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#I mean that’s great but I’ve already failed the requirements I had STRONG symptoms

traumatized-motherfuckers · 4 years

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Stress-based sickness, psychosomatic disorders, and the F word. Fibromyalgia.

Read up or listen up @t-mfrs.com (podcast available wherever you stream.)

Waking up, like I didn’t sleep for weeks. Falling asleep after five minutes on my feet. A pounding head. That sense of dread. Sticky sharp pains through in my shoulders and neck. Brain short on energy, missing a few cards from the deck. Waves of nausea and stomach cramps. Chills and sweats, depending on the body amps. Swollen lymph nodes. Muscle weakness poorly bodes. Insatiable hunger but nothing sounds edible - shit, now desire to throw up is incredible. Eyes shriveling, dry, back into my skull. The aches in my legs, pulsing and dull. Foggy thoughts. Racing heart. When will this end, why did this start?

Did I finally catch the ‘rona? Or am I just past my limit for being stressed out again? Well, I just moved, so this time I know that the answer is very likely… stressed.

So who wants to talk about getting sick? Yeah, among this group, the answer might be surprising. A lot of us do.

Why? Not because we love bitching and complaining when we feel less than ideal - spoilers, that’s every day, there’s really nothing left to say about the raging shit storms inside of us after a few years of it. We’re tired of hearing about it, too… just like we’re tired of living it, feeling it, and fearing it.

No, for us, it’s because it feels like there’s always a surprising ailment right around the corner when we least expect it. One that seemingly has no logical basis or reasonable solution. One that no one else understands. One that feels like it’s born of mental illness, somehow, while being very physically present. One that we don’t even bother bringing to doctors anymore, because no one needs to be shamed and shoved out the door again by their flippant disinterest in anything we say after the words, “Yes, I have anxiety.”

Yep. If you haven’t tried to mingle mental health with western medicine before, let me give you a quick disclaimer: unless you’re missing an arm, don’t bother. In my experience, the only thing you’ll get is an eye roll, possibly a prescription bandaid that somehow makes you feel worse, and a bored recommendation to see a psychiatrist - even if you already do.

All of this, of course, has the effect of only making you feel more upset. First, mentally, as you ruminate over the disrespect of essentially being called a liar just because the doctor doesn’t have enough training. Then, physically, as your increased stress and systemic arousal pushes your body into a new level of overdrive.

Oh, was it a mindfuck just to make the doctor appointment, get yourself there, and deal with the social anxiety of a waiting room for 30-120 minutes? I bet it felt great for someone to then invalidate your health concerns, recommend you calm down, and send you out the door without even looking you in the eye. Feeling more upset, now on a highly emotional basis? Enjoy the shame, hypertension, and lost sleep, as if you needed any more of that.

Today, I want to talk about the stress-central area of my health that hasn’t been completely figured out… and the label that I - embarrassingly - just recently learned is highly applicable to my physical condition.

But also, the outrage that I feel over said label, because, well, it explains nothing. In fact, if anything, it probably does all of us a huge disservice after we’re granted this diagnosis by pushing us into the express lane for being written off. It also separates two issues that are poorly explained, rather than combining them into one full picture that might actually yield answers. Oh, and should I mention that I think this is a larger problem of gender bias in the healthcare system? Yeah, why the fuck not. Might as well air all my grievances as a nice lead-in to another upcoming episode; is mental illness diagnosis skewed by gender?

I don’t want to let my pounding head and aching shoulders deter me too much, so let’s just get started.

History of ailments

I’ve talked about this before, but to briefly cover how fucked up this body is… let’s take a trip back to 2013 when my system failed me out of the blue. And by “out of the blue,” I mean that I had chronically overworked myself running on anxiety, obligation, and starvation for 2 years, leading to physiological revolt.

So, looking back, “duh.”

But at the time? This was all-new. It was crisis-inducing and beyond comprehension that I went from a perfectly healthy, physically resilient, surprisingly strong and low maintenance specimen to a chronically pained, systemically ill, digestively impaired, and constantly exhausted sack of wallowing self-hated.

After a lifetime of zero health concerns, I found myself bedridden and obsessed with every weird thing my body was doing to me. Which, as you’ve probably guessed, came hand in hand with the new weird things my brain was doing to me.

You’ve probably heard the “What IS CPTSD?” episode by now, so I’m guessing you’re not a stranger to the details about the common emergence of complex trauma symptoms. Yes, that’s based on a lot of research, but it’s also a throwback to my own experience. I was a long time depression and anxiety lurker, first time complex trauma contributor around age 23, when my brain was suddenly uprooted by a series of new social and therapy-based traumas.

My depression became debilitating negative self-regard and stronger suicidal ideation. Suddenly, my social anxiety became agoraphobia. My new health issues became topics of obsessive and intrusive thoughts… you know, when I wasn’t ruminating about my role in every trauma, my worthlessness as a human, and my recently-unsettled childhood memories. My early twenties were a great time.

And with all the mental strain, came the unresolvable insomnia. Which fed right into the health problems. Which circled back to spark more mental duress. Health anxiety is not a fun way to live.

So, to call my illnesses psychosomatic is completely appropriate. But, also, completely insulting when a western medicine practitioner utters the phrase as if it was a turd slowly coming out the wrong end. And that’s exactly what happened every time I tried to seek help.

To be clear - back in the day I had some very easily detectable physical problems. I understand that doctors have a difficult job when it comes to interpreting the immeasurable inner experiences that their patients detail, but that wasn’t entirely the case here. When your body stops digesting food, well, there’s some evidence to prove that it’s a fact. When a 96oz medical grade laxative used for colonoscopy prep results in zero percent colon cleanse… uh… somebody isn’t doing their duty (pun intended). And boy, did my digestive system just decide that it was DONE doing its only job.

Everything I ate seemed to spark unpleasant physical responses, but moving materials through my guts and extracting nutrients wasn’t one of them. After months of garbage disposal failure, I was basically a walking sewer mixed with a compost pile. I found myself chronically starving, exhausted, puffy, distended, intestinally inflamed, and generally sickly. Your body doesn’t fare so well when it has no sustenance, it turns out.

At the same time, or maybe slightly predating my digestive protests, I started getting ill in weird ways. Things I had never experienced before started popping up, like chronic respiratory tract infections, sinus infections, and gum infections. I was having what seemed like allergic responses to something in my inner or outer environment. I was often covered in hives or my face and stomach were inflating like balloons for no apparent reason. I had near-constant pain in my continually-locked shoulders and neck. My actual skin, itself, hurt, as if I was being stretched to the brink of bursting. My lifelong migraines transformed into something new - disorienting tension migraines that came with horrifying loss-of-vision auras and feverish shakes.

Generally speaking, I was so tired all the time that I could barely get out of bed for more than a few moments before retreating back to my safe place to feel like garbage. My limbs felt like someone had tied weights to them and extracted several major muscle groups. I struggled even showering or washing my face, because both required holding my arms up higher than I was capable of enacting. I was so deliriously tired that I couldn’t see straight, think, or complete basic tasks.

On top of giving up my impressive life trajectory in the aftermath of the physical breakdown - because I was too fucking exhausted to consider the next steps I needed to take for grad school - this is also where I’ve previously mentioned my drive-aphobia coming into play. When you can’t count on your own faculties, you definitely don’t want to be behind the wheel. And suddenly, life gets very restricted.

