You Get Killed, Walk It Off

I go in and stare at the dog a moment: no facial swelling, no dyspnea, no lethargy. I clean up the vomit, then check his mucous membrane color: nice and pink with a good capillary refill time. I exit the room to finish the estimate and to inform doc when she finishes with her next exam.

A minute later: he's vomited 2 more times. I go back in, still no dyspnea but he's now lethargic. Lift up a lip and now his MMs are pale and muddy colored, with a CRT greater than 2 seconds. I go interrupt doc in the other exam to come look at the dog.

We give diphenhydramine IM. I go over the surgery estimate and linger in the room to monitor. Breathing is still good 10 minutes later but he's getting more lethargic. No improvement in MMs or CRT. Doc does a reasses, not a fan of heart rate/pulses. We give a steroid injection IM and some SQ fluids. I keep watching. 5 minutes later he's perking up, MMs are getting pinker. I kept him there another 15 minutes and by that time he was back to normal.

In my 26 years as a tech i can say that this is honestly the first time I've seen an older adult dog have an anaphylactic reaction to a vaccine it's gotten numerous times before. It's also maybe the 5th time I've seen an anaphylactic reaction *at all*. And you can imagine how many tens of thousands of animals I've either given vaccines to or have been working the day they got them after 26 years, including nearly a decade in a high volume shelter.

So anyways, that was my extremely anxiety inducing afternoon.

Me to the dog the whole time:

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.

try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.

Only high temperatures will kill cyclospora. It resides in what is like a shell, which is highly resistant to water and most cleaning chemicals. The substance it uses to cling to food is so strong we don't even fully know what its limits are. It may be best to avoid fruits and veggies you can't cook. Scrubbing only works if done hard enough and on foods with no hiding places (Like cucumbers and grapes). Peeling the skin off is your best bet at avoiding it however, scrubbing is not guaranteed.

I was bulled extensively in elementary school, but 1. Mostly by my teachers and 2. Not during this, because we ALL had PBS Nature and as Deer, I was allowed to gouge, kick, bite, keep running even after being grabbed, or body-check the larger children into the picnic tables and other architecture.

You know, for realism.

Players put their backs to the wall of the school building with one person currently in charge of throwing the ball as hard as possible at someone on the wall (we all wanted to see a brief imprint of "tioV" on the skin). You could try to dodge it but you had to stay against the wall. Torso shots were an auto out. If they hit a limb, you tucked it behind your body as if you'd lost it in combat. This actually meant legs were a more fun target than going straight for the torso as then you got a few rounds were a target could take additional limb hits because dodging was so much harder. Last player standing got to be thrower next round.

Eventually it was declared by teachers that the balls could only be used for kickball, funnelball or four square.

Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme