Because of the energy drinks. 
It could not have been a more cliche moment. The conversation topic kicked off with the nurse commenting on my bestie’s vape. And how it was so much more dangerous than smoking, with a detailed description of popcorn lung (if you need a reminder) and that people were being put on respirators and still being unable to catch their breath before dying.
She then followed this up with an incredibly passionate, heart wrenching account about the state of things in medicine and how they’re seeing more and more young folks coming in with maladies typically reserved for the elderly… you could have copied and pasted her warning with that of a CC influencer; heart attacks, strokes, etc 19 year olds coming in with things for people in their 50s, yada, yada. All the hits… right up until she concluded on how it’s the fault of energy drinks.
Meanwhile, I’m just sitting there in my n95.
Fast forward later in the night, to the end of this poorly written scene, with the nurse giving me a fistbump and telling me she ‘hopes I feel better’ as we said our goodbyes.
And no, i did not get into it. It was my besties bday and it was not a scenario in which me getting into a debate was going to end well.
So, yeah. I’m just sharing this to remind y’all that there are people are out there in the medical field noticing something is wrong. And that you’re doing the right thing by masking… and/or not drinking energy drinks, I guess. Lol🤷
Lmao, I remember a guy telling me at a party that organic food had cured his mom’s cancer and I was also compelled to not start an argument. Energy drinks have been widely available for 20+ years but only now are they making the kids drop dead?
They’re drinking too many now!I did know a woman who drank one of those giant Rockstars everyday and died in her sleep at 30, but I’m pretty sure it had more to do with being able to drink a handle of vodka in a night and smoking weed to mask the pain when she had a UTI.
There’s nothing particularly unhealthy about energy drinks. It’s just caffeine, vitamins, taurine, and l-carnitine all of which are in pre-workout supplements as well. Provided you’re not drinking them like water and are sticking to the sugar free ones you should be alright.
Saying something isn’t particularly bad for you so long as you don’t have very much of it can be applied to all sorts of nasty things.
conversely, saying something is bad for you because too much can kill you can be applied to things such as sunlight and water
Exactly. Obviously energy drinks aren’t exactly a health food, but people (typically older generations) really overexaggerate how unhealthy they are.
Yeah, and you can also be killed instantly by an energy drink can or bottle dropped from a great height onto your head.
Wait, what are we talking about again?
It’s like how “the lemonade that kills people” was about as caffeinated as ordinary tea, it’s just people with no caffeine tolerance or some weird previously unknown sensitivity to caffeine were sitting down and chugging a gallon or more of it in a single sitting, faster than it could make them feel sick and stop.
I could be biased but with most of the caffeine related deaths I’ve heard about it turned out that the person had previously unknown heart conditions.
That too. It’s a compound effect of “actually gets stimulant effects from caffeine instead of just a blunting of acute symptoms of fatigue” and “has a heart problem that can be triggered by stimulants” and “takes a fairly large dose of caffeine very quickly”.
Like with the lemonade where people were drinking just huge volumes of it in a short period of time, like the equivalent volume to two or more pots of coffee, and then also had an unusual sensitivity to caffeine and preexisting heart conditions.
When my brother was in a coma my stepbrother was convinced if he forced him on a vegan, organic diet it would somehow reverse brain cancer
He still fucking died but at least my stepbrother got to use him as guinea pig and tell him that it was his fault he had cancer because he ate too many chicken nuggets
That would be infuriating not gonna lie, I try to remind myself that people are just grasping at straws and looking to things that give them some semblance of control and try to reserve my ire for the people that are peddling / spreading that kind of misinformation. Worked in a warehouse for a while and remember packing some book on how to cure your cancer through diet and it felt incredibly grim, like I was sending someone their death warrant.
I never actually asked the guy what form of cancer his mom had, just assumed it was a type that has a high chance of going into remission on its own but I wasn’t about to tell guy that it probably wasn’t the organic lettuce that had saved the day.
The book you packed might have been the one my stepbrother bought and expected me to make all the meals from, for some reason.
It was called Cancer Fighting Kitchen and either that author or another cancer cookbook author said the diet cured him while minimizing the fact that they had surgery that completely removed the cancer, then switched to the diet.
