But do you have the tee shirt?

Get it on my Zazzle panel at the bottom of the page.

If you’ve been in emergency medicine long enough, chances are you’ve asked that question. A couple of days back, I got the following e-mail from a friend and fellow paramedic instructor:

Today was a red letter day in my Paramedic Class. They discovered The Butt Page.

It all started with a HIPAA violation perpetrated by one of my students. I am shocked and appalled by such behavior and promptly issued an appropriate admonishment. We do not tolerate this.

He managed to get a phone photo of the x-ray of a very large vibrating dildo lodged between the Sigmoid flexure and the transverse colon in a patient who “presented” during his clinical shift last week. Unfortunately he was NOT able to determine whether the vibrator was activated at the time, whether the patient sought removal or simple battery replacement, or something else.

I admonished him about the necessity of doing a complete Hx and Physical exam on every patient, which would have revealed the status of the object. Remediation noted.

Since we were on the module on abdominal emergencies, naturally the discussion turned to occult colonic objects, and while discussing the medical and social implications thereof, one student who was at the time conducting research online (my students bring their computers to class and I encourage them to Google and seek information on topics we are studying) seems to have stumbled upon The Butt Page, or, Rectal Foreign Bodies. He pointed out to us that at that moment he was visitor # 1, 742,394 since 1997, a fact that must have some sort of special significance.

QUERY: How many visitors were Republican?

Well, anyway, at that point I took a break, because further attempts at carrying on any sort of academic dialog were futile.

Now, the apex of the ensuing informal discussion landed, as one might surmise, upon Gerbiling.

Suffice it to say that this revealed several interesting demographics about my class: Those who were aware of Gerbiling and those who were not were 3:1.

Now I can say without fear of contradiction that the ratio is currently 4:0.

Sadly, Gerbiling has now been relegated to Urban Legend status. However, using the opportunity as a Teaching Moment, I asked the class to consider alternatives to Gerbiling, such as Mousing, Snaking, and Baby Alligatoring [it's a Louisiana thing].

In the next hour, we examined the dynamics of Beer Mug removal, Softball removal, and Vegetable removal.

At 1630 I got a call from my boss, the Dean of Allied Health, asking me if I could account for a sudden influx of students asking for information about taking the Paramedic Course.

I had no idea.

Heh.

When I taught paramedic classes at a technical college, the nursing students used to make up absences by sitting in on paramedic classes. They’d listen to the lectures, do some of the practical skills if they were of such a mind, and role play as victims for our scenarios. On exam days, we’d have the prettiest volunteers dress in their skimpiest bikinis, use a little theatrical makeup and wound effects to give them realistic injuries, and dress them in old, tattered breakaway warmup suits like you often see NBA players wear.

One day a group of my victims was standing outside in their bikinis, smoking and chatting as they waited for their turn at the makeup table. A group of aircraft mechanic students asked what they were doing, and one of them answered, “Oh, we’re waiting for the paramedic class exams. In an hour, they’ll be taking our clothes off and examining our bodies from head to toe.”

The next morning, I got a similar phone call from our dean.

…if your bank is prone to bunging up your Visa debit card access on a regular basis, and you decide to hop on your bike for a jaunt to Houston to visit a friend…

… withdraw some $%#^& CASH MONEY before you go, less the bastards strand you in Deeepinahearta, Texas in broiling heat fifteen minutes after the customer service hotline shuts down for the day.

I don’t know who’s more pathetic; my bank, or me for putting up with their crap.

Update: Apparently, two $500 purchases on consecutive days at the arena where they’re having the friggin’ gun and knife show won’t get your account locked, but several $7.50 purchases at gas pumps along the I-10 corridor will.

Idiots.

Anyway, thank you Snarky, for the $20 bill. It came in very handy indeed.

… post a few motivational posters of your own, with even bigger boobs.

That will show those sexist bastards that not only are you onto their game, but that you’re subtle and devious and not someone to be trifled with.

Yeah, that’ll teach ‘em.

And be sure to send me the link, so I can ogle see how you put those knuckle-draggers in their place.

