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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2024

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  • The laws criminalizing abortion also effectively criminalize miscarriages because of the way they investigate things and the fact that dilation and evacuation/curettage is frequently needed for miscarriages that occur after 10 weeks or so. The conservatives in question will refuse to accept that the fetus died in utero without any intervention and prosecute women that have to have dead fetal tissue removed to prevent sepsis, save their lives, and preserve future fertility if that’s what they want.






  • When I was working as an ER tech, I had a patient that was in the early stages of DTs in the lobby because he lied and told the medics in the ambulance that he was having a panic attack. We were up to 8 hour waits in the lobby and non-critical ambulances were being brought out to the lobby. He was perfectly lovely the entire time, but around the 5 hour mark when the valium was wearing off, he started sweating and shaking profusely. I had to have our registration folks distract his dad so I could ask him privately if he was withdrawing from alcohol. When he said yes to that question, that bought him a ticket to the front of the triage line and we got him into the next available room.

    I will remember that incident for the rest of my career, because if I hadn’t looked at his medical record to see that he had previously had a consultation regarding alcohol cessation and known what the symptoms of withdrawal looked like, I wouldn’t have pulled him aside to get the truth of the situation and things could have gone extremely badly for him. I can’t imagine what he was feeling, devolving into DTs in front of his dad who was so judgemental that he had to lie to the medics about what he needed help for.


  • Withdrawal from many drugs is miserable to go through, but because of the chemical mechanism of the dependency formed in alcohol use disorder, withdrawal from alcohol can lead to death without other comorbidities or complications. Some of the symptoms of acute withdrawal include delirium tremens and seizures which, while awful, are just the harbingers of the later stages of acute alcohol withdrawal that lead to death. This is also ignoring the plethora of other health problems that can develop as a result of long term alcohol use disorder, many of which can be fatal all on their own.