I gave up my… anything life trajectory at that point. I went from a wildly social and focused student with a fantastic sense of humor about life and stronghold of self-determination to… Hiding indoors. Keeping isolated. Obsessing over my health. Googling the most embarrassing things late at night. Having no answers. Feeling like a crazy person. Hating myself. Fearing that this was the end. Assuming that my future was over. Guilting myself for fucking up my past. Replaying my tragic story of a rapid flight and a crash, after everything I had fought so hard to accomplish. Giving up.

This is riiiiight about where I pull most of my inspiration for talking about living in perpetual “trauma states” from. Being consistently triggered, out of control, and terrified. Having no answers and no one to even ask. Watching mental illness take over my world without the slightest clue of what was happening. And, oh, the perpetual torment of unpredictable physical breakdowns.

Everyday a new surprise. Every moment the opportunity for a shocking change in vitality. Every night a battle of my brain versus my chronic pains versus sleep.

And so it persisted, throughout 2013 and into several later years… despite the fact that I actually came up with an answer for myself that vastly improved a good part of the sickness struggle... but definitely didn’t fix it all.

Finding AN answer

I’m sure I’ve already mentioned this, too… but eventually I found some respite in my health struggles through no help from modern medicine. In fact, I helped myself thanks to familial clues when I decided to exclusion-diet my way into an answer. My grandpa had celiac’s disease long before it was trendy and I decided gluten was a logical place to start. And what do you know? That helped about 60% of my ailments.

So began years of obsessing over figuring out the gluten free life. Which, contrary to popular opinion, fucking sucks. I get that it became a trendy idea at exactly the wrong point in my life, but goddamnit, I hate the question, "Are you ACTUALLY gluten free, or is it by choice?" It is not a dietary walk in the park when essentially every item is contaminated with some form or another of secret sauce and your body is going to flip out at the slightest dusting.

I remember being so distraught over having these drastic dietary considerations to figure out on my own that I would spontaneously break down into tears in all sorts of places - the fridge, the grocery store, restaurants, social contexts when people kindly asked, “how about you choose where to eat this time.” I can’t choose! I can’t eat anything! I would privately bawl to myself. What a fun time that was.

But that was not nearly the end of it.

It turned out, yes, entirely cutting the glutens helped immensely. I also realized that sugar was not my friend. In fact, processed anything was not going to have a great outcome. But then… there was this other weird pattern that I started noticing in my life… sometimes I was pretty healthy and (relatively speaking) happy with the way things were going off-wheat. But sometimes I was just as sickly and digestively screwed when I definitely hadn’t consumed anything questionable. As if other tried and true components of my diet randomly became gluten analogs that upset me just as much.

Plus, there were some ailments that just never seemed to go away. The insomnia was a persistent problem that stretched back to being about 5 years old, but got more severe with time. The aches and pains in my neck and shoulders only worsened, no matter how many tennis balls I rolled on, yoga classes I attended, or muscle relaxers I popped. The exhaustion came and went with connections to my mental health and diet, but not directly related to bready food items. The brain fog didn’t clear up when I had a strictly regimented diet. The tension migraines never fully returned from where they came.

I was still finding myself bedridden and ready to give up on the whole idea of living on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes it was every two weeks, sometimes once a month, sometimes a few months apart. But I never knew why, how long it would last, or how to control the system-wide failures.

And if you want to know how western medicine helped me with any of these continued challenges… it didn’t. I tried to get answers for years before I finally gave up. Every doctor turned me away. Every specialist was critically uninterested. Even the Mayo Clinic neglected to listen to what I said or utilize applicable resources, after I was so sure they could solve the medical mystery of my life.

So. I stopped trying at a certain point. I resolved myself to being health anxious and perpetually confused by myself. I realized that I would never know what any day was going to bring, because my discomforts and continued sicknesses seemed to come and go with the tides.

Eventually, after years of this bullshit, it got a bit better. I buckled down with - you guessed it - strict routines designed to circumvent some of the challenges.

I realized that my diet needed to be incredibly tight, and by that, I mean “boring.” Beyond gluten, I cut out basically everything sugary, carby, and processed. I noticed that without a certain variety of physical exercise on a regimented basis, everything started slipping. I prioritized finding ways to get to sleep at night, even if it meant being rigid and assessed as “dramatic” by less slumber-impaired humans. I gave up any activities that caused neck and shoulder strain, and tried to be better about things like stretching. I also noticed that dealing with my emotions was a gateway to pain and discomfort relief, which was an uphill battle all it’s own. And, you know, eventually I learned about this Complex Trauma thing that explained a HUGE part of early to mid twenties, including a majority of the physical ailments.

But, although I began to live like an above-averagely healthy human again… I’ve still always had a few mysteries about my health.

Sure, over the course of many years I’ve figured out how to live with a semi-predictable body after long periods of never knowing what tomorrow would bring. But, unfortunately, there are still times when my system throws me a curveball. During those unanticipated spans of health failure, I’m left ruminating on a question or three that haven’t ever been answered consistently.

One of the most common inquiries is coming at you next.

Stress or sick?

So, even after all my life changes and careful modifications. All my sacrifices and seemingly over-the-top regimes. I’ve still had an ongoing health obsession that pops up from time to time when my shit starts to go downhill.

The incrementally-observed question that runs through my head on repeat… “Wait, am I communicably sick, or am I just fucking stressed out again?”

I realized a while back - maybe in my mid-late twenties - that holy hell, I sure felt like I was coming down with the flu more often than it was logical. The thing was, my symptoms only ever progressed to the point of feeling like I was still actively fighting off the sickness as it took hold. I would get the temperature dysregulation, the headache, the muscle pain, the foggy feeling, and oh boy, the exhaustion - that generally serve as your first signs of contagious trouble.

I would be too deliriously tired to get up and do anything. If I made myself go to work, it felt like wading through a dream. Half present, half falling asleep at my desk. My body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Even my head was too heavy for my neck to manage the task.

Beyond the energy void, I would genuinely start to experience pre-illness complaints, like swollen lymph nodes, congestion, and the aforementioned shivers and shakes. I would find myself incredibly hungry, as though my immune system was ramping up for a fight. I would get weak, like all my electrolytes were purged from my body. I would characterize the experience as feeling “generally under the weather” in preparation for something much larger slamming into town.

Beyond the energy void, I would genuinely start to experience pre-illness complaints, like swollen lymph nodes, congestion, and the aforementioned shivers and shakes. I would find myself incredibly hungry, as though my immune system was ramping up for a fight. I would get incredibly weak, like all my electrolytes were purged from my body. I would characterize the experience as feeling “generally under the weather” in preparation for something much larger slamming into town.

And I would respond in kind. I would retreat to bed, Nyquil and vitamin C showering over me on frequent intervals, gearing up for the systemic war of a lifetime. I would drift in and out of sleep for a day or two, fending off the weird muscle aches and sweat sessions that come with an emerging fever. Interestingly, many of my old food reactivities would rear up during this period. I would get my neti pot and vomit-bags ready for action.

And then… nothing else would happen. Assuming I chilled out and retreated to a state of forfeit when I actually treated myself with kindness and care, everything would work out. After 1-5 days of being back in my bedridden state, determined that significant contagious sickness was headed my way, it would seem to just disappear overnight. Or, clear up by about 70% overnight, to be more realistic.