*ring, ring*

AD (groggily): “Huh, who, whazzis… um, hello?”

Ex Wife: “Hey, are the batteries charged on your cardiac monitors?”

AD (confused): “Uuuuhhh… yeah, I suppose I could find some hot batteries. Why?”

Ex Wife: “Husband In Law is getting dizzy when he stands up. I’d like to see what his rhythm his before I decide to schlep him over to the ER.”

AD: “Um, okay.”

Ex Wife: “We’re right around the corner.”

*five minutes later*

AD: “Sorry dude, I couldn’t resist.”

HIL: “Not funny.”

Ex Wife: “So it’s normal sinus rhythm?”

AD: “Other than being a little fast because he’s out of shape, yeah.”

HIL (to Ex Wife): “Told you it was nothing serious.”

AD: “My work here is done. I’m going back to bed.”

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

I rarely hurry on a bad scene. I don’t dawdle, but neither do I bark orders and scurry about with a grim expression set on my face. I’m calm, and I’m deliberate. That works for me.

When everyone around you is shitting their pants, stumbling over their own feet and handling objects as if they’ve just gotten their brand new opposable thumbs, it helps to be the island of calm in that sea of panic. People tend to mimic the demeanor of the man in charge.

I’ll crack a joke, or calmly give an order accompanied by a smile and a wink, and people settle down. I’m the paramedic on the call. It’s my job to make things run smoothly.

And likely as not, things do run smoothly. Sometimes not as smoothly as I like, but rarely are they chaotic.

And face it, when Grandpa is dying of a heart attack, the potential for chaos is quite real. People scurry about, frightened, wailing and gnashing their teeth, bordering on hysteria. They panic because they don’t know what to do.

And they calm down fairly easily, because they called me, the man who does know what to do.

But when the frightened scurrying, wailing and gnashing of teeth is being done by the ER doctor and the nursing staff at a metropolitan hospital ER, and they’re convinced they know what to do better than you do, calming things down is not so easily done.

And it’s pretty damned pathetic, really, when the level of care increases dramatically when you wheel the patient out of your ER and into my ambulance. Time to remove the word hospital from your facility’s name, folks. It’s false advertising.

I was taking better care of MI patients twelve years ago with a fraction of your resources and training. And I was doing it in a 5×10 foot space at 80 miles an hour…

If ever your boyfriend happens to beat you to an unrecognizable pulp, and the paramedic asks if he has ever struck you before, the proper answer should never be, “Well yeah, but not this bad.”

No, the proper answer is, “No, this was the first and last time. The cops are still photographing his body in the other room, but still, mind where you step. My Glock throws brass a long ways, and some of the empties might have made it into here.”

Remember, the recidivism rate for freshly ventilated girlfriend beaters is zero.

When I first entered the blogosphere, I mostly read and linked the gun blogs. Soon thereafter came my fellow EMS bloggers, and finally a number of physician and nursing blogs found their way onto my blogroll. I follow quite a few, and I get something different from each one.

Dr. Lucy Hornstein of Musings of a Dinosaur is where I go for my daily dose of medical wit and wisdom.

People often mistakenly believe I’m in EMS because I crave the excitement or the variety of it, and truthfully that is a part of the attraction, even if the adrenaline rushes are harder and harder to find at this stage of my career.

No, the real reason I stay in EMS is because there is little ambiguity in what I do. Call an ambulance, an ambulance comes. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, young, black, white, sinner or saint, I answer every 911 call the same way. At the heart of it, what keeps me going in EMS is my clinging to this foolish ideal that medicine matters more than money.

Of course, in the real world, we know that isn’t true. Trace every major issue in health care, and at its root you will find dollar signs, or the lack thereof. But still, it’s nice to find a fellow Quixote now and then; a kindred soul tilting at the same windmills.

I suppose that’s what attracts me to Dr. Dino’s blog. Her tagline says it all: A Family Doctor in solo private practice; I may be going the way of the dinosaur, but I’m not dead yet.

