A man of knowledge, I see.
maybe go to an emergency opthamalogist instead of a optometrist for eye infections next time.
I thought this was going to be about the glare of a white background.
When coming across an unfamiliar problem, does anyone else feel themselves be possessed by the “problem solver”? It’s like the rational part of your brain doesn’t think it needs to be there so it delegates to your lizard brain and your lizard brain decides to “solve” the problem itself.
It’s so jarring how much can “seem like a good idea at the time”.
Sort of, but not the lizard brain part. My rationality stays intact except I become too stubborn to reasonably decide if it’s worth the time and effort to solve this problem (spoiler: usually not). If it seems solvable then dammit I wanna figure it out, the rest be damned.
Not at all, no.
Tell me more about this feeling.
It’s like a step above autopilot. It feels like the rational parts of your brain are locked off to you and the world is briefly as confusing to you as when you were a kid.
Obviously you can shake out of it and think harder about your scenario, but usually you just want the thing over and done with and that leaves you fumbling about long enough to make a bad decision.
I experience the opposite even when I’m under time pressure (running late for something). When I discover some small, unrelated problem my brain will switch to problem solving mode and focus on this new task instead. This way I totally loose track of time, even though I was totally stressed out about it a second ago. This can happen with stuff like a broken tool but also if I happen to look at a sudoku.
sounds like burnout :(
I used to work in a college computer lab. One night, a girl waved me over and said “the foot pedal isn’t working.” I said “foot pedal?”
Sure enough, she had the mouse on the floor, and was trying to work it with her bare foot.
To be fair, and balanced, and Cody, there are actual foot pedals for computers.
They are mostly used for driving games, but they are pretty useful for other stuff, like push to talk, or additional ctrl alt and shift.
EMN reference in the wild! Don’t forget to tune in to the livestream tonight at 8 PDT!
You’re about 20 years late with this advice but damn that push to talk pedal would’ve been super handy in my ventrilo days…
I work at a MSP with several law firms and several medical companies along with other types. Multiple lawyers and a few doctors we’ve worked with had foot pedals and something like Dragon Naturally Speaking doing dictation for them. With the use of VDIs this was sometimes a pin because of USB redirection and all, but they absolutely needed to have it working.
We used purpose made floor pedals on the sociology research office to control a transcription software. It allowed precise control over a voice recording so any of us lowly students could quickly transcribe interviews and focus groups without removing the hands from the home row of the keyboard. It was already 30 years old technology by the time I got to college. It was apparently first invented for work with actual tape players.
How does pouring water in an infected eye relieve pain? That sounds like it would do nothing to me.
seems like it would cause more pain and infection, plus degree burns and then losing your eyesight.
It might reduce dryness-related pain, or wash out any dust or eyelashes that were causing irritation. Unless you are sensitive to the preservatives, saline solution would do the same and be more convenient. They have single-use saline packets for people with preservative sensitivity, but those are kind of pricey, so I can see the case for boiled water.
People get weird ideas and can be stubborn about them. My father spent more than a week using Clear Eyes in an attempt to moisturize. (Clear Eyes is a product to reduce red appearance, is not meant to improve eye comfort, and causes rebound irritation as the blood vessel constrictor wears off.) It took multiple talks after his eye irritation was only getting worse to convince him to switch to the actually moisturizing drops the eye doctor had given him.
Maybe I’ve been too far up the other long tail of the bell curve for too long, but doesn’t “boiled” - the past participle of “to boil” indicate that this should be water in a post-boiled state? As in, water that is no longer even warm, much less hot?
I am struggling to understand how anyone can think that pouring boiling or even still-hot water into their eyes is anything within even ICBM range of “a good idea”.
To me, “boiled” simply implies that the water has been at 100°C (or appropriate altitude-adjusted value) for some interval in the past. It implies nothing regarding how far in the past this occurred or, for that matter, its current temperature. The water could have any arbitrary temperature now, including 100°C.
Have you seen what people do while driving? Do you think they are paying more or less attention to some doctor talking at them than they are operating a large deadly machine?
“my doctor told me to put boiling water in my eye! if im not gonna listen to him why am I paying him?”
If you want it to be more sterile you should boil it, let it cool down, and then boil it again, because some spore forming bacteria will survive the first time and start to germinate
I figure in the last four billion years or so all water has been previously boiled…
Atoms cannot be easily created or destroyed.
However molecules can and often are easily assembled.
Water is one of those molecules which are easy to create, and easy to break back apart into its constituent atoms. So yes, there is likely plenty of water that has never been boiled because it was created so recently (cosmologically speaking).
Story time.
My wife is an optometrist.
One day a patient called the office because he had foreign body in his eye. No big deal. They had equipment for removing a foreign body from the eye safely. The patient asked how much the exam was. They told him (I think it was around $70) and he said he’d think about it.
He called up a little while later and said he got it out. He asked if he still needed to come in, and they explained that he still should have his eye checked to make sure it wasn’t injured.
When he got there, my wife asked him how he got it out.
He said he used the edge of a razor blade to pick it out of his eye. He said he does it all the time.
