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Manly Stuff Paint me surprised by this Real men

LIFE IN THE ASYLUM by Will Dabbs MD

     I was working nights in the ER at the Level 1 trauma center in Jackson, Mississippi. For a time Jackson, Mississippi, was, per capita, the most violent city in America. Places like Chicago and Detroit had larger body counts, to be sure. However, if shredded meat per unit population is your metric, Jackson eclipsed them all.

I never did a full shift in the ER without at least one gunshot wound. My personal record was seven. Once you got the holes plugged these unfortunate folks were surprisingly pleasant company, often even polite. The shooters weren’t typically psychopaths, not by a long shot. To an individual, they all just had poor impulse control.

The capacity to control one’s emotions is arguably the single greatest predictor of success in life. It isn’t money or race or social status. Most everybody I encountered shot up in the ER angered easily. Prisons are replete with such people.

Our hero was maybe eighteen or nineteen. For reasons that should soon become obvious, documenting his birthday was not our top priority. Our first inkling something was amiss was a frantic radio call from the ambulance. This young man had run afoul of some unlicensed pharmacist over turf, the exorbitant price of illicit pharmaceuticals, or the conflicted affections of some young lady. Eventually somebody slapped leather. He had been shot about fifteen minutes before reaching the ER.

It took five of us to hold him down. This guy was thoroughly jacked—think an anorexic Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1984. He was also liberally festooned with gang tats. As they rolled him off the truck he was fighting like a Norse berserker—screaming, shouting, and cursing at all of us. All he wanted to do was to go home. He told us as much with great verve. How much of that was exogenous drugs, an innately fulminant personality, the intensity of the moment, or some toxic combination I shall leave to the philosophers.

We finally got him strapped to the bed and went to work. Once he realized he was not going anyplace he calmed down enough to speak. More to serve as a distraction than anything else, I innocently inquired who had done this to him. It didn’t matter at all. The perp was the cops’ problem, not ours. However, anyone in extremis benefits from a little redirection. They all wanted to share their stories. If I could get him focused on ratting out the guy who shot him he might not fight us so fiercely if we needed to start a central line. Panting from the exertion, he gasped sincerely, “It was Some Dude.”

The entire room erupted in marginally-restrained laughter. We weren’t trying to be cruel or make light of this poor guy’s sordid state. It was simply that his answer was so monotonously predictable. They all claimed some variation on this theme—“There I was, sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea and reading the Bible to my blind grandmother, when Some Dude jumped out from behind the bushes and busted a cap in my ass. It was dark and he was wearing a hoodie, so I couldn’t tell who it was, but he was packing a Glock nine…”

They all said that. If the local constabulary could just lock up Some Dude then Jackson would be instantly transformed into Mayberry. Mr. Dude was a bloodthirsty brigand indeed.

We got his clothes cut off easily enough. This guy was well and truly ripped. He had clearly logged some serious time with free weights. The external stigmata of his injury were deceptively benign.

There was a single black hole in his anterior chest roughly equidistant between the sternum and the right nipple. There was surprisingly little blood. There was also no corresponding exit wound.

Bullet holes are a special kind of black. They’re a bit like that inky dark spot between the stars on some warm spring evening bereft of overcast. Bullet holes seem to suck in both light and hope. This one was also sucking in a little air.

In my experience, thugs use whatever assortment of ammo they’re able to steal—sometimes it’s high-end, sometimes it’s crap. Cop bullets would reliably shred dudes. Thug rounds most typically just punched tidy little holes. However, just like real estate, the name of the game was location, location, location. This location was bad.

I’m expanding the timeline a bit. What happened here happened quickly. We were all working frenetically to keep this kid from dying. However, we were soon to be overcome by events.

I knew this guy for maybe ten minutes total. During that brief time he underwent the most remarkable transformation. When he rolled into the ER he was profane and venomous. He snarled at us, cursing and thrashing. He told us in no uncertain terms what he was going to do to us if we didn’t cut him loose and just let him go home. And then something creepy happened.

Gradually his demeanor thawed. He began begging us. He offered us money or drugs, anything we wanted, if only we would not let him die. This went on in the background for a few minutes, and then he ignored us altogether. That’s when he began to pray.

Maybe the guy grew up in church. Perhaps he had a Godly grandmother. At this point, our hero started praying like a nun at a Black Sabbath concert.

“Please, God, don’t let me die! Lord God Jesus, please don’t let me die! Oh, Jesus God, please don’t let me die!”

His voice got higher, and he struggled against his restraints. Then he arched his back and blew great gouts of blood out of his mouth and nose. It went all over the place. And then he died.

We worked on him for a while after that, but there was no fixing that much broken. We postulated that the round had likely perforated his pulmonary vasculature. These large-caliber vessels carry vast quantities of blood, particularly when you are properly tooled up. Most of your chest is empty space. Every second after he had been shot, he had been bleeding into his lungs.