Declarations of a Dinosaur: 10 Laws I’ve Learned as a Family Doctor delivers, with Dr. Hornstein’s typical wit and wisdom, a set of truths about medicine that will resonate not only with her fellow primary care physicians, but anyone who works in health care. It should be required reading for any medical student contemplating a primary care specialty.

Heck, it should be required reading for any doctor, because along with an unflinching insider’s view of what is killing primary care, it also gives us some inspiration that there is life in the old girl still.

Primary care, that is, not Dr. Hornstein. As far as I know, Lucy Hornstein is neither dying, nor an old girl.

I finished the book Friday afternoon before work, and on a lark, I dropped my copy off in one of the local ERs. It was a slow night, and as it so happens, one of the family practice residents doing a rotation there is a former paramedic and coworker.

I plopped Lucy’s book on the counter in front of him and invited him to read. Before I had completed my run ticket, he and several of the ER nurses were flipping through the pages, chortling out loud, “Hey y’all, get this! Third Law: the urgency of the test is inversely proportional to the IQ of the insurance company pre-authorization clerk!”

When I came back a couple of hours later, the book had changed hands, and the triage nurse had her head buried in its pages, smiling just as broadly as my buddy the family practice resident. I had to politely knock on the counter to get her attention that we had brought her a patient.

At 239 pages, the book is a short read but not a lightweight one. I’ve often said that the essence of wisdom is in packaging profound truths in simple phrases.

By that measure, Lucy Hornstein is wise indeed.

Buy it and read it, y’all. It’s that good.

Sent to me by a friend, an ER nurse in a major trauma center, in an e-mail the other day:

Guy comes in last evening with an abscess on the left lower chest wall, been there for about a week. It was I&D’d (incision and drainage procedure) here a few days ago, and he was kept as an inpatient for a day or two.

He said “They were giving me antibiotics, and when they cut it they kept sticking their fingers in it.”

He presented to me at triage last evening with a chief complaint of continued chest wall pain at the site, shortness of breath, and “it feels hard around it (the incision),” and…get this…”when I breathe, I also feel air coming in and out through the hole they cut.”

Yup. Guy had an open sucking chest wound, and the hardness was subcutaneous crepitus. I wonder how long it has been like that, as he looked surprisingly good, considering. I threw a quick Tegaderm over it and hustled him to the trauma room.

Someone is gonna dread Morbidity and Mortality Review this month.

Heh, I’ll bet.

I’ve actually seen relatively few sucking chest wounds in my career. The sheer physics of it make it fairly unlikely; in order to have a sucking chest wound, air has to pass through the wound more readily than it would through the patient’s trachea. That requires a pretty big permanent wound channel, and even the larger caliber handguns don’t typically leave such a large hole.

I’ve seen a couple of sucking chest wounds left by big knives, and in one memorable instance, a length of galvanized electrical conduit, but the only sucking chest wounds I’ve seen left by firearms were in deer I’ve shot.

Pistols and pocket knives rarely leave a hole large enough to allow easy entrainment of air. Nor do scalpels.

Well, unless the doctor wallows out the hole with his finger, that is.

Courtesy of Native American Nurse, a bunch of us from PGHNSTRACH went to the ZZ Top concert tonight. The last time I was at a ZZ Top concert was well over twenty years ago, and a lot of things have changed since high school.

Back then, bare titties were plentiful and you could get a decent contact high by just breathing the air in the arena.

Now, all the boobage was held up by underwire bras and you could get lightheaded on Ben Gay fumes. There were also a distressing number of concertgoers on Hover Round scooters.

Depressing, that.

But still, a good time was had by all, especially Native American Nurse. I strongly suspect the last time an Indian got that drunk, Manhattan got sold for a handful of beads and a few trinkets.

ZZ Top still effin’ rocks, too.

And on a good day, so do I.

“I… I just can’t,” he sobs into his hands. “I can’t take care of myself… I can’t deal with things. I need to be in a home.”

“Any family? Anyone you could stay with?” I ask, already knowing the answer. Still, I hope that somewhere in his fractured memories, a loving family member might magically appear, someone who will take him in. I hope, and always I am disappointed.