There’s probably hundreds of those kinds of books, assume it’s big money particularly in countries like the U.S. where there is a common mistrust of health care workers. Can only try to point out people like Steve Jobs or that Australian influencer who tried to lifestyle her way out of having an arm amputated until it was too late.
Energy drinks have been widely available for 20+ years but only now are they making the kids drop dead?
Hell I remember when kids were getting blackout drunk on original four lokos
Which were genuinely dangerous when people would keep drinking instead of passing out.
You know I was gonna say but no one was worried about people getting heart attacks, but I looked it up and it looks like there are people saying it gave them heart damage and caused cardiac arrest.
Though the social panic at the time I don’t remember as being about that. I don’t think the effects of four lokos were deemed as so bad that they were causing a substantial rise in youth heart attacks.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard some of the most shit medical takes from nurses. Even doctors have shown complete ignorance regarding people’s immunocompromised status.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard some of the most shit medical takes from nurses.
i think it’s the combination of having a very limited scope medical education, but still significantly more than the average member of the general public
so if they get a bizarre medical idea in their head, they aren’t going to be talked out of it by someone who isn’t also a nurse, or a doctor or something
so if they get a bizarre medical idea in their head, they aren’t going to be talked out of it by someone who isn’t also a nurse, or a doctor or something
Right! And then the combination of confidence and arrogance that leads to this type of mindset.
Your banner still makes me laugh every time I see it.
:D
It’s not like I remember every comment vividly, but you post quality things is my general impression so it’s always a fun misdirection right at the end to see a fun little shit post. Keeps the Internet fun and weird, and I’m grateful for it!
Through colleagues, I an acquainted with an antivaxxer who became a nurse lmao. I think she got kicked out when she refused to get the COVID vaccines.
I know a nurse who would complain incessantly about the vaccine mandate and their hospital. Coincidentally, the same person who was all over facebook yelling about sharia law in Michigan.
Honestly, the energy drinks and the vaping on top of the COVID probably aren’t helping.
Of course they don’t, but you don’t blame someone’s exceptional aim for when they unalive themselves with a firearm.
unalive
This is not tiktok. You can use real words.
Like, noted YouTube superstar and gamer extraordinaire Pete Dorr had what is likely a COVID heart attack last year. He’s unvaccinated and also I don’t think he’s literally ever exercised in his entire life up to that point. The kind of people who aren’t getting vaccinated and definitely aren’t masking are also not living healthy lives.
The vaccine isn’t stopping long Covid, comrade. Vaccinated or not, your odds of stroke or heart attack after a Covid infection are about doubled for 6-8 months. And that was what they came up with after infection 1. Average vaxxer folks are approaching double digits, with your real over achievers already up there making posts on tiktok about how they can’t remember their friends’ names anymore.
Is long COVID and heart attacks related? I thought the vaccines helped mitigate the worst of COVID which included the heart attacks but not necessarily long COVID. What’s the effectiveness being measured in regards to the vaccines? Just deaths? Whybisnit able to taper deaths but not any else?
It’s just semantics, really. Long Covid is Covid. The vaccines basically just prevent the initial infection from killing you, but most of the bad shit remains with like maybe a 10% drop in occurence.
After a single Covid infection you’re still looking at an elevated risk of:
- stroke, cancer, and organ failure
- opportunistic infections (like strep, pneumonia, shingles, etc)
- brain damage
- compromised immune system
Idk the mechanics of why the vax keeps you out of the immediate hospital/grave, but keep in mind it did not take very long (Aug 2022) before the number of vaccinated deaths outnumbered non-vaxxed and in my (and many other’s) opinion the people who died (are dying) from vaxx and relax were victims of social murder/eugenics.
Do you have a handy scientific source on the elevated risks you mentioned? I’m always referencing that COVID causes long term damage to people but I would like to have a scientific source about it that I can send to people instead of just saying “trust me”
I’m out and about for the afternoon, but I think this will give you everything you need. 🤞
Thank you for the writeup. I wasn’t disagreeing with you, literally Just Asking Questions. I haven’t been keeping up with COVID stuff since I can’t do anything except self-quarantine, mask, and vaccinate at this point. Everyone I know has already heard all my arguments about it and remained unchanged so yeah.
No worries, I just get a bit ranty.
