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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2024

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  • I have done CPR on people before, and it is astonishingly brutal. To do it correctly, you have to cave their sternum in to be able to apply enough pressure to the heart to actually move blood around. For “Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest” patients that receive bystander CPR, the survival to discharge is around 10%, give or take. The most common outcome of CPR (if it is successful and you get a pulse back) is days to weeks of dying slowly and painfully in the ICU. The older someone is, or the more health problems they have, the much lower the chance of recovery is.

    CPR is absolutely reasonable for a younger person that stands a good chance of walking out of the hospital at the end of it, but 90 pound 90-year-old is extremely unlikely to survive in a meaningful way. It is very reasonable to request to not be put through that massive amount of suffering for a very low chance of any meaningful benefit.

    There’s also degrees of DNR. There’s separate options for CPR, intubation, supportive care, active treatment, palliative care, etc. It’s a lot more nuanced than CPR yes/no in most situations.









  • The ones I observed with my attending physician were using twilight sedation with propofol, and I think they got small doses of fentanyl to manage discomfort/pain during and right after the procedure. The propofol lets them knock you out for a while without putting you under so much that they have to intubate. (That is anesthesia’s job though, so it might be recorded differently on your records)






  • Biden absolutely has some control over this, but Netanyahu is the bigger problem at the moment. Biden has influence over Netanyahu (with a lot of caveats and red tape due to decades of foreign policy), and Harris has influence over Biden…but that’s not the same thing as absolute control. There are also parts of this that have to get approved by congress and there’s only so much the office of the president can do unilaterally.

    They can be doing more, and they should be doing more, but Harris’ role and capability is limited to that of an advisor (under strict scrutiny from everyone) right now, and that doesn’t actually give her that much power.



  • There are lower ranking Democrats that are espousing the right ideas about things like the filibuster, gerrymandering, and even some that are agitating about the electoral college BS. The best strategy I see right now is to clear as many Republicans out of office as we can, and support the newer, lower-level representatives that are aiming to affect real change.

    My voting strategy has always been to “vote blue, no matter who” on the top of the ticket, then do my research and be more selective about the offices lower down, especially in the primaries. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if more progressive candidates take hold of the House and the Senate if everything they pass just gets vetoed by the fascist in the Oval Office anyways.