General Discussion Thread

[DB (f.k.a. DaveBro)]

Any thought of confetti (or other cool stuff) to celebrate the 500th page on Monday?   

[G0vnah]

Any thought of confetti (or other cool stuff) to celebrate the 500th page on Monday?   

I vote a virtual toast of Mead! Mead is delicious and great!

[Laufey]

Laufey, that sounds awesome. Lizards?

Two friends of mine own a few geckos and a bearded dragon. Possibly also pet cockroaches.

(Re: moving the mythology discussion: I'll notify the team.)

Oooh!  I ate there! The one in Helsinki?

There's a very silly photo of me wearing the plastic horned helmet.

Yes, that one. I prefer the Tampere one for atmosphere but the Helsinki Harald is good too.

That looks incredible! Although (coming from an English cultural background) it is a bit startling to see "cold smoked horse" all over the menu 

Horse is a bit special for Finns as well, although not long ago it was nothing unusual says my mum. When she was small horse meat was commonly used for making sausages.

[Sc0ut]

Job, rabies immunoglobulin isn't the only thing injected into belly muscles. When my husband was laid up for a couple of years with a hospital staph infection, they were worried about blood clots because for a lot of that time he was comatose or semi-comatose and not moving, so they injected a daily dose of anticoagulant into his belly muscles. When he was awake enough to notice, it obviously hurt. I've seen other drugs administered that way too.

During my recent hospital stay I was also given anticoagulant shots in my belly. On my last day there, the nurse said they can actually be given in the arm as well. I asked her to go for the arm to see if it hurts less, and in my case it seems it does a bit (it feels less wrong, anyway). Not sure why they'd go for the belly to begin with. I don't know if the muscle explanation holds, as for most people the abs are under deposits of fat of varying thickness.

[Róisín]

Laufey, the critters sound like fun! And thanks for doing the post!

Sc0ut, a doctor at the time said they use the belly muscle because stuff disperses slowly and evenly from there. Whether that's the only reason I don't know.

[JoB]

Job, rabies immunoglobulin isn't the only thing injected into belly muscles. When my husband was laid up for a couple of years with a hospital staph infection, they were worried about blood clots because for a lot of that time he was comatose or semi-comatose and not moving, so they injected a daily dose of anticoagulant into his belly muscles. When he was awake enough to notice, it obviously hurt. I've seen other drugs administered that way too.

Blood clots in immobile patients usually form in (the deep veins of) the leg, so I count those anticoagulant (e.g., Enoxaparin/Lovenox) shots as having an apparently valid reason to go there (in this case, near the large blood vessels leading to the legs). Same for local anesthesia shots combatting pain in the abdomen, or pain that goes through nerves in the abdomen (a situation occuring more often for gynecologists, I'm told), of course.

Injections that are popular to go into the stomach region are, in particular, those that the patient administers himself - no need to fold yourself up to reach a leg, twist around for sides or back, or do it single-handed on the other arm. (Insulin shots, which you do into the subcutaneous fat, are particularly often done that way.) That doesn't imply that it's necessary to place them there, though.

Lastly, there seems to be a hoax circulating among bodybuilders that steroids develop the muscles around the injection site more than those farther away, so those who want an instant sixpack are interested in making abdominal injections. The replies I see posted to them go out of their way to explain why one would not want to do abdominal injections unless necessary; in particular, the layer of muscle over your intestines is rather thin, contains more blood vessels you could accidentally hit as well, and if the muscle chooses to swell up, chances are that that'll be a problem in and of itself because some of them are "caged in" by tendons that cannot give way (which is exactly why a sixpack looks like a sixpack and not like just another beer belly).

[Unlos]

During my recent hospital stay I was also given anticoagulant shots in my belly. On my last day there, the nurse said they can actually be given in the arm as well. I asked her to go for the arm to see if it hurts less, and in my case it seems it does a bit (it feels less wrong, anyway). Not sure why they'd go for the belly to begin with. I don't know if the muscle explanation holds, as for most people the abs are under deposits of fat of varying thickness.

Those shots are deposited in the fat and not in the muscles at all (subcutaneously) which is why it is easy to use the stomach. But I think the early rabies shots were actually into the abdomen proper (intraperitoneally) but I'm trying to look it up

[saminiemi]

A registered nurse here.

