Time to do The Happy Dance

(Photo from the Seattlest Flickr pool)

Yay! My Washington state nursing license finally came through! Now I've got to figure out whether to buy a plane ticket for Wednesday now, or wait to see more details about the storm that's supposed to come through on Tuesday, which might just be rain, but also might be mixed with snow.

Connecticut just got hit with 4" to 10" of snow today, depending on location, which will soon be changing over to freezing rain later this afternoon, so I'm stuck inside, checking out airfares and flight schedules. Maybe later I'll listen to a find from my trip to Nashville- a great Friday evening funk radio show online.

Nursing News

(Picture; Quechee, Vermont. November, 2007. By me.)

Medicare Rule Will Affect Nurses
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule eliminating reimbursement for certain hospital-acquired conditions starting Oct. 1, 2008, will have a significant impact on nurses, according to a new paper released by researchers at George Washington University and the American Academy of Nursing.
The new rule eliminates payments for in-patient pressure ulcers, certain injuries (such as fractures), catheter-associated urinary tract infections, vascular catheter-associated infections, certain surgical site infections, objects left in surgery, air embolism, and blood incompatibility.

This next one is a mind-blower. And it's from the Wall Street Journal, no less ;

The Heparin Trail
China's Role In Supply
Of Drug Is Under Fire
February 21, 2008
YUANLOU, China -- In a small, damp factory here, blood-smeared men wring pulp from pig intestines, then heat it in concrete vats.
The activity at Yuan Intestine & Casing Factory is the first step in the poorly regulated process of making raw heparin, the main ingredient in a type of blood-thinning medicine that in recent days has come under suspicion in the deaths of four Americans.

Investors run for cover, trial lawyers drool in anticipation ;

China quality problems may make Baxter (BAX) the next Mattel (MAT)
The debacle is not unlike the one that plagued Mattel (NYSE: MAT) last year when it was importing toys from China that contained high levels of lead. In Baxter's case, however, it appears that people have lost lives.

Vacuuming Blood Clots Better Heart Attack Treatment
A Dutch study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that if blood clots blocking an artery are vacuumed out instead of being pushed aside, the chances of heart patients surviving major heart attacks increase drastically. The clot removal also leaves them with fewer problems.

Social support impacts blood pressure
Older adults who lack support from family and friends may be at heightened risk of abnormal blood pressure regulation, new research suggests.

Drug Information Portal from the National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Includes prescription and non-prescription drugs, dietary supplements, drugs of abuse, and investigational drugs. "We cover over 12,000 drugs from the time that they are in clinical trials, through their FDA approval, and then on to the marketplace. The coverage includes: Resources hosted by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) such as MedlinePlus, ClinicalTrials.gov, DailyMed, and Dietary Supplements Label Database, and HSDB and LactMed as well as outside resources such as Drugs@FDA and AIDSinfo."

"Is that a resort?" ***

***Actual comment from a Connecticut resident.

No, it's the view from the 5th floor of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in New Hampshire, where I did two travel assignments.

Pretty sweet, huh?

;-)

(Photo by me, Fall, 2007. To see more pictures of DHMC, click here.)

No-contact (with reality) Lenders

(Savannah, GA Hair Studio, Spring 2007 - photo by me. To see more photos of Savannah, click here.)

A Former Nurse Finds Focus in a Knitting Business

Your new word of the day.
(I'm willing to bet you haven't heard this one before.)

To Do in Seattle : Northwest Flower and Garden Show
February 20-24, Weds - Sat 9AM to 9PM, Sun 9 AM to 6 PM
WA State Convention Center, 7th and Pike, Seattle, WA

Remember Flounder from the movie "Animal House"?
As Dean Wurmser famously told him,
"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life."
Fortunately for Flounder, it's apparently not an impediment
to getting a job with the FDA;
FDA evaluated wrong Chinese drug factory
Producer of heparin ingredient went uninspected because of name mix-up
(See sidebar at left for more about the Baxter Heparin recall.)

Your daily dose of Doom;
This is an amazing statistic. "...To stem the foreclosures,
the mortgage industry says, lenders need to reach people they call
"no-contact borrowers," those who have eluded or rebuffed them.
There are lots of them. From September 2005 to August 2007, 53 percent of the loans backed by Freddie Mac that went into foreclosure involved borrowers who could not be reached..."
And look at how long ago it started. The housing market
was just starting to peak then.
Breakdown of the social order, or just the proles (a.k.a. my peeps)
finally figuring out how to stick it to The Man after 30 years
of the rich reneging on their end of the social contract???
We've gone from presidential candidates blathering about
"The Ownership Society" to the "You've been owned" generation.
Kinda' funny, even if it doesn't... uh... exactly bode well for the banking system.
Then again, neither does borrowing $50 billion dollars from the Fed
in the span of a few weeks, in order to stay afloat. 
I guess that's a pretty amazing statistic, too.
 
Alright, enough Doom already. Stop scaring the nice people, Amy. 
Let's get back to the happy/useful stuff.

LibriVox: free audiobooks.

Science for Kids.

Free online anatomy textbook.

Medical Mnemonics

It's a right-click world

(Photo; Employee taking a break from watering flowers to show off "Impeach Bush & Cheney" t-shirt, Upper Valley Food Co-Op, White River Junction, Vermont, September 2007. Taken by me.)

Put the Freeze on Identity Theft

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Walter Lewin has become a global Internet star now that anyone with access to a computer can watch his tough but fun Physics 1, 2, and 3 lectures free of charge.

Get an MIT or Yale Education Free

Knit a Sweater, Hipster Style
Somewhere on the way to kitsch, knitting suddenly became cool. Witness a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal in December on "Sock Wars." A variation on the game Assassin, popular on college campuses, Sock Wars players essentially pair off in face-to-face death matches, racing to knit a pair of socks: Last one to finish is "killed."
Such competition is probably more pressure than most people are looking for, but there are other ways to dig into the edgy side of your grandmother's hobby. Books such as Anticraft: Knitting, Beading, and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister by Renée Rigdon and Zabet Stewart offer a start, with projects like "belladonna sleeves" and "pop art skulls" pillows.

Investing in Commodities Funds

DNA Pollution May Be Spawning Killer Microbes
Rogue genetic snippets spread antibiotic resistance all over the environment.
(Unfortunately, not as weird as it sounds.)

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries

How Grandma Sees The Remote