“None,” he sighs raggedly, twisting a dirty sock in his hands. “There’s nobody but me.”

We sit on the side of a bare mattress in a seedy hotel room, surrounded by half-eaten food and piles of clothes, the room reeking of unwashed body and stale cigarettes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t left this room since I’d seen him last.

“I need to be in a home,” he repeats, breaking into a fresh round of sobs. “Why won’t they put me in a home?”

I know why, but I offer no answer. How horrible must his demons be, that living in an institution would be his greatest hope? I vacillate between thanking God I will never know what he is going through, and wishing I did, and thus somehow understand him better and perhaps hate him less.

And God help me, hate him I do, sometimes. Every time the call comes in, “Non-life-threatening emergency, no priority symptoms. 50-year-old male, states he can’t take care of himself,” I know it will be him, and the weariness grips me and threatens to drain whatever small satisfaction I gain from doing what I do.

This wasn’t what I signed on for. This isn’t what I’m trained for. There is nothing wrong with his body; no illness to treat, no wounds to bind. It’s his mind that is broken, and there is nothing that I, or all the psychiatrists in the world, or anyone short of God himself can do to repair it.

And the futility of it makes me resent him terribly, makes me dread seeing his face. And the shame that he might see the resentment on mine burns me like a torch.

And so I say nothing, sitting silently beside him, and I bear witness to his despair.

“Why won’t they take me?” he sobs plaintively, clutching desperately at my arm. “Call Zeke,” he begs. “Zeke’s my friend. He’ll make them put me in. I can’t survive out here.“

How bleak must his life be, that he regards the parish coroner as his savior? People only interact with a coroner when a relative has died, or when someone thinks they’re crazy. Neither is a happy occasion.

The truth is that he’s not sick enough to be locked away. He doesn’t hallucinate, doesn’t hear voices urging him to do bad things. He doesn’t contemplate killing himself. He calls for the same reason he did last week, and last month, and a dozen times before that. He is simply a man for whom living independently and wrestling his demons are two tasks he will never, ever be able to manage simultaneously.

And he knows it.

He is too honest to game the system, too naive to understand that’s what it may take. Should I tell him what to say, how to act so that he’ll get at least a few days in a place of comfort, where people may at least pretend to care about his welfare? I certainly know the litany well enough. I could teach him the magic words.

But then, how will I justify it to myself, knowing that he’ll be taking up bed space needed by someone who is truly a danger to himself or others? In post-Katrina Louisiana, psych beds are all too precious a commodity. Mentally ill patients here move through a vicious cycle of hospitalization, medication, discharge, decompensation, hospitalization, medication, discharge…

… fragile people stuck in a meaningless revolving door of all too many psychotropic medications and all too little meaningful therapy, and altogether nonexistent followup care. They warehouse them and dope them with Haldol and Thorazine until their reimbursement capitates, and then suddenly declare that they’ve made significant progress and are ready to be released again into the world, with a prescription for medications everyone knows they can’t afford and outpatient appointments with a psychiatrist everyone knows they won’t be able to keep.

And if I did coach him on how to get committed, it would be a temporary solution at best. He’d likely spend at least 24 hours in the ER awaiting a psych bed… somewhere. And the ER nurses hate to see him coming, their weariness and distaste manifest in their expressions. It’s an expression I know well. I’ve worn it myself.

And so I don’t coach him on how to act, don’t tell him what to say. Resignation and dismay radiate from him like a roiling black cloud, threatening to envelop me if I get too close.

So instead I sit there, silently at his bedside, and I bear witness to his despair.

I find myself wondering what is the point of it all, asking myself if something, anything I do makes a difference. Patients like him certainly make me doubt.

Rookie Partner putters around the room, gathering medications, clothing, and personal effects. Wallet and a half-empty pack of Newports, keys and a small laminated card with the 23rd Psalm written upon it; they all go into a bag with the cleanest clothing and underwear we can find. A search is launched for his cigarette lighter, and RP’s impatience is etched upon his face as I make him scour the room for it.

