Smoke more cigs and help this guy out.

With all the compaints about the US healthcare system at least the Doctors here finish the procedure.

This guy's doctors remind me of building contractors.


Cigarette packs patch up hole in chestWednesday, April 23, 2008
Rao Jiacang, the man with cigarettes on his chest
Never mind nicotine patches - a DIY patient is using cigarette packets to cover up a gaping hole in his chest.
Rao Jiacang plastered the packets over himself after running out of money for crucial heart surgery.
Somehow he has survived for ten years, despite his beating heart being gruesomely visible through the paper folds.
Rao Jiacang measures up
But he is now desperate for a donor to come forward to pay for proper treatment to cover over the wound measuring seven by three inches.
Part of his ribs and skin were hacked away by surgeons in 1998, hoping to remove part of his infected lungs.
But the 51-year-old, from Taining in China's Guangdong province, says he was unable to afford the rest of the treatment after stitches were taken out.
He said: "I had the operation in 1998. I was then laid up for almost five years but gradually got used to the wound, and since 2003 I have been back on my feet.
"But no-one would give me a job and people were scared of me with the big hole in my chest.
"Because of that, I haven't dared to go outside, in case people get frightened."
He says he keeps the plaster coverings sterile, and changes the cigarette boxes several times each day.
Local doctor Wan Fi said: "It's a miracle that Rao could have lived so many years with such a massive opening in his chest."
His friend Xi Lin, 35, who was present when the plaster was changed, said: "I did not know what to expect but then I saw a heart through the hole in his chest, and it was actively beating."
An estimated one in 8,000 people are dextrocardiac - that is, their heart is not on the left hand side of their body, but slightly to the right.

There are times I don't want to share a joystick

It use to be you had to watch out for strangers offering candy. . .

At least if you're playing badly your buddies won't grab the joystick out of your hands.


Sorry, you are out of ammo ...
1 hour, 28 minutes ago
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Two Belgian beer fans have launched a video game named 'Place to Pee', which allows players to slalom down ski slopes or kill aliens while relieving themselves at urinals.
Werner Dupont, a software developer, and Bart Geraets, an electrical engineer, got the idea while drinking Belgian trappist beers, they told Reuters Television at a local festival on Sunday.
"This thing had to be invented by Belgian people and that's what we are," they said.
The 'Place to Pee' booth is designed for two users at a time and offers two games -- blowing up aliens in outer space or skiing down a virtual slope. Gamers hit their target by aiming at sensors positioned on either side of the urinal.
A specially designed paper cone allows women to play too, the inventors say.
Their 'Place to Pee' logo resembles 'Manneken Pis', the little urinating boy fountain that is among Brussels' top sightseeing attractions.

No Urine Bag for me. I'll use my coke bottle.

Now this is a case of skipping the company picnic and the water ballon fight.

Union: Urine bags to cut down on bathroom breaks goes too far
Associated PressMar. 20, 2008 01:16 PM
DENVER - Union officials in Colorado say a Qwest supervisor tried to cut down on lengthy bathroom breaks by telling workmen to use disposable urinal bags in the field.The manager distributed the bags to 25 male field technicians, telling them not to waste time leaving a job site to search for a public bathroom, the Rocky Mountain News reported Thursday."We deal with a lot of silliness in corporate America, but you've got to admit, it takes the freakin' cake," Reed Roberts, an administrative director at the Communications Workers of America District 7, told the newspaper.
Roberts did not return a message left by the Associated Press.Qwest spokeswoman Jennifer Barton said, "There's no policy whatsoever" requiring field technicians to use the bags."They are there for convenience, and they are there because employees asked for them," she said.The union has not filed a grievance, Barton said, and she could not discuss the details of the allegations from the communications company's field worker in the sparsely populated area near Montrose.Roberts said he had complained to Qwest's corporate labor relations department. He said the company has made an issue of the amount of time wasted by workers returning to the garage or central office for bathroom breaks.But he said it appears this manager "took it upon himself to cut down on the time technicians spend to go to the bathroom."Neither Roberts nor Barton gave the name of the supervisor involved.Qwest is the largest provider of telephone service in Arizona.Qwest and other companies have for years offered portable urinal bags to workers who could find themselves in the field far from a bathroom.The bag's manufacturer, American Innotek, said it provides the bags to various industrial companies, including electric utilities, municipal public works and telephone companies.Ryan Hiott, a regional director for Innotek, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered 2.5 million bags after Hurricane Katrina.

Loving your pet too much

I guess I misjudged what the Animal Lovers lobby was all about.