It took several rounds of this pattern - I couldn’t tell you how many - before I finally realized… heyyo, my body shuts the fuck down when I’m stressed out. Every time I experienced one of these sudden falls from health, it followed (or ran in tandem with) a period of significant stress, anxiety, and/or depression. And if I let myself relax for a week, it would all be okay. If I tried to push through it because ObLiGaTiOnS, I was signing myself up for a prolonged and far more serious health failure. It happened too many times; I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. Like I had postulated earlier in my adulthood - my health seemed to be drastically affected by my mental state. Particularly, my interpretations of stress, obligations, and fears.

And I can tell you, my health anxiety quieted down for a while in the aftermath of the acceptance. Call it immersion therapy. When you’ve experienced the same event over and over again, but A never leads to B, and C-alming your shit makes condition A disappear back into the ethers... well, eventually you take it for what it is and just stop panicking so much. I think I got tired of preoccupying myself with the whole dumpster fire at some point and preferred to extinguish the flames by letting them run their course.

This is where I’ve lived for the past many years now. Realizing that if I push myself too hard mentally or physically, or if I let too many stress signals infiltrate my brain… I’m about to get fucked up. My health will slip quickly. I will be reactive to essentially every food on this planet. My body will be puffy, inflamed, and painful. Not to mention, so goddamn tired all the time. But that’s it. It won’t last forever. I’m not going to die. Telling myself the opposite makes it all last a lot longer. Don’t pile stress about your stress-induced sickness onto your existing stress, and you'll be better soon.

And yet, when it’s happening, I also never know for a fact that my stress-based illness is definitely what’s going on. The result is getting trapped in a “will I or won’t I” obsessive spiral of anticipating the worst while reassuring myself that it might be nothing at all. There’s a lot of internal and external conversation about it, as people want to know if you’re sick and you want to be able to warn them that you feel like death… but also have to throw in the caveat, “Iunno, you have to realize that this happens to me all the time and it’s usually nothing, though.”

Of course, this creates the opportunity for my brain to 1) tell me I’m probably fine, quit complaining, pussy, and 2) compare myself to everyone else on the planet, who doesn’t crumble when their brain interprets times are hard. Because, of course, I have to make myself feel mentally ridiculous for feeling physically horrible. Other people are always happy to help in this regard, too. "You sure get sick a lot. I thought you had the flu last month. Wow, it always seems like something is wrong with you." Mhm, I feel the same on all accounts.

And, Fuckers, that’s why I stopped talking about it or looking for answers a long time ago. Instead, I've just relied on the most logical answer and quit worrying. I’ve done enough research on my own, not to mention all my Animal Science schooling, to know how stress responses work. They’re significant. They have the potential to disrupt your entire body through hormonal dysregulation. And they work differently - as far as we can tell - depending on the organism.

So that’s what I’ve leaned on. Acknowledgement that stress really screws with me. It zaps my energy. It fogs up my brain. It makes me overstimulated. It causes weird pains and immune system responses. It churns up my digestive problems. It also makes me feel like I’m starving but nauseous all at once. Over long periods of time, it can lead to infections. It, obviously, ruins my sleep, which reaaaaally doesn’t help with any of it.

That’s that. Pretty complicated but simple. Try not to stress yourself out and god help you, if you do. Chill for a few days and you’ll be alright, probably. No one knows why it happens. Doctors don’t care. Just watch out for yourself, because no one else deals with this shit.

Unless… they totally do.

So, that’s fibromyalgia

I guess this is where I tell you something that a lot of folks have probably already figured out. Sorry if you’ve been yelling at me through your headphones this whole time - chill, I’m getting to it.

There definitely is a term for everything I’ve described. There are millions of other people who experience it. And, yeah, doctors often still don’t believe it’s real… but the numbers and anecdotal evidence don’t lie.

Ever heard of fibromyalgia?

Of course you have. But have you ever really looked into what it meant? Because… I hadn’t.

Annnnd then a listener and I were chatting on Instagram a few weeks ago. And she mentioned... everything I just mentioned. And her diagnosis had been? Fibromyalgia.

Via DM, your fellow Fucker started telling me about being tired all the time, mysterious aches and pains that worsen with stress, IBS symptoms, improper temperature regulation, and over-exertion that leads to required days of recovery. My jaw hit the floor.

You know I hopped online and started doing more research of my own. And all of the information was confirmed and expanded upon in a way that drove my mandible straight into the basement.

Hey, you know how fibromyalgia is synonymous with “widespread pain?” Oh shit, if you dig into it, there is a lot more to learn. Here’s a (maybe, complete?) list of the currently known associated symptoms. Keep in mind, I couldn’t find a single comprehensive resource for this information. This list is compiled of information from the the peer-reviewed article I'm going to read from later, the American College of Rheumatology, the CDC, Healthline, and Medical News Today. And if it sounds like a bit of a "catch all" pile, I think you're right.

Pain and stiffness all over the body

Fatigue and tiredness

Depression and anxiety

Sleep problems

Problems with thinking, memory, and concentration, known as “fibro-fog”

Headaches, including migraines

Tingling or numbness in hands and feet

Pain in the face or jaw

Digestive problems, such as abdominal pain, bloating, constipation, and irritable bowel syndrome

Tenderness to touch or pressure affecting muscles, sometimes joints or even the skin

Irritable or overactive bladder

Pelvic pain

Trouble focusing or paying attention

Pain or a dull ache in the lower belly

Dry eyes

Sleeping for long periods of time without feeling rested (nonrestorative sleep)

Acid reflux

Restless leg syndrome

Sensitivity to cold or heat

Problems with vision

Nausea

Weight gain

Dizziness

Cold or flu-like symptoms

Skin problems

Chest symptoms

Breathing problems

Insulin resistance

Wait, wait, wait. THAT’S what fibro is? Because, I’m sorry, I have literally never heard any of that detail before… and although it gets so ambiguous that I suspect these ailments are all the conditions that just haven't been explained before by medical science... this list just described my life. All the way down to the tiniest detail of dry eyes, as I now recall chronically dumping drops into mine for those same years in my 20s. What. The. Shit.

Prior to this research, my symptomatic knowledge of fibro was essentially - pain, of the unexplained and incurable variety. No one ever once has mentioned anything else about the condition to me, or allll the ways that it correlated with my years of health trauma. Not my peers, not my doctors, and not even my amazing, well-informed therapist.

So, maybe I’m really late to the game here, but long story short, my mind was blown when I heard that there’s actually a term for this experience which I had forfeited to processing as a “unique way that my body individually destroys me” for all these years. I thought I was just uniquely uncomfortable all the time and stopped burdening others with my experiences.

Maybe that’s why I never had anyone clue me in to the diagnosis - I honestly stopped talking about the cyclical sickness a while back, after recognizing that people didn’t respond favorably to the narrative, “I just get too stressed out to function.” Shutting my mouth and writing off my experiences may have halted my potential for hearing a realistic account of living with fibromyalgia. Oh, how the trauma shame shenanigans never stop royally fucking you.

Of course, based on my own recent education, now I’m wondering if fibromyalgia applies to far more of us in the trauma community. Because if I hadn’t found reliable information on it in all my trauma and inflammatory illness research over the years… how many other people are in the same boat?

And this brings me to my next point. I really hate the term fibromyalgia.

Why I hate the term

There’s actually another explanation for why I never heard about everything that fibromyalgia describes. Uh, you’re going to hate me for this, but I didn’t think it was a “real” diagnosis.

