[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yeah. There was a sticker I saw as I walked down to. In the hospital to visit mom, and it just had a circle in it. You are enough.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: And this goes back to a couple of things that we've kind of harped, and I think we. It's important for us to say we're talking, I hope, to lots of caregivers who might be in this situation.
And, you know, there's such a thing as caregiver burnout. This is in the chart. It actually showed up when I did the research for this. You know, you can't pour from an empty cup.
Foreign.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: How's it going?
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Welcome to Snowmageddon.
Yeah, we haven't gotten this kind of snow in a long time, and I think it's going to get bigger than, you know, minute by minute. I started around 7:30 in the morning, and now it's. It's covered most things. It's got big flakes coming down and.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Blowing to the side and swirling around. So.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Hey, and if y' all are watching on YouTube, you can look right back at my window over here and see it's all white. It's crazy. That doesn't happen too often.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Not here.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
My goodness. So we got a lot of stuff to talk about today, I think. Yeah.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm. I'm taking my own experiences and kind of putting them in helpful tips. Part of me is like, I wish I didn't have this experience. But still, you learn some stuff when you go through it.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Tell us about what's been going on.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Well, so, first of all, my mom is. Okay, let me start off that way. But a couple.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: We always ask, how's your mom?
[00:01:35] Speaker A: She's doing. She's doing good. Yeah. But she did have a Minor stroke about 11 days ago.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: As this podcast goes, which won't mean much to people viewing it, I guess. And it's a minor stroke. It was on her right temple.
And that affects your left side because, you know, the brain switches. And we have had to do some rehab. So I have some things that. That I can affirm and also did some research on about, you know, caregiving and what do you do when, you know, post stroke. And I think they're pretty cool. And there's. I think they'll spark some. Some. Some conversation.
Um, so, you know, taking a little bit of what's happened to my mom. That's not good, and saying, okay, well, here's how you handle it, caregivers, if this happens to you. And so I can get into that. We can certainly talk about that. And then I've also dropped some things into the show notes. Thank you, Barry.
That will kind of give you a good guide if you're going through this. There's some things you need to look for. Certainly things. And I think this could start off right now. If you're having a stroke, if you think your loved one's having a stroke, there is no time to think. Well, maybe. Should we go to the doctor? The answer is you should go to the doctor. Any signs of a stroke, for sure. And so be aware of that. Sudden changes in speech, vision, balance, strength.
If you see something that looks like a seizure, don't assume it is.
Take them to the hospital and make sure you get the right diagnosis from a professional.
Any confusion, extreme sleepiness, that's pain, shortness of breath, almost feel like they're having a heart attack, which is still another reason to go to the er. Any severe headaches, swallowing problems, which is something unusual that you may not associate with stroke. And you know, any signs of infections or fever or UTI or pneumonia or anything like that. When it does, you always go to the emergency room and have them check you out.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: So I, you know, our listeners here may not know what went on. And so I thought I would just ask you some questions about your mom's situation. And you can answer what you want to or, you know, say, that's private. I don't want to. I don't want to talk about that. But I think maybe teasing it out a little bit might help. I know you, like you said earlier, your mom had a small stroke. How'd you find out about it?
What brought you to it?
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Well, that, that is. So I won't get into too many details, but I was not in town, so I had a caregiver who was there who called me and said, something's happening. I think I'm going. She had already called 91 1, which is a smart thing to do, but she was telling me a little bit about it and that I was actually on the phone as mom was experiencing it. So that was a little scary. And at the time, we didn't think it was stroke. We thought it was seizure.
So we thought, okay, this is another one related to some, some another disease. She has Parkinson's. And I also found out that Parkinson's and, And Alzheimer's are kind of like partners walking in the same halls. They. They show up in similar circumstances. So as I was talking to people in the hospital later, I found out that most people in early Alzheimer's May get associated with Parkinson's, too. Interesting. So that was interesting to learn. But, yeah, I was in the middle of that, dealing with, what is this? And like I said, my caretaker had. Did the right thing. She didn't call me first. She called 911 first. And you were simply waiting on them, getting there, and they took care of.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: To give you a little bit of solace right there that you knew. You knew somebody was with her. You knew, you know, it was already being taken care of. Now, here's. Here's an odd question for you. How did you keep yourself from having a stroke at about this time when you.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: I was focusing on making sure that I asked right questions, that I didn't get emotional, and it was very difficult. But we were of the opinion that this was a seizure, and she came out of it very quickly. So that's the other thing, is it doesn't have to be this long event. It was about a minute, which felt forever to me. But then she started responding to people before the people got there.
