Suburban Hospital Volunteer: Fill & Download for Free

It's unnatural for me to think along the lines of the best I've ever felt about doing my job. I just try to do a job to the best of my ability.Emily Dickinson wrote (1),'If I can stop one heart from breakingI shall not live in vain;If I can ease one life the aching,Or cool one pain,Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again,I shall not live in vain.'That sentiment pretty well sums up my approach to life and work, which were, are and likely always will be unabashedly intertwined. There's also a dueling desire for immortality through work, much as John Clare envisioned (2),'In every language upon earth,On every shore, o'er every seaI gave my name immortal birthAnd kept my spirit with the free'Lucky enough to have started by choosing to do research, I haven't yet had a job that was all bullshit. To work on ideas and on trying to generate evidence for or against them (basic research) or to actualize applications derived from those ideas (applied research) fits David Graeber's notion of a production rather than caring profession.Never been a full-time flunky, goon, duct taper, box ticker or taskmaster (3) though bullshit certainly consumed varying proportions. For example, early morning conference calls as part of bullshit committees (box tickers) set up to make appear something's being done though clearly nothing of value was expected, the goal more about being seen to do something rather than actually doing it.However, if creating indelible memories is part of what makes life meaningful, I seem to have done so quite diligently while doing my job. Perhaps the seeds were sown in childhood or maybe it's reflective of how I responded to formative influences.'General debility'. For years, the family GP would slash this term across the top of my prescriptions and indeed I fell sick quite frequently during a handful of years in my childhood. While the man himself is but a fuzzy memory now, I clearly recall that slash of writing and the intense frustration illness always succeeded in churning up to the surface.Ordinarily I used to be happy-go-lucky, easily content, easily pacified but the moment I fell ill, like a demon conjured out of the fever, my mind would seek to practically leap out of my body, frantically concocting lists of to-do and must-do items that I should be working on if only my recalcitrant body would cooperate.This sense of time passing is time wasting stuck with me. Somewhere along the way the habit set in to get the job done, whatever the job at hand might be. What that means in practical terms is I tend to put all of myself in whatever it is I choose to do. In the process I may have accumulated more than my fair share of hair-raising work-related adventures. A couple of illustrative examples follow.For some years I worked on a research project asking an important question that still remains unanswered, 'how does our immune system tolerate proteins (antigens) that the body only makes later in life?'. For various reasons, sheep turned out to be an optimal model system for testing answers to this question.Many outlandish adventures beset this eccentric little study. The final standout one occurred in 2006. The sheep were housed at the NIH large animal facility in Poolesville, MD. My then boss and I would drive out by 5 or 6 AM so I could be back in the lab by 9 or 10 AM to process the blood.This boss trained championship border collies as a hobby and of course, they herd sheep. Was she killing two birds with one stone with this project, with me playing the role of the unwitting flunky? We'll never know for sure.Anyway, we'd established a well-worn routine by then. After the dogs herded the sheep into a corner of the barn and held them in place, she would restrain one of them and I'd kneel in front, palpate and jab its jugular vein with a needle and syringe to pull ~30ml of blood.Things panned out dramatically differently this instance. Somehow the boss missed some restlessness between the dogs and sheep at the back. Suddenly, the entire herd stampeded. Right over me. Full-grown sheep, each weighing at least 200 pounds. Not only knocked on my back obviously but also somehow turned over during the frenzy. I have no memory of those moments. Boss later said she had to pull me up and shake me hard to revive me.I managed to limp back to the farm buildings, drank some hot tea, swallowed 4 aspirin and we headed back after a bit. After we finished the bleeds, I took them to the lab to process and set up the experiment. Once the pills wore off, excruciating pain, especially under my right scapula. The pain eventually dulled to a blunt ache. However, it would recur now and then, and only disappeared altogether several years later. I was obviously incredibly lucky to have escaped serious harm in this instance. Sense dictates I should have immediately stopped what I was doing and instead headed to a doctor followed by a visit to OSHA*. However, quitting the task at hand didn't even occur to me. After this incident, I was however done with that project.A second example shows I'm equal opportunity when it comes to expending effort, whether or not I'm paid. Capitalist logic would surmise I must have quite some holes in my head. This one happened in 2007. My husband and I worked in the same lab and used to eat dinner together at the NIH building 10, 2nd floor cafeteria. Often though the fare would be so depressingly unappetizing that we'd head out to Rockville, MD, eat dinner and return to the lab for an hour or two more of work before heading home.We went to Baja Fresh that evening and came back to the lab. I was driving my stick-shift which I parked and we headed up the stairs into the building. By chance, I turned around to see the car sliding backward. Wrong gear and forgot to put on the parking brake!Thankfully the lot was empty but for my car. Problem is it was starting to accelerate, veering to the left. It would end up crashing into a barrier and maybe even land on the walkway below. We started racing after it and I managed to get the door