The unspoken message is that finding the lighter itself isn’t so important as showing him that someone cares enough to look for it. RP may not get that yet, but he will. We’re still working on our nonverbal communication.

Finally the lighter is found, and it goes in the bag too, tucked carefully between the cigarette pack and its cellophane wrapper. RP waits by the door, patiently now, as our patient sits on the bed, still anxiously twisting that sock in his hands.

“Do you think they’ll admit me?” he asks tearfully, afraid to hope.

“I don’t know,” I dodge, and he sees the answer for what it is. He starts to cry again.

And silently I sit beside him, and I bear witness to his despair.

And then the radio crackles, and the pager vibrates, reminding me that we’ve lingered here too long.

“Come on Roger, it’s time to go,” I tell him gently, taking his hand and placing another on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, man. We’ll take care of you.”

… the call comes in, you know who it is before you even get there.

If the complaint is “rectal pain and bleeding,” the call comes in after midnight, and the location is a random street corner, the patient is going to be Hasbro.*

With Hasbro, it’s always rectal pain and bleeding, it’s always a 10/10, and he was always operated on just. last. week.

Rookie Partner thinks I’m clairvoyant, and I didn’t even have to recite Hasbro’s medical history, address and baseline vital signs, all of which I know by heart.

* So named because if he actually had as many rectal fistula repairs as he claims, his anus ought to resemble a Play Doh Fun Factory set on “spaghetti.”

It would seem that my review of Cycles and More’s customer service has struck a nerve. Some cretin who calls himself “gjerry3,” who has a Blogger profile only a couple of weeks old, has taken it upon himself to defend Cycles and More, and to inform the entire Intarwebz that I am a fat, flaming douchebag who can’t be pleased no matter how well I’m treated.

Awww, some troll got himself a Blogger profile just to say bad things about me! I’m touched!

Y’all go check out his comments in the Cycles and More posts to see what hilarity ensues when a semi-literate cretin disengages his finger from his nostril long enough to venture forth on the Internet.

And remember, the more you click on the links, and the more you egg him on, the more he’ll drool on his keyboard and the higher you’ll drive my Cycles and More posts in the Google rankings. So make with the clicky!

Oh, and gjerry3, normally my Momma is the only one who ever called me a fat, flaming douchebag. Only, she knew how to spell and use proper punctuation…

Edit: #1 Google result!

… because we carnivores are smarter.


Brain food, anyone?

Thanks, Uncle Strings!

Serious, she digs the bear. So much so, that I think the only way you’ll top it is to book a command performance from Hannah Montana herself.

It’s having conversations like this:

Rookie Partner: “The chick at the window says there’s no one in the Whitney Houston suite.”

Ambulance Driver: “Oh, well. Drive around the courtyard. There’s only so many rooms at Habib’s Crack Palace and Arms Bazaar. Maybe we’ll find our guy.”

RP: “What did the dispatch notes say again?”

AD: “Intoxicated male, in the Whitney Houston suite. Requests transport to substance abuse rehab. Which, of course, makes it your call, Partner.”

RP (hopefully, after making the circuit of the motor court, and interrupting at least one blowjob for a john to cheap to invest in a room): “I don’t see anybody. You reckon he’s left?”

AD (pointing): “Nope, that’s our guy right there.”

RP: “Aww, shit. Why him?”

AD: “Call it a hunch, but a naked guy sitting in a lawn chair, pissing into his shoe while swigging Cuervo straight from the bottle just screams ‘detox’ to me.”

And indeed, that was our guy.

Recently, The Borg discontinued the use of 10-codes for internal radio communications. We had already been using plain English in all inter-agency communications, a federal requirement implemented post 9/11.

Predictably, we’ve got a few folks bitching, voicing (erroneous and ill-informed) concerns about HIPAA, as if every denizen of Scanner Land hasn’t already memorized all our 10-codes anyway. In reality, they’re upset that we don’t have our own secret squirrel language any more, and what good is being an EMT if you can’t speak in incomprehensible radio jargon?

