Health | Ain't Complicated

Caregiving and Medical Emergencies

From CarePages, this observation:

Caregiving for someone who is seriously or chronically ill is a daunting task, and an emergency can be frightening. Taking steps in advance will help you handle a crisis, should one occur.

They proceed to give some emergency preparedness tips with these 5 Basics Steps to Emergency Preparedness:

Take a CPR class.
Learn the Heimlich maneuver.
Maintain a well-stocked first aid kit.
Create a medical provider list and keep copies handy.
Buy an automatic blood pressure cuff.

So obviously some sort of caregiver training is important. Anyway, after giving some elaboration on each of those, they give these 4 Steps to Take in an Emergency Situation:

Assess the situation.
Call 911.
Loosen any tight clothing.
Comfort and communicate.

In conclusion, “For a caregiver, an emergency can be both alarming and frightening, but when you’re prepared, you can make a tremendous difference in your loved one’s well-being.”

So there you are, caregivers: A few ways to reduce caregiver stress.

Probiotic Enzymes

I take some because they’re supposed to be good for my innards. I guess.

Something about flora. (Maybe even flora and fauna?) Stomach flora? Intestinal flora? Colon flora? Appendix flora? Gizzard flora? Something.

For me, the most noticeable benefit to these billions of “viable organisms” is that I have far fewer episodes of heartburn. (Or is it acid reflux?)

But I have more questions: Read it all

Iced Tea and ITF

“Iced tea I know, but what’s ITF?” you might be asking yourself.

In this case, ITF stands for Iced Tea Forever.

He’s the second tenor in the no-longer-singing-together A Cappella Harmony Quartet.

The purpose of this post is to show him this “staged” photo I took an hour or two ago in our kitchen:

I make the iced tea around here, Tom. And mighty fine iced tea, I dare say — half peppermint, half spearmint. (I really like my Mr. Coffee Iced Tea Maker.)

PSA to Cows: Eat Grass

Strange and dumb are reasonably mild terms to apply to this:

The British government is sending out a different message: Sex can be fun and healthy, for young and old alike.

In two new leaflets, the National Health Service advises elderly patients that it’s “never too late to experiment” and tells teenagers that sex every day “keeps the doctor away.”

“Urging them to enjoy their own bodies is a bit like encouraging cows to eat grass or birds to fly,” said the Independent newspaper.

Those excerpts come from this WaPo story.

You want my take? No? Then quit reading here.

So you’re still reading. OK, thanks.

Urging them to sin against their own bodies is like encouraging cows to eat tansy or birds to fry…only worse. Much, much worse.

“Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18).

Instead of keeping the doctor away, I thought it brought on the doctors…for treating STDs and for “treating” pregnancy and for delivering babies. But, hey — maybe it doesn’t work in the Mother Country like it does here in the Colonies.

If you think that’s my Victorian morality showing through, that’s OK. I just as well have it (as long as it’s first Christian morality) since Victoria’s offspring seem to have sprung free of it.

Look, I know they’re not legislating anything (yet), but I’ve got a question. If you “can’t legislate morality,” can you legislate immorality?

HT: Emily Belz — “Forget abstinence education!”

Of Graphene and Bottled Water

I was winding down my computer stuff for the day when I saw two interesting headlines. Here are the introductions to the stories, under my modified headlines:

New Wonder Material, One Atom Thick

Imagine a carbon sheet that’s only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.

That’s graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It’s creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.

“It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.

“A few grams could cover a football field,” said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce.

Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it’s as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll.

Skip the Bottled Water

Consumers know less about the water they pay dearly for in bottles than what they can drink almost for free from the tap because the two are regulated differently, congressional investigators and nonprofit researchers say in new reports.

[…]

The researchers urged Americans to make bottled water “a distant second choice” to filtered tap water because there isn’t enough information about bottled water. The working group recommends purifying tap water with a commercial filter, however.

Now I must get to bed. I volunteered to take my Dad and my aunt to the Portland (Oregon) airport early tomorrow morning. To pull that off, I need to get up at three. 😯

Give Peas a Chance!

I like peas. Especially raw, popped right out of the pod, fresh off the stalk.

And I remember years ago when we were house-sitting Marion and Berneice Schrock’s house in Hubbard, Oregon. They’d told us to help ourselves to stuff in the freezer. I fear we launched a Bigger Than We Should Have assault on their stash of frozen peas-and-baby-onions. Wow, those were delicious!

I also like split pea soup, especially with bacon and/or ham in it.

Not only are peas delicious in so many settings, they’re alleged to have nutritional benefits for your bones and cardiovascular system and who knows what else.

So, parents, be good parents and train your children early to eat these little round marvels. If you start early enough, you’ll have unusual children — who like peas. (And you might learn to like them as well.)

I thought I coined “Give peas a chance” as a unique, lightly-mocking spin-off of “give peace a chance.” Google dissuaded me of that self-inflicted, self-aggrandizing notion. 😆

Being of the suspicious, determined-not-to-be-gullible sort, I wonder if this image has been photoshopped:

What’s So Great About Cherries?

Well, they look pretty on our trees:

And they taste really good in our mouths. (I ate fresh home-grown ones with my coffee and tea this morning.)

But nutritionally and health-wise, what’s so great about them?

Here are three articles I found on the subject:

We had a good cherry crop. I’m thankful.

Oh, and what’s so great about cherries? Well, they “contain significant amounts of melatonin” and they have a “good combination of antioxidants.” Click the links above for the details.

(I wonder if Michael Jackson ate them at all. I imagine they could have done wonders for his mental and physical health issues. Maybe he had an orchard of them at Neverland, eh?)