open but by then it had sped up quite a bit. Before I knew what was happening, my husband yanked me away and reached in to pull on the parking brake. I somehow landed on the floor.Thankful we managed to stop the car in time, I got in to drive it back up to park it correctly. My husband, who can't drive a stick-shift, got in beside me, took one look at me and told me to immediately drive to Suburban hospital located across the street from the NIH campus.I laughingly brushed him off saying I was fine. He just stared at me in a way he never had and kept insisting. Turns out my forehead somehow got slashed as I fell. There was a gash cutting across my right eyebrow. A little lower, well, you can fill in the blank yourself.Luckily the Suburban ER was practically empty that Friday evening. In what now seems like no time, an extremely competent and no-nonsense ER nurse had finished stitching up my gash. 10 maybe 12 stitches. She did such a good job the scar across my right brow is practically invisible now.Thing is those days I organized a monthly volunteer food for the homeless program that ran every 2nd Saturday, which as it turned out was the next day. The reader can perhaps see where this is headed. Yes, I pulled up to the event like clockwork, set up the tables and got the prep work done as usual. It isn't that I thought the work couldn't proceed without me. It's just that I abhor pulling out of commitments at the last minute for flimsy reasons and obviously I wasn't incapacitated. The volunteers were likely unable to comprehend why I even showed up because the area around my eye had swollen to the size of a demi-golf ball, something I could hardly hide. It looked far worse than I felt but they weren't to know that. After I explained what had caused the bizarre change in my appearance, they assured me they'd take care of everything and insisted I head home, so I did.Funnily enough, the outlandish work tales I've steadily accumulated over the years help keep me going. Of course, they pale in comparison to what it must be like to work in a fulfillment center warehouse or any of the millions of other slave labor jobs that continue to boom in this global economy era.* OSHA = Occupational Safety and Health Administration - WikipediaFoot-notes1. Life. Dickinson, Emily. 1924. Complete Poems2. John Clare – A Vision3. Amazon.com: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (9781501143311): David Graeber: BooksThanks for the R2A, Daniel Kaplan.

Sometimes, working with HIV/AIDS affected people in 1983 was a blessing. Sometimes it was rough. I remember doing volunteer work at Cook County Hospital during that time. I also remember how hard the disease hit those who had it.This was long before the advent of the modern miracle drugs that now seem to control it, and during, what I call, the “dark ages” before the general public began to understand (and accept) its mode of transmission and that it wasn't “God's scourge on those gay people.”For example, a good friend of mine had to go to the hospital. This was a “good suburban hospital” with excellent rankings. When the doctor came in and began to examine him, my friend told him (the doctor) that he had AIDS. The doctor jumped up and told him, “What!?!? See, now you've gone and contaminated my equipment.”Another time, while I was visiting a patient in the hospital, the guy I was visiting needed his medication (he had thrush, a common fungal infection in babies, but a very nasty one in adults). The nurse on duty wouldn't administer the medication. Since it involved just swabbing the stuff on the inside of his mouth, we did it. Nothing like that EVER happened at Cook County Hospital.Then there was the time we called a young man's family to tell them that they needed to get to the hospital because the guy had taken a turn for the worse. One of his sisters answered the phone, and after we told her what the doctors said her response was, “He ain't dying, he hasn't suffered enough.” (I am not lying, those were her exact words.) I cannot repeat what the staff had to say about that. Oddly, she out cried everyone else at his funeral.At the funeral of a good friend of mine, the funeral home put a glass cover over the open part of his casket. The funeral home refused to enbalm him unless the family agreed to that.However, there were positive responses as well. I saw both doctors and nurses hold the hands of dying patients, literally crying in frustration because they couldn't do more for the patient.Sometimes, nurses would work extra shifts to ensure that their patients had excellent care. This was before the mode of transmission was known. They would just change into another “suit and gloves” as we used call it, before going to because their next patient. The changing of mask, gloves, and gown was needed because many of the patients were in reverse isolation.Also, because a large number of people with the disease lost massive amounts of weight due to the effects of the disease on the body, often the medical staff would “walk the extra mile” in an effort to make sure patients ate.There was one nurse, in particular, at Cook County Hospital who took it upon herself to treat the patients as if they were related to her - especially those whose families wouldn't or couldn't visit a family member. Occasionally she would help patients eat if they were too sick to feed themselves. Or dry the tears of some patient who was isolated or felt alone. Or pray with a patient if asked. I remember she used to tell me that she had sons in the same age bracket as many of the patients, and she only hoped if it were one of her sons who was sick, somebody would be there with them when she couldn't.One VERY good thing that happened during that time was that people, both gay, straight, and those in-between, realized that they had to be honest with their doctors about their lives, and doctors learned that they had to honor their oath, and for some, actually many, it meant getting past their homophobia. But many realized that caring, compassionate patient care came first -without judgement.Edited for grammar.

