u/XIFOD1M

Makes me chuckle every time

I’m a student and just finished a ride along. One call was a patient who was bleeding pretty heavily from an extremity. This patient was HIV positive and family said he was compliant with his medication. I’m aware that I’m being stupid, but I’m just anxious about the possibility of some kind of exposure that I may have simply failed to notice or that might have occurred after the fact during the cleanup. I was wearing gloves the whole time as well as glasses. At no point did any of his blood get on me, into my gloves (where I had a small abrasion from an earlier call), or onto my clothes. I wasn’t even handling the patient much. I cleaned up appropriately after and wiped down my equipment. Why am I still anxious about this?

Edit: Thank you all for the replies. I realize that it’s a part of being in emergency medicine, so I hope I didn’t give the impression that I was fearful while interacting with the patient. The reason I had very little contact is because, as a student, I’m really only supposed to watch to begin with. I appreciate all of the comments explaining that the risk is extremely low. I have a tendency to dwell on the fringe possibilities and “what ifs” but I’m also aware of the realities and understand that I’ll need to learn to be less anxious moving forward.

While not especially religious myself, I find religion as a concept fascinating. I’m awed by Catholic iconography and Jewish tradition and many facets of Sikh philosophy and so on. In particular, I find myself drawn to books that are based in religious traditions even if they themselves are not religious texts. Things like Paradise Lost or Faust or Inferno. Branching farther out, things like East of Eden or Frankenstein that make an effort to contextualize our relationship to God.

Frankly I don’t think I’m explaining this genre very well, but hopefully the books I’ve mentioned give a good enough idea of what I’m looking for. I think that all of these books have a feeling of gravitas that I enjoy. I’d be very glad for any recommendations along the same lines.

I’m pretty afraid of any kind of bug infestation, but especially roaches and bedbugs (especially because I’m in the city). I saw someone say the right move is: change at the station, shift clothes go into a garbage bag, which goes into washer and dryer on high as soon as possible.

What do I do about my boots? They’re old fire station boots, so they’re big, clunky, and leather and can’t go into a dryer. Odds are I’ll have to wear them on the subway home and at least a few steps into my apartment.

I’m completing my EMS course now but have been nervous for a while about one aspect of the job. I have relatively minor eczema on one hand and, while my dexterity isn’t impacted at all, occasionally I do get small cracks in my skin. It happens less since I started managing it more aggressively (vaseline and gloves at night, dishwashing gloves, etc.).

My primary concern is that I might be more likely to experience a risky exposure to fluids if my gloves were to break. I don’t know if I’m being overly cautious though. Case in point: I have my first ride along in a few days and a small crack just opened up on the tip of my pinky.

A secondary concern is that the constant handwashing and application of hand sanitizer will exacerbate the issue. That said, my symptoms are pretty minor so it should be manageable as long as I continue to treat it aggressively.

Basically since I was a kid, my tonsils get bad any time I have a cold. It was always the symptom that bothered me the most and I didn’t even realize until I was in my 20s that this was abnormal. I’m now 24 and I feel like the rate at which I get tonsillitis has accelerated slightly. It seems to be about once a month for the past year. Oftentimes, it’s the only symptom.

I got checked for Strep and the swab came back negative.

As for severity, I think my case is pretty mild compared to most of this sub. It’s never so bad that it can’t be controlled with medication, and oftentimes it’s more of an annoyance than an illness.

I’m currently dealing with the longest bout I’ve ever had (10 or so days) and it’s frustrating, but still not a major impediment to my life.

Should I consider tonsillectomy? Or are there things I still oughta try? Given the frequency, I think there’s no doubt that it would qualify as chronic, but with the severity being so middling, I’d be curious to hear your opinions.

I know that getting certified at a community college is the preferred choice, but it didn’t fit my timeline so I’m taking an accelerated course that was well reviewed.

The instructor just doesn’t seem great. She’s reading the slides like it’s her first time seeing them and will up and skip an entire section if she doesn’t understand it. She frequently mispronounces terms, which isn’t a big deal until she conflates them with other, similar terms.

I’m not trying to be a dick, but it just feels like something where I’d like to be receiving instruction from someone who knows what they’re talking about because the outcomes matter.

The practical skills education will hopefully be better and I guess I can follow along with the textbook to make sure I’m getting all the material.

So far, it’s been catastrophically difficult for me to keep all of my cuts straight and square. I’ve tried with templates as well as directly on the leather. I use a steel square to mark the cuts and a cork-backed ruler to actually make them. All the same, I often end up a few millimeters out of alignment on one end of the piece or another.