If the thought of putting the edge of a razor blade against your eye is not horrifying enough, remember that when you’re working on your own eye, you don’t have depth perception.
This story made me physically cringe, oh hell that sounds awful.
remember that when you’re working on your own eye, you don’t have depth perception.
Every year or five I’ll get a “sclera blister” that feels like a honking grain of sand in my eye. Sure, I’ve thought about taking a pair of tweezers to tear the dome of that blister off, but I have always been squicked like crazy because I can’t properly judge distances that close to the cornea. Corner of my eye or on the rim of the eye lid itself is difficult enough, but anywhere directly on the sclera that’s close to the cornea is definitely no-go land for me.
“all the time” excuse me… I perform surgery on my self all the time but I can’t even put eye drops in without my eyes locking down the second the drop falls from the bottle.
Eye drop tip:
Pull your lower eyelid down to create a little pocket and put the drop in your eyelid.
Yooooo
I go for the corner and then blink it around. This pocket thing does not work for me.
What the actual fuck 😱
Seeing this post made me physically cringe. I am “The Public.”
In my late 20s, my ear started hurting. I was utterly convinced it was just a stubborn clump of earwax. I went to the pharmacy and bought one of those bulb syringes for rinsing ears. The pharmacist calmly and explicitly instructed me: “Make sure you only use lukewarm water.” I went home, washed my ear canal, and nothing happened. I figured I’d just give it a few days to loosen up.
Over the next couple of days, the pain escalated to an excruciating level. I’m talking find-chair, put-my-head-in-my-lap kinda pain. And as my son had just been born, I was operating on a good mix of extreme pain and severe sleep deprivation.
Eventually, i came to the conclusion that hotter water = more wax melting, and if lukewarm water didn’t work, maybe it just needs more heat. The hotter the water, the better chance it has of melting the wax, right? So, I boiled some water. And with zero hesitation, I injected boiling hot water directly into my ear canal.
It was not earwax.
I ended up at the doctor, where I learned that the initial agony was actually a severe case of otitis media (a middle ear infection). And thanks to my brilliant home remedy, I had managed to add a scorched ear canal and a secondary outer ear infection right on top of it.
So yeah. When that optometrist said, “Look at me. I want you to understand that I mean water that has been boiled and has since cooled down,” he was talking to me. I am the guy.
I’m so happy you’re still with us. Stay safe friend. And keep up on your sleep.
Thanks for the kind words, I am glad that you are here as well!
my ear started hurting. I was utterly convinced it was just a stubborn clump of earwax.
I am lucky enough to be one of those people who simply never builds up any serious amounts of ear wax. It’s oily and not crumbly, so a gentle swish of a Q-tip after a shower and it all comes out. my doc checks my ears twice a year and has never had cause to complain.
But IIRC ear wax is soft enough to never be particularly painful unless you pack it down with something like a Q-tip. Like, so long as you know you have one of those ear wax types for whom Q-tips in any usage capacity is a bad idea (it’s usually the crumbly ear wax), the most it will do is accumulate until your hearing is affected.
Now granted, it’ll plug up the ear canal until you have trouble hearing things. But all you need then is some professional irrigation by a doctor a few times a year, and as long as you aren’t in a third-world country like America, that should be 100% free.
i have to lavage my ears out every 6month-year due to massively increased shedding from atopic dermatitis, the indication is when sounds get muffled in one ear. getting the ear lavage kits from online has been very useful.
Ear wax has never been an issue for me either, I had a friend who had just had their ear canal rinsed by a doctor. And their explanation kinda fit the bill…
So with a new born, new house that I was renovating, and stubbornness that I can handle everything myself, I managed to convince myself that this was the root cause
I suffer from impaction occasionally and used to irrigate with 2% hydrogen peroxide. The H2O2 reacts with the wax and helps break it up. It is one of the strangest sensations though, bubbles forming and popping en masse inside of your ear canal. Eventually I bought an ear cleaning otoscope and scoop out the wax manually every few months.
i just use warm water and a ear lavage, the ones with the spray bottle attached to a tube to squeeze into the eary. before that i used a ear syringe which was much more time consuming and annoying to use.
Those bulb syringes can be a nightmare too, read that the cause of someone’s problem was mold growing the bulb and getting sent straight into the ear.
Gross and terrifying. If you can’t see what’s inside, don’t trust it’s clean.
On the bright side, your boiling water probably did a good job of disinfecting it.
they have the kits with the plastic bottle sprayers attached with a hose, easier to clean and less messy.
I’ve got one of those bulbs but it comes apart so you can see and clean the inside. It’s also transparent so you can see inside it even if you decide to be lazy.
Ear infections definitely are some of the worst pain I’ve experienced. I would put them up there with really bad burns.
Any pain localized in the head is really the worst. Tooth infections, ear infections, migraines…
As someone who has them quite often: the weird thing is the pain level varies wildly between each infection. One time the doc had to tell me I had an ear infection as it was painless - another time it felt like someone was ramming a dagger into my skull at a 5 second intervall.
Sleep deprivation will make you do some crazy things
Not my proudest moment…
Must be in the US
Those points used to be straight…
just like the frogs!
My first thought as well
