Posts by Kyle Brown88

I’m wondering what kind of recourse someone actually has after experiencing true anesthesia awareness... You know, feeling the pain during surgery because the anesthesiologist just wasn't sharp enough to notice, all while the patient is paralyzed by muscle relaxants so they can't move or even scream. The person is absolutely traumatized from feeling every single incision. What should they do now that the surgery is over? What actually happens in these cases?

So the patient complains, the anesthesiologist feels a momentary pang of guilt, and that's the end of it? In the US, I'm honestly skeptical about whether you could successfully sue for PTSD. It feels like everyone would just shrug their shoulders and look the other way. That story about the 80-year-old lady sounds like textbook PTSD to me. A lawsuit? Unlikely. Reporting it to the Chief of Medicine? Probably just met with a wave of the hand... so what's left?

It’s entirely possible that the whole point of vaccinating against just four specific virus strains is simply to ensure Merck & Co. keeps raking in the cash...

When you're looking at blade reconstruction, you also have to account for the loss of muscle tissue, darkmaker.

It’s actually an interesting little fact that there are so many different strains of HPV out there, yet Gardasil only covers four of them... I find myself nodding along with quite a bit of what Jamie Rivera78 is saying. It’s funny, really... how much it irritates me when people get worked up over some silly narrative built on shaky statistics. And then, in their attempt to push back against the medical establishment, they somehow end up landing right in the lap of big pharma marketing...
Maybe one day we'll actually see a decent generic vaccine that covers all the types?

Anyway, based on what Jamie Rivera78 is getting at, it doesn't make much sense to be vaccinating girls, boys, or frankly, anyone else with Gardasil.

Look, first things first... if a doctor is being rude, just tell them you’re done with them. Seriously. Report them to the department head for being unprofessional and treating a patient poorly... just so they get what's coming to them. Then, move on to a different hospital where people will actually treat you with some dignity. You're a human being, not just a piece of meat...

Regarding reconstruction, you basically have two paths: muscle flap surgery or implants. With the muscle approach, the perk is that you aren't putting a foreign object in your body, though water-filled implants aren't exactly "dangerous," I suppose. My main issue with the muscle route is that if you harvest half a muscle from your back, you're essentially sacrificing some functionality... which seems like a pretty questionable trade-off to me. Cutting into a muscle that helps you move, knowing it might never fully recover... it's a lot. Just a heads-up, a surgeon who favors the muscle method probably won't give you the full, honest picture regarding loss of function or pain... they'll likely just sing praises for their own preferred technique.

As for implants, the standard process usually starts with an expander—basically a smaller version of the implant. They inject fluid into the expander over several sessions until the skin stretches enough to accommodate the final volume (if they had just placed the implant immediately after the tumor removal, this whole step wouldn't even be necessary...). Once the skin is ready, they swap the expander for the actual implant. In the end, you're left with a scar running roughly down the middle of the breast, and there's no nipple. You can reconstruct the nipple using local tissue flaps, or you could just go the tattoo route. Personally, I think tattooing looks better... and you can probably find a really talented tattoo artist in any major US city who can pull that off perfectly.

I hope these thoughts help... there's plenty of info out there online if you keep looking.

Do you all think the current situation, where only girls are getting vaccinated, actually makes sense... or is it just fundamentally flawed?

I can't help but wonder why the current situation surrounding HPV vaccines feels so... off. Usually, when you deal with sexually transmitted diseases, the logic is to look at both partners. But with HPV, we get this strange phenomenon where everything centers on cervical cancer while men are just completely brushed aside.

Men definitely transmit HPV, and they certainly can fall ill from it. In some circles, the consequences for men are dismissed as "minor," though I’m fairly certain anyone dealing with genital warts isn't going to find the experience particularly trivial. Beyond that, HPV causes penile cancer in men, as well as throat cancer—given how it spreads through oral sex. While both types of cancer are relatively rare, they are undeniably serious issues for those affected.

Now, someone please try to explain to me how this approach is actually rational. Just focusing on half the population while ignoring the other half, and then seasoning the whole thing with pseudo-scientific nonsense like "the vaccine's efficacy hasn't been tested on people with a shoe size of 8"... it just doesn't track.

Look, I can accept the idea that women might face higher risks, but I cannot stomach the moronic claims that the vaccine hasn't been tested on men. Since when did men and women suddenly develop entirely different immune systems? And since when do viruses exist that exclusively target one specific gender?

Another thing that really gets under my skin is these mindless recommendations regarding which age groups are "suitable" for vaccination. By the time a girl is over 17, she's likely had enough partners that there's a significant chance she's already encountered HPV. Isn't that just discriminating against girls—or guys, for that matter—who are less sexually active? Take someone who hasn't even had sex by age 25; they could still benefit immensely from HPV immunity if they plan to become active later. Wouldn't it be more equitable to perform an HPV test before vaccinating, targeting only those who aren't already infected, rather than relying on this blunt, age-based selection process?