use schools."
What kind of schools are these? Lamaze classes or something like that?
The kind of schools made out of ticky-tacky.
I suspect this of being very funny but, of course, don't get a word of it.
S. P-J is one of the chief designers and implementers of Haskell, a functional programming language with lazy evaluation and a sophisticated type system which includes type classes (hence the subtitle of his paper on its evolution, "being lazy with class"). Haskell is known for deriving a lot of inspiration for its abstractions from category theory. Zippers are a data structure that allows for navigation and update of arbitrary other data structures (the type of the zipper for a given data structure can be thought of as the derivative of the type of the original data structure, or, more salaciously but somewhat puritanically, as the type of the original data structure's one-hole contexts). Finger trees are a functional data structure with many applications and a funny name.
I think the rule is not before 41 weeks for elective inductions for new mothers and not before 39 for everyone else.
There's got to be a joke involving functional programming and c-section.
Destructive updates are frowned upon.
My sister wanted a natural birth first time around (I may have already told this story). The baby was two weeks late. She went through about 12 hours of doula-assisted labor, and eventually, the doctors decided that a c-section was necessary. The resulting child measured in the 100th percentile for head-size in her state. (Yes, I asked about the statistic, and yes, he really did have the largest head on record.) She was so damned excited to schedule her induction and c-section for her next child.
schedule her induction and c-section for her next child
Does a person get induced if she's definitely having a c-section?
But I feel like it's a pretty big jump from "have the family remove jewelry" to "have the roommate of the guy who brought the woman home from the goth club last night remove clit ring"
Was anyone else witness to this request by the cops because this seems more than a tad weird to me. So her date was gone and she was just hanging around getting high naked? And generally I can't imagine allowing, let alone requesting, a stranger dick around with a dead body. If there was an issue with jewelry then the medical examiner who responded to the scene could remove it and we'd book it into evidence for safekeeping so the family could recover it.
Although sometimes these weird pissing matches go on with dead bodies because people are trying to avoid doing paperwork. We had a guy this summer blow his brains out in the yard with a .45 after a fight with his wife. Fire and EMT guys declared this guy still had a pulse and working on him in a kind of ridiculously gruesome futile act. I'm not a doctor but when I'm stepping over a piece of brain in the grass and chest compressions are causing stuff to squirt out of the massive hole in his head then maybe it's time to let him go. Anyways, they transport him to the hospital and I follow the ambulance up there and of course they pretty quickly declare him dead. The nursing supervisor totally tried to pawn that guy off on me saying the body involved a crime scene. No way, if they want to say he's alive and transport now they just bought the result and I'm outta here. She was not pleased.
He now lives in SF, has facial tattoos, bartends at a leather bar and is going for a criminology degree.
What is it with odd dudes majoring in criminology?
115.1: her date was too wigged out to do it, if I am remembering right, and so other roommate volunteered? Also her date was busy spinning a whole story about how actually he wasn't the one to give her the drugs (which he totally was) and didn't even know she was shooting up (he was shooting up, too). I am fairly sure other people were there for the whole exchange; if they weren't I would certainly not put it past this guy to have invented or embellished things. I suppose I could ask the other people who were there if they remember actually hearing that, but it was almost 20 years ago.
There may well have been some kind of pissing match. A shipment of unexpectedly, wildly potent heroin that hit Boston around that time; there were a whole lot of ODs and so I could imagine them being collectively tired of dealing with all the dead junkies.
115.last: Batman, yo.
When somebody ODs, don't the cops look around for drugs, needles, etc?
Sure. I think they found the drugs and needle that she used in the room (that's how they know it was the super potent kind that was floating around). But he claimed she brought that stuff with her.
Incidentally his story about where the heroin came from was for his roommates' benefit as much as the cops, as heroin was strictly forbidden in that house.
I'm pretty sure the cops were convinced everybody in the house was a junkie because 1. nobody could afford food and 2. one guy was puking in bed (he had the flu). But no. They were just on acid.
We totally are looking around for that stuff and often it's in the trash because even if the people who call it in aren't involved in the drug aspect they'll feel the need to make everything look a bit better and they'll chuck the paraphernalia.
Last week these geniuses decided that the smart play was to drag the body behind the neighbor's shed which happens to be bordered by a chain link fence and backs up to an Arctic Circle. And they didn't even try covering it up with anything so it didn't take long for some lady walking her dog to notice that oh hey, there's an obviously dead person over there in the leaves. You know you're making bad moves when even "Blanca" the street whore crashing in the druggie house knows that moving the body is a horrible idea and refuses to help. I had to take one of those people up to the ER. Jail wouldn't take that person until doctors drained a fist sized abscess on their ass. Don't do drugs kids, that was way groty.
About the c/sec rate: having witnessed that conversation between the mother and her OB way too many times, I think of women who have c/secs as heroes. The doctor always makes it sound like it's in the best interest of the baby, and the mother is consenting to major surgery for her child's benefit. It's like donating a kidney.
No doctor ever says:
my wife is nagging me to get home and this is dragging out
my kid forgot to walk my dog this morning and if I don't do it before office hours I will have a mess to clean up tonight
my partner is taking over call at 8am and will be upset if he has to cancel his office hours for my patient
these people annoyed the hell out of me with their questions and their doula and their candles and now I'll show them who's boss
the last bus is at 1:30am and if I miss it I'll have to pay for a car service
... to the patient, anyway.
