Unashamed Good Omens Pirate

To be fair, bragging about overworking is in many cases a coping mechanism for medical professionals who are stuck in a system where they have very little say in how their workday is structured and how much shit they have to deal with. Doesn’t make the culture any less toxic though. “You have to be strong enough to survive inhuman working conditions in order to make it in medicine” is an attitude that is actively preventing much-needed change towards sustainable working hours and workloads.

I’ve made choices in my medical career that have led to a work situation where I get enough sleep and exercise, regular meals, a manageable workload, the necessary support from attendings, and a department head who actively prioritises the education aspects of my residency. I have time to sit down with coworkers for lunch on most workdays, instead of eating at the desk while typing up paperwork with one hand. I leave work on time for the most part, and I am compensated for the overtime if I have to stay behind to deal with a critically ill patient. I have met fellow doctors from other departments/hospitals who act as if I’m not a “real” doctor unless I regularly suffer at work, and the most charitable thing I can say about that is that I think they’ve worked in an abusive system for so long that they don’t recognise what a healthy job situation looks like when they see it.

And it's frustrating to me, because I think, excepting this aspect of the culture of doctors, I think would enjoy being a doctor AND I think I'd be unusually good at it AND I think, as frustrated as I would get by the brokenness of the medical system here in the US, I also think i would be unusually good at enacting positive change in the system and i would have a heck of a lot more clout and influence in doing so as a doctor than I do now.

I think a large portion of why the medical system in the US is so messed up is that it systematically keeps people such as myself out of the medical system and out of medical professions.

The culture of stress oneupsmanship and stress glorification systematically discourages and excludes people such as myself who have a strong desire for harmony between words and actions and integrity and a low tolerance for compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance.

You want to know why so many doctors give their patients medical advice they don't themselves follow? This is why.

Believe me, I know. My one grandpa was a classic doctor who smoked and drank and ate bacon and southern food deep-fried in trans fat and probably died 10+ years younger than he could have, because of it. And he was smart enough to know much of this stuff too.

This stuff is personal to me. I've seen all the different facets of it, in my own life, in my family, my friends. I've seen it kill people.

Imagine what society would be like if doctors led by example. Imagine if they healed themselves first and then approached healthcare from a place of wholeness. Imagine if a doctor was able to say stuff like...hey, I know it's hard, but you can lower your LDL through changes in your diet and lifestyle. I've done it and countless of my patients have. Here are some of my favorite foods that made it possible. Imagine if the doctor's office were located in a walkable neighborhood that made a walking-centered lifestyle easy. Imagine if the doctor just exuded healing vibes instead of lowkey coming across like House, a show that's often uncomfortable for me to watch just because of how close to home it hits. Like it's a caricature but the phenomenon it depicts is all too real. But imagine if the doctors were actually healthy.

This is what I want. Instead hospitals and medical offices are closing in walkable urban areas left and right and the cynical doctors are living a high-stress lifestyle with long car commutes to suburban hospitals and medical offices, and any half-assed lifestyle recommendations they give come across as "You and I both know full well I don't follow any of this advice myself and you're just gonna come back in a few moths and I'll prescribe you some drugs."

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare.

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

What if Grace made a lopsided crochet Rocky and cuddled it every night.

What if Rocky couldn’t stop making xenonite puppets of his alien friend.

I couldn't miss an opportunity to make epic geological phenotypes for eridians:D them rocks will look fly as hell on my watch!

Nerding out under the cut:)

“you came back!”✨🫶

One category I've been exploring is lace, because I always seem to revert to lace. Knitted lace often has lines of decreases, which distort the vertical columns of stitches into emphasized diagonals. Here is a small swatch of a lace diamond pattern, fairly bog-standard except for the cable crosses at the points of the diamonds. The top half of each diamond shape is framed by its decrease lines, while the bottom half grows vertically out of the YO increases.

By using some False Decreases, it's possible to add diagonal framing lines to the lower edges of the diamonds as well. Now they look more symmetrical, and have a nice kind of crispy-edges effect.

Here are charts for both stitch patterns:

Yeah it's not

Elderly lady mail clerk and young customer are chatting. Customer says, "oh! I'm wearing my boss's coat right now, give me something weird to put in the pocket!" Others within earshot all start looking for something because, hey, important quest. Mail clerk finally reaches under counter, pulls out a large roll of labels, and tears one off.

Twas this