newbie

What did you see during your first week of work?

I saw a kid who had been out in the sun all day. Her core temperature was 40 degrees celsius and her brain was cooked like an egg. We cooled her down until the helicopter could come to transfer her to the children's hospital.

I saw a glass dildo sitting high in someone's tummy; I wanted to ask them, "If you're going to spend all that money to put things in your butt, shouldn't you make sure they're butt friendly?" I want to make pamphlets for the waiting room: All about that bass? Try a flared base!

I saw a toe that had been disconnected from it's owner (mostly) and reunited these lost friends.

I saw a nail through a thumb that somehow missed the bone. The owner was learning to be a roofer. It was his first hour on the job. I suggested alternative career options as we yanked it out.

I saw fractures and cuts and coughs and colds and sore tummies and hernias and one thousand vaginas and one swollen ball.

All in all, a good week, I think.

Heavy Metal

The median level of ferritin in women is 45. This means that roughly half of women (surveyed in an American study) are low in iron. The study also found that women who were iron-deficient perform worse on basic cognitive tests.

Extrapolating from this, half of women are not meeting their cognitive potential due to low iron levels.

This information was delivered to me by my emergency medicine podcast, as I drove home from my first staff shift. My immediate thought was, "Well obviously! The patriarchy keeps us malnourished to prevent us from reaching our potential!"

Hear me out...

Society pushes women to be thin and sweet and docile. This involves being gentle - not red meat eating carnivores, but salad grazing ladies. This means eating less; smaller portions proportional to our dietary needs. This means eating restrictive diets that prevent women from getting their required levels of iron, folate and thiamine; all required to maintain healthy hemoglobin levels.

I'm not saying the patriarchy is consciously forcing women to have a low-iron diet in the hopes of keeping them docile and dumb. I'm just saying it's a nice coincidence that the same societal mandates that keep us hungry and weak also work to keep us cognitively slow and cardiovascularly deplete.

I got a nice rage burn as I drove. I pulled a chicken bone out of someone's tonsil yesterday, no sedation required, so I'm pretty sure I'm at the top of my game. And my iron levels are spectacular. Fight the patriarchy! Eat a steak! Or take your ferrous gluconate regularly.