Dutch parliament approves ban on sex with animals
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The Dutch parliament voted unanimously Thursday to outlaw bestiality and pornography involving animals.Sex with animals and the making of animal pornography now will carry a punishment of up to six months in jail under the measure.Current Dutch law forbids bestiality only when animals are found to have been mistreated.

Animal pornography is explicitly forbidden in 80 countries and pornographers had lobbied fiercely against a Dutch ban, said lawmaker Harm Evert Waalkens, who introduced the measure."The Netherlands is now a magnet for perversities and we don't want that," Waalkens said.

Wow the dangers of a high fiber diet

All this could have been avoided if her boyfriend stop feeding her all the prunes.

Woman sits on boyfriend's toilet for 2 years
Girlfriend was physically stuck to the seat — her skin had grown around it
NESS CITY, Kan. - Deputies said a woman in western Kansas sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years, and they're investigating whether she was mistreated.
Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said a man called his office last month to report that something was wrong with his girlfriend.
Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.
“We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.”
Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman's 36-year-old boyfriend.
“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Whipple said. “It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”
He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.
“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,”’ Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”
The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that “there was something wrong with his girlfriend,” Whipple said, adding that he never explained why it took him two years to call.
Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to her mid-thigh. She was “somewhat disoriented,” and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.
“She said that she didn’t need any help, that she was OK and did not want to leave,” he said.
She was taken to a hospital in Wichita, about 150 miles southeast of Ness City. Whipple said she has refused to cooperate with medical providers or law enforcement investigators.
Authorities said they did not know if she was mentally or physically disabled.
Police have declined to release the couple’s names, but the house where authorities say the incident happened is listed in public records as the residence of Kory McFarren. No one answered his home phone number.
The case has been the buzz in Ness City, said James Ellis, a neighbor.
“I don’t think anybody can make any sense out of it,” he said.
Ellis said he had known the woman since she was a child but that he had not seen her for at least six years.
He said she had a tough childhood after her mother died at a young age and apparently was usually kept inside the house as she grew up. At one time the woman worked for a long-term care facility, he said, but he did not know what kind of work she did there.
“It really doesn’t surprise me,” Ellis said of the bathroom incident. “What surprises me is somebody wasn’t called in a bit earlier.”

Too many balls!!! March Madness

Damn talk about a Freudian slip. Sitting on the couch watching a bunch of men bouncing a big orange balls for 4 days.

March Soreness
SPRINGFIELD, Ore. - For guys who park in front of the TV during college basketball's March Madness, the Oregon Urology Institute has a suggestion: Why not use that time to recover from a vasectomy?"When March Madness approaches you need an excuse ... to stay at home in front of the big screen," the clinic's radio ad says. "Get your vasectomy at Oregon Urology Institute the day before the tournament starts. It's snip city."Institute Administrator Terry FitzPatrick said men need two to four days to recover from the procedure - but not all take the time.

He's reserved a dozen appointment slots for March 19, the day before the first tipoffs of the NCAA Tournament, and another dozen for March 26, before the tournament's second week.He reported filling 15 slots by Thursday afternoon and expects to fill all 24.The sports radio station broadcasting the clinic's ads promises to send each patient a recovery kit of sports magazines, free pizza delivery and a bag of frozen peas.Peas?"The frozen peas are malleable enough that you can get them right in there and get the swelling down," FitzPatrick said.

I'll take the veggie pizza.

And I thought I could take everything but anchovies on my pizza.


Moms' bizarre ritual is hard to swallow
Some say cooking afterbirth or encapsulating it in pills averts baby blues
By Melissa Dahl
Health writer

