The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
Today has been an awful day to have eyes. Or a nose. I can't say my ears have been assailed too badly so far.
That gentleman who can play the flute both ways was around, thanks to missing most of his mandible. I didn't miss having to do the dressing, especially since he's developed maggots and needed insecticide of some sort poured over his gnashing pincers.
But even worse was the other gent with a MASSIVE growth in his chest, like JFC I've never seen anything like it. He could have been an extra in the Last of Us show without any makeup. When I was swabbing out his insides, I was genuinely scared that if I poked too hard I might find myself inside his mediastinum and fondling his heart. It split open his ribs and stuck a good half a foot outside him, dripping with pus. I was all "isn't that an excessive amount of bandages" before I began, but no, you needed the output of a small cotton plantation to cover him back up.
The smell. It's a good thing I have a strong stomach and that I've had no time to have breakfast, lunch or dinner. I didn't have the appetite to check his notes so I don't even know what cancer he has, but I'm swearing to never get that one.
Gangrenous diabetic feet? Not that bad, I'll debride a dozen a day (and had to). But when you can smell the patient from the other end of the ward, that's when you wish the COVID anosmia stuck around for good.
What would happen if you swallowed a piece, big or tiny, of someone's cancer tumor?
Nothing at all. Well, barring some projectile vomiting into a conveniently placed bin.
Cancers are almost never transmissible by that route. Barring the odd exception like a sexually/contact transmitted disease in dogs and Tasmanian Tigers.
The piece would land in my stomach, all alone but for the gastric fluids (I really haven't had a chance to eat), and it would be promptly digested.
There's a minor risk of poisoning or gastroenteritis, depending on how rotten the tumor is, and this guy had a volcano.
But in all likelihood? I would come out of it with a well taught lesson not to open my mouth while dressing tumors, or spraying them down with saline prior to it. I was offered a mask, but it wouldn't help with the smell unless it was an N95, and would otherwise just fog up my glasses. I would rather eat a dozen tumors raw instead of endure a needle prick accident while reviewing an HIV or HepB case, the risk is almost certainly lower.
I'm largely used to this shit, today's cases were extra awful by the standards of a rather jaded Resident Medical Officer.
(I suppose you could make a nice steak out of a rhabdomyosarcoma, but I find that the clinical pathologists aren't game, and the cautery tools in theatre don't give them them quite the sear I'd like.)
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