Does anyone have any tips I might try or is it just a matter of practice?

I was a hobbyist woodworker for a long time and had similar issues.

My ex (Girl A) and I were together for about two years. She broke up with me while she was away on a semester abroad and the whole thing was pretty traumatic. I spent the next year and a half getting over her, which was hard because she would reach out intermittently to say that she missed me (but didn’t want to get back together). I dated plenty of women in that time, but I started getting more serious with another girl (Girl B) recently, although we weren’t exclusive yet.

All of a sudden, Girl A reached back out and says the whole thing was a mistake. The same week, Girl B says she wants to be exclusive. I explain the situation to both and they agree to give me time to figure it out.

I have so many good memories with Girl A. I don’t hold the breakup against her. I’m so impressed by the life that she lives and I might even still love her. On the other hand, she can be oblivious. A lot of trust was broken when she dumped me. I don’t really like her friends or her priorities in life. On top of all this, she’s basically asexual. The connection is phenomenal when we’re just talking but there’s even less heat between us physically than there was before.

Girl B is different in a lot of ways. The connection started off purely physical and we “match each other’s freak” perfectly. She also likes the same kind of media that I do and we really get along. We debate and talk and it constantly feels fresh. And she demonstrated a lot of maturity with her level of understanding around this situation. The problem is that, while I like her more than Girl A, I don’t know if I love her.

Ultimately, I picked Girl B because I didn’t want to keep Girl A on the hook. I kept hoping that she would offer up some solution to all the fears I had, but she never really seemed interested in addressing our problems.

Now I’m worried that I made a mistake. Girl B is perfect for me “on paper” but what if the healthy thing is NOT being with someone just like me? What if I need someone like Girl A who’s going to force me outside of my bubble? Is the sex really that much of a factor? Right now it doesn’t seem that way but it was a MAJOR point of frustration when we were together.

My ex (Girl A) and I were together for about two years. She broke up with me while she was away on a semester abroad and the whole thing was pretty traumatic. I spent the next year and a half getting over her, which was hard because she would reach out intermittently to say that she missed me (but didn’t want to get back together). I dated plenty of women in that time, but I started getting more serious with another girl (Girl B) recently, although we weren’t exclusive yet.

All of a sudden, Girl A reached back out and says the whole thing was a mistake. The same week, Girl B says she wants to be exclusive. I explain the situation to both and they agree to give me time to figure it out.

I have so many good memories with Girl A. I don’t hold the breakup against her. I’m so impressed by the life that she lives and I might even still love her. On the other hand, she can be oblivious. A lot of trust was broken when she dumped me. I don’t really like her friends or her priorities in life. On top of all this, she’s basically asexual. The connection is phenomenal when we’re just talking but there’s even less heat between us physically than there was before.

Girl B is different in a lot of ways. The connection started off purely physical and we “match each other’s freak” perfectly. She also likes the same kind of media that I do and we really get along. We debate and talk and it constantly feels fresh. And she demonstrated a lot of maturity with her level of understanding around this situation. The problem is that, while I like her more than Girl A, I don’t know if I love her.

Ultimately, I picked Girl B because I didn’t want to keep Girl A on the hook. I kept hoping that she would offer up some solution to all the fears I had, but she never really seemed interested in addressing our problems.

Now I’m worried that I made a mistake. Girl B is perfect for me “on paper” but what if the healthy thing is NOT being with someone just like me? What if I need someone like Girl A who’s going to force me outside of my bubble? Is the sex really that much of a factor? Right now it doesn’t seem that way but it was a MAJOR point of frustration when we were together.

I’m getting my EMT in a couple months as well as going back to school for a pre-med post bacc program in the hopes of going to med school.

The EMS work isn’t just for the experience though, it’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and am very excited about. I’m in a position to spend some time looking around for a job and I don’t have to take the first thing that comes up, so I wanted to ask what the most exciting roles are?

I know that your role as an EMT-B is very limited compared to what a Paramedic or AEMT might do, so, at the end of the day, I’ll take what I can get.

I’m excited to do the job no matter what but, since I have the freedom to look around, I thought it’d be worth shooting for something fun.

Tl:dr: My ex broke up with me and came back. Now I still have feelings for her but we’re not very compatible. I need to chose between her and another girl with whom I’m very compatible, but who I do not love yet

My ex broke up with me about a year and a half ago. We had been together for two years and were very much in love. Obviously, I dated casually after the breakup and recently became FWBs with a new girl. The new girl is smart, pretty, fun to talk to, shares my interests, and the physical connection is incredible.

