ater

Not me, but in the span of a couple weeks I had some really awful experiences with pediatricians. My middle kid was almost three when they had a horrific fever and was complaining about a stiff neck, which is a huge red flag… But the ER sent us home with the diagnosis of “neck torsion.” A few hours later we went to a different ER because they had a lump the size of a grapefruit in their neck from an infected lymph node. Required several days in the hospital to get IV antibiotics.

A couple weeks after that I gave birth to our youngest, and at her 3 day check up her doctor claimed to see sores in her mouth and was worried about herpes (despite the fact that neither me nor my spouse have any STDs) so she sent us to the ER… No one there bothered looking in her mouth until after a lumbar puncture. Then someone realized there were no sores at all, but harmless gum cysts that are extremely common in infants. They kept her overnight for monitoring and that morning a med student presented the case to her peers as a cautionary tale to verify symptoms before jumping into an LP.

The parabolic microphone idea sounds interesting! I use the Merlin bird ID app to identify what I can hear, but it’s not directional, obviously. I do have a pretty decent digital camera with 40x optical zoom, but you really need to know where to point it, because the slightest change in angle is a big change at a distance.

I can’t use any magnifying lenses because I have blind spots that interfere with it. I can use a digital camera, I actually have a pretty good one with 40x optical zoom. But since you need to really know where you’re pointing at for long distances, I mostly just use it for bee spotting!

Bird watching. I’m going blind in such a way that makes binoculars impossible to use, and am completely deaf in one ear, so I can’t even tell which direction the calls are coming from 😅

smartphones basically don’t produce toxins during production or when disposed

Er, citation needed? Because pretty much every piece of a cell phone is toxic when recycled (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11270-023-06328-2), even just the plastics used in the casing (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019332556). There are not nearly enough recycling facilities to handle all the e-waste (https://microjournal.researchfloor.org/impact-of-e-waste-on-human-health-and-environment/) and most of it is shipped to developing worlds to be burned in open air pits.