I don't know anything about rabies shots, but normal injection ways are.
A)intradermal (inside the skin tissue, rare)
B)subcutaneus SC(under the skin, the fat tissue.
C)intra muscular IM(inside the muscle)
D)inside the vein. IV

Regurarly shot SC shots are given normally to belly area as there normally is relatively plenty of fat in large area. The other spot are the arms (on the outerside), but those aren't convenient when you have to give shots daily or several times a day, as the tissue tends to get irritated in the long run. Regurarly given shots are usually those that people tend to start giving themselves. For that the belly area is the most obvious spot.

Human system is build so that when the vaccinated stuff hits the bloodflow, the effect is more or less universal. Everything will be drawn into veins and sucked up to the heart and then distributed evenly to body via arterias. It really does not matter where in the skin tissue you get shot.

SC is the slowest as it takes time for the medicine to get absorbed from the tissue to veins (as there aren't that many small veins in the fat)
IM is fast as there is plenty of veins in the muscles.
IV gives you instant distribution. Only couple of heart beats.

You can give injections to the spot where the stuff is needed. Like lidocain to numb your skin before suturation, but that goes into "small surgical operations category"

[Laufey]

Today was fun but so much running around. Also packing, so now I'm feeling tired in the half asleep -way. BUT.

- Randomly ran into an old friend and her girlfriend at a cafe!

- Met my cousins, one aunt and one cousin's children (her one and a half year old kid is tall as a three year old, that's what you get when both parents are super tall I guess). Was fun catching up with them, the last time we met was two years ago.

- Met two friends and their pets: a bearded dragon, three geckos, five mice and three hissing cockroaches. I got to hold some of them, the mice, cockroaches and geckos, and surprisingly they all seemed ok about climbing on a stranger. Even the geckos seemed to regard me as a pleasant heat source and just... parked their bellies on my palms. Geckos are so cute.

- Later on got to meet more family, made it back quite late. Tomorrow is the flight back home to Iceland.

[urbicande]

Yes, that one. I prefer the Tampere one for atmosphere but the Helsinki Harald is good too.

I'll have to try it when I'm in Tampere later this year!

[Noodles]

My grandma works at a library, and this was being rejected on grounds of condition, so she brought it when she came to visit:

Reaction 1: aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa
Reaction 2, after reading some: tolkien you nerd
Turns out he, uh, """borrowed""" a few all of the dwarf-names.

[Róisín]

Noodly: dwarf names including Gandalf. And other things. What a find! Auden and Taylor translated the poetry well, Auden in particular was a very fine poet in his own right.

[Noodles]

Noodly: dwarf names including Gandalf. And other things. What a find! Auden and Taylor translated the poetry well, Auden in particular was a very fine poet in his own right.

Yeah, I knew about Gandalf, but not most of the others. I once saw an illustrated book of Auden poetry that was super super pretty, though I hadn't read much of his stuff. :>
(my new favourite thing: that one part where the giant takes Mjollnir hostage for Freya to marry him and she's like "haha no" so Thor puts on a wedding dress)

[Purple Wyrm]

- Met two friends and their pets: a bearded dragon, three geckos, five mice and three hissing cockroaches. I got to hold some of them, the mice, cockroaches and geckos, and surprisingly they all seemed ok about climbing on a stranger. Even the geckos seemed to regard me as a pleasant heat source and just... parked their bellies on my palms. Geckos are so cute.

I've got a gecko that lives in my spare room. The rest of the complex has periodic problems with cockroaches, but I never even see one, so I figure he (she?) is eating any that dare venture into my flat

[Róisín]

Wyrm: yes geckos do eat cockroaches, and moths and mosquitoes and anything else they can catch. Lizards are good pest control as well as being pretty.

Noodly: yeah, 'Thor's Wedding' is a way funny story. I tell it as part of my storyteller thing at the mediaeval fairs, and the little kids love it. I usually pair it with something like the Irish 'Munachar and Manachar', that lets them play with words and help to tell the story. The serious stories I save for the adults, and the really dark stuff for after the audience have gone home. This year at the Gumeracha Fair they've put me in the Viking and NVG encampment, so I'll be able to tell some of the sagas and the great tales, part of the Táin, and maybe some of the native songline stories.