Yep. I’m telling you with moderate guilt that for the longest time, I appraised fibro in the same way that western medicine considers all psychosomatic illnesses - not valid. And I’m unhappy with myself, too. Believe me, I feel like my least favorite kind of person... a hypocrite. But this also points to the systemic issue that undermines so many of our attempts to get help, and that makes me far more unhappy.

You see, a number of years ago, as a budding counselor with a few years of experience, my therapist friend mentioned something about fibro. Specifically, that it was a common label granted to more seriously mentally affected patients… and it wasn’t believed to be a real thing. I wish I could remember more detail on the context, but the basis of the story is, someone that I trusted - someone with many trauma patients - told me that in her experience, no one took fibromyalgia seriously. People with intense mental illnesses regularly presented with unfounded complaints of pain, and this is the term they were assigned as a result.

There was no proof of their physical discomfort. The patients tended to have myriad mental and physical health issues. They tended to be more difficult clients. Professionals had doubts about how serious the complaints were. No evidence, no respect. It was just about that simple.

To give more weight to the story, here’s one quick excerpt that is actually validating to read, from an article titled, The management of fibromyalgia from a psychosomatic perspective: an overview.

“People with FM often reported dismissive attitudes from others, such as disbelief, stigmatization, lack of acceptance by their relatives, friends, coworkers, and the healthcare system, that consider them as ‘lazy’ or ‘attention seeking’ people, with their symptoms ‘all in their head’. Such dismissiveness can have a substantial negative impact on patients, who are already distressed, and also on the degree of their pain.”

So… similar to the asshole social associates described above… for years after that, I paid no attention to fibromyalgia. When people brought it up, I nodded and moved on. I didn’t disbelieve that there would be a connection between mental illness and the onset of bodily pains after my own experiences, but the term had also been shuttled to a file in my head that sidled up next to, “seeking prescription pain meds.” This was an incorrect judgement based on incorrect, oversimplified information. But unfortunately, it left an impression.

So… similar to the assholes described above… for years after that, I paid no attention to fibromyalgia. When people brought it up, I nodded and moved on. I didn’t disbelieve that there would be a connection between mental illness and the onset of bodily pains after my own experiences, but the term had also been shuttled to a file in my head that sidled up next to, “seeking prescription pain meds.” This was an incorrect judgement based on incorrect, oversimplified information. But unfortunately, it left an impression.

It took the real life account of someone with the diagnosis to show me all the ways that my previous perception was completely incorrect. I suddenly realized how reductive and insulting the false information had been. Annnd all the ways that I could have really helped myself and a few others a lot sooner if I had just investigated the term on my own, rather than lazily falling back on someone else’s casually-expressed opinion.

So, I’m saying… fuck me. 100%. That makes me really upset with myself. But it makes me even more frustrated with the medical field.

And this is why I hate the term fibromyalgia.

It doesn’t actually explain a fucking thing… and it doesn’t seem like anyone is actually trying to.

At this point, there is no known cause for the development or persistence of the disorder. Fibromyalgia has essentially become more of a label for a grouping of symptoms that we “allow” people to assume when we don’t know what the hell might be wrong with them. I say “allow” very purposely, because it feels like our medical overlords have granted us this word as a way to pacify the uncomfortable masses - not treat them.

At this point, there is no known cause or organic mechanism for the development or persistence of the disorder. Fibromyalgia has essentially become more of a label for a grouping of symptoms that we “allow” people to assume when we don’t know what the hell might be wrong with them. I say “allow” very purposely, because it feels like our medical overlords have granted us this word as a way to pacify the uncomfortable masses - not treat them.

Millions of humans have detailed the same experiences, but science hasn’t yet come up with a way to explain them, so let��s go ahead and give them a new diagnosis that boils down to “Not sure what’s going on, but they say it’s unpleasant and it sounds a little something like widespread pain. Cool, let’s call it a day. Nah, we don’t need to educate the medical community or the public - we don’t need a single list of all the known comorbidities - because we don’t get it, ourselves. Let’s make sure we put that disclaimer right in the definition, so everyone knows it’s a controversial topic."

And implicit in saying that doctors and scientists don’t understand the term, comes a negative connotation of assumed delusion or attention-seeking complaints.

Essentially, what I’m bitching about is the tendency of researchers and practitioners to shuttle things they can’t directly measure to the back of the relevancy line. Despite all of the anecdotal evidence from fibro sufferers that corroborate the same causes, symptoms, and outcomes… we can’t see what they’re talking about and we don’t have an easy explanation, so we put this in the “fake news” stack of information - AKA psychosomatic illness.

Now, it’s also worth mentioning that fibromyalgia is deeply intertwined with trauma. Something like 2/3rds of fibro patients also have confirmed PTSD symptoms, if not higher. Exact numbers depend on which study you trust. Just know, it is a prevalent, accepted, correlation between trauma and the development of fibromyalgia. And of course, no one has determined the causative or affective relationship between the two at this point in time.

Hell, we all know that a lot of mental and physical health professionals don’t even want to acknowledge trauma at this point - or, do so with a smirk and an eyebrow raise, at best. So tethering the two poorly-comprehended disorders together? Oh boy, it’s a sure-fire way to ensure that no one listens to a word you say after honestly answering their background information questions. Might as well throw down your wallet and walk yourself right out of the office at that point.

The medical field’s lack of trauma education is a big problem. Making “psychosomatic” a dirty word isn’t helping millions of folks out there. Being invalidated by the people who could possibly help you is another mental health crisis waiting to happen. And all of this is infuriating to me, following my own experiences and thinking about other people’s.

Should we take this one outrage step further? Sure.

You know that a vast majority of fibromyalgia sufferers are… women. Sorry, about to get a tad feminist. Is anyone here surprised that primarily female voices tend to be written off by medical professionals? Ha, ha, ha. No, probably not.

For all of human history, the ladies have been getting the shit end of the stick when it comes to medical care. We all know that women were given amazing explanations for their ailments, such as having “hysterics” or "the vapors" not so long ago.

Furthermore, there is research showing that doctors do not take women’s accounts of pain severity seriously, in particular. Even fellow female doctors and nurses are given different treatment by staff when they go to the ER, versus male counterparts. And if you’re a minority or socioeconomically challenged woman? The data says you might as well take two aspirin and see what happens the next morning, because the medical attention research is even worse for those demographics. Huge surprise.

So, pulling this all together: Considering that the majority of us who receive complex trauma diagnoses are women… considering that implicit in this label, comes the increased likelihood that we’re not economically well-to-do and belong to minority groups one way or another… how do you figure we’ve ever had a chance of receiving real help for our unmeasurable physical conditions?

So, pulling this all together: Considering that the majority of us who receive complex trauma diagnoses are women… considering that implicit in this label, comes the increased likelihood that we’re not economically well-to-do and belong to minority groups… how do you figure we’ve ever had a chance of receiving real help for our unmeasurable physical conditions?

Yeah, we haven’t.

We’ve been given a term - complete with a wink and a nudge - that no one wants to meaningfully research or prioritize understanding. We’ve received a new phrase that doctors will “generously grant us” when we’re drowning in unexplained symptoms and pain. We’re then labeled with a word that essentially amounts to “disregard and humor” for all our future appointments. On top of it all, we’re carrying the burden of traumatic histories, which immediately qualify us for misunderstood diagnoses that more or less equate “ghosts in their blood” - because, hell, we can’t quantify mental illness, either.