For my part, I get a healthy giggle at the fumbling attempts to get used to the new system. Every time I hear someone say, “Ten-four…um, uh… I mean affirmative,” I get the irresistible urge to say “Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?”

What really saddens me is that now I can no longer torture a rookie dispatcher with a rapid-fire barrage of “We’re 10-98, 10-8, 10-19, 10-18 to the 10-81, 10-4? If not 10-2, we’ll 10-9.”

It just loses something when instead you have to say, “Dispatch, we have completed our last assignment and are available for call. We’ll be returning to our station as soon as possible, if that’s all right with you. If our transmission wasn’t understood clearly, we’ll be happy to repeat it.”

On the bright side, the next time I ask the tinny, static-distorted voice at the drive-through speaker to repeat herself, I won’t find ten #9 meals waiting for me when I pull up to the window…

Ex Missus: “Just letting you know I paid the lawyer this morning. Three weeks, give or take, and you’re a free man.”

Ambulance Driver: “Cool. My harem was getting antsy.”

EM: “Do you recall if the lawyer said Little Brother’s DNA test was required by law, or ordered at the discretion of the judge?”

AD: “Can’t recall. Why?”

EM: “Well, I’d rather not spend $500 on a DNA test to establish paternity if a couple of signed affidavits from you and Husband In Law would suffice.”

AD: “I’ll ask the lawyer. Maybe we can get the judge to waive the DNA testing because Husband In Law is a Texas A&M fan.”

EM: “Uhhhhh, why would that matter?”

AD: “DNA testing would prove nothing. All Aggie fans have the same DNA anyway…”

That answer would be NO.

… while the rest of America wept and eulogized the dead pedophile, American soldiers died in Afghanistan, more people lost their jobs, North Korea launched a handful of missiles into the Sea of Japan, Congress passed the biggest tax increase in American history, and an EMT in Ohio mourned the death of her patient.

I suppose I should be happy that at least one person in this country has her head and heart in the right place.

I got yer pictures right here*…


Father and daughter, stylin’ and profilin’ with their matching shades.


KatyBeth, getting ready to ride, with her Joe Dirt Signature Model mullet blowing stylishly in the breeze.

Her Mom and Grandma insist on calling it a layered cut, but as far as I’m concerned they ruined my daughter’s gorgeous waist-length hair. Gotta admit though, it is easier to comb, and since she looks like she has bed head 24/7, we’ll be able to devote that thirty minutes every morning we’d normally spend perfecting her coiffeur to some other worthwhile pursuit – like sleeping in.

Just throw on a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, tuck her little Copenhagen can in her back pocket, and we’re ready to go…

Don’t worry, Strings. I’ve got your picture coming.

… when someone’s life shatters around them, it is sometimes hard to remember why we even try.

Day in, day out… people who don’t love themselves enough to take responsibility for their own health, and don’t care enough for others to lend a helping hand to their fellow man… it’s wearying. It can blind you to the very reason you got into such a profession in the first place.

We wade through the mud, and the blood, the piss and shit and vomit, the shattered glass and twisted metal, for very little thanks and a meager paycheck, and we often do it for people who expect a hand out rather than a hand up, who then have the temerity to claim, “I pay yo salary!”

We are mistakenly called heroes by people who don’t know any better, and ambulance drivers by people who should know better.

And when I write about it, someone always responds with “I couldn’t do what you do.”

But honestly, it’s not that different from being a cop, or a firefighter, or a prison guard, or a foster parent or social worker. Just a different milieu, that’s all, the same motivation written in a different medium, the failures all too familiar and all too frequent.

And when somebody asks me what it takes to make all that worthwhile, I always respond the same way:

“Just one person.”

Go read.

When you raise a child with cerebral palsy, life is all about finding alternatives, and seeking a balance between finding alternative ways to do things because the conventional way is impossible, and making her do things the conventional way, because even though it’s harder, it’s better for her.

And that’s a delicate balance, hard versus impossible.

Take diet, for example. I believe there is a distinct possibility that my daughter will one day grow to resemble a Chicken McNugget, only with serrated, squared edges more reminiscent of a Cheese Nip.

