Yep.

Cleaning. Home improvement stuff. Driving. Cardio.

A more niche one—we got a puppy this past summer. Those first few months they need so much attention. Having an audio book in my ear made the process of following him around everywhere/training so much less infuriating.

Yeah, I’m EM. Ended up being more work for me.

Worked in the ER.

Audiobooks. So amazing to be able to “read” while you’re doing other things that are required of you.

Ones I’ve experienced because of healthcare and would’ve otherwise not really known about—

US tech CT Tech Xray Tech Medical Simulation Tech/Actor (this varies, can also be IT. Med sim centers need a ton of IT) ECMO Perfusionist

So agree here.

I remember back when I was in high school some really old alumni came back for an award and gave a speech. He went on about how these were “the absolute best years of his life” and how we should enjoy them.

The kid next to me was like “That’s depressing as shit. That guys in his 80s, has a family, and this was the best thing he ever experienced? Sounds like his priorities have never been straight.”

Always stuck with me. Was really profound at the time.

My mom. My parents have moved a few times and each time she throws out more and more. Their lifestyle is extremely Spartan.

When they become unusable due to freezing, bad hardware failures, etc. That has usually been around every 3-4 years.

Yep. Been saying for a while that it feels like old Reddit.

I wonder if it’s a nerd-level thing. Reddit devolved as it turned into another social media outlet instead of a niche internet techie place.

Honestly pretty much all through complex scenes and groupings in the app. I have different scenes for morning, late afternoon, and night. They all vary based on mood and season. That’s pretty much it. Only use automation for outside lights and to mimic presence when traveling.

I said this too—the Hue system is game changing as a mood setter. Helps me relax at night by dimming, etc.

1. 8 Sleep Bed—it’s liquid cooled and heated based on your sleep stage. I know it’s expensive, but the sleep it’s given me has been unrivaled by anything else I’ve ever used to regulate my sleep. I work shifts so good sleep is priceless. You spend a third of your life asleep, so it’s worth an investment.
2. Hue lights for my entire home—privacy issues aside, it’s a game changing investment. We replaced the recessed lighting with recessed hue lighting fixtures as well. It’s insane how having multiple lighting settings and colors for times of the day/moods can change your entire mindset.
3. Home gym—if I were pressed for one component it would be the power cage and Olympic bar, but investing in a fully functional home gym has given me much more in return than what I’ve put into it (whether that be physical work building equipment or money).

Numbers like this are always bonkers to me. Like, how have we allowed this to happen?

It’s a fucking social media site. I know surgeons who work 80-100 hour weeks and make 1.5M a year—and even that seems obscene to me. But they’re academic subspecialty surgeons who are quite literally saving lives daily by personally performing heart transplants. How the fuck do we think as a society that a smug ass CEO’s “effort” is worth 200x that?

Society is so backwards and fucked.

I think it definitely will. I’m at a large medical center and it’s always surprising what we’re able to do (that we consider to be basic) compared to rural places. Fingers crossed!

So sorry you’re going through all of this. As an ER provider I feel so terrible for the patients I see with chronic gastrointestinal issues. I always try to do some things to broaden the differential (I’ve had some pretty clutch diagnoses of chronic mesenteric ischemia in cases like yours by doing a CTA instead of just a CT—usually on patients who have had multiple CT’s), but there’s only so much you can do with the resources available to us in the ED. I always place a GI referral, but I feel like most GI’s actually ignore the chronic stuff if scopes are negative. It really sucks knowing a lot of possible answers but not being the person who can test for them.

Hopefully Mayo helps. Almost sounds like you have some sort of GI motility issue—I wonder if your trigemial neuralgia is actually a more nuanced symptom of an underlying CNS/PNS unifying diagnosis.

Can this please be marked as some sort of spoiler? I haven’t watched Picard Season 3 yet and this was a massive spoiler bait title…

Epsom salt bath with bath oils and some of that jazz lettuce while watching Star Trek

Yeah, I think there’s a handful of toxic folks on here who are behind the bots or a series or alt accounts. I think Reddit probably had more infrastructure in place to crack down on stuff like that, but it’s happened to me (although less dramatically) in other threads here as well. But yeah, there’s no way my relatively normal comment got immediately downvote spammed and commented on by 6 different accounts. Definitely alts.

Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.

Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.

When my dog died almost a year ago to the day, it was one of the worst things my wife and I have ever gone through. I know that’s proof of my privilege—but I think it’s also proof of how much animals mean to us. They’re pure good. I work a lot of weird shifts; when I come home my wife may not be awake or present, but my dog was always there. It initiated intense, physical grief in both of us.

Lean on any friends or family you have. Post here. Don’t deny how bad you’re hurting, but look for another animal to help after you grieve. I feel like our pets represent different chapters in our life, and when one leaves us a new chapter opens. That chapter may come with a different pet for a different time of your life. We chose to use the closing of our chapter as a transition point—we had a few horrible months at first but ultimately kicked some bad habits we had been building for a while. But where you are right now is horrible, and as another human being I understand to an extent how badly you’re hurting.