Most of us nurses can predict a patient's chances based on who the doctor is, the time of day, and the doctor's mood on arrival. Note: if your doctor isn't at the hospital labor-sitting, you are on track for a vaginal birth.
About 80% of primary cesareans are for variations of "labor taking too long" such as failure to progress, arrest of descent, cephalopelvic disproportion, etc. About 10% are "stat" due to the fetal heart rate tracing indicating a problem, and most of those babies come out with APGARs of 9/9, which could be interpreted as "we saved the baby just in time" or "we misdiagnosed a problem that turned out not to exist."
Note: if your doctor isn't at the hospital labor-sitting, you are on track for a vaginal birth.
Happened to me! The doctor on call arrived basically right in time to coach me through the last pushes and catch the baby.
It's way deep that this thread is about birth and death.
About 10% are "stat" due to the fetal heart rate tracing indicating a problem, and most of those babies come out with APGARs of 9/9, which could be interpreted as "we saved the baby just in time" or "we misdiagnosed a problem that turned out not to exist."
This is basically what happened to me, I think. Because I was 41, I kind of went in figuring I'd end up with a c-section (as in, there's no way anyone was going to let me "take any chances" and "chance" was going to be defined way down). After not all that much pushing, the doctor flat out told me that I could just say the word and have a c-section whenever I wanted. ("I'm so good at it! I made a super tiny, low incision!") I said "No thanks!" She had some kind of time limit for how long she was going to let me labor, but we never got there anyway, since Baby O's heart rate began plummeting with each contraction (there was a name for this I can't remember -- variable decelerations?) and all of a sudden 12 people were in my room running around like lunatics with an older guy shouting at them to calm the fuck down "It's not like you've never seen a whatever-decel before!" And within 15 minutes I had a little tongue-flicking lizard baby! APGAR 9/9. So who knows?
124: Exactly, who knows? We often see those variables when the cord is around the neck, which happens about 30% of the time. Depending on the doctor, it can either be a cesarean and "The cord was around the neck! I saved your baby's life," or a vaginal delivery with reduction or cutting of the cord and the same claim, or once, just once...the doctor quietly cut the cord, left it hanging to the kelly, and placed two more clamps closer to the baby. Then he turned to the father, handed him the scissors, and said, "Would you like to cut the cord?"
P. S. Super tiny incision is bad. We often get low APGARs (baby needs resuscitation) when the skin incision is too small and the doctors can't get the baby out through it. This usually happens to patients that the doctor feels special about: friends, celebrity patients, nurses and office staff. The end result is often a small, careful smile with a nasty straight line at an angle at one end from the frantic snip with the bandage scissors.
121: This is my impression as well -- the idea that a c-section is the easy way out (under circumstances where it could have gone either way) seems so wrong. Obviously, you can't say anything meaningful by comparing individual experiences, but what I did sounds as if it was so much easier than anyone I know who had a C. (And I'd like, again, to thank the random OB on call who let me deliver Sally breech. If he'd pushed for the C, I would have taken his advice, obviously, but I was really glad not to have surgery.)
The doulas and midwives love my dad. He doesnt mind waiting it out. I cannot begin to count the number of flights or trips that got screwed up when I was a child.
The end result is often a small, careful smile with a nasty straight line at an angle at one end from the frantic snip with the bandage scissors.
I am totally going to check. I was definitely lifted off the table and bounced a couple times as they yanked the little dude out.
About the c/sec rate: having witnessed that conversation between the mother and her OB way too many times, I think of women who have c/secs as heroes.
But presumably these are the conversations happening at the hospital (to which I'm never privvy, anyway.) What I have heard is panicked pregnant women explicitly hoping for a c-section. These two scenarios are, of course, harmonious and would together drive up c-section rates.
I think inductions often lead to c-sections, and I can see why that might be the case, although I have little medical knowledge. It also might be the case that a lot of still births are avoided through the combination of induction and c-section.
From what I understand (why yes, I read Atul Gawande's book too), the problem is that both parts of 131 are true. Maybe not 'a lot', but some babies are certainly saved by interventions. The problem is 1) figuring out which babies those would be, and 2) figuring out how to factor in the greater dangers to the mother, especially when those dangers aren't as quantifiable as dead babies.
I am totally going to check. I was definitely lifted off the table and bounced a couple times as they yanked the little dude out.
I goiing to immediately start working on inventing a table to assist with this effective technique of bouncing the mother in order to get the baby out. In the olden days, they strapped you vertically to the wagon and let the road work the magic.
I believe it is inarguably true that lots of babies are saved through c-sections. I don't think there's much evidence at all that c-section rates over somewhere around ten percent save any additional babies -- that is, that there are hospitals with rates around that low (12%?) and no higher a rate of neonatal morbidity and mortality than any others (I'd have to google to back that up, I'm remembering the polemics I was reading back when this was more of a personal issue). So, identifying the unnecessary c-sections is something that at least some health care providers seem to be able to do.
A WHO report backing me up on the 10% claim.
129: "I was definitely lifted off the table and bounced a couple times as they yanked the little dude out."
It's perfectly normal to feel that way. It takes just as much force to squeeze the baby out of the incisions as to squeeze one through the vagina. You probably look lovely down there.
132: "some babies are certainly saved by interventions"
Indeed.
However, for perspective, the infant mortality rate in countries with poor nutrition and no birth attendants is around 16%, and many of those deaths are preemies that don't make it. (The US prematurity rate is 12% but most of them survive.)
The WHO would like to see a cesarean rate of 10% everywhere, meaning fewer for us and more for Africa and India.