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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
glitterandsalt
transpopuko

Hot take but schools shouldn’t have football at all

transpopuko

Football: *causes various injuries including head trauma just by playing the sport*

Schools: this is cool we should get our 15 year olds to play this in front of a screaming crowd and bribe them with scholarships

tamamos-spaghetti

schools: we should also use half our budget to keep funding it because then we can sell more tickets, which is why this school exists

drferox

Generic/Unknown/Fictional Poison Treatments

drferox

Whether you’re a writer trying to avoid getting yourself put on a watchlist, medically inclined or just curious, these are the general steps we as veterinarians would take with a poisoning or toxicity case when we don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, including a completely hypothetical made up poison.

Assess the patient

What you do first depends on what state the patient is in.

  1. Are they conscious and what are their vital signs?
  2. What symptoms do they have?
  3. Have they eaten the poison, or been exposed to a toxin some other way?

Treat the urgent problems

Treat the symptom most likely to result in death first. Trouble breathing? Control the airway. Irregular heartbeat? Get an intravenous line in and start symptomatic treatment. Seizures? Medicate them. The aim is to just make them ‘not dead’ in the next fifteen minutes so you can figure everything else out.

If they present without an urgent problem, so before they have symptoms, then move on to decontamination.

Decontamination

How did the patient come into contact with the poison or toxin?

  1. Did they eat it, if so can we make them vomit? Is it safe to do so (able to swallow, toxin does not release gas, isn’t corrosive), if not, stomach pump time, +/- enema. (some toxins, like snail bait, speed up the gut transit time so the poison is often sitting in the large bowel by the time symptoms set in)

  2. Is it on them somehow? Rinse, dissolve or otherwise remove from their skin.

  3. Is it injected? Well, we’re going to have to do this the hard way.

Clearing the toxin

So, patient is currently alive and not at immediate risk of dying in the next 20 minutes (hopefully), but still poisoned, and we want to clear that.

Most patients will have a perfectly decent liver and pair of kidneys to do most of the work for us, but we can help them along in a hospital setting. There are a few possible pathways any given toxin can take to be rendered harmless or to leave the body:

  • It can be metabolised. Be wary though, some toxins, like antifreeze, are actually metabolised into more toxic compounds before they are rendered harmless.

  • It can be excreted in urine. Unfortunately, some of these toxins can also be re-absorbed from the bladder.

  • It can be excreted in bile, enter the gastrointestinal tract and leave the body in the stool. But, many of these can also be re-absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract too.

So, how do we support these functions?

First, give an antidote if you have access to one. But with an unknown toxin, you probably don’t.

  • Intravenous fluids. The liver and kidney both like lots of fluid to work with, so we make sure they have enough, but not too much. This also helps dilute any toxin inside the kidney, reducing the damage it might do, and speeds up renal clearance.

  • You can couple this with a urinary catheter to drain urine immediately instead of letting it sit in the bladder, where it may be reabsorbed. We sometimes do this in a severe chocolate toxicity.

  • Oral activated charcoal. Whether it’s fed or administered by some sort of stomach tube, flooding the gut with activated charcoal absorbs most organic toxins (those with chains of multiple carbon atoms) and prevents them being absorbed. It wont work for very small molecules or heavy metals, but it’s a fair guess for a lot of unknown toxins.

  • Laxatives. Activated charcoal is often paired with a laxative, so that gut contents contaminated with the toxin aren’t sitting in the intestine any longer than they have to be.

And then, if we’re still going, things start to get a bit more involved.

  • That hardworking liver may well benefit from a collection of antioxidants and amino acids if it’s having a hard time. It uses those molecules to bind to all sorts of toxins and their breakdown products, and if it’s running out you can supplement many of them. Some can be given intravenously, some orally. SAMe is used a lot for just genetic ‘give the liver a little help’ purposes.

  • Some toxins bind to fat, which is a problem because the brain is mostly fat, and they don’t dissolve into the water of the blood to be cleared very easily. So we may use an intravenous fat infusion, usually used for nutrition, to help make the toxin accessible and clear it. There’s already plenty of water and protein in the blood, but not much fat except for immediately after a meal.

Symtomatic control

And while you are decontaminating and clearing the patient, you need to maintain symptomatic control. That is basically using whatever works to control any symptoms the poison or toxin is producing, as they happen. That’s the basic ‘keep it alive’ side of treatment while decontamination and clearing is the ‘actually treat the problem’ side.

And with a bit of luck, some good equipment and a bunch of skill, you can keep them alive long enough to figure out what’s going on.

nonbinary-scatterbrain
armeniangenocidehistory

Yepraksia Gevorgyan, 110

Armenian genocide: survivors recall events 100 years on

shingeki-no-survivors

To this day, the quote I read in a survivors biography in 7th grade still haunts me. “Who does now remember the Armenians?” 

You know who said that? Hitler. Adolf Hitler, as a way to justify the Holocaust. Because the world turned a blind eye to the Armenian genocide, he thought the world would turn its back to the Holocaust.

The worst part is, he was right. America, Europe, the governments knew what was going on. And they ignored it. Now, more than ever, remember the Armenians. Remember the Cambodians, Rwandans, Jews. Never again means now.

wiisagi-maiingan
wiisagi-maiingan

My favorite part of Halloween is the influx of people telling us not judge people who dress up as Natives because "they might be Native American and wearing traditional regalia!!"

First of all, what parent is letting their kid run around and trick or treat in regalia? Seriously, who does that?

Second of all, there is a big difference between felt buckskin dresses and plastic tomahawks vs a jingle dress beaded with love and care or a fancy shawl that was clearly handmade. Regalia looks authentic because it IS authentic, and no one is going to mistake it for a Halloween costume.

Think before you speak.