The moon holds a mystical place in the history of human culture, so it's no wonder that many myths — from werewolves to induced lunacy to epileptic seizures — have built up regarding its supposed effects on us."It must be a full moon," is a phrase heard whenever crazy things happen and is said by researchers to be muttered commonly by late-night cops, psychiatry staff and emergency room personnel.In fact a host of studies over the years have aimed at teasing out any statistical connection between the moon — particularly the full moon — and human biology or behavior. The majority of sound studies find no connection, while some have proved inconclusive, and many that purported to reveal connections turned out to involve flawed methods or have never been reproduced.Reliable studies comparing the lunar phases to births, heart attacks, deaths, suicides, violence, psychiatric hospital admissions and epileptic seizures, among other things, have over and over again found little or no connection.One possible indirect link: Before modern lighting, the light of a full moon have kept people up at night, leading to sleep deprivation that could have caused other psychological issues, according to one hypothesis that awaits data support.Below, I'll review several studies — the good, the bad and the in between — but first some basic physics:The moon, tides and youThe human body is about 75 percent water, and so people often ask whether tides are at work inside us.The moon and the sun combine to create tides in Earth's oceans (in fact the gravitational effect is so strong that our planet's crust is stretched daily by these same tidal effects).But tides are large-scale events. They occur because of the difference in gravitational effect on one side of an object (like Earth) compared to the other. Here's how tides work:The ocean on the side of Earth facing the moon gets pulled toward the moon more than does the center of the planet. This creates a high tide. On the other side of the Earth, another high tide occurs, because the center of Earth is being pulled toward the moon more than is the ocean on the far side. The result essentially pulls the planet away from the ocean (a negative force that effectively lifts the ocean away from the planet).However, there's no measurable difference in the moon's gravitational effect to one side of your body vs. the other. Even in a large lake, tides are extremely minor. On the Great Lakes, for example, tides never exceed 2 inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which adds, "These minor variations are masked by the greater fluctuations in lake levels produced by wind and barometric pressure changes. Consequently, the Great Lakes are considered to be essentially non-tidal."That's not to say tides don't exist at smaller scales.The effect of gravity diminishes with distance, but never goes away. So in theory everything in the universe is tugging on everything else. But: "Researchers have calculated that a mother holding her baby exerts 12 million times the tide-raising force on the child than the moon does, simply by virtue of being closer," according to Fighting Ignorance Since 1973, a Web site that applies logic and reason to myths and urban legends.Consider also that tides in Earth's oceans happen twice every day as Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours, bringing the moon constantly up and down in the sky. If the moon's tugging affected the human body, one might presume we'd be off balance at least twice a day (and maybe we are).Studies of full moon effectsHere are some of the reputable studies in peer-reviewed journals that have failed to find connections:EPILEPSY: A study in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior in 2004 found no connection between epileptic seizures and the full moon, even though some patients believe their seizures to be trigged by the full moon. The researchers noted that epileptic seizures were once blamed on witchcraft and possession by demons, contributing to a longstanding human propensity to find mythical rather than medical explanations.PSYCHIATRIC VISITS: A 2005 study by Mayo Clinic researchers, reported in the journal Psychiatric Services, looked at how many patients checked into a psychiatric emergency department between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. over several years. They found no statistical difference in the number of visits on the three nights surrounding full moons vs. other nights.EMERGENCY ROOM VISITS: Researchers examined 150,999 records of emergency room visits to a suburban hospital. Their study, reported in American Journal of Emergency Medicine in 1996, found no difference at full moon vs. other nights.SURGERY OUTCOMES: Do doctors and nurses mess up more during the full moon? Not according to a study in the October 2009 issue of the journal Anesthesiology. In fact, researchers found the risks are the same no matter what day of the week or time of the month you schedule your coronary artery bypass graft surgery.Not all studies dismiss lunar influence.PET INJURIES: In studying 11,940 cases at the Colorado