So that's typical of a minor stroke, that it's not long, it's not debilitating. If it had been major, she might not have come out of it until after they applied medication. And you might have heard the medication they use on major strokes to relieve it. It's called stroke buster. They put something in their bloodstream that will undo a clot or something like this. This is probably not what this was.
And. And that helped me.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Just knowing me, you know, me for a while, tend not to do. Get it. When I go under critical situations, I tend to get more analytical, which can be good and bad. You have to watch out for signs of that. But, you know, it was. It was. I guess we're getting into the idea if you're in the middle of this, you have to remain calm. Because where I was, there was nothing I could do other than offer advice, other than be reassuring to my caretaker, who was also having a little trouble watching mom go through this. So it was interesting to go through that particular situation. And, you know, if you've never done that before, keep in mind you're not helping if you're emotional, if you don't have the right, you have to calm yourself down and realize you got to get through this. There'll be time for that kind of thing afterwards. And I did that too. You know, there were times I looked, okay, this is, you know, mom having a particular event. So I don't know if that was too much or not too little.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: No.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: But I think that was good. It was an interesting point of view, especially since I couldn't do anything but offer advice and. For your shore.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yep. Because, you know, you're a little way. A little ways away and.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Yes. And.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: And not knowing what's going on, too, that makes me think about. There's a line from Ted Lasso that it didn't have anything to do with any medical, but I. I think it applies to a lot of things, is don't freak out till you find out. Yes, and exactly. That's. That's hard to do. I know it's hard to do because your brain wants to go solve this problem, wants to analyze it, wants to know what's going on, and that's just super tough. So once you got to the. To. Got in touch, found out what the. What the diagnosis was, so what typically came after that? What did the doctors recommend and that kind of thing?
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Well, it was. My mother lives about a minute and a half from the hospital. I mean, we're very close, so they were in the place at no time. And keeping in contact with that caregiver, my caregiver, who gave me updates, was a forced effort. You have to keep asking questions. You have to, you know, she. She knows to text me and things like that. And then we have to have the right paperwork in place so that the doctors kn. That we were supposed to get the right information.
And so I had done that before, and when my mom went to the hospital back in April, and so I knew that this hospital had all that paperwork in store. And I thought to myself, the tip that, I guess most people going through is make sure you have that paperwork ready. If you are in a situation where or you have a medical power of attorney or something like that, it has to be registered with the local authority and has to be registered with the hospital. So make sure you do that as a prep. If I hadn't done that, doing that from where I was would have been difficult and made a lot of. So that. We've talked about those kind of papers before in previous podcasts, but, you know, it's really important to have that stuff already done, so now you can focus on the problem and not the access.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, not the access. That's really good, good advice. If you have a hospital nearby that, you know, that'd be your hospital, it would be a good, good thing to go ahead and do that and have it in place.
You know, I wonder, too, if they would. In the. In the throes of something like that, would they accept an electronic Copy. Would they just have paper? They just have to have paper. Wow.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: They want the original copy. And so I had gone through that before where I actually got the original copy, showed it, made them a copy of that. They saw it and they had it registered at the hospital.
Well, yeah, many some places do, but this hospital did not. So, you know, that's the something you want to get through and not. And do that when you're not in a time of crisis.
So that's a problem.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Cool.
Well, that's a good to know also. So I think from that they. I'm sure they did whatever they needed to do to get her stabilized. And then at some point in time I think you talked about rehab. So.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Yeah, so this is. There's a cool chart we put into the. To the show notes that it has some talking points on it that I want to just kind of hit because I think it's a way to talk about em in a way that makes a lot of sense.
So there's some things that happen with folks that you have to pay attention to. So things like mobility and weakness, speech difficulties, swallowing problems. Again, I didn't realize that it was in there. Things with memory and thinking, emotional changes. So here's. Here's a couple of things with. With mobility and weakness. It's. Recovery isn't about speed, it's about consistency.
So what you want to do is make sure that your loved one gets into a rehab program that consistently does things that will improve her recovery mode. So strokes, if you haven't. If you don't know what a stroke is, I think most people do. But just in case it is a. It's when the blood vessels in your brain either bleed or are they clogged in a way that prevents oxygen getting into your blood. Your brain's blood cells, depending on what point in your brain that attacks that can attack different things. Like your brain has pretty on an omic things that do things like beat your heart and breathe when you want to walk. It knows how to do that. When you want to remember things that recalls those items.