The whole ordeal makes me really upset. The fact that I was inadvertently pulled into this biased disbelief makes me more upset. It also serves as quite a demonstration of how powerful or deleterious knowledge can be after it worms its way into your head involuntarily and becomes your only “go-to” piece of data, true or false.

One seemingly-trustworthy person mentioning a negative opinion of fibromyalgia one time in my past somehow infiltrated my thoughts to the extent that I didn’t have a second thought for 5 years? And we're talking about a goddamn trauma researcher - with, what I consider - an otherwise open and connection-happy mind?

The power of assumed authority and truth in opinion is significant. If I can be swayed in this way, how could less mental health informed medical professionals stand a chance in responding differently? That’s frightening and clarifying… though immensely upsetting.

So, since biomedicine hasn’t bothered to find any great information for us, despite the rapidly increasing rate of fibromyalgia diagnoses in the past two decades - how can we make sense of the information to actually help ourselves?

Let’s talk about that next.

What we can conclude

So it kindof blows finding out that you probably qualify for a new medical term… only to find out that we don’t actually know anything about said term. I say this, because if you’re waiting for me to pop off with some sweet research on fibromyalgia… uh… I haven’t found it yet. But not for lack of trying. So far every article I’ve seen has been pretty basic and uninspired.

Does fibromyalgia correspond with trauma? It does. Does stress mediate and moderate fibromyalgia, PTSD symptoms, GI problems, and depression? It does. Does it take a long time and numerous appointments to receive medical help for fibromyalgia complaints? It does. Does the comorbidity of post-traumatic symptoms make fibro more uncomfortable and challenging to overcome? What do you know - it fucking does.

(Wow. So enlightening. Having two debilitating disorders is less fun than having one. Who’s funding these research studies, anyways?)

The first thing I can conclude is, there’s not that much to conclude. This is to say, no one - that I’ve seen, so far - has revealed anything super shocking or thought-provoking about fibromyalgia.

Really, the most interesting things I learned from my reading are that

1) insulin resistance is another associated disorder, which explains even more of my baffling life

2) sex hormones are leached from your system under stress, which, refer to point number one... explains another huge chunk of my existence, and

3) the recommendations for treating fibro long term are the same recommendations I’ve given for getting your trauma life re-ordered.

You know how I always push for people to find out what’s manageable on their own through trial and error, rather than approaching trauma recovery with preventable fires burning in every area? Hey - someone agrees.

Namely, it's recommended that in order to manage fibromyalgia you establish routines including strictly nutrition-based eating habits, non-threatening forms of consistent exercising, prioritizing tons of sleep, and controlling your environment as much as possible for stressful stimuli. Doctors can also supplement your rehab with antidepressants, because, again, fibromyalgia is related to the same underlying hormonal imbalances as depression - but the larger health issues are managed best by changing your behaviors. Just like I’ve said.

I suppose this is no surprise, since this entire time I’ve unknowingly been talking, in large part, about how I’ve controlled my own fibromyalgia symptoms. I just thought it was mandatory trauma pains I was dampening. But the word is out! There's a separate phrase for it. The doctors and I agree; stop treating yourself like a turd, and maybe you’ll stop feeling like one. Whatdoyouknow. Sometimes there are reasons for the things I notice experientially, even if they aren’t originally informed by medical lingo.

Secondly, looking at what we can conclude at this point about fibro… Well, it justifies my previous hypothesis that stress is the root of my body’s evil. There’s not much to definitively say about fibromyalgia at this point, but we know for a fact that it is agitated and potentially caused by stress.

This perfectly aligns with my observations that a terrible work week mixed with a personally challenging month on top of a physically exhausting cleaning marathon will lead to a systemic breakdown every time. And, conversely, those times when life has actually been pretty chill correspond to periods of bodily health and limited upset - the times when I wonder “was I ever really sick at all?” and start to health gaslight my damn self.

Realizing the link between stress and sickness, of course, also begins to explain the correlation to trauma, and particularly, complex trauma.

Now, let me start by saying that there’s some debate over the downstream effects of PTSD - some researchers swear that it decreases system arousal in the face of later stress, others have collected data reflecting that a nervous system hyper-sensitization takes place. From my own trauma involvement, I’ve seen and heard more cases of the latter; we’re quick to upset and easily pushed into stressed territory. I don’t know many, if any, trauma folks who are non-responsive to disturbing life events... but that sounds more like a deep, dangerous, clinical depression symptom to me.

Personally, once I’ve been chronically stressed for a few weeks or months, then I notice the loss of stress response take over. My limbic system gives up, the HPA axis stops responding, and therefore nothing can rattle me. Perhaps you’ve also had the experience of laughing when your car breaks down, because it’s already been 3 months of disaster around every turn and there’s nothing else you can do for yourself. So, sure, people can reach a point where they legitimately don’t respond to the chaos anymore, but I’m not so sure that’s a consistent norm. I think it’s more likely that you turn off your stress reactions if you’ve been adequately prepped to dissociate for the sake of sanity or your chemical balance is so wack that your danger center has powered down.

I can tell you without a doubt that before the point when my stress threshold has been raised sky-high thanks to repeat exposures and wiring disconnections... I’m a rapid-responder when anxiety comes calling. Stimulus - rapid survival reaction - no space in between being startled and shaking from head to toe. And this is the case for basically every Motherfucker I know. I’m no expert, but I think we tend to fall more into the hypervigilant camp surrounding this podcast, rather than the laxadonical one. Always on the lookout, always ready, often bowled over by our own responses.

I’m a rapid-responder when anxiety comes calling. Stimulus - rapid survival reaction - no space in between being startled and shaking from head to toe. And this is the case for every Motherfucker I know. I’m no expert, but I think we tend to fall more into the hypervigilant camp surrounding this podcast, rather than the laxadonical one. Always on the lookout, always ready, often bowled over by our own responses

This nervous system sensitization, as they call it, explains a lot of trauma symptoms. I’ve regularly discussed the hypersensitivity problem it creates, when your brain doesn’t adequately filter out or assess neutral stimuli because it considers basically everything to be a threat. This can also contribute to the ADD and ADHD diagnoses that we receive, when our heads are too busy trying to sort all that data streaming in to direct our thoughts in a steady way. Or, the ways that we’re uniquely thrown immediately into panic mode when we sense a risk. Plus, we’ve probably all had the experience of tiny, secret triggers sneakily upsetting our bodies when the stimulation wasn’t even significant enough to pass through our cognitive recognition centers. These are all caused by the same systemic over-sensitization problem.

In general: yes, we trauma folk are sensitive to our environments - inner and outer. We are easily pushed down survival pathways to fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses. We rapidly catastrophize ambiguous information, which can convince our brains and bodies that the worst has already happened. We’re hyperaware and easily overstimulated, often agitated, and regularly on edge.

I maintain, in the face of controversial evidence, that we get stressed out easily. And our bodies react dramatically.

I feel like I should also state that this is especially true, as most of us have read, when we have unresolved emotional strain floating around in our meat jackets. We can be overstimulated and aroused (in a bad way) from the inside, out. Since the majority of us are not skilled in emotional recognition or resolution, we’re often walking around with a lifetime of hard feelings stored in our guts. And there’s been roughly zero doubt in my head about emotional and environmental stress contributing to dissociation, contributing to a vagal nerve shutdown as a big part of the digestive failure that characterizes fibromyalgia, IBS, Crohns, and so many autoimmune disorders.

