EmergencyDpt

I'm not one to pile on but if you have had a supernatural experience then it was totally your own. If I had one I'd look into my mirror and see what about me led me to a conclusion not supported by other witnesses or by reproducable and robust experimentation. There are well plenty of very well documented studies that show that other than the obvious quietus, there is no change in state from life to death of the corpus. No fan fare, no flashing lights, no spirit blinking its way to the ceiling, no change in weight or size, just death. Back to my rights as a citizen of the United States and more importantly, the perpetrators of social injustic that would put me to the back of the bus. In the workplace, my homosexuality only shows as much as your heterosexuality. I heard a radio comentator this morning say that , 'gay is the new black'.

Yoginurse2b, Thank you for your post. As athiests we are doubly damned (pun intended) by a society that would rather look back toward the hunter/gatherer, every man for himself, magical thinking mindset. I'm always dissapointed that nurses who use technology in every aspect of their lives aren't more agnostic (at least). It's a simple experiment to take heart attack victims and pray over one and give the other integrillin and see what happens. No sane nurse or medical professional would question that prayer is not a viable treatment for disease. Yet if you ask them whether it's ok for gays to marry, they drag out a tome that is THOUSANDS of years old to look up the answer! That the ancient King James is the last person to have it rewritten, when my nursing textbooks weren't good from one term to the next due to rewrites is proof that the information is outdated and useless. I didn't mean for this to be an attack on religion but it has already been brought to the fore by other posters. Religion is the primary mover against equal rights for gays, and women as well. If that's what it takes to get you to bed at night, go ahead and get down on your knees. However to make rules for modern times based on heiroglyphics scratched in the dirt is a recipie for disaster. I repeat, keep your religious gloves off my rights.

Making a point? Have you no idea that without the ability to engage in a civil marriage with our partners, we are denied the right of survivorship. When your partner dies, your house, your pets, your posessions go to your partner's closest reletive and guess what...it aint you! Lets use the words "civil marriage" because that is what has been taken away from us, the ability to engage in a civil marriage; a marriage recognized by civil authority, ie. the US government. Without the ability to engage in civil marriage, we can't put our spouse under our healthcare plan with the same pretax money that a wife would be paid from. Trust me on this. I got a letter from HCA corporate headquarters and they told me that since same sex partners are not spouses, they are just like adding your next door nieghbor to your policy and it comes post tax, not pre tax and that's about a 33% mark up. Why do I have to pay that? Without the ability to engage in civil marriage we cannot adopt our spouses children like a straight couple can to get healthcare and other benifits. Without the ability to engage in civil marriage, there is no clear path for joint home ownership, joint stock purchasing, and other cooperative profit based ventures that are automatically assumed of the new narrowed marriage laws. Without the ability to engage in civil marriage, we cannot sue an expartner for child support or alimoniy. There are just tons and tons of ways that without marriage, our relationships are second class. The poster that thinks that marriage is to bring children in the world is wrong, it's to make the partner part of your estate. The children of that marriage also will be part of your estate for sure and gay people can have just as many children as straight people. And it's just a short walk from your line of logic to make all marriages by senior citizens or other people who cannot bear children null and void. Civil marriage has nothing to do with sexuality, it's all about rights. Gay people want the same rights as everyone else. There is no desire to make churches perform matramony ceramonies for anyone any more than a jewish person can sue a catholic church to perform a ceremony from their faith. The snake handling and candle waving mumbo jumbo of religious rites have nothing to do with what gay people want. We want rights, the same rights as everyone else. We want the right to have the work we've done with our partners in raising children, amassing property, and participating in the tax system be recognized by civil authority. If you want to dip your head in water and paint your bottom blue, go ahead, but don't put your religious gloves on my rights. The sooner people start getting on with history and put down the fetters of the past, the sooner we can deal with the problems facing our generation. The world is not flat, the sun does not orbit the earth. Religion is not magic. Prayer does not affect the outcome of anything except your perception of it. So keep the state separated from all that or you will have traffic lights working on prayer power and taxes based on your church attendance. As humans, we only have eachother. Look at sharia law in muslum lands and you see that religion can cause good people to do bad things all in the name of god. A woman gets raped, she will be stoned to death for it! A woman gets caught driving, she looses a hand. A women gets caught without her head blanket, she gets lashed. Religious law is religious law and it should never be mixed up with civil law. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep the religious hysteria from infecting the cool logic of government for the betterment of mankind.

Just Cause, Thanks for your post. And good point. However, exit polls show that the majority of people who voted for prop 8 did so for reasons that were not germaine to the issue, ie, teaching gay marriage in school. Marriage has not been taught in schools since public schools have been formed in California. Gay people already had the right to get married and no one was teaching anything about marriage, gay, straight or otherwise. So I resubmit that this was passed under false pretenses. The wool was pulled over the eyes of California voters. The night before the election the prop 8 people covered the internet with 'save marriage rights' ads all over google adsence. This is the opposite of what proposition 8 was about. It wasn't about saving marriage rights, it was about taking marriage rights away! Gay people didn't want to take marriage rights away from anyone, we just want the same rights as anyone else. The supreme court agreed. That's the job of the court, to intervene when "the will of the people" would take rights away from a minorty, to "legislate from the bench", just like when blacks were integrated into schools, and when women were made fully vested voters, and Jim Crow laws were struck down. Do you think voters passed laws for that? Eh, no. The voters were all for segregation and injustice. It's called checks and balances, you should look it up. That lies were perpetrated to pass the bill is just one of the MANY legal avenues to defend against this onerous bill. If you have to lie to get your bill passed and fool voters into thinking it's something it isn't then your bill deserves to fall to the gavel, and it will because it writes descrimination into the constitution. Shame on them and shame on anyone who would take rights away from a minority for no reason other than they can. Martin Luther King wouldn't have supported it. Equal rights for all humans. If your marriage is in trouble because I marry my partner, you should seek councelling. Gay marriage does not detract one bit from society, it only makes it better. I pay my taxes and my bills. I go to work and heal the sick and I deserve every right that everyone else has. If anyone has a problem with it then they should take a good look at the mirror and see why that may be. I did and I started the terrifying and hurculean work of dealing with my homosexuality and the role society would try to force on me; the roll of a second class citizen, good only for picking up the garbage, shunned by society because I was born gay, unable to marry, or adopt children, or have the rights of survivorship of the property my partner and I accumulated together. Anyone can kick me out of an apartment because I'm gay. Anyone can fire me. It's still legal in 26 states to fire someone because they are gay. Well no more. Sorry, I'm pushing back and I invite everyone who sees injustice in the world to call it out. I call bull @#@! on prop 8!