So a stroke can cause issues with all those kinds of activities.
And recovery from that is rewiring your brain to do those same things, to relearn a lot of those same things. And depending on how bad the stroke is, you have to do more of that. And the real point of that whole statement is it's not. It's not recovery fast.
It is about recovery early and consistent. So they have to be in a program. And basically my mom went into rehab where she's doing physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy every day.
And if you don't do it every day, as you get away from the event, your brain becomes less and less able to recover from that. So having mom in a place where a nurse came in every morning and said, okay, it's time to do ot, it's time to do physical therapy. It's time to do speech therapy was good. This is not the kind of thing you do on your own. It's not the kind of thing you do without a professional.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Yep. So you need somebody there who's. Who's measuring you constantly and helping you through the. Through the bumps and that kind of thing. So I guess it's a. It's.
Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm trying to interpret what you're saying here, but I believe it sounds like it's.
You have to rebuild the pathways. That. Not necessarily rebuild the pathways, but if you had pathways in your brain function that got destroyed as part of that.
Part of that stroke, you have to rebuild new ones, essentially rebuild them, strengthen.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Them, that kind of thing. So the other thing is swallowing, and what goes on with mobility are things like squeezing your hand, holding onto objects, picking up a fork, those kinds of things.
So those are things that are. Over time, we've done that all our lives. So they're automatic places in our brains that know what a fork is, picks it up, knows how to use it, and all we have to do is direct it. Right. The rest of that stuff is sort of built autonomously in your head. When you have a stroke, you may lose that capability and have to relearn some of those things. And so now it becomes difficult to tell the difference between a fork and a spoon and a knife, what you do with one and how you use it. And depending on the severity of the stroke, you can lose lots of things that you would have normally done without thinking, certainly things like driving. But at this point, my mom and my other loved ones are not driving anymore. But you can tell those kind of autonomic things that you build over time, you lose them. And even if you could get them back, you may be very slow to get them back. So your reaction time to recovering from a fall might be pretty bad after a. An incident like this. And I guess I should say, hey, we're. We're not doctors, we're not therapists, but we're just giving you the perspective of a caregiver. So you always want to couple this with a doctor who's examined your loved one to tell you what it is medically they're dealing with. So there's a lot of good information in our show notes that talks about the difference between isonamic and hemorrhagic that I'm not going to get into because I couldn't tell you the difference between those two, but without beating it anymore. But you want to have a conversation with your primary care person, the ER doctor, and you probably got a rehab doctor that goes along with that that you should talk to. And then, believe it or not, there is a caseworker that talks to you about, okay, what do we do to help you in your rehabilitation plan? Was it going to another facility, getting more equipment, doing specialized therapy? What's the plan and how do you react to that? And that you should have that conversation.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: More than once in house also, Right?
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Yeah, most places have that kind of thing, so. So my mom is going to do multiple places over time, and we're trying to get her as much therapy as possible. But that was me talking to my caseworker and my doctor pretty frequently about how she's doing and the rehab she's doing and how we should react to that. So this is not something they can do by themselves. This is where they'll need you as a caregiver, need you as a loved one to be rather. And maybe even making some decisions for them because it will be difficult for them to kind of get the whole grasp of that when they ramp recovery. So, yeah, you gotta be careful.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: So with all that, all the rehab. So how does insurance and Medicare and that kind of stuff fit into this situation?
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Yeah, and caseworkers can help you with this. Now, if you live in South Carolina, United States, my mom was a state employee for many years, and her state insurance has a lot of good benefits. And one of the things it does pretty well is rehabilitation from stroke. So my mom has an insurance set up where you can have up to 100 days in a facility. And either her insurance pays most of it or if it doesn't, then things like our federal systems, if you're out of country, will pay the other pieces that don't that aren't the net. So I think it's like an 80, 20 rule, up to 20 days.
So 100 days is a good bit, especially for a minor event.
It may not be enough for something major. And so you have to be careful of that. So ask the questions of your insurance provider. What happens if you have these things, heart attack, stroke, afib, those kinds of things that may have some recovery in them?
And for me, I'm managing those a hundred days and very carefully.
I'm going to try to get her, you know, the first 20 days, and then we'll probably save it. And then there's sort of time period that you have to be in a. In a. In a rest home or your home. I think it's 60 for where we're at, where those counters we set.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Okay, gotcha.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Having a conversation with your caseworker about that, who can look at your insurance and tell you what the terms are, is really important.