On top of the unresolved emotional root of stress, this pings another episode that I've previously released. The one about being overly restrictive in your diet and exercise for the sake of appearance perfectionism. If you physically exert yourself too strongly through caloric deprivation or extreme work outs, you can easily stress your body into a survival response. It can't tell the difference between starvation for bikini season and starvation for lack of food. Running your ass off for your upcoming wedding or running your ass off for your upcoming bear attack. Your danger sensing center is sensitive and it overreacts, much like myself.

Now, considering that all these examples of central nervous system sensitization and physiological survival states that go hand in hand with Complex Trauma and Fibromyalgia, so many weird health mysteries are potentially resolved. But, not exactly the pain component. Or, is it.

Again, the authors out of Italy and Brazil who penned, The management of fibromyalgia from a psychosomatic perspective: an overview, have a potential way to think about that. They state:

“Even if the causes and pathophysiology of FM are not completely known, widespread chronic pain could be explained by a vulnerability due to a perturbation in the central processing of sensory information, named ‘central sensitivity’ or ‘central sensitization’, that amplifies the response of the central nervous system to a peripheral input. Hence, people with FM and/or other central sensitivity syndromes have a lower threshold for interpreting sensory information as noxious. Several factors, such as genetic predisposition, deficiencies in neurotransmitter levels, biochemical changes in the body, endocrine dysfunction, mood states, anxiety, sociocultural environment, psychological trauma and past experiences in general, expectancy beliefs, and catastrophization have been proposed as explanatory mechanisms of patients’ subjective experience of central sensitivity. Current research indicates that abnormal sensory and pain processing is a key factor in the pathophysiology of FM. There is robust evidence that abnormalities in central pain processing, rather than damage or inflammation of peripheral structures, play an important role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain in patients with FM.”

Interesting, huh? I still think inflammatory responses are a big part of the 1000 piece stress puzzle, but I don’t disagree with the idea that our finely-tuned danger detection systems amplify pain and discomfort signals to deafening levels. Putting all the system data together, you can deduce a fairly complete picture of how strain, physical degradation, and pain are all related.

Finally, I have confirmation that being overly stimulated causes everything from my energy drain to my dietary responses, migraines, and autoimmune attacks... all the way down to my temperature sensitivity, random presentation of allergic reactions, and even that occasional sharp pain in my jaw… not to mention all my life-altering functional problems, like being unable to sleep at night, existing with debilitating pain, and living while feeling sedated?

All of my strange health complaints from the past decade have aligned with this new label. And that label corresponds perfectly with my inkling that running on cortisol and overzealous guardsmen have been the major source of my health anxiety sauce. Welp, it’s been validating research for all of my educated guesses, to say the least.

Long story short, there’s not a ton of helpful information about the reasons for developing fibromyalgia or what makes it get worse. But there’s one thing we do know for a fact; stress is the enemy. At least I think it’s comforting to conclude that stress is the root of many of our C-PTSD complaints, as well as depression, anxiety, insomnia, obsessive thoughts, and now… a whole list of common maladies, labeled fibromyalgia.

Whether or not it’s really understood, at least there is a connection between everything. At least there’s something that ties ALL the random, disjointed pieces of torture together. I’m guessing that for many of us, fibromyalgia is similar to complex trauma, again, in that regard.

And, lastly, I can conclude that… I have more questions

More questions than answers

Here’s one last excerpt from the aforementioned article, which is the only one I found that’s worth hearing from.

They state: “FM is labelled, often with a negative connotation, as a ‘functional somatic syndrome’, part of a ‘somatization disorder’, ‘fashionable diagnosis’, ‘idiopathic pain disorder’, ‘non-disease’, ‘psychosomatic syndrome’, dismissing the true suffering of the patients. In the absence of a univocal identified biological cause, subjective reports of symptoms by the patients are often viewed derogatorily and discredited as ‘psychogenic.’”

Like I said, there isn’t a lot of helpful information out there if you’re looking to learn more about this controversial condition. Unfortunately, it has been categorized as a “functional somatic disorder” which essentially means that we don’t have an explanation for the organic basis of the disorder.

Uh, I don’t know what could be more organic than the endogenous hormones in our own bodies creating downstream health effects, but hey, I’m not a biologist anymore, what do I know?

The fact remains - there’s a lot more to understand about the assorted mechanisms that lead from trauma into depression, generalized stress disorder, and physical manifestations of a biochemical system that’s running off-balance. And this is where I have the biggest questions.

First, I have to get this out of the way. I’m wondering about the known gender split in fibro. The numbers are horrendously skewed towards women as the primary sufferers, and that’s not helping the medical legitimacy case. So, what are the chances that men just don’t have fibromyalgia at the same rate as women? Either they don’t get stressed to the same magnitude or their bodies respond completely differently? It’s possible. OR. Is it something else?

It seems to me like this follows another similar mystery - what are the chances that men just don’t suffer from Complex Trauma at the same rate as women? Pretty poor? Probably more of a diagnostic or seeking-help issue? Yeah, I think so, too. Yet, if you look strictly at the numbers, it sure seems like there are more women hearing about C-PTSD than men.

This analogous labeling issue between the genders makes me think of a few explanations…

1) Men don’t seek help for their physical ailments the way that women do, either because they’re less in tune with their bodies or because they’re shamed for not being tough enough if they complain. Just like C-PTSD.

2) Men don’t hear about fibromyalgia, because it is an engendered diagnosis reserved for dramatic women at this point. Just like C-PTSD. They receive other partial diagnoses, like IBS, that are less controversial. This leads me into a whole spiraling rant about several genital-dependent psychological diagnoses that I feel similarly about, but one of them is…

3) Men don’t receive the same level of fibromyalgia labels as women because men don’t often receive Complex-PTSD labels, which would serve as a hint to their doctors, since trauma is a well-known predisposing factor…

This brings me to the next set of questions.

It’s unpopular opinion time, but, frankly, I don’t know that any of these trauma and fibro issues are really that separate.

It seems to me like we’re talking a lot about one particular problem that splinters off into a thousand different outcomes, depending on the circumstances, the biology, and the human in question. Not separate conditions.

First comes the trauma, then comes the presentation of downstream physical and mental symptoms. Presentation, magnitude, and personal recognition of these symptoms varies, just like severity of Complex Trauma does. But under both conditions, our experiences are often so similar - the hard part is that we struggle to describe them and often lean on abstract language which can be used in such diverse ways. We focus on different problems, depending on our own life impacts.

So, maybe we notice and report internal events differently, but it’s hard for me to believe that the two disorders aren’t more than corresponding diagnoses - and are, in fact, one and the same.

I could be very wrong, but I’d sure like to find out.

So, to the small percentage of fibromyalgia sufferers who don’t have trauma… you sure? To the depressed and anxious folks who can’t seem to get a grip on their physical health, but never saw their life as traumatic… want to take another look? To all the traumatized folks with Raynauds, food allergies, hypertension, ADD, aches, and migraines… have you really looked into the full definition of fibromyalgia?

ARE these conditions of trauma and fibromyalgia different? Or is this another complication in identifying unseeable symptoms in a population of folks who never learned to name their mental and physical experiences? Is this an artifact from a group who tends to underestimate and under-report their own experiences in light of unhealthy others’ core beliefs? How prevalent is fibromyalgia, really? Especially in the context of Trauma?

Is it possible that everything boils down to one underlying event - trauma - that produces a whole host of other biological adaptations down the line? Did we create a separate term for it, simply based on a lack of standardization?

Or is this an exclusionary problem?

