The only time I’ve ever been under general anesthesia was when I had my wisdom teeth removed, over 20 years ago. First, the nurse gave me nitrous oxide to relax me. Then she put in the IV needle with the real anesthetic. Pretty much the instant the needle hit my vein it was lights out.
I picked other in the anesthesia poll because the only time I was operated on I was 2.5 years old and the only thing I remember at all is the light above the operating table.
I’ve been given twilight sleep three times and for the colonoscopy one, I was wide awake and entertaining the proctologist with my patter. I suspect he thought I was chatty due to the twilight, but nope. I was chatty with anticipation of both an interesting procedure (I could watch the screen) and the thought that afterwards I was going to eat not one, but two corndogs, because very hungry and craving them. But usually it’s lights out rather quickly, helped by the fact that I practice meditative breathing before the procedure.
When I got my tonsils out when I was 10, it was at St. John’s (Marcus Welby’s hospital) in Santa Monica. Normally, they’d come to your room and give you a kind of sedative (?), then transport you to the OR and finish the anesthetia there. Because there was a younger kid than I was getting hysterical, they decided to swap our surgery times. I was moved up about 2 or 3 hours. My parents had to rush to get there, and I can remember being wheeled into the hallway as they rushed off the elevator, so I only saw them for a second. But I still remember how cool it felt to be lying flat on the gurney as the elevator rose to the OR floor. I didn’t get any anesthetia until I was actually in the OR. But I was told to count down from 100 and only got to like 97 or something.
Also, my roommate was a girl who’d been a thalidomide baby.
I derive the quadratic formula in my head sometimes, at night when I’m having trouble falling asleep.
Yes, really.
My neighborhood fits the provided description of “middle class” but is definitely “lower middle class” by almost any other metric.
Is there any reason or logic to this, or is it just because the word “childless” has been used so often in the past in a negative sense (e.g. for people who were unable to have children) that it has picked up that connotation?
Yeah, that’s why the word rubs me the wrong way (and I don’t have children). If I were King of Words, I’d restrict “child-free” to temporary contexts, as in “My sister’s watching the kids tonight; we’re child-free for the evening.”
“Child-free” is somewhat political, and aimed at the peer pressure to have kids - especially that aimed at women.
I can sympathize because I know a couple of women who were unable to get certain medical procedures because they were “too young” and “you might change your mind” and “you have to get permission from your husband”
That’s about the extent of my knowledge on this topic.
I was eight for tonsils and it was the rubber strip they put over my eyes so I wouldn’t see the damn light. That and not liking the odor and being held down as I struggled a bit.
I had that for the first endoscopy, and propofol, which is a more powerful sedation for a later one. I never went fully out for the first one, although it messed with my memory. I remember commenting that i felt drunk, though. The second is so good at preventing you from forming memories that it feels instantaneous. It’s not that you are out immediately, it’s that you don’t remember anything from shortly after it’s administered.
And then there’s Antinatalism.
As far as baby showers, of course I chose “I don’t care”. One of the nice things about being a man is being totally unaffected by showers.
Showers are about giving people presents, and you ordinarily need a lot more stuff for a first baby than for subsequent babies. So I guess I care a little. But there are lots of reasons other than “first” why you might need a lot of stuff, and there might be a “party called a shower” for a subsequent kid that wasn’t really about gifts, and my guess is that if I were actually invited to a shower for a subsequent kid, I’d be pleased.
Men sometimes go to baby showers also, these days.
Plus which, those men who expect to be fathers to the about-to-be-infants are all affected; because the idea of showers is to provide things that the infant will need, and it’s considerably easier to take care of a baby if you’ve got those things.
– As the idea of showers is, or used to be, to provide things one needs for baby care that someone who never had a baby before is likely to be in need of: it seems to me that effectively asking one’s friends and family to give those things all over again for each kid is, indeed, mildly tacky – except that there certainly are situations in which it isn’t, because there are situations in which people for one reason or another don’t have what they need for a second or later baby. Plus which, some people see a shower as basically an excuse for a party. I’d mildly rather they called the party something else if they’re not asking for a whole new set of Everything Needed for Baby, but on the other hand, if you want to have a party, have a party.
Hell, I was regularly going to baby showers 30 years ago for a few years, when all our friends were having kids. I found the showers kind of boring…they have a certain rhythm that requires you to mostly stand off to the side and occasionally ooh and aah…but I understand they were important for the celebrants.
I was invited to, and attended, all of my friend’s baby showers. The women all did baby shower stuff and the men hung out in the yard drinking. Not entirely unlike most of our get-togethers around that age.
Heck, a woman in my department is having a baby, and the whole department is invited to her baby shower, which seems to have been organized by a guy. And the last department baby shower was FOR a guy who was expecting his first kid.
Reported.
Huh??
J/K.
No showers for me. I’ve heard the descriptions of the games y’all play at showers, and nope. Not going. Never.
I figured it was probably a joke; but didn’t (and don’t) see what the joke was.
Showers vary, I gather. Haven’t been to any myself in quite a while; what I have been to didn’t involve any games, mostly just ‘ooh, what a cute onesie!’ and so on.