A typical adult human carries around five liters of blood—two and one-half two-liter Coke bottles. Lose a liter of that in twenty minutes, and normal people are flirting with unconsciousness. Make that two liters, and it becomes life-threatening. There is surprisingly a lot of space in your lungs to park blood.

The support staff in such a world—the nurses, respiratory techs, and the like—are all of them maniacs. That’s the only reason anyone might voluntarily work in a place like that. They goaded the surgical residents for not cracking the guy’s chest right there in Trauma 1. However, the surgeons had all done this before. That’s not something sensible folk aspire to do.

I washed up and took a minute, actually about five. While we were dealing with our condemned thug, life went on in the ER. That meant sewing up lacerations, stabilizing broken bones, and valiantly battling the scourge of venereal disease one shameless John at a time. However, my heart wasn’t really in it. The rest of the night was a bit of a blur.

I had a half-hour drive to get home. I didn’t want my family to live in the kind of place where I worked. The parts of Jackson I traversed going home looked like Mogadishu. Some of the street walkers and drug dealers I saw in the ER likely plied their trades around my daily commute. By the time I got home the sun had come up. I pulled into my garage utterly spent.

My first stop was the laundry room. There I found Samantha, our golden retriever rescue. She was a simply magnificent dog—affectionate, loyal, and without a mean bone in her body. The fact that she was in the laundry room meant that she had been a distraction. My wife homeschooled our three kids. Whenever Samantha’s presence began adversely affecting the kids’ school work, she got banished. The same thing happened to me from time to time.

This time I needed her. I rubbed her ears and accepted her unqualified affection with gratitude. That’s the great thing about dogs. They love you when you’re tired, grouchy, and smell bad. Unlike humans, canine love does not come with preconditions. In this case, Samantha was showing an unnatural interest in my shoes. That’s when I realized it.

My sneakers were liberally doused in human blood. The vile stuff had also gotten into my socks. We typically gird up with goofy little booties and such, but this evening there had been no time. I shed all of it, scrubbed everything down in the sink, and put my shoes out in the garage to free Samantha from temptation. Now finally barefoot and suitable to reenter the land of the living, I stood beside the closed door and just listened.

On the other side of the door there was laughter and happiness not befouled by the world I had just abandoned. The kids didn’t always like school, and my wife was a serious teacher. However, there was so much love there. I felt vaguely like a man crossing a great desert who finally had water within his grasp. With that I pushed into the house.

The kids jumped up and ran over to grab my legs. My wife tolerated the interruption. I hugged each of them in series and then my bride. That was when she innocently queried, “How was your night?”

How do you answer that? I had just put my sneakers in the garage so the dog wouldn’t be drawn to the human blood that defiled them. My family did not need to be befouled by such as that. My wife never signed up for it. I just smiled and said fine. When you live long enough in an asylum, eventually it starts to feel like home.

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A Victory! COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Good News for a change! Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Leadership of the highest kind Paint me surprised by this Real men Stand & Deliver

The man must of had solid brass balls!

On this day, 80 years ago on April 2nd 1945, Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg met Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler at the Hohenlychen sanatorium in Lychen, Germany; Himmler was unsuccessful in convincing Bernadotte to help seek a peace between Germany and the Western Allies.

In 1943, Bernadotte was appointed head of Sweden’s Red Cross.

He wasted no time using his contacts and his humanitarian platform to try to help some of those most in need: prisoners of war (POWs) held by Germany.

By the beginning of 1945, Bernadotte had managed to secure the exchange and safe passage to Sweden of thousands of Allied POWs. But rather than withdrawing after a mission successfully accomplished, Bernadotte dramatically upped the ante. Contacting Heinrich Himmler, he proposed that the Swedish Red Cross be allowed to bring concentration camp inmates to Sweden, too.

It was a brazen suggestion, but it worked. Himmler gave Bernadotte permission to retrieve some 8,000 inmates, primarily Danes and Norwegians, from German concentration camps.

To ensure that Allied bombers didn’t target the evacuees, Bernadotte secured permission for the inmates to travel in 36 buses (donated by Volvo), which had been painted white with a red cross on their roofs. Because incarceration had left the inmates in perilous health, the buses also carried medical equipment. Some 250 Swedish Red Cross helpers accompanied Bernadotte and the concentration camp evacuees in what soon became known as Bernadotte Convoys.

With these evacuations underway, Bernadotte presented Himmler with another humanitarian rescue scheme: he wanted permission to free non-Scandinavians; Jews and others, from concentration camps and bring them to Sweden. On April 21st, Himmler agreed. Bernadotte Convoys managed to bring some 12,000 other concentration camp inmates to Sweden, including 7,000 women from Ravensbrück, around half of whom were Jewish.

When the war ended, Bernadotte had rescued at least 15,500 concentration camp inmates

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Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Manly Stuff One Hell of a Good Fight Paint me surprised by this Real men Stand & Deliver War

I found this on the net & I was pretty amazed on how many ships were sunk at Guadalcanal

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Born again Cynic! California Paint me surprised by this

The Hidden Reason California Is So Expensive | Steve Hilton

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California Grumpy's hall of Shame Paint me surprised by this Some Sick Puppies! The Horror!