Have all the various ways we’ve learned to categorize and describe our experiences actually separated one full disorder into two half-disorders; one that encompasses the brain and another that covers the body? Is it our societal misunderstanding of the connection between our perceptions and our meaty husks, forcing us to separate the issues of mental and physical health that would be better understood together, as one?

I’m not sure! But I’m definitely thinking a lot about it.

Partially, from personal bias. I always considered my physical issues to be part of my trauma life, not separate from it - and that explanation made perfect sense to me. Where do these disorders really split? Maybe it’s possible to have Complex PTSD without the physical symptoms, but that's really not what I hear from people. The most of us have at least some periods of physical ailments, even if they're not persistent. To me, it seems like a distinction that should be made within the trauma diagnosis - with or without physical wellness degradation - rather than piling a separate, largely-ineffective diagnosis on the vast majority of us who have some variety of said bodily ailments.

I feel like the real issue isn’t “what is fibromyalgia?” The actual problem is a lack of biological understanding in the Psychology field. And a mirrored failure to understand Psychology in the medical field. Then, throw in a reluctance to study the conglomerate of bio-physiology and mental health issues in the scientific research literature because both experiences are difficult to measure or confirm and the studies would be less elegant.

If more psychologists actually learned system biology and more medical practitioners actually studied abnormal psychology, maybe we wouldn’t have disparate diagnoses that each come with a half-recognition. Maybe we could have one term that encompassed the full experience of trauma. Maybe these professionals could confirm all the details that we don’t understand by working with a more comprehensive approach to how humans work as a whole, rather than organ by organ. Just a fucking thought.

Because, I can tell you, if my therapist friend had the same biological education that I did at the time, I guarantee that she wouldn’t have told me fibromyalgia was a “pseudo diagnosis.” If she had knowledge of the connection between stress hormones and bodily breakdown, plus the trauma physiology that determines our sensitivity to stress - there’s no way she would have been so flippant or insensitive with her words. But under the influence of her counseling peers, the diagnosis became a fallacy.

I think this highlights the danger of the problem at hand. It only took one industry-determined void of knowledge to pass along an unfair opinion that skewed at least my perception for years down the line. And, think about it, how many times has one innocently-baseless comment in the psychology or medical fields probably created a lifetime of bias in an up-and-coming professional?

Maybe this is why we have the self-perpetuating negative connotation of psychosomatic illness in our society that seems to crawl its way towards improvement, while every other disorder makes significant strides. A lack of personal understanding of the biology-psychology connection is easily turned into a respected opinion, and readily transmitted to unknowing people who are eager to learn from their wise mentors. And so, the next generation inherits the same set of half-baked progress-stunting ideas. Over and over and over.

Depressing! And enlightening.

And that’s roughly where I stand today, after days of fibromyalgia research and very few satisfactory answers. Depressed and enlightened.

More or less, asking myself more questions about the legitimacy of our entire mental and physical healthcare system and all the lines we draw in the sand. Confident that trauma leads to increased stress leads to increased brain and body trauma. Somewhat happy to know that I’m actually not the only one who consistently apologizes for feeling like shit and questions if it’s “valid” or not because it seems connected to my brain. But also, pretty pissed off that we’ve been given a word that comes with no explanations and a hellofalot of medical field judgement, as if we needed more of that.

Oh, one more factoid to throw into the end of this conversation. There’s a link between low socioeconomic status and fibromyalgia.

Hey, the same link exists between socioeconomic status and complex trauma. Hey, it’s another predisposing factor for post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms’ emergence. Hey, big surprise, if you have a stable and predictable physical and financial environment, you’re less likely to develop the terror-based conditions brought on by earlier trauma.

If you have financial resources, you’re also less likely to be chronically stressed by the demands of life. You’re probably also more likely to receive respectable medical care. Therefore, meaning that you’re both less likely to have enough perturbation to develop over-sensitive nervous system responses and less likely to be dismissed by doctors with a label they don’t believe exists. Plus, probably more likely to have access to mental health care that could prevent the onset of Complex Trauma presentation, and likely fibromyalgia, altogether.

Oh, look, logic explains so many things. Or, fuckit, let’s just choose to believe that poor people are lazy and always want to complain about something, whether it’s in their heads or their bodies. Whatever the rich white men say.

Big issues to think about.

Like I state way too often on this show, it’s the small things in this trauma life that bring you comfort. And monumental societal failures that make you scream. (Okay, I just added that last part today.)

Wrap it

Okay, let me get out of here before I question more beliefs that are way out of my paygrade. Sorry, medical and psychological practitioners. I know that I’m just a critical observer who, like that kid everyone hates in class, perpetually asks too many questions.

At the bottom of all my complaints, I just wish that we could come up with a way to characterize these disorders that actually helped people understand what was happening. If you know how your body is reacting to what stimuli and how the symptoms are all related, that's a lot more powerful than throwing assorted barely-defined titles at them.

If we can't definitively say that fibromyalgia and trauma symptoms are one and the same, fine. Let there be a distinction. But I think it would be preferable to call fibro something more telling and true to the accepted cause. Call it semantics, but something like Stress Affective Syndrome would be more useful than the made-up word of fibromyalgia. Please, anyone feel free to come up with a better phrase, because I just made "Stress Affective Syndrome" up so I could say "I've got SAS." It already fits the bill.

I guess I’m just up in arms that I’ve tried to find answers for my brain and body health all these years, and turned up completely empty handed until random connections have eventually given me the information I’ve needed after a decade of effort. Maybe if I had my complex trauma diagnosis before I had my health complaints, someone would have mentioned fibromyalgia. Maybe, they would have knowingly smirked and sent me to a psychiatrist. Hard to say.

Even if I had gotten that information about fibro, would it have helped separate from the C-PTSD diagnosis? Honestly, probably not. I would have just been harder on myself for suddenly being too weak in the face of stress. And after reading that medical professionals doubt the validity of fibromyalgia, in the first place? Well that would have been a whole other source of disbelief, anger, and negative self-regard. Maybe a whole new crisis, once my inner critic got a chance to hammer away at my head.

I suppose that figuring out the patterns of my strange bodily conditions actually needed to happen organically for this Fucker, because any semi-questioned diagnosis would have just been more fuel for my trauma fire at that point when I so thoroughly despised myself. Confirming to myself, for a fact, that stress fucks me up may have been a prerequisite for accepting that I might be “one of those fibro people.” You know, the ones who lie about their symptoms. Ha.

And, again, this says a lot about the potential damage that poorly-described labels can do to people… just as much as it says about my own reluctance to be considered a weak-minded over-reactor by outsiders.

All of this being said, I’m so grateful for finally finding out exactly what all fibromyalgia actually entails. It took too long, but honestly, the information came at the perfect time. Two days after I got it, I was stress-sick. Ahhh, it's fibro time. How’s that for irony?

As always, I do think there is some empowerment in the basic root understanding that you aren’t the only one who’s dealt with any of this. The mysterious illnesses, the pain, or the lack of care from modern medicine aren’t individual experiences. Hey, you might even be relieved to know that someone else on this planet routinely asks herself, “Do I have cancer for real this time, or am I just overworked again?”

After years of nobody I spoke to having a tale that even mildly resembled my autoimmune breakdown, finding anybody who related to my issues was extremely relieving. Not only was it a common experience, but it meant that I hadn’t somehow brought the discomfort on myself - through mental illness, physical shenanigans, or plain old weakness - the ways that I feared.

