Chetzemoka

Critical care nurse here. The answer is esophageal varices.

It’s the same physiological anomaly as hemorrhoids, except in your esophagus. Swollen, fragile veins caused by increased internal pressure. In the case of hemorrhoids, that pressure inside the veins is caused by straining too much when trying to poo. In esophageal varices, the increased pressure inside the esophageal veins comes from blood backing up from a swollen, scarred, and damaged liver. So we often see esophageal varices in end stage alcohol use disorder.

Horror stories abound in emergency departments and ICUs of having to do CPR on a patient massively hemorrhaging out of their mouth from esophageal varices. As soon as nurses I know saw this report, our immediate thought was, “Yep, varices.”

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15429-esophageal-varices

GOP death cult be like, “Hear me out, do you really NEED to live though?”

To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.

My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.

This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.

The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.

This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.

Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.

I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.

This is the one they were waiting for. There are several live cams trained on the area, and one of them caught the exact moment it erupted:

https://youtu.be/QcxaqCIon_Y

Yeah, the problem is it slips too easily into essentialism. “Oh we evolved this way, nothing we can do about it I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

Especially for questions like this, which could pretty easily be explained by cultural influences, no need to bring evolution into it.

Yeah, working on yourself makes you resilient, but it definitely doesn’t make you unstoppable. Like Picard said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”

In the context of modern times, women are six times more likely to be abandoned by their spouse after receiving a devastating medical diagnosis like cancer than men are.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm#%3A~%3Atext=A+woman+is+six+times%2Clonger+the+marriage+the+more

Injecting medications into necks.

Medical things are rarely accurate, but Jesus this one is absolutely infuriating. There’s no anatomy in a neck that you could even inject anything INTO. You’re not aiming for a jugular vein on the fly and there’s not enough tissue in a neck to receive an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. If your needle is too long, you’re definitely hitting something critical. It’s feasible that you could squirt medication into someone’s trachea or esophagus or - god forbid - spine if you actually tried this nonsense.

Arms, people, ARMS. This is where we inject things into people who are not interested in receiving an injection. Arms or butts, right through the clothes. You’re aiming for the deltoid muscle or the glutes. I’m even willing to concede the inaccuracy of a medication affecting someone instantly (they don’t), if Hollywood would just stop having characters inject things into people’s necks.

On our next episode of medical things that make me crazy: People getting shot through the shoulder with zero consequences.