Respiratory Therapy 101: Just Keep Breathing

As a substitute for anything approaching actual content, I give you a series of links that will surely provide you with some interesting reading.

First, Change of Shift is up at MonkeyGirl’s blog. There are some awesome articles there this week, and the theme is crayons and their colors, which automatically appeals to the crayola enthusiast in us all.

In other linky news, a respiratory therapist named Wayne Albert Bleyle who used to work in California has been sentenced to forty-five years in prison for molesting large numbers of patients in a convalescent ward in San Fransisco. Not only did he molest them, he photographed himself doing it and put it on his computer, which was a big contributor to his getting caught. I think I can speak for RT’s everywhere when I say that I hope that Mr. Bleyle chokes to death on some shitty prison food and then rots in hell. Intriguingly, he is named Wayne, which according to Freakonomics (link goes to their blog) is an aberrantly common name among criminals. It does pop up a lot on crime websites.

For today’s final link, I give you Oscar the Death Cat (link changed), who curls up on nursing home patient’s beds just before they die. The RT in me immediately began wondering about causation and allergies and so on, but apparently he’s just the messenger. I could use a cat like Oscar in my work. It would really help me to prioritize my treatment regimens, plus he’s just adorable with his little collar and bell! He’s supposedly very accurate, having called 25 deaths to date. The nursing home staff have begun to use him as a diagnostic, going as far as to call families in when Oscar makes his predictions. I’d try it at work with my housecat, but his major skills seem to be stalking flies and throwing up in fascinating spiral patterns on the tile floor.

I think that the nursing homes around here should invest in some cats. They could use one or two to do patient rounds. It beats their current system of making an aide poke the patients with a broom handle from the doorway of the room and then calling 911 if they don’t say “ouch…”