State University Veterinary Medical Center, researchers found the risk of emergency room visits to be 23 percent higher for cats and 28 percent higher for dogs on days surrounding full moons. It could be people tend to take pets out more during the full moon, raising the odds of an injury, or perhaps something else is at work — the study did not determine a cause.MENSTRUATION: This is one of those topics on which you will find much speculation (some of it firm and convincing-sounding) and little evidence. The idea is that the moon is full every month and women menstruate monthly. Here's the thing: Women's menstrual cycles actually vary in length and timing — in some cases greatly — with the average being about every 28 days, while the lunar cycle is quite set at 29.5 days. Still, there is one study (of just 312 women), by Winnifred B. Cutler in 1980, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, that claims a connection. Cutler found 40 percent of participants had the onset of menstruation within two weeks of the full moon (which means 60 percent didn't). If anyone can tell me how this oft-cited study proves anything, I'm all ears. Also, one should be skeptical that in the intervening three-plus decades, nobody seems to have produced a study supporting Cutler's claim.ANIMALS GONE WILD: A pair of conflicting studies in the British Medical Journal in 2001 leaves room for further research. In one of the studies, animal bites were found to have sent twice as many British people to the emergency room during full moons compared with other days. But in the other study, in Australia, dogs were found to bite people with similar frequency on any night. Some wild animals do behave differently during a full moon: For example, lions usually hunt at night, but after a full moon, they're more likely to hunt during the day — likely to make up for the tough going on a moonlit night.SLEEP DEPRIVATION:There's been a lot of research into this topic. In the Journal of Affective Disorders in 1999, researchers suggested that before modern lighting, "the moon was a significant source of nocturnal illumination that affected [the] sleep–wake cycle, tending to cause sleep deprivation around the time of full moon." They speculated that "this partial sleep deprivation would have been sufficient to induce mania/hypomania in susceptible bipolar patients and seizures in patients with seizure disorders." When I first wrote this story in 2009, I looked over these oft-cited suggestions, scoured the scientific literature, and could not find where any of them had been tested or verified with any numbers or rigorous study of any kind. Since then, there have been a few more studies on the topic.A small study in 2013, of just 33 volunteer adults, found they slept less during the full moon even when they could not see the moon and were not aware of the current lunar phase. The researchers say the findings would need to be replicated before they could be considered reliable, however. Then in 2014, a broad review of sleep-moon research, done by scientists at Max-Plank Institute of Psychiatry, found no statistically significant correlation between the lunar cycle and sleep.More recently, research published in March of 2016, of 5,800 children age 9 to 11 in 12 different countries, found they slept about 5 minutes less on nights with a full moon. That's "unlikely to be important" from a health perspective, the researchers said, but it is interesting. They speculate that the brightness of the full moon may be the reason, but with all the artificial light around these days, they doubt that suggestion.Expect more small studies in the future to suggest a link, and don't be surprised if further broad scientific reviews find the possible connections to be shaky.Myths persistIf one presumes that modern lighting and mini-blinds have pretty much eliminated the one plausible source of human-related moon madness, why do so many myths persist?Several researchers point out one likely answer: When strange things happen at full moon, people notice the "coincidental" big bright orb in the sky and wonder. When strange things happen during the rest of the month, well, they're just considered strange, and people don't tie them to celestial events."If police and doctors are expecting that full moon nights will be more hectic, they may interpret an ordinary night's traumas and crises as more extreme than usual," explains our Bad Science Columnist Benjamin Radford. "Our expectations influence our perceptions, and we look for evidence that confirms our beliefs."And that leads to this final note, which is perhaps the biggest logical nail in the coffin of the moon madness myths:The highest tides occur not just at full moon but also at new moon, when the moon is between Earth and the sun (and we cannot see the moon) and our planet feels the combined gravitational effect of these two objects. Yet nobody ever claims any funny stuff related to the new moon (except for the fact that there is more beach pollution at full and new moon ...).Information source :- Moon Myths: The Truth About Lunar Effects on You