brillohead

I'll live vicariously through all y'all on the shingles front.... I never had Chicken Pox growing up, and got vaccinated about twenty years ago, so I don't ever have to worry about shingles.

After work this morning, I was able to have dinner with my half-brother (from my biological mother) and his wife, plus my son and his girlfriend. My son and brother hadn't seen each other in about 7-8 years. I made the "boys" sit next to each other, because I knew that politically they were two peas in a pod and would talk to each other constantly. I was right! 🤣 After we did the "midwestern goodbye" (which lasts 30+ minutes), the guys were still talking on the sidewalk outside the restaurant as the women all went in different directions to the three vehicles!

Don't get me started..... *sigh* I was "too young" to get a knee replacement because "they only last twenty years". So what? I could just get it done again in twenty years, when the procedure and implant have both been greatly improved from what we had at the time! And they wanted me to lose weight first.... well, how do you lose weight when you can't walk without pain???? Such a bunch of baloney!!!

Shame on the doctor for not explaining the entire procedure to you before he started! I'm glad that my explanation made sense.

Hips are MUCH less complex than knees. We rarely have a hip replacement patient spend the night at our hospital (same for knees, but we do see more knees than hips overnight). I can actually only remember one hip replacement in the last year, and that was because she was an elderly woman who lived alone, so it wasn't safe for her to go home (she discharged the next day to our rehab facility for a couple weeks before returning home). My left hip has gone bad because of how long I've been walking around on my wonky left knee... if they'd replaced the knee when I asked them to, I wouldn't also need the hip replaced.

I was thinking of you and your garden the other day. I had a coworker from the ER as a patient, and when I went to hang her IV antibiotic, she saw the "piggyback hook" that I was throwing away (it's a plastic hook that comes with the secondary IV tubing, but we don't need it because our pumps do the piggyback portion of it for us). In the ER, they only ever use an IV pump for critical fluids, like blood or pressors or similar, and they never bother to run their antibiotics as a secondary line, so she wasn't used to the piggyback hook because she never uses that kind of tubing. She grabbed the hook and asked if she could keep it, b/c she could use it in her garden to hold stuff up. (That's what made me think of you and your huge garden!) I told her I could get her a whole bunch of them... so all three of the RNs working that night saved our hooks for her, and I gave her a whole bag full of them on my way out of work the next morning! The double-sided hook on the left is what I'm talking about. It comes folded in half in the packaging, and you can straighten it out to get the full length.

In addition to clear margins, which has already been mentioned, a lot of it has to do with how they're going to close the hole. Think of it like sewing.... You have a hole that is 1.25 inches in diameter that you need to sew together. You want to sew the edges together, not just covering the gap with thread, like you'd do when darning a sock. If you just sew all the edges together, you'd end up with a puckering in the fabric all the way around the hole (like a drawstring purse), with additional stress on the fabric in all directions. On skin, this would make an UGLY bumpy scar, plus increase the risk of the stitches getting ripped out because of the excess pressure/stretching on the skin as your body moves. Instead, you would want to make the incision longer on each side of the circle -- basically, it's going to look like a drawing of an eye (apologies, I am not artistic, and even less so with a mouse!): So now when you sew the purple edges together, the fabric won't all bunch up and pucker in the middle, because the loss of fabric will be spread out along a greater amount of fabric. Similarly, the stress that is put on the sewn edges is shared along the entire length of the incision instead of all focused in one area, so the stitches are less likely to rip out, and with less stress on the area, scarring will also be minimized. I hope this makes sense... I know what I'm trying to say, but I'm not sure if it makes sense the way I said it. Okay, I wasn't happy with my drawing, so I found an actual lesion excision on YouTube and took some screenshots (no gory pics, in case some have a weak stomach). To remove this mole, you can see that the surgeon drew the "eyeball" elliptical edges extending beyond the mole on both sides: Then when it was stitched back together, it made for a smoother incision without the puckering: The larger the area that needs to be removed, the farther out the incision needs to go in both directions in order to prevent puckering. Hope this helps! Edited to add: I absolutely LOVE Aquaphor for scar prevention. It's basically Vaseline with a few additional skin-friendly ingredients. If you want to reduce scarring, try to prevent the area from forming a scab -- you should keep it moisturized at all times to prevent the tissues from drying into a scab,

