2-for-Tuesday: Forehead and Ear Digital Instant-Read Thermometers
- Remember when you shoved a tube of deadly chemicals into your mouth for minutes at a time to get a vague idea of how hot your head was? These do the same thing in seconds, and without the risk of mercury poisoning!
- You get 2 of them so you can leave on in your sick kid’s room and one in the bathroom, or travel with one, or do whatever. Point is: 2 thermometers is actually not a bad thing to have.
- You can use it in the ear or on the forehead.
- It doesn’t need touch anything to take the temperature, so you can use it on multiple people without cleaning it, making it the ideal thermometer for the oft-maligned party game, “Guess My Temp!”
- Be sure to follow the strange and commandment-like instructions to “avoid the inaccuracy,” such as minimal “conversation of wind” and making sure that “there shall be no water or any shade on the forehead.”
- Some have complained that the temperature varies each time you do a reading. This can definitely happen. BUT, on the other hand, it takes seconds to try again. Take the temperature three times and you’ll have a very good idea of what it actually is.
- Model: DMIT, which stands for ‘Dual-mode infrared thermometer’ but is also the sound you make when you were hoping for a sick day but it turns out your fine.
Degrees of Ease
It’s about halfway down the feature bullets to these Medical Forehead and Ear Digital Thermometers that you see this:
“JUST ONE BUTTON to press. No more fear of breaking a glass or swallowing mercury.”
And you’re reminded that there was a time when, in the name of health, we put a glass tube of an extremely dangerous chemical into the mouths of children.
Children.
Children who might heave their favorite toy across the room just to see if it can fly. Children who eat the erasers on the end of a #2 pencil because it looks like gum. They were given a tube made of glass–the most satisfying of all smashables–filled with a weird, perhaps even delicious-looking, red substance.
Kids these days have it easy.
Or do they?
My mom, a nurse, always had a cupboard in the bathroom stocked with the most up-to-date medical paraphernalia. Therefore, we had a digital thermometer from the beginning. It was nice. Like this one, no mercury. Like this one, an easy straightforward digital readout of your temperature. Unlike this one, it took what felt like a half-hour to give a final verdict on whether or not you’d reached that magical realm north of 98.6 and earned the day off from school. And so, it wasn’t uncommon for the temperature-taker to put the thermometer in the child’s mouth and then walk away to take care of something else, allowing the child freedom to manipulate, through a variety of means, the final result.
This is hypothetical, of course. I would never have done such a thing.
(Oh, and also, just an FYI: that whole 98.6 being the average human temperature thing is the result of tests conducted by one doctor using a crummy armpit thermometer in the 19th century and is mostly bullshit.)
These thermometers, meanwhile, can register a temperature in seconds from the mouth or the forehead, thus disallowing for any alteration of results.
In conclusion: Kids these days actually have it tough.
-
2-for-Tuesday: Forehead and Ear Digital Instant-Read Thermometers 77
-
Buying Things Cheap 7
-
Getting out of school as a kid was THE BEST... unless it was because you had: 42
-
Goat Day #14: I'm gonna miss this 17 -
Meh Clipisode - Let's Meet Your Cats 35 -
Help a school. 172 -
What to do in Palm Springs? 6 -
credit cards didn't work 16