Giving Birth to a Flaming Porcupine

As nurses, we are supposed to assess pain in our patients and provide "pain management". An important aspect of this task is trying to quantify the pain. In hospitals, scales to quantify pain have included the venerable "0-10 Scale" with 0 being pain-free and 10 being agony to such a degree that death would almost be welcome. Some places use the "faces" scale with an illustration of a face with a big smile for pain-free to one with a big frown at the other end of the spectrum. In working with people with cognitive impairments, the experts say to look for signs of pain, such as facial grimacing, guarding (drawing away from touch), moaning or yelling, etc. While this may be better than nothing, "We can do better".
Thinking outside the box, I would like to introduce the "Mitchell Pain Scale for People Who Don't Like Pain Scales" (copyright 2013). Going from pain-free to most severe pain, the scale includes:
- Eating your favorite Ben & Jerry's
- A paper cut
- Getting hit in the head by a dodgeball thrown by your mother
- Your laxative has kicked in
- Your ex-wife is squeezing your nuts
- Giving birth to a flaming porcupine
Although the scale in in beta and still needs reliability and validity testing, I think things are off to a good start. Five options is probably not enough, so please send me your suggestions to add to flesh things out. Be as descriptive as you can and let me know where you recommend it be on the scale. You are also welcome to submit alternate titles for the scale (maybe the "Flaming Porcupine Scale" would have more acceptance).
Who knows? Working together, we may come up with the biggest advance in health care in the last 50 years. Put on your thinking caps, and thanks for your help.

WOMBAT

No, I'm not talking about a furry little critter from Australia. WOMBAT is an acronym that stands for "Waste Of Money, Breath, and Time". I learned about it many years ago from one of my fellow nurse managers in the UK. In my private life, I am opinionated, judgmental, and cranky. In my professional life, I have learned to leave most of it at home (or keep it to myself) and to do my best to be reasonably polite.
The cranky me thinks there are a lot of WOMBATS out there. Among them are:
- anyone named Kardashian
- Real Housewives of anywhere
- televised golf
- airline travel
- meetings just to have meetings
- rap music
- people who call themselves "experts" (if they are, they don't need to tell you)
- Congress
- sleeping late (I just can't do it)
- traffic circles
- Suggested Retail Price
- junk emails
- zoning permits
- automated phone answering systems
- pennies
- exercise (people jogging during a rain storm is just wrong)
- tofu
- "celebrities" who think I need to know what they are up to
Although the list is not exhaustive, it gives you an idea that I am a bit of a curmudgeon (at least part-time). On the bright side, all of the WOMBATs in my life have increased my tolerance dramatically so that my proudest achievement is actually that I am NOT doing 25-to-life.
How about you? Any WOMBATs in your life?

Giving the Finger

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger, it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and one would therefore be incapable of fighting in the future.
This famous weapon was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as "plucking the yew" (or "pluck yew").
Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, "See, we can still pluck yew! PLUCK YEW!" Since "pluck Yew" is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodental fricative "F" and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute are mistakenly thought to have something to do with an intimate encounter. It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as "giving the bird."
And yew thought yew knew everything.

Only two good things ever came out of Italy, and Sophia Loren's got both of them

My late father was a UCC (United Church of Christ) minister, but he was also quite a chauvinist. The title of this piece was just one example of his sayings. Fortunately, he restricted his chauvinism to the privacy of our home, although why my mother didn't kill him years ago remains a mystery to me and my siblings.
My mother was an elementary school teacher and, while she didn't take crap from anyone else, she seemed to have a fair degree of tolerance for him. Sometimes, though, he came close to stepping over the line. Her pet name for him was "Jackass" and he seemed to always know that, when he was addressed by that endearing moniker, that it was time to back off or die.
My younger sister, the other female in the house, also occasionally was the target of his not-always appreciated sense of humor. Her nickname, based upon her chest, was "Flatso". Despite such endearments, they were actually quite close. (Her nickname for him was "Geezer".)
In public, my father conducted himself the way you would expect a minister to act: respectful, supportive, and humorous without being extreme. He was a volunteer fireman, drove the ambulance, and mentored younger clergymen. If only they knew what he was really like.
In life, we learn by seeing both how things are done and how they are not done. My father provided both examples, though most were how things should be done. Among the things I learned from him were:
- honesty
- importance of family and friends
- being respectful toward others
- money isn't everything
- if you're going to be a jerk, do it in private
- some women have to unbutton their blouses to count to two
(Damn; sorry about that. Not everything I learned was helpful.)
For me, being a nurse and working in a profession that is 95% female, I would never follow in his footsteps to chauvinism. If I had, I would probably be dead (or severely disabled). Despite the challenges of growing up with my father, and the challenges I gave him growing up, I guess I turned out OK.

How Hot is it in Hell?

This is a true story.

A thermodynamics professor had written a take home exam for his graduate students. It had one question: "Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Support your answer with a proof.
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So, we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the  rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it? If we accept the postulation given to me by Ms. Therese Banyan during my Freshman year that "It would be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, than #2 cannot be true, and so Hell is exothermic.
The student got the only A.

Obstructed Airways in Texas

Two Texans were seated at the end of a bar when a young lady seated a few stools away began to choke on a piece of hamburger. She was turning blue and was obviously in serious respiratory distress.
One cowboy said to the other, "That girl is having a rough time."
The other agreed and said, "Think we should help?"
"You bet." said the first.
He ran over to the woman and asked, "Can you breathe?"
She shook her head no. "Can you speak?"
She shook her head no again. With that, the cowboy pulled up her skirt and licked her on the buttocks. The woman was so shocked, she coughed up the obstruction and began to breathe with great relief.
Returning to his friend, the Texan said, "Funny how that hind lick maneuver works every time."

When you're riding a dead horse...

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
In my leadership training, I have learned that a whole range of far more advanced strategies are employed, such as:
- Buying a stronger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Threatening the horse with termination.
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
- Re-classifying the dead horse as "living impaired".
- Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
- Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
- Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
- Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and
  therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other
  horses.
- Re-writing the expected performance requirements for all horses.
- Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?