Those of you who are following me on Twitter will know that I had an accident with some hot wax about 40 hours ago and sustained some nasty second degree burns on my left hand. I basically flayed one finger and have now decided Theon Greyjoy is not such a pansy after all.
The good news is that it doesn’t really hurt. The bad news is that it doesn’t really hurt – that can’t be good. I was in the ER today to have my wedding rings removed which is kind of sad, but rings do not a marriage make. In order to remove rings the nursing staff uses some kind of tool to create a groove in the ring and then another tool to actually cut the ring. I can’t be more specific because looking at my hand kind of makes me want to puke.
Let me preface this by saying that I have a great deal of respect for nurses in general. I consider them rare women actually doing a vital job. However, this clearly does not inoculate them from sexist bullshit. Two lady nurses were attempting to remove my rings and were having a hard time with it and causing me a significant amount of pain. One nurse gripped my burned and damaged finger and yanked on it while the other nurse desperately tried to cut through the ring. I stopped them and asked if it was a matter of strength and both nurses assured me it had nothing to do with strength – it was just a matter of using the tools correctly. After a few more excruciating rounds I looked at my hand to see one nurse attempting to apply pressure to what looked like a pair of wire snips. Extremely pissed off at this point I insisted they call a male nurse.
Enter Justin. He was a man of average build and height – not some huge, hulking beast of a man – and it took him approximately two seconds to cut through the rings. Guess what? He was stronger than the lady nurses! The only reason I can think of that the two nurses would prefer to subject me to a bit of torture rather than grab the closest man who could do the job much more easily than they could is bullshit feminist ideologies about men and women being exactly equal in all ways. Add a little professional resentment to the mix and you have a perfect storm of female nurses putting ideology ahead of their patients. How lovely.
It normally takes around six weeks for a new layer of skin to grow during which time I’m going to find typing a bit of a challenge. On the other hand, my recovery is going beautifully so hopefully I will be back at the keyboard much sooner than anticipated.
In the meantime I’ll be tweeting the shit out of the #womenagainstfeminism hashtag and it is only my genuine affection and appreciation for nurses that keeps me from starting a #womenagainstfeministnurses hashtag.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
First of: OUUUUUCH. Pain caused by burns is the worst pain ever.
Second, a man (like me for instance) also never likes to as for help (or directions when I am lost for that matter).
I do not think this is a feminist issue, rather a “admitting defeat” thing. Still sucks though.
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I wonder, have the nurses learned that it is a matter of strength, and will they incorporate this newly found knowledge into their future practice?
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Number one: Ouchie! Don’t do that!
Number two: A good jeweler can fix those rings to like new without a problem. It shouldn’t even be a terribly expensive repair. My dad had an accident where they had to cut off his ring. They gave it back to him in two pieces.
Number three: Look up right hand, single hand dvorak. I haven’t learned any of the dvorak variants yet, but I’ve read that they’re really easy to pick up.
Number four: Feel better soon!
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I thought it was the more reasonable, less – prideful women who have no problem asking for directions.
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Sorry to hear about your accident Janet, but look on the bright side, you could have been in a house fire and they could have sent you a female fire crew.
In which case we might all be mourning your untimely demise.
Get well soon!
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Ouch! But it’s easy enough to get the rings fixed.
OTOH, there are ways to get rings off swollen fingers that don’t involve cutting; surprised that this wasn’t tried.
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They probably weren’t thinking about it nearly as much as you give them credit, JB. I doubt feminism had anything to do with it.
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Very sorry to hear about your hand and ultimately your rings, but good on you for realizing the severity of the situation and acting accordingly.Very sad state of affairs wen some women would rather cling to false beliefs (which deep down inside they KNOW are false )which allows an innocent bystander to go through the grinder and experience negative outcomes simply so they could continue in the charade.
Note this situation well everyone, this is the exact same attitude that so many misinformed spread to the ill informed simply to bolster their position. Why women will spread lies about abuse statistics, the limitations on female fertility and desirability, and the general issues facing the genders of today.
The fantasy means more than the reality and some will chase it by any means necessary.Wishing you a speedy recovery JB, and hoping that your rings are better than ever once repaired.
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“The only reason I can think of that the two nurses would prefer to subject me to a bit of torture rather than grab the closest man who could do the job much more easily than they could is bullshit feminist ideologies about men and women being exactly equal in all ways.”
Their conscious ideological concerns are only half the issue. The other half would be their unconscious concerns assuming that they are indeed professionals who are not ruled by these concerns. (Been reading a lot of Jung lately.)
