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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • May I ask you about the nature of your heart problems exactly?

    Because a “heart attack” is not actually a medical thing. What people usually mean when they say “heart attack” is what we call a myocardial infarction (lack of blood flow to the heart muscle caused by a blockage or constriction in a coronary artery.) And less commonly people use the term “heart attack” to refer to cardiac arrest where the heart just stops beating for some reason. (Myocardial infarction can turn into cardiac arrest, but cardiac arrest can happen because of any number of other things as well.)

    So do you have a confirmed occlusion of a coronary artery? Or do you have a diagnosed cardiac arrhythmia of some kind? What are they planning to do to treat you? Because “don’t get excited” isn’t a long term management strategy. It’s usually just to get you through until you find a successful treatment.

    (I’m a cardiac critical care nurse. AMA)



  • Dark healthcare provider humor incoming: When considering these kinds of questions regarding CPR, we actually say, “Well, they ain’t getting any deader.”

    CPR actually reverses death. That’s why it only works sometimes and only if provided in a very short window of time after you’ve died. Nothing that is done during CPR is going to make that worse. So yeah, the reality is that it’s a little bit of a controlled free-for-all. It’s called “heroic measures” for a reason.




  • Singing lessons. I’m honestly not even kidding.

    I’m an American who grew up in a part of the country called Appalachia. My native accent is often associated with being uneducated and stupid, so I learned how to change it when I was a young adult.

    The thing that helped me most was voice lessons that taught me how to control the muscles in the nasopharynx, throat, tongue. The reason that’s difficult is because you can’t see the way those muscles move when someone else speaks or sings, so you can’t just mimic what they’re doing. It takes a little bit more effort to learn.

    Learning how to sing classical western music (opera type stuff) allowed me to learn how to speak in that kind of just generic Midwestern American accent that has less negative social associations.

    Now, that being said, I also have Indian friends who grew up in the United States who still speak with a similar Indian accent as their immigrant parents, and it’s really no big deal. So you could just roll with your native accent.

    (And also, I still code switch back into my native accent when I’m talking to my family or I visit my home region. Your native accent never goes away even when you learn a different way of speaking.)