southsamurai

Honestly, the perks were pretty damn intangible. Contacts with other caregivers and providers was the most useful one. Secondary, you build up community connections. There's people in my area that have gone out of their way to help me decades after I took care of their family member. I'm still friends with some.

At one point, I worked for the home health company that was a branch of the hospital, soi had acces to their medical library, and could attend seminars and lectures that would normally be only for enrolled students (teaching hospital).

The contacts I made, back in the early 2ks, allowed me a chance to interview pathologists, coroners and medical examiners for a book I was planning to write.

So, I guess that's more tangible than I thought lol.

But for me, I just loved being the guy that got to do the job. I was never happy it needed doing, but if it did need doing, at least I got to get in there. Since other parts of the job were a bit more difficult, having a patient that I was going to help heal was also a major boost and helped stave off burnout. Sometimes, no matter how well you handle end of life care, or chronic conditions, it grinds at you that the case only ends with death, or some other less pleasant outcome.

But wound care? 95%, you do the job and when the case ends it's because the wound is gone, and that feeling is like crack. You get little hits along the way as the wound improves, where you get to tell the patient how much has improved, that the infection is gone, or that it shrank over the weekend. But that big hit where you get to say "I won't be here tomorrow because you don't need me" holy crap is that magic. I'd ride home smiling and elated.

Because they're tiny. Some are invisible without magnification. Even the bigger ones are smaller than a grain of rice, and an unusually small grain at that.

All it takes is walking through dirt that's been exposed to something infected. It doesn't even have to be where an animal poops directly on the spot, some eggs can handle being washed away during rain to somewhere else. Which means that even pavement isn't completely risk free where avoiding bare ground would help.

You ever watch crime shows where they bring up Locard's principle? The idea is that no matter where you go or what you do, you will transfer something from one place to the next. That something may be indistinguishable from the environment, but we're swimming through clouds of dust and microbes every step we take.

Every step you take, barefoot or shod, you're in contact with something. Teeny tiny pieces will be picked up. It may fall off the very next step, or a dozen later, but you're carrying things along, even on the slickest, smoothest shoes. There's little microscopic textures that grab things.

An egg for a parasite is usually going to be great at sticking to things. That's how they find new hosts. Some of them can survive for scary amounts of time in fairly difficult conditions.

The question isn't whether or not you've ever carried something like that into your house, it's how many and how often.

Well, aren't you just a ray of sunshine. Answered my question at least

Masturbate to it.

Either you'll get a new fetish, or find a new level of rejection. Either way, you win.

I'm only joking a little.

The point is that you'll get over it eventually. Everyone that runs across their parents naked or fucking gets over it at some point. Sometimes it takes growing the fuck up to get there, but that is what it is.

The sooner you stop letting yourself think it's some kind of big deal, the sooner it'll stop feeling like a big deal.

Pandas

x-post from /u/99trumpets (original post)

"Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears.

Panda Rant Mode engaged: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA. Wall o' text of details:

• In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too.

In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem.

• Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on.

Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding. Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade).

• Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation.

Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source. Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities. Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course.

Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges.

• The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault.

Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes.

Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise. tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out. /rant.

• Edit: OP did not say anything wrong but other comments were already veering into the "they're trying to die" bullshit and it pissed me off. (Sorry for the swearing - it's just so incredibly frustrating to see a perfectly good species going down like this and people just brushing them off so unjustly) Also - I am at a biology conference (talking about endangered species reproduction) and have to jump on a plane now but can answer any questions tomorrow."

Well, a lot of it comes down to what's on the floor, and how aware you are of risks

Truth be told, a pill isn't going to pick up anything that's going to hurt you in the amount of time it takes to pick it up, unless you're in a location that is highly contaminated. And if you're in that kind of place, you wouldn't be taking a pill inside to begin with, you'd be geared up.

But, floors are what we walk on. When we walk, every step picks things up, and the next puts some of it down.

As such, anything could be there, from something as innocuous as sand to as bad as the eggs of a parasite. If someone isn't following good practices and is walking around in the wrong places they could track in anything, even crazy shit in a hypothetical, like uranium dust or whatever.

Your average household though, you're maybe going to be dealing with mild chemicals in small amounts, some e-coli, maybe some tetanus, and the usual assortment of bacteria, fungi and particulates that are everywhere anyway. So, if what you drop isn't going to carry enough of any of that into your mouth to disturb the microflora already present, it won't matter.

Thing is, the wetter something is, the more it's going to pick up, and the more likely it is to carry it to your mouth. A pill isn't picking much up, and some will fall off. A piece of bologna is picking up a lot and it'll stick.

So, it's all about risk management. There's some really dangerous stuff on even very clean floors sometimes. If you're walking in and out a lot, the risks go up that something bad will be there. Me? I'm at least going to thoroughly wash that bologna if I starving and I can't afford to replace it. Then cook it to hopefully kill anything left behind. But a pill? I'd have done exactly what you did because the risk is so low it isn't worth worrying about.

And?

You act like my approval or disapproval of their hobbies, lifestyle, or whatever is supposed to change basic decency. It doesn't.

There are limits to what I'll call someone for sure. I'm not calling anyone master. Beyond that, it's just good manners to try and call people what they prefer, within the limits of our own capabilities. DR knows my brain is fucked and it would make it a nightmare to have a conversation if I tried to use the person-independent neopronoun reliably, so they don't give me shit about screwing up.

That's basic decency.

If I'm talking to a preacher and they prefer to be called reverend, I'll call them that, and that's someone who talks to their imaginary sky friend on a daily basis. Wanting to fuck a dragon isn't any weirder than that. It's just basic decency.

Out here irl, people sometimes use my middle name instead of my first. Usually because they know a family member that talked about me. But I don't let anyone but family use my middle name. The people that refuse to honor that are assholes, and I have nothing else to do with them. Because it's just basic decency.

If DR was wanting to be called furher, or messiah, I can see refusing to use their preferred terms. But they aren't.

And it doesn't even matter if they were trolling because someone else's bad actions aren't an automatic excuse to be an asshole too.

What kind of person do you want to be? The sort that errs on the side of kindness and manners, or the sort that's an asshole? That's what it comes down to.

Well, surr.

But if you aren't respecting people's pronouns, you're an asshole, so the choice comes with that

They would contact the rail companies and ask travel be stopped, if possible. Otherwise they just run it across and hope. There are devices that can do the job, but my cousin says he's never seen any on an engine.

Fuck me. I totally missed it.

Now what am I supposed to do do?

If you're dating for a year and a half and you don't know if it's serious, it ain't.

However, if your partner's kid is going giving you a mom/dad day anything, the kid at least is taking it seriously, so you damn well better figure it out fast

Jfc, that group goes hard