Perhaps your youthful attractiveness, zest for life, and the rings themselves (indicating a loving commitment to an actual man) triggered these nurses to the extent that the strength of their hands were actually physically impaired! I’m glad that you had the presence of mind to ask for a male nurse. They are great to have around.
My own experiences in hospitals with female nurses (not good, by the way) remind me to be careful of accidents. I tend to bring out the sadistic impulses of certain types of women who would appear to be threatened or envious (it isn’t always clear) that I am not operating from their particular cognitive dissonance. Having me strapped to a gurney is apparently triggering for such a type in the opposite direction–a strength surge. Such apparently is the peculiar paradoxical behavior of the amygdala–a part of the brain responsible for such anomalies that tends to be less problematic in persons of more *rational* persuasion.
Speaking of accidents, I was without the use of my dominant hand for nine months and thereby learned to be ambidextrous. It was a character building experience that taught me a new mastery. I wouldn’t recommend hurting one’s hand for such an experience but since it is done, I hope that you seize the opportunity to discover a new facet of life that heretofore might have been hidden from you because you had two working hands.
I love the Dvorak keyboard idea. The Qwerty after all was designed to slow down typing speed in order to reduce mechanical failure in the early typewriter. I had once wanted to learn Dvorak (two-handed) but being that I was already at 100 wpm decided not to take that fork in the road. My hands are like vice grips even if my amygdala does occasionally give me some trouble.
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Wow, feminists are right about the harm of waxing your legs
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Do more videos in the meantime! (I miss your intro)
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Ouch! Hoping you feel better soon, really enjoy your work, U are a national treasure!
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Oh no, I hope you get well soon!
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JB, take a well earned rest and allow your changed circumstances to work their magic and enjoy the resultant fruits. Hope the healing is fast, smooth and as painless as possible.
Thanks for your posts.
John
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I’ve had hand injuries before myself. Definitely no fun. Get well soon.
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“I stopped them and asked if it was a matter of strength and both nurses assured me it had nothing to do with strength – it was just a matter of using the tools correctly.”
While strength certainly helps, I suspect the nurses–being a couple of tools themselves–unwittingly identified the REAL reason for their own failure: “it was just a matter of [NOT] using the tools correctly.”
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Ouch! Hope all goes well and you’re soon fit for fight again.
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The good news is that it is unlikely to be six weeks for your 2nd degree burns to heal enough to allow you to do most tasks, including typing. If you’ve got average healing then it might be a week until your blisters subside and the pain disappears – after that you should be able to resume blogging without much discomfit. In the meantime, consider using some form of computer/smartphone speech-to-text to get most of your thoughts down, then use your good hand to make minor changes and formatting. Avoid popping the blisters as long as you can, it just exposes your damaged flesh to bacteria (you might have to if you need to bend fingers and the blisters prevent that). Best wishes for your recovery.
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Ow 😦 I hope your hand has a speedy recovery! polysporin and vitamin E oil should do the trick! All the best
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I pour a BUNCH of candle wax every week.
I have, on occasion managed to warm my fingers, hands, legs and other assorted ticklish spots.
Stings like hell and lasts for days. At least I get some nice candles out of my misery.
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Caprizchka, women are perfect to work as nurses because they have no heart. Thay can deal with human suffering much better than male “nurses”.
By the way, dear, I cancelled my trip to feminazi Iceland, and changed it for Morocco. This is very male chauvinist pig country. You would love it. The problem with this very male chauvinist pig countrys is virginity. I mean: men have to wait until marry to have a shag. Same as women. The only option they have is with European female tourist who come here for a “romantic trip”. Tons of them.
I think a flight from U.S West Coast to Casablanca is not so big deal. I can pick you up in the airport if you like. You tall blonde women SHINE in the North of Africa.
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Ouch, that looks really painful. Burns are no fun and wax is a nasty one.
I work in healthcare and I really appreciate the men that are around, nurses, doctors, even technicians. Yes, their tendency to be stronger is invaluable, but it’s the emotion they
bring to a room that I like the most. Women can be ridiculous, office politics, petty sniping. Men have a way of bringing calm to the chaos, of changing the dynamic.
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Great tip, thanks, but I doubt that I have the stamina.
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Don’t be silly, that would be dangerous. We wouldn’t any precious women going anywhere they might get hurt now would we.
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I second that.