Long covid is not covid. Long covid is an umbrella for several diseases, but the most common ones are autoimmune diseases that are triggered after the initial inflammation which we call covid. The severity of your acute covid says very little about the possibility to develop long covid which could be the reason why the chance to develop long covid only slightly decreases after vaccination.
However, the chances for heart and vascular issues decrease more significantly after vaccination: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccine/121756
I see you post a lot about COVID so I’m curious where you get your information when you apparently are disinformed on some important details.
Over the years I’ve approached viral propagation from different disciplines, from marketing to malware. So if you see me ranting about mass immune dysregulation or wastewater interpretations, as I have been since 2020, that’s my own knowledge. Otherwise, I’m typically paraphrasing or quoting a number of epidemiologists or wastewater experts I try to check in regularly with on x and bluesky. (Though I’ve been taking a few months off, so if I’m a bit behind, it is what it is.) And yes, Long Covid is Covid is one of those paraphrases, possibly even a direct quote. Viral persistence being a key driver of (edit: many of) the, over 200, sequelae associated with Long Covid (especially the autoimmune response) is pretty much considered locked in at this point and honestly (edit: even for those that aren’t) I’d still consider you to be arguing semantics.
Long Covid is a post-viral syndrome characterized by persistent symptoms targeting multiple organ systems after initial SARS-CoV-2 infection. Current literature suggests that the mechanisms causing Long Covid involve viral persistence, immune dysregulation, systemic inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, and metabolic disturbances. By forming reservoirs in the tissues of various organs, SARS-CoV-2 may evade immunological clearances while triggering immune responses and contributing to chronic symptoms through cytokine imbalances, T-cell exhaustion, and systemic inflammation. These symptoms parallel other post-viral syndromes such as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), suggesting similar mechanisms of pathology. The coronavirus has also been linked to neuroinflammation and endothelial dysfunction causing cognitive symptoms and cardiovascular complications. Furthermore, its ability to lower energy production links it to post-exertion malaise (PEM) and muscle pain. These symptoms may result from iron dysregulation and persistent oxidative stress due to Covid-impaired mitochondrial function. This review synthesizes current data on the mechanisms that drive Long Covid pathogenesis and explores potential therapeutic strategies to mitigate viral persistence, immune dysfunction, and metabolic disturbances. It is critical to understand these interactions to develop targeted interventions that address the long-term sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection and improve patient outcomes.
This is currently the most recent large scale literature research on long covid, that combines the main hypotheses and their empirical evidence: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01300-z
It describes viral persistence as one of several hypotheses, it’s reductive and harmful to say that viral persistence is the main cause for long covid when there is no scientific backing for that claim. There are other factors at play that are not necessarily caused by viral persistence, and viral persistence alone does not cause the symptoms, since viral persistence has also been identified in people who do not have long covid. On top of that, viral persistence is not the same as an acute covid infection. It’s a phenomenon that happens after the acute infection and manifests differently than acute covid. Vaccines can impact the symptoms of acute infection and of post infectious illness differently, and it’s reductive and harmful to group them all together and say that vaccines do not mitigate many of the risks of a covid infection when they do.
For you this might be an argument about ‘semantics’, but for people who suffer from long covid and medical experts who work with people on long covid it defines whether the research is useful or not, and whether there is any progress on treatment.
For decades, ME patients and non grifting scientists have begged for research that does not group all post viral infection or all chronic fatigue patients together because it has been shown again and again that there are different mechanisms at play for these symptoms, which makes any large scale research that does not differentiate between these groups completely useless. Research that groups all forms of long covid together are similarly useless.
Any researchers who claims that they can explain the cause for long covid and back it up with science is lying, because the science says that we don’t know the significance of the different mechanisms at play, and that this significance probably differs greatly because there is more than one distinct illness that falls under the long covid umbrella.
AFAIK the severity of Covid is a symptom of how much your endothelial tissues are affected, and these are all throughout the body.
Vaccinated? Thought so.
Considering the chronic migraines started for me only after contracting COVID I do worry about getting a stroke. Thanks return to office you did us all a massive favour!
Honestly I’d rather hear people whine about energy drinks than the vaccine.
I live in a jurisdiction where energy drinks were recently banned for children under a certain age, and it was all I heard about for a period of time.
Cocaine in any form and meth are really hard on your lungs, heart, liver, smoking it is particularly hard on heart and lungs, especially using dodgy filter materials like steel wool.