Just another sign of the decline (Los Angeles & I was born about a mile or so away from here))

According to [a] Reddit user … every tree between 1st Street and Wilshire Boulevard was cut down. However, a review of photos suggests a few remain standing.

 

Photos from Instagram show downed trees at the intersections of Olympic Boulevard and Hope Street, Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street, and Broadway and Cesar Chavez Avenue.

 

 

It was Easter weekend, so LA’s Urban Forestry Division didn’t answer calls from the media. LAPD also didn’t have any answers for the media. Apparently someone can cut down trees in the middle of America’s second-largest city without a single cop noticing.

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Our Great Kids Paint me surprised by this Real men Soldiering

BE THE BALL! BY WILL DABBS, MD

Winter sports are justifiably popular in the frozen north. However,
such stuff can be terribly unforgiving of foolishness. Public domain.

I had one particularly unfortunate soldier when I was stationed in Alaska. We’ll call him Billy. Billy was a good kid, but he grew up with a dearth of positive role models. We were putting him out of the Army for writing bad checks, but that process takes a minute.

Our arctic military base sported a well-lit ski slope that was visible from all over post. The Army just teems with arcane rules. Included among the myriad of obscure dicta was a prohibition against farting around on the ski slope after hours. However, these were young American males. You can take the boys out of second grade, but you’ll never take the second grade out of the boys.

On this particular Friday evening, Billy and his mates had parked at the base of the ski slope and trudged up to the top with big inner tubes to do some after-hours, off-the-books sledding. Somebody spotted the mischievous scamps and alerted the MPs. The Army cops met the motley mob at the top of the hill and directed them to go elsewhere and do something else. My guys requested and received permission to make one last run to get back down to their vehicles. Cue the ominous music …

Everything is Physics

 

Billy launched down the sharply angled slope atop his inner tube. As it is not physically possible to maintain any semblance of directional control on such a primitive conveyance, he drifted off the track and struck a light pole a glancing blow. Fret not; there was no significant harm done … yet.

Billy bounced up in the air only to awkwardly remount his hurtling tube. This time, he was on his back, clinging for dear life with his legs flailing vertically in the air. It was in this inelegant configuration that his butt impacted the ski rack set in concrete at the base of the slope. He was traveling at, conservatively, three times the speed of sound when he sheared off that big piece of treated lumber with his rectum.

By the time his buddies reached his side, he had eviscerated himself through his anus and was in the midst of a grand mal seizure. Billy’s entrails had tragically become his ex-trails. Investigators discovered one of his testicles in the snow the following day. To put it mildly, Billy was in a pretty rough way.

Come dawn, I located Billy in the hospital. Before I went to med school, he was the person nearest death, but not technically dead I had ever seen. He miraculously survived the first few days and underwent his first of several surgeries.

Among other things, this ordeal earned him a colostomy bag. For those unfamiliar, a colostomy is a surgical procedure wherein your large bowel is plumbed through a hole in your abdomen to a bag on the outside.

Once complete, a colostomy leaves your butt free to heal, meditate, sleep, or whatever without further molestation. Surgeons perform them for a wide variety of very good medical reasons.

The Inimitable Power of Family

A combat unit is a tribe — a curiously dysfunctional tribe without any secrets. Although Billy was a poor soldier, he was a good kid. We all wanted him to thrive. Given the sordid circumstances, his separation proceedings were quietly binned. He became a barracks rat, spending his days nondeployable in the orderly room answering the phone. In this capacity, I recall he did a simply spanking job.

We all followed his progress from a distance but with legitimate interest. If nothing else, Billy’s travails reliably put our own problems in perspective. You take stuff like pooping for granted right up until it’s gone.

After several more surgical procedures, Billy finally had a test. His surgeons were going to insert a rubber ball in his butt and then start a clock. If he could hold the ball in place for a fixed period of time, they would reverse his colostomy, and he would get to poop like a normal person again. If he failed, then that bag would become his lifelong companion. Test day was a big deal, and everybody knew it.

As he departed for the hospital on the big day, Billy’s buddies slapped him on the back with heartfelt admonishments to “Be the ball, brother!” and “Crush that ball, stud!”

Billy returned a couple of hours later, looking spent but happy. When I queried him regarding the events of the day, he smiled and said simply, “Held the ball, boss.”

A short while later, Billy had his colostomy reversed. He was ultimately medically retired to receive a military pension that would span the rest of his days. All things being considered, I’d say he earned that. Billy had, after all, and against all odds, indeed held the ball.

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Paint me surprised by this

What I have suspected about Cats for a very long time!

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Paint me surprised by this War

What amazing times we live in!

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All About Guns Paint me surprised by this

ICE “Lost” $100 Million in Guns & Ammo… Guess Who Found Them?

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All About Guns Paint me surprised by this

CMP Uncovered: Surplus Rifles & Competitive Shooting