You want to burn through your days all at once.
You want to know you have them. So because recovery after a stroke is better if it's done in the early stages. You don't want to wait a month and then start rehabilitation. That's. That's. You've lost a lot of opportunity if you've done that.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: Sure. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. When you were talking about recovery, it made me think about. I have a friend from high school, actually. Her dad had a stroke a few years ago, actually a year or two ago. And he's a musician. He's been playing guitar like a madman for 50 years. And she was telling me after the fact that the part where the side of his brain. I guess it was the right side. He had his. And it affected his left. It affected his left side. And he being a guitar player, she said he could strum like a madman, but he. But he couldn't work the left hand to handle the fretboard for a while after that. I think he's coming back and he's getting with where he can play a little bit now. But that's been. I think that was really tough for him because that was his outlet. That was his. That was his thing to do. Yeah.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: And it's actually pretty interesting because speech therapy also goes with memory. So the speech therapist, when with my mom, is asking her questions about her family, what it was like to be a child, and getting her to talk through that also helps her work the memory notes of those items, too. So it was interesting. I didn't expect that when I came in and watched some of that therapy, that the young man who did it with her would go into her history and keep in mind, you have to remember that she may not be remembering everything correctly, but the act of doing it is a therapy in itself. So that was.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Pulling something from memory regardless, and it helps out. I see. That's cool.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Tell you, the other thing I work that I. That I realize now is you have to Work in the idea that they are impaired. And so fatigue and listlessness and even reluctance to do this is built into the rehab process.
So you should expect it, you should plan for it.
Don't be annoyed by Is part of their healing process. It's not stubbornness.
Just keep in mind that you're helping your loved one through a maze that they have now entered. Yeah, it seems like they should know how to use a fork. But guess what?
Some of those skills get. Are probably degraded. And you gotta be patient with that and remind yourself of that.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Man. Well, that sounds like that was a tough thing. It's probably ongoing tough thing for a little while, but it.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing that I got a little bit that makes me realize how important prevention is on this is that there are medications out there that prevent stroke.
It turns out in our particular area, we had to balance two things and we reduce the medication. But you know, the liability. Things like ribosis and blood thinner things, not redosis, eloquence to prevent stroke like this are important. So if you're in that situation where you're considering someone who's on a blood thinner, keep in mind that if you. You decrease that item, you increase their chances of a stroke.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: It's all a balance. It's all about.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it is.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: It. You know, you learn a lot of things like you would need to address their pain because sometimes they may not be able to focus it. You may have to talk to them in a different way. I mean, there's a lot of great tips on that chart that I think make a lot of sense for caregivers.
Want to kind of put it in context for us.
If you haven't dealt with that before, your loved one has a risk for it. Read through it because it might jar something that will help you out in a moment of crisis.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: And just to remind everybody that is in our care, tech and tips research, Google Doc and we will put a link to it in the description and in the show notes so you can get right to it.
It's pretty easy to get to, but it's there and it has all the show notes from all of our episodes. So you can kind of go through and pick and choose if there's anything else from the older episodes that you might need.
All right. I think we covered that one pretty well. You think? Anything else you can think to add?
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Yeah, there was a sticker I saw as I walked down to. In the hospital to visit mom and it just had a circle in it. You are enough.
And this Goes back to a couple of things that we've kind of harped and I think we. It's important for us to say. We're talking, I hope, to lots of caregivers who might be in this situation.
And, you know, there's such a thing as caregiver burnout. This is in the chart. It actually showed up when I did the research for this. You know, you can't pour from an empty cup, so you gotta take time for yourself. You gotta take breaks, you gotta join other groups like you're doing here. You gotta understand that you're gonna be irritable and feel guilt about that, and I certainly did, and talk to people about that. So address your burnout, because your burnout is going to affect their recovery, believe it or not. So I think it's an important thing to say. I found myself caught up in that, and some family members helped me through that. Actually, Barry did too, sometimes. So, you know, you gotta realize that you're a human.
And when you're in that point where you're the weakest, maybe time for you to stop, step away, do something to get your mind off it. Recharge. Fill your cup up so that you can pour it back out for your loved one when they need it. So I think that's very good advice.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: I mean, your, your.
Your strength, your energy and your patience are all finite resources. And you don't want to deplete all of those self control. Throw that one in there too. All of those are finite resources, and you have to replenish them from time to time. And you don't want them disappearing at the wrong times. So, you know, you have to fill your car or your truck up every once in a while with gas to get to the next place. You got to do that for you too.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: You got to do that for this too.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I get it for sure.