In the first few days of her baby’s life, Devorah Shalev was weepy. Then giddy. Then stressed. Then hungry. But mostly, overwhelmed - the 31-year-old mom from Las Vegas was hit hard with a case of the baby blues.
When she became pregnant with her second child, she looked for ways to stave off those sad feelings - and ended up doing something surprising. She ingested her placenta.
Placentophagy, as it’s called, grabbed headlines this summer after a judge ordered a Las Vegas hospital to give a new mom her uterine lining, which the woman planned to dry, grind up and ingest. She, like Shalev, had heard that ingesting the placenta was a natural way to ward off the baby blues - those overwhelmed, weepy feelings that 80 percent of moms develop after giving birth.
New moms who swear by the benefits of consuming their placenta point out that it’s a common practice among mammals - and after all, women are mammals, too. But no studies have examined health benefits of human placentophagy, says Dr. Diana Dell, an assistant professor in ob-gyn and psychology at Duke University.
"There’s certainly no data," Dell says. "And, truthfully, the only place there may be data is in veterinary journals."
Because the placenta contains estrogen and progesterone, some women believe that the sudden withdrawal of those hormones after the delivery is what causes the baby blues, and that ingesting the afterbirth restores hormone levels.
"The placenta does produce estrogen and progesterone," says Mavis Schorn, the director of the nurse midwifery program at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. "So the theoretical idea is that it may help, but there's absolutely no research on it."
Schorn also points out that because no research exists for this practice among humans, it's not clear what the cooking or encapsulating does to the nutrients and hormones that are in the blood.
Still, placentophagy isn’t something recently dreamed up by crunchy granola types - it’s been going on in many parts of the world for centuries:
· In parts of Indonesia, the Czech Republic and Morocco, new mothers once believed eating the placenta guarantees future fertility.
· Chinese women thought a bite of dried placenta would speed up labor.
· Once women in Hungary had tired of the whole child-bearing business, they believed that by burning the placenta and placing the ashes in their husband’s drink, he’d soon be shooting blanks.
Today, Google helpfully points the curious toward guides to preparing and eating the placenta. "Use your favorite lasagna recipe and substitute this (placenta cocktail) for one layer of cheese," chirps one how-to Web site. Another suggests grinding it up as a pizza topping.
But for women not blessed with iron stomachs, Jodi Selander offers help. Ingesting placenta doesn’t have to be a stunt to put "Fear Factor" to shame, the Las Vegas mom promises.
Popping placenta pillsAfter giving birth to her first child, Selander was cursed with a tough bout of the baby blues. Searching for natural remedies to combat those sad feelings before she delivered her second child, Selander stumbled upon a way of eating placenta without actually eating it - instead, she popped a pill.
"Before, I’d only ever heard of eating it," Selander says. "Which, if a woman wants to do that, that's wonderful - but that was something I personally couldn't do."
Selander opted for a home birth with her second child, and after the delivery, her midwife placed the placenta in the refrigerator. In her own kitchen the next day, Selander used her food dehydrator to dry the placenta, baked it in her oven, ground it up and put it into capsules. There was enough of the stuff to create about 150 capsules, of which she took one a day for the next two to three weeks.
"I felt so much better; I just felt great," Selander remembers.
There may not be any concrete evidence for its benefits, but Schorn says that unless the placenta was kept improperly, there are no inherent dangers to ingesting placenta, whether through encapsulation or cooking and eating it.
"It's an organ. So, just like any organ meat, if it wasn't kept well - if it wasn't frozen or kept at a cool temperature - you have a danger of bacteria or something growing," Schorn says. "But there's nothing inherent about placenta that would make it more dangerous than any other meat."
After her positive experience with the practice, Selander now sells placenta encapsulation kits from her Web site, placentabenefits.info. Still, she's honest about the ick factor she’s up against. While she says her site gets about 70,000 hits a month, she's only sold a couple dozen kits in the past year and a half.
"The first time you hear about it, everybody thinks it's weird," Selander admits.
Weird, sure. But isn’t it also just a little … gross?
"I don't think so, but some people would think so," Selander says. It just calls for a change in your mind set, she says.
"We have a very sanitary society. Anything that is not cleaned up and pretty and made to be put on display, we do deem as gross," she says. "But the thing is, birth is a messy process and the whole act of bringing life into the world is a whole messy ordeal."
One of Selander’s clients is the once baby blues-plagued Shalev, who says the experience helped her enjoy - not just survive - the first few weeks of her second child’s life.
"After the first baby I was an emotional wreck," says Shalev, speaking on her cell phone. "I’m sure my husband here can verify that." (Hubby Amir Shalev grunts his agreement in the background.)
But she noticed a sharp contrast in the weeks after delivering her second baby.
"It occurred to me that after a week I hadn’t cried once," Shalev says. "I was definitely stressed, but not once did I feel completely overwhelmed."
'Not the most attractive organ'Even the most vocal placenta pushers don’t expect the practice to ever become a national trend. But Selander hopes that the process will keep slowly attracting attention as another option for women to consider. The placenta, in her opinion, has simply received a bad rap.
"It's not the most attractive organ," Selander says. "And it comes out and it's attached to your beautiful baby, so in comparison of course it's not going to get as much respect and affection as the baby - of course.
"But at the same time, it's what helped bring that baby into the world. Without that placenta, there would be no baby," she continues. "We create it, we give birth to it, and it has such a truly, truly sacred connection to the child and to life."