I don't know how you rehabbers do it. I would be the WORST rehabber, because I'd want to snuggle and cuddle and pet and baby-talk all the critters, which would make them impossible to return to the wild after imprinting on a human! Bless you and your colleagues who do what others of us can't for the most helpless of our creatures!

My birthfather is going through this right now. He had been taking Celebrex daily (an NSAID), and ended up in the hospital with a GI bleed last fall, so now he's prohibited from taking any NSAID medication going forward. His arthritis is now hurting him so badly that he sometimes has trouble even getting out of bed in the morning... and this is a man who is still laying carpet for people at 78yo, so not a lazy person at all! I might send him a bottle of the Instaflex Advanced that @George C mentioned here -- it looks to contain turmeric plus other joint-friendly supplements, without any NSAIDs to interact with other conditions/medications. It's not cheap by any means, but if it improves his quality of life, it's worth it to me! My own knee/hip pain has improved a bit, partially because I've lost some weight, and partially because I'm not working in the ER anymore (less walking on the inpatient side of the hospital, more time sitting and charting incessantly). I still have a LOT more weight to lose, but just in the bit I've lost so far, I've noticed an improvement in my pain level.

I'm so glad you were treated well and are feeling better now! Do you know the difference between a surgeon and God??? God doesn't think he's a surgeon! 🤣 With that being said, one of the things I like about working in my teeny-tiny rural hospital is the lack of arrogance of most of the staff here. Both of our general surgeons have the least "surgeony" attitude / personality I've ever seen! They are very approachable, happy to answer any questions, and will even ask for advice on how to enter something into the computer (we have an antiquated software program that is EXTREMELY un-user-friendly). I ran into one of our OB/GYNs in the hallway the other morning -- she was coming in, and I was headed to a staff meeting, and I'd had her patient overnight. I stopped and told her that I "did the best I could" (patient had a VERY unique presentation, and the doc hadn't seen her in person yet, just via phone/text with the ER doc in the middle of the night). The OB/GYN literally said, "DUDE, look at what I woke up to in the middle of the night!!!!" and proceeded to whip out her phone and pull up our HIPAA-compliant encrypted texting program to show me the photo that the ER doc had sent her. She had heard her notification go off and opened the text all bleary-eyed at 2am and WHAMMO! -- a picture nobody wants to see at any time of day or night! 🫣 Finding a doctor or "provider" (wink to @Ocean Boy) who acts like a human being with common human decency is such a rarity these days... I'm glad you had a good experience!

Bonnie, you are so sweet to ask after me! I got behind on posts, then felt bad about it (because I like to read ALL the posts so I know what's going on with all my friends here), so I kept putting off coming back until I had time to read ALLLLLLL the pages I had missed and then it snowballed to the point that it would be physically impossible to catch up. (I have a tiny bit of OCD about certain things, and this is one of them.) So I finally told myself to suck it up, and I came back today and only read back about the last fifteen pages. (Yes, my OCD is kinda twitching right now, but I'm powering through! I know I have missed so much!!!!!) So to anyone who posted something sad, I'm sending you positive juju, and anyone who posted something happy, I'm sending you congrats. I'm glad to be back amongst you all again, and I'll try not to let my OCDish tendencies get in the way of posting here again in the future!

Map of the island:

I wouldn't exactly call 900-plus feet apart as "backing up to each other". Are you sure it was Hideaway's music you were hearing rather than from some random person on South Beach inconsiderately blasting music from a Bluetooth speaker?

Is the whole pool area loud, or is it concentrated on one end? Is the only tranquil area on the beach, not near the pool?

I know several adults who regularly order something off the kid menu, too!