My goodness gracious. Well, you know, we started on the.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Heavy side, didn't we?
[00:21:52] Speaker B: I didn't mean. Yeah, we did. But I'm going to say this. This is kind of along those lines, but this is just an old adage that we have in our house about a lot of things. January suck. They just suck. That's all there is to it. It happens every year, at least in our group. You know, if we. We feel like if we can make it through January un.
Then we feel pretty good about the rest of the year.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: My family going back to grandparents and aunts and uncles and stuff like that. Lots of bad things have happened In January. I don't know why. It just seems to be the case. There's a lot of things that are going on in there. My, My dad is, as a lot of, you know, is a minister and he is just over 80, but he finds himself still out there going to take care of other people. And I really love that about him and get annoyed about that, about that, about him all at the same time a lot of times, because I'm afraid sometimes that he, in his. In his journey to go help these other people, he doesn't take care of himself and he doesn't realize that he's 80, you know.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Sometimes that's kind of.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Kind of tough, but sometimes the caregiver needs a caregiver.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's. He's doing. He's doing. Doing good work out there. But the January part of that is he's had multiple funerals here in January to preach from people either in his.
In his congregation or people that are just friends of the family and that sort of stuff. So he's. He's had a rough week of it this week from that made me think about, you know, when it. When. When you're in January and it's kind of. Kind of dark and it's kind of. Kind of cold and it's easy to kind of give in to, to. To tiredness and thought and thoughts, especially when there's a lot of illness going around. There's a lot of political unrest who, you know, that can affect you to try to find something to get away from that stuff or. And fill. You cut back up, like Bobby said. Yeah. Any way you can do that's good.
So thinking about January and being cold, I had a couple of little things I want to talk about about winter storms again, pointing back up here to the snow in my window. I don't. I think our last episode was before our. What we. What we were going to call Snowmageddon. Well, last week we had a big winter storm that at my house, actually. It caused the power to go out for a couple days and it made it where it wasn't easy to travel. It was mostly ice and that. That led to a lot of power lines being down, a lot of trees falling on power lines and that sort of stuff. And we've had a lot of folks who. It's taken longer than two days to get their power back. And it made me want to talk a little bit about things, about things you can do to stay safe during that time to stay warm.
I just got A couple of small recommendations I wanted to throw out there. In our case, our. Most of our heat and our. We have an HVA system that's a H vac system that's all electric. And you know, we were out that without it, obviously. We had a couple of generators. Excuse me, we had one small generator that helped us out with that. I had lots of battery packs that I had available and ready to go before this happened. And I learned some things about how to get drop cords into your house. If you have a, if you don't have a whole house generator set up. A lot of times you have to have a small generator sitting out in the yard running and then you have large drop cords that you bring in to power things like your refrigerator for time. For time or small space heaters or things like that. And a couple. I found that one of the coolest ways to get that in your house without, without being too drafty or causing more cold. And I am a fan of the pool noodle. I know that sounds crazy, but the pool noodle is a very, very useful.
[00:25:26] Speaker A: Tool to know what you did.
Yeah, I know exactly what you did. Yeah.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: So what I did was, and I wish I could show this, but I may find some photos of this and put them in the show notes later. But in one case, this worked with both generator drop cords and also with a tiny propane gas space heater that I had to help out with. The cold pool noodles will let you make a gap in your window. You can raise a window a little bit and you can bring a drop cord or a gas line through your window and then use that pool noodle to encase that and then drop your window down onto that pool noodle and it will keep you from leaking air, cold air in or leaking heat out of your house. It's one of the handiest $2 fixes ever that I've ever seen. So use that both for drop cords from the, from the generator and to you to power this little heater that I love and I'm going to recommend because I'm going to throw it out there in our show notes. It's just something that's worked out for me. There's a company called Mr. Buddy that makes propane heaters that are unique in that they are rated safe to use indoors into certain, certain circumstances.
So they can be lifesavers during power outages or really when you're trying to keep one room livable if you treat them right and you, you don't get silly about it. So just because they're rated for indoor use. Doesn't mean you get to skip things like having carbon monoxide detectors around and, and, and, you know, smoke detectors and that sort of stuff. You gotta have those. The carbon monoxide thing is a big deal because it's kind of sneaky. It, you can't smell and it, and it's, it can show up and cause problems with older adults, especially even before they realize that something's wrong.
So they're really cheap. I think the one I bought, the carbon monoxide detector that I bought was maybe 20 bucks on Amazon. And it will, if it detects a problem really loudly and make sure that everybody knows that there's a problem. So that's a must if you're dealing with these little, little heaters. They're another, another must is to keep ventilation up. You may have to crack a window to make sure you're getting oxygen in. A lot of these monitors are very good in that case in that they will detect low oxygen in a room as well and set off alarms. So beyond just carbon monoxide, they do that. They can, in this case, the one that I bought could detect that there was propane or natural gas in the air.
So it's a, it's a good thing that I recommend to get. I will put a link to that carbon monoxide detector in the show notes as well.
But the whole thing is, is just you can, you can mitigate these, these winter storms by some fairly inexpensive ways as long as you're smart about it. And I'm gonna. Like I said, I'll put a, a link to the things that actually worked out for me.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, let's see here. While we're talking about smart, I know a lot of people think, well, I can use my car to do some of this generation. And there's some, some really good tips about what to do and what you can't do.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: First of all, we need talk re emphasizing the whole idea about carbon monoxide kills people. You should never run the car in the garage. You should never keep your exhaust should be completely out of the ice and snow. When you run the car, do it at least 20ft from the house. Crack a window if the car is fully outdoors. And if you feel nauseous, sick, sleepy for unknown reason, you need to turn off whatever you're doing and get fresh air immediately because that's. Those are the only signs you might get of that kind of things.
You should not use your car to do space heaters or microwaves, refrigerators. Those are too Big too much amperage and it's not going to work. Well, you can do things like, you know, phone chargers, laptops, and LED car.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Alternators aren't made for that much. That much.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: They're not made for that kind. They only do about 400 watts at most of amperage from inverter. So you need to be careful about it. So I'm gonna throw some stuff in the notes about that. So if you're thinking about using your car, there's some definite no's about that kind of thing and make sure you all do all the things you can.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Operate along with that. The, the 20. 20ft from the house thing, I think is a very important thing. Yeah, and this is kind of a small thing I didn't think a whole lot about before, but when I was doing some research, getting ready for the storm, Chad GPT, our friend pointed out some very specific things here. And I think this applies to cars. I think it also applies to generators that you need to get them 10 to 20ft away from the house. In the case of generators, you need to make sure that the exhaust is pointed away from the house if you can.
And also think about the fact that carbon monoxide is. It doesn't have a smell, but it's also heavier than air, so it sinks.
All right? So if you think about that and you look at the terrain, if you're in a case where maybe you're. You have a generator or your car sitting outside and it's uphill from your house, think about that carbon monoxide maybe going to the ground and then sliding downhill towards your house where it might get sucked up into vents and things like that. So that also can. Can cause you trouble.
So even if you're running a generator outside, it's not a bad idea to have a carbon monoxide detector inside just to check to make sure you're not accidentally backflowing some of that stuff.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: And never do any of this while you're sleeping. Don't ever set this up and then go to bed. That's not. This is things you do while you're awake and you can react. So.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: All right, man. Gosh. Let's see what I got. Anything that let's. On my list over here, I think we've covered a lot of it today.
So hopefully by the next time we're back, we'll be back out of Snowmageddon and the sun will be shining again. And I think by the time. The next time we put out a new episode, it'll be out of January. So that'll be, yeah, a good thing.
And hopefully we're a little, little closer to spring getting ready for that. Right. I'm trying to think I'm traveling next week and but I'll be back in time for us for to do the next episode, so we'll get it out on time. Until then, though, I hope that if any of you guys are listening out there and have any comments, we'd love it if you would comment on our YouTube videos that actually helps us with the algorithm and any kind of reviews that you can do on whatever your podcast platform of choice is. We would love to hear, hear from you. Even if you just like to email us at Care Tech and
[email protected], we always love to hear from the community.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Absolutely. And make sure if you're on YouTube, subscribe and go ahead and get notified, all those things because that helps us keep the algorithm pointed to us and that allows us to do more so.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. I've noticed back on our analytics we still have a, we still have a sturdy listenership in Singapore and lots of new places in the United States that I haven't seen.
So that's, that's pretty cool. We haven't added any new countries in the last week, but it's nice to see different cities and different regions around the US as well. So anyway, we're. That's us. That's it for us for today and hope you all have a good rest of your January and we'll see you soon.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Goodbye.
Stay warm, Sam.