So I strike a balance between what she wants and what I think she should have. She gets her burgers plain, because varying textures give her the heebie-jeebies. For that same reason, she digs plain rice without gravy, although she loves that same gravy on mashed potatoes. It’s not being a finicky eater, it’s simply that she recoils at certain textures, particularly when her sensory input is giving her mixed signals. She loves ice cream, for example… but not if it has chunks of anything in it.

So we compromise, and we find alternatives.

Clothing is another example. She can put on pants, skirts and panties by herself, and I require that she do so, but shirts require help from Daddy. She likes girly things, and adores anything pink. But Cinderella dresses do not mix well with campground mud and campfire ash, so we compromise by allowing her to wear pink camo.

But the most frustrating thing for me to deal with is her aversion to sounds. I’m not talking loud noises, folks. I’m talking any unusual or unexpected sound. What seems like a pleasant little music-box jingle to us jangles her nerves something fearsome.

So I try to strike a balance between her aversion to sounds, and inoculating her against unreasoning fear of loud noises.

Her Grandma, for instance, made it damned near impossible to take Katy to any place that used industrial-style toilets. The louder flush gave her fits, and her fear of loud potties damned near grew to a phobia. And Grandma, ever-protective of KatyBeth, enabled her and let her avoid those noises. And Grandma agreed that it was indeed loud and unpleasant, and everyone knows that Grandmas know everything.

So it took us forever, and not a few accidents along the way, to get Katy to poop in a public restroom. First it was covering her ears when we flushed, and then it was taking her outside the stall while we flushed, and finally we progressed to making her flush, so she’d know when it was coming. And forewarned being forearmed, she discovered it wasn’t so scary after all.

She started asking to go along when I’d go shooting, or asking me to take her hunting. And the noise at first scared her badly, even with multiple layers of hearing protection. So I took her on father-daughter trips, just the two of us, where the only rounds we’d shoot were her special “quiet bullets.”

And after she got used to those, we used regular .22 high velocity rounds, and she didn’t flinch. She still thinks we’re using the quiet bullets, though. The past couple of trips to the range, I took her along, and she happily played back behind the firing line (under supervision, of course) wearing her hearing protection while surrounded by all manner of loud noises – including explosive Tannerite targets – with nary a flinch. When her turn came, we called a cease fire, and everyone put their guns away while Katy shot a few clay targets and water-filled Coke bottles with her special “quiet bullets.”

Hopefully, one day we’ll actually progress to the point she can hit something with those bullets, without me helping her aim. Till then, as long as she asks to shoot and seems to be enjoying herself, I’ll leave the nuances of sight picture and trigger squeeze for another day.

Now, all that background is a prelude to the question she posed today. She brought me a toy carousel, and asked me to remove the batteries because the music it played skeeved her out. And I gently explained that turning it off was the only thing necessary, and the carousel would function just fine, but without music.

And Her Excellency Mistress Katherine, Queen of Logic, informed me that sometimes switches get turned back on accidentally, and the only way to be sure was to remove the batteries. And if I, Serf AD, were unwilling to remove said batteries, perhaps it was just safer all around to get rid of the toy.

And I informed her that it was wasteful to throw away toys, particularly treasured ones that we still played with, and that she may want that toy in the future, or choose to give it to her baby brother or her own child one day. And having thrown away that toy because she could not get over a silly, irrational fear of the noise it made, she may come to regret getting rid of said toy if that day should ever come to pass.

At which point my daughter pondered my irrefutable logic for all of ten seconds, and then brightly arrived at her solution:

“You know what we could do, Daddy? We could take it out to the range and tape some of your exploding stuff to it, and then it would blow up when we shoot it. Now that would be fun!”

I tell you, I don’t know whether to be proud or dismayed…

*Snerk.*

Hat tip to Mule Breath.

By way of Mule Breath, a godless liberal hippie treasured friend, we have a Penn and Teller video on the freedoms we celebrate today.

Go watch it. It’s really good.