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That sounds nasty…I had a similar incident with a female dentist. I was in to have a wisdom tooth removed, which should’ve been a simple job – however, she wasn’t strong enough to pull it out in one go, so she ended up shattering the tooth (her grip was too hard relative to the force she was using to pull – classic mistake which occurs when there’s simply not enough strength to do a job).
In the end, she got the tooth out in three parts, fracturing my upper jaw and creating a hole between my mouth and my sinus (which she didn’t notice). This, in turn, kicked offa serious infection in the wound site which saw that side of my face almost double in size – and the dentists did nothing except prescribe me some pain killers I could’ve bought over the counter.
It was only when I sought a last-ditch second opinion from my doctor that the extent of the damage was revealed…and, as it turns out, I was hours away from being admitted to hospital and about a day away from being on life support, had I not gone to him for help.
So yeah…once bitten, twice shy. I’m sure there are female dentists who *are* strong enough, but I won’t go to any of them for anything more than a checkup. The last one nearly killed me.
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Best wishes for a speedy recovery young lady.
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Oh… come on…
Funny that European feminazis go to Morocco to shag with Arabic male chauvinist pigs. They don´t like their feminist European men.
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Just a quick word of advice—– a woman will never have the grip strength that a man does unless you’re dealing with a seriously butch woman. It’s a matter of simple size. Even a big fat woman will have relatively small bones and muscle groups regardless of the visual size of her forearms. Small bones and muscle groups make for a weaker grip. Happens on very small men, too, but they get some offset caused by the lifelong exposure to high levels of testosterone and other male drugs that boost strength.
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Oh my gosh! That’s horrible.
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The skin of a burn is sensitive but also, the connective tissue is damaged.. If you try to pull a ring off a burned finger, 9 times out of 10 you will take most of the flesh off with it.
I have seen burn victims that had to be moved lose ALL the skin off their backs when lifted by firemen. It just slid off to the floor…. Life before limb…..
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Having suffered some serious burns a decade ago, I truly sympathize. Losing sensation means your burns are pretty deep. Hope you don’t need skin graft – but I heard they can take some skin cells and make them multiply, and then “spray” them onto the burnt areas these days….
I can tell you about one funny thing that might happen (happened to me). As the nerve endings grow back out into the new skin tissue, they might find slightly new locations. Ergo, until you have adapted, poking one area may give the sensation that you are poking somewhere next to it 🙂
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Interesting. Removing dressings stuck to the burn hurts but only mildly and only for about 10 minutes. As of right now, I still feel no pain and two fingers have healed completely. No scars, just a bit of redness.
It’s very strange
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My experiences with female nurses are both good and bad– human nature in a nutshell I suppose. But I understand what you mean by the hostility some women can express toward woman who don’t necessarily fit in to a certain culture. I have always felt a little on the outside because I don’t buy into the feminist doctrine. Ah well. I’ll take my husband, kids and happy family over fitting in to the “girlfriend” clique any day.
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Btw JB– I hope your hand is healing up well.
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I hope you are on your way to healing when you read this. I am sorry about those nurses…one’s pride should NEVER interfere with patient care. I have been an ER nurse 17+ years……mostly inner city (now, thankfully, in a military hospital where my patients are MUCH nicer to me). My experiences (getting beat up, spit on, groped, bit, etc) have resulted in me actually being MORE comfortable when I am working shifts with male nurses….I actually prefer it. I never thought to analyze the politics of it. The male nurses are usually bigger, stronger, and, dare I say it, protective of the female nurses (at least most of us) More men going into nursing has to be one of the best things to happen to this profession…at least in my opinion 🙂
And can I just say you are the bomb…I LOVE everything you write…and have even shared some of your stuff with my male co-workers (if you only knew how they approach sexual assault in the military…it would make your head spin). They are VERY relieved to know that women like us exist in the world. We have shared some good conversations about your posts.
Feel better soon!
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Yes we are all different and attract different sorts of nemeses. By no means is my experience intended to be representative however it is always nice when the experience of two or more people overlaps a bit. Speaking of overlap, I respect your priorities.
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dude, I don’t think it’s a “women are equal” thing. Most women have asked a guy to open a jar or put the water jug into the cooler. They were just trying to take it off and were getting frustrated and getting focus-brained because of it, you know, like when you’re working on something
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“They are VERY relieved to know that women like us exist in the world.”
Count me in as another one.
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“Enter Justin. He was a man of average build and height – not some huge, hulking beast of a man – and it took him approximately two seconds to cut through the rings.”
Testosterone can come in handy sometimes can’t it? It’s not all evil like the feminist like to pretend it is. 😉
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Ouch, I hope you get well soon!
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