Until recently though, she was clear that she didn’t want it to be anything exclusive, so when my ex reached out to say that she missed me, I started talking to her again. (In fact, they both know about each other, so I’m not betraying either one’s trust). All of a sudden, everything that ever bothered me about my ex hit me all at once. She’s gorgeous and she’s kind, but she doesn’t share my interests, can’t solve her own problems, is passively self centered, the physical connection is nil, and is just generally a little air-headed.

This should make my choice simple, but here’s the problem. The new girl, has decided that she wants to be exclusive with me if I decide not to get back with my ex. I have so much fun with her and I like her a lot, but I don’t miss her when she’s gone and I don’t feel my heart race when I see her. The old girl annoys the hell out of me but I still get excited when she calls and I think it’s entirely possible I might still love her.

Both of them realize that they’ve put me in a difficult position, so they’re willing to wait and let me figure it out, but obviously I don’t want to prolong it. I just find myself oscillating from one to the other on a near daily basis. What do I do?

My figure drawings are passable, but nothing to write home about. I work from reference and don’t have a ton of interest in working from imagination, so anatomy tends to be less of a focus because, as long as I accurately draw what I’m seeing, it turns out okay.

That said, I wanted ti try my hand at some anatomy studies because it seems like something an aspiring artist should do. The more I research though, the less clear what an “anatomy study” actually is becomes. Many people are even opposed to the use of anatomy books that are floating around.

Is it a series of sketches of specific body parts in different orientations that detail the underlying musculature? Are they tracings of existing works that have the muscular insertions highlighted? What kind of practice should I put in that will be useful for the “atelier style” drawing that I’d like to achieve?

The funniest part of this sub is finishing the hardest crossword of your life, only to go to the comments where, invariably, someone has written “Cute puzzle. Pretty easy for a [insert day] though.”

Edit: For the record, I don’t begrudge them this at all. When I say “funny”, I do really mean that it makes me chuckle to get ego-checked like that

I’ve been drawing portraits with both graphite and charcoal for the better part of a year, with vague aspirations of moving to oil painting eventually. Right now my drawings are passable. I can usually draw a faithful depiction of an individual and have gotten better at conveying both emotion and various intensities of lighting.

My question is, so I wait until my drawing skills are “perfect”?

For what it’s worth, I don’t care at all if someone is googling answers to keep their gold streak alive. It has no impact on me and I’m happy they’re enjoying the hobby.

I’m curious though, are these people really NEVER stumped by a cross requiring two pieces of trivia that they have no way of knowing? Or have they just gotten so good that they’re able to work it out no matter what?

It seems inconceivable to me that these folks can go years without getting screwed over even once by bad cluing or an incomprehensible theme.

My ex dumped me in a pretty traumatic way almost 2 years ago now. She wasn’t cruel or disloyal, but she was thoughtless in the way she went about it. She was my first and only serious, long-term girlfriend and we had even been living together up to that point.

After the breakup, she continued to reach out occasionally, often intimating that she missed me but wasn’t “ready” to come back yet. This kept me on the hook and made it hard to heal for a long time.

Just recently, she reached out and explained that she missed me, that she thought about me every day, and that she wanted to know if it was too late. I told her that I needed time to think about it and that we should talk, because I needed to get a bunch of stuff off my chest before I could even consider the prospect.

Now that we’ve been hanging out a bit again, I worry that, despite the fact that there are still feelings there, we’re not compatible. I don’t begrudge her any of what happened when we were breaking up, but when I look at her, my heart doesn’t speed up the way that it used to. I might even still love her, and I definitely don’t want to hurt her, but I don’t know that I want to try. And it hurts all the more because it’s clear that she wants it so bad and so badly regrets what happened.

This girl is gorgeous, exceedingly kind, and an artist, which I find admirable. But we are now incompatible in so many ways too. We don’t have many common interests and theres just no heat between us.

I’ve been seeing a girl casually who has started to imply that she wants to take things to the next level. She’s also very pretty, she’s very smart, and the physical connection is unreal. I haven’t made a choice yet, but I’m leaning in the direction of making things work with her. (For the record, both of these women know about each other and I’m not lying to either one about my seeing them at the same time).

I just don’t know what to do. I was hoping that someone from this sub may be able to contribute some advice or stories of their own. I can’t believe that I’m thinking about rejecting my dream girl but I just don’t know what to do.