Yoginurse2b, Jimmy and I were really dissapointed about that vote. They couldn't have passed it without using lies and misdirection. In exit polls, 80% of people who voted for prop 8 did so to keep homosexuality from being taught in the schools. This was one of many lie campaigns used by the prop 8 religious people who put out commercials that if prop 8 didn't pass, then CA schools would somehow be teaching 2nd graders to be gay. This is a total fabrication and the Superintendant of Schools put out a commercial decrying this decietful tactic. Gay people already had the right to get married and some 18,000 had tied the knot. There is nothing taught about marriage at any grade level in schools. Prop 8 was about taking the right of gay people to get married away from them, not about teaching 2nd graders to be gay. This is just the kind of 'win at any cost' tactic used by certain groups that want to make governing a zero sum game instead of win-win cooperation that it should be. It's very unAmerican and dispicable. That blacks fell for this trick in such huge numbers means that society has a very short memory as it wasn't too long ago that a black man couldn't marry a white woman in the US and the very same arguments where used against them...that black men would be grabbing little white girls if they got the ability to marry whites. No one wants to lend a hand when it's the other guy's back up against the wall. http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y199/EmergencyDpt/?action=view&current=102720082410.jpg

As a gay male in his 40's I have seen the incidence of homophobia in the workplace decline quite a bit. Of course I moved from Georgia to San Jose to escape some of that but all in all it's a more accepting workplace. Gay people have had a tough time as a minority in society. I remember when I was in my twenties I saw my first gay bashing and it really shook me up. Then, when Mathew Sheppard was tied to a post and beaten to death by those criminals, it really put homophobia in the national spotlight. I had a very hard time dealing with my sexuality. I did not want to be gay and I tried religion and therapy to 'get over' it like it was a disease. After a great deal of soul searching I slowly came to realize that I was no better or worse than any other human for the sexuality that I did not choose. I decided that I would stop beating myself up over it and stop taking the mental garbage that others were throwing my way, friends and family included. After that my life blossomed. I was no longer holding back who I was and that allowed me to grow instead of wither. Most people don't realize I'm gay when they meet me. I've never been a 'fabulous' homosexual. I'm more of a slogger at it, I'm afraid and sometimes I envy those who are better at it than me. As for work...I'm 'out' and I don't make any beans about it. I have a partner of 5 years and I find men attractive. That's who I am. I have a sexuality and while it's not a big part of my work life, I am not going to hide it in fear because it is just as beautiful and worthy of respect as any other part of me or any one else. I owe it to the next generation to leave this world in better shape than I left it. I decided to do that, in part, by fighting homophobia. I perform my care in a nonjudgemental fashion and don't expect to be judged if my sexuality is revealed in conversation. Nursing, by its nature is a very personal profession. You perform sometimes embarrassing or painful procedures on a human and they tend to want to know a little bit about you. Accepting who I am, allows me to better accept other humans for who they are. Sometimes other people are in a place that requires some personal growth before they can be accepting of gays, or blacks, or indians, or any other minority. It's not for me to either shelter them from it and stunt their growth or judge them for being in a place that I was in at an earlier stage. However I owe it to the world to be a good person and a worthy nurse who, among many other things, is an unashamed homosexual. I don't accept intolerance and point it out when I see it. "I hope that look on your face wasn't because I responded to your question that I live with my boyfriend. Because we are gay, we are not allowed to get married, therefore we have no choice but to live in sin. Write your congressman about it, would you?"

On my planet the pyxis is in the waiting room. It takes cash, checks, foodstams, wic cards. It saves giving a million dollar work up to people who are just garden variety drug addicts.

We had a fourteen year old boy with his mother's vibrator in him in the "on" position. You could feel it through his stomach and definatily auscultate it "BZZZZZZZZ" I don't know who was more embarrased, him or his mother. I look at it as a normal part of sexual experimentation. The abnormal part is letting go of the damned thing...

Use it often in the ER. One hospital protocol stated that only an MD can give it if IV but that was just one. The research I've done says that it's very safe. it was used extesively in Viet Nam as a battle field anesthetic becuase it had little or no effect on respiratory drive. We use a flow sheet and treat it like any other conscious sedation procedure. Personally I prefer to hold the kid down (bruticaine) and do most procedures. When you absolutely can't use that approach ketamine is a good way to safely put the brat down. Mostly the decision is based on what the doctor is familiar with. Lately we have been using alot of etomidate. That stuff is a miracle.