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  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 10th, 2023
  • baldingpudenda@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•First responders of lemmy, do you ever find yourself hating the people you're saving when you're constantly dealing with easily-avoidable catastrophes?
    841·
    1 day ago

    There’s a patient that we would see a couple of days per month. They’d OD on heroin, we hit them with narcan and an electrolyte IV to hydrate. He’d eat something and leave. We would give him resources to get some help. Each time I’d get more and more angry.

    6 months of this and I finally asked why he’d OD almost like clockwork. He said the good stuff sold fast and he’d only get enough for like 2 maybe 3 hits(?highs, fixes?) The guy’s life was just waiting on his dealer to get it. He would figure out how to make enough cash to keep his withdrawals at bay while saving up to buy up as much as he could when the good stuff arrived.

    The last time I saw him, day shift told me he came in, got hit with narcan twice, this was after EMTs had given him narcan as well. when he was steady enough, he left AMA(against medical advice). He came back 3 hrs later for another OD. Doctor came in and told him he’s killing himself. this organ is damaged, this one has this, blah, blah, blah. He responded that he’d be fine if we would stop killing his high. I did the usual and he left sometime the next day.

    We haven’t seen him in 4 months. I guess he finally got to enjoy his high.

  • baldingpudenda@lemmy.worldtoBooks@lemmy.world•Finishing Hyperion, what next?
    18·
    5 days ago

    Blindsight by Peter watts.

    Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

    So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

    You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,” recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist – an informational topologist with half his mind gone – as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

    Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex, also known as the striate cortex or Brodmann Area 17. --Wikipedia