mind over med @mindfullymedical - Tumblr Blog

ryebreadgf

loocotomy-deactivated20260410

'Someone Lights Someone is Lighted' by Ivan Pokidyshev (2025). From 'Wanderers in the Dark' exhibition, St. Petersburg.

I miss you.

I miss the way we used to delight in the absurd.

Openly. Breathlessly. Shamelessly.

I still do sometimes, in subdued ways, as soft as a wrinkling around the eyes.

It never bubbles through me. No longer does it break past my lips as laughter. It’s silent now. Forbidden. Forsaken.

I wish the world was still mad, in that dark and cheerful way that percolated through out friendship.

I miss you.

bestiolin

lyn chao yu

gabalut

Malus pulmonis, watercolor and colored pencil

titsay

namedvesta

The Bird of A Thousand Voices, installation by Boris Acket at the Vilnius Light Festival in the St. Catherine Church, 𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟨

sesiondemadrugada

Peter Sculthorpe.

dxmedstudent

mariacallous

flintandpyrite

Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.

teaboot

Hi!!! One of my parents got meningitis when I was a kid.

They were in the hospital for nearly a month, the rest of us were all placed in medical quarantine, there were several points we thought they were gonna die, and even though they survived, it was a SUPER close call and they lost about two years of memories from the ensuing brain damage.

Like… a two-uear-long cookie-cutter pocket of thoughts and memories went missing right out of their brain. It’s an inflammation of the brain that cooks it alive.

I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THERE WAS A VACCINE.

I WILL BE GETTING IT.

dxmedstudent

To give you a clue about how serious bacterial meningitis is:

One of my colleagues reviewed a child with mild viral symptoms during clinic, I think around lunch time. They even got a senior doctor to look the kid over, because they were a little less experienced themselves. The child's observations (vital signs) we're normal and they looked good, just like a normal kid with the snuffles and a cough. No signs of pneumonia.

As every good doctor should, they told the parents what to look out for, and when to seek help if things changed.

The parents got worried that evening. They drove you the hospital but the child got VERY sick on the very short drive to hospital.

The child died that evening. They had rapidly developed pneumococcal meningitis. A condition we can now vaccinate against with the pneumococcal vaccine. When the case was examined, nothing was missed, the child had simply become rapidly and life threateningly sick within a few hours with an extremely aggressive infection with a high fatality rate.

Most experienced doctors I know have a story like this - or a story about someone who came into A&E (ED) mildly unwell but only developed actual meningitis symptoms during their wait in the department and could have died if they were sent home earlier.

Cases like this are why I try to drill into each patient when they need to go straight to A&E.

At a GP surgery we actually carry only a few drugs to give patients ourselves, because if someone is sick we call an ambulance and send them over to the hospital ASAP. The aim is to not delay sending people to hospital, as that is where the real intensive treatment starts.

We have defibrillators for cardiac arrest. Adrenaline for anaphylactic (life threatening) allergic reactions. Oxygen, salbutamol, ipratropium (for asthma or copd) and often dexamethasone (for croup) to help if someone is seriously struggling to breathe...and benzylpenicillin. The initial antibiotic injection for suspected meningitis. Because you do not wait for test results to treat it. You don't even wait for them to get to hospital, or even for them to get into an ambulance. You trat as soon as you suspect it. Because by the time it is confirmed, it is often too late.

It boggles my mind that there are people who think it's an unnecessary vaccine. Or who think that a couple less shots for their kids is worth risking an increased chance of developing meningitis.

If you can't find the AAP vaccine recommendations and aren't sure, please look to the UK. Look to Australia. Etc. The rest of us are still vaccinating. And make sure you're with a pediatrician or family doctor etc who believes in vaccines.

mindfullymedical

This is a meningitis story but not one that is specific to a stereotype covered by a meningicoccal vaccine that older kids and teens get (the one they are eliminating)- However the point remains.

My practice took care of a 15 month old child. Parents were antivax.

This baby (like many infants and toddlers) had recurrent ear infections and were waiting to see ENT to get ear tubes.

The patient was seen in clinic and had a bad ear infection, plus cough, congestion, fevers, and poor appetite, but vital signs were as expected (low fever and very slight tachycardia) and the child was playful in the exam room. My partner prescribed antibiotics and arranged follow up in two weeks for an ear recheck.

That little toddler decompensated (fevers that wouldn't break and crying non stop, wouldn't eat or drink) so the parents took them to the emergency room.

In the end the child was found to have Hib meningitis.

A disease that we have a vaccine series that is 95% effective at preventing...

That little toddler left the hospital three weeks later profoundly changed. That child will never see or hear again- they were rendered completely blind and deaf and will remain so as long as they live

(Unfortunately parents did not follow up with audiology (because it was two hours away from home) and they missed the window of time where cochlear implants would have been an option)

My partner recalls that when he saw the child in follow up, they no longer smiled or laughed and seemed withdrawn into themself. The parents never accepted or acknowledged fault. They went on to have another child but left our clinic as we have since implicated a policy of only accepting patients who vaccinate.

#meningitis #mindfulmumbles #pro vaccine

thatsbelievable

purr-in-ink

titsay

wheresonichedgehogwnt

I will one day be able to articulate my feelings about the sleep deprivation of having a newborn being less severe than the sleep deprivation I experienced in medical training, but I have a newborn mammal to feed every two to three hours with milk I am personally making, so I think it'll be a minute before I can get around to it

mindfullymedical

Mom of a now almost four month old. The sleep deprivation of pregnancy and having a newborn is so so much better than residency sleep deprivation. I was up every two hours for the first month or so and it was still better. Now we're only up every 4-6, so if I time it right its only one wake up when I'd normally be asleep.