Furthermore, it proved that I hadn’t imagined it all. Because believe it or not, you’re surprisingly willing to throw yourself under the bus after all the pain has passed. I’ve spent the past decade telling people, “I think I have the glutens, as I call it... but I don’t really know though, it’s never been explained, sometimes other things bother me, and sometimes it’s really not a big deal, I don't know what it is” as an almost-apology. A disclaimer that I, too, doubt my own memories and conclusions because they weren’t properly validated by who I considered authority figures.

Hearing that other people had digestive disorders and autoimmune disasters in the wake of Complex Trauma, via the book The Body Keeps The Score, shocked me into self-acceptance of my prior experiences. Hearing that all of it can be encapsulated by this term fibromyalgia a few days ago - well, shit. This is a more mainstream occurrence than I ever previously thought.

And you know what? It does matter to me that I’m not the only one who falls apart when my brain gets overwhelmed. Even if it doesn’t fix anything. Even if my own postulations for how fibromyalgia is born from trauma feel more applicable than the scientifically proven ones. Even if I don’t believe the term deserves to stand alone as a medical label without further delineation - especially of the connection to and overlap with trauma. Even if I think… it might be inseparable.

And you know what? It does matter to me that I’m not the only one who falls apart when my brain gets overwhelmed. Even if it doesn’t fix anything. Even if my own postulations for how fibromyalgia is born from trauma are more enlightening than the scientifically proven ones. Even if I don’t believe the term deserves to stand alone as a medical label without further delineation - especially of the connection to and overlap with trauma. Even if I think… it might be inseparable.

Now I know. When I feel a physical breakdown coming on, with the suspected cause being stress… I don’t have to apologize for it. I don’t need to tell people that I just can’t handle the pressure with unfettered shame for my own biochemistry. I can rest assured that what I’m going through is common - far more common than we know - and completely valid. Even if there are people ready to tell you that it's not.

But, to be honest, I still probably won’t tell anyone that it’s called fibromyalgia. I’m not proud to say, I wouldn’t want them to think I’m just being dramatic.

UGH.

#cptsd #healcptsd #actually CPTSD #just cptsd things #traumabrain #Complex Trauma #trauma recovery #complextrauma #complexptsd

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handeleugene · 5 years

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It was a real privilege to not only attend but have the incredibly high honor to speak at Blend Fest this past year. Such a humbling experience and one of the highlights of my career. Since giving my speech so many people have reached out to me asking for advice & tips on public speaking. I’m no expert by any means but I wanted to peel back the layers & share an in-depth overview of the process that went into putting my speech together.

When the Blend team reached out in February asking me to speak, I of course, said YES! And then promptly proceeded to get to work. I wanted to get started right away because I felt a strong obligation to rise to the occasion & deliver a great product that was worthy of the amazing conference that is Blend. It was incredibly exciting yet incredibly nerve-racking putting this speech together. Symptoms of impostor syndrome were present throughout this whole process but the one thing I took comfort in, was knowing that this wasn’t my first Rodeo. I’d been teaching since 2014 & I’d done 4 talks in the last two years, all leading up to this grand moment. Even though I had 8 months to prepare for this speech I wanted to get started right away because I knew a deadline 8 months away would be easy to procrastinate on. I also knew from the beginning that I wanted to memorize my speech so the earlier I could get it done the more time I could have to practice, revise, & refine my speech. The very first thing I did in preparation for my talk was to start being more observant of the world around me. It just so happened that I was attending Motion Plus Design LA only a week after learning I would be speaking at Blend. So I used this conference to do field research & take notes. I took notes on what captured the audience, what didn’t, what was well received & what wasn’t. The big take away I got from all the talks was that vulnerability really resonated with the audience & made the speaker relatable. Any personal experiences you can draw from to help emphasize the point your making really landed well with the audience. And not taking yourself so seriously was something I noticed worked well on stage as well. Once I got started drafting up ideas & concepts for my speech I decided NOT to start completely from scratch. Instead, build upon past topics I’d given that I knew resonated with audience members & leaving behind the topics that didn’t. That meant taking some of the most successful parts from my F5 Speech as well as my talks at Otis College & Hyper Island. Now a strong part of me wanted to just stop there, take the “Don’t Mess with Success” approach knowing that I already had a solid foundation. But one thing I’ve learned is that past success doesn’t guarantee future results. There’s always room for improvement, I really wanted to push myself on this one, do in-depth research, educate myself more on certain topics & come up with new material that I haven’t presented before. Like I mentioned earlier, I wanted to deliver a unique product that was worthy of Blend. Recycling old material with little revision would save me A LOT of time, effort, & stress but would be the lazy route. One thing about me is that I stubbornly like to do things the hard way. I recently read in Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic, that you can often find comedians doing small sets at local bars in LA & NY. Well established comedians are constantly testing out new material on local audiences to see what jokes land & what jokes bomb. By the time you see a famous comedian on stage doing their big tour & Netflix special, they are already well prepared because they’ve done a countless number of small gigs refining their material along the way. I share this story because I wanted to use this same approach in preparation for my Blend Fest Talk. I intentionally signed up to be a guest speaker at a Local LA meet up called “Creative Neighbors” in July. I wanted to force myself to have the first draft of my Blend Fest Speech ready to present at Creative Neighbors & use this small intimate environment as my testing ground for some of the material I was writing.

Speaking of comedy, we all know the quickest way to win over a crowd during a speech is to get a few laughs in. I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t want my speech to be as funny as possible. From my own personal experience, I’ve found that the most memorable talks were the ones that made me laugh the most. Knowing myself, I knew that making my speech funny would require ALOT of work. I must have listened to 2 or 3 standup comedy specials a week in the span of 9 months. Studying not only the material but the delivery & the stage presence of comedians. Some people came up to me after my speech & said that I looked like Hassan Minhaj with my hand gestures which is funny because I definitely tried to mimic his enthusiasm on stage. The more I studied comedy the more surprised I was to learn how formulaic jokes can be. Lots of jokes follow a format that is recycled but just repurposed to align with each individual’s experience. The Call Back Technique probably being the most popular example of this. I tried to use some of these formulas I was learning to write my own jokes based off of my own personal experiences. I even learned that the truth alone isn’t always funny, sharing an exaggerated version of the truth for the sake of storytelling is commonplace in comedy & was definitely a technique I used in my speech. Once I had the blueprint laid out for my speech it was time to rehearse. One thing I failed to do in my talks prior was leave adequate time to practice my speech & it definitely showed. This time around I wanted to have more confidence & stage presence & not rely heavily on my speaker notes like before. I knew taking this approach would require more work of course but again, I wanted to deliver a product worthy of Blend and the many heroes of mines which would be in attendance. So memorizing as much of my speech as possible felt like the right thing to do.

One thing I learned in this cyclical process of rehearsal, revise, refine, was the way that you write & the way that you talk are two completely different things. If you’re writing the script for your speech you have to write it in a way that you would talk, sounds obvious in theory but proves harder in practice. A lot of the refining of my speech was centered around making the scripted part of my talk as conversational as possible. This conversational aspect I kept tweaking all the way up until the night before my speech. It's a weird phenomenon but you don’t really know what your speech sounds like until you rehearse it out loud. The last thing I wanted to do was to sound like I was reading to the audience or giving a lecture. I had to get out from behind the podium and actually speak to the audience as much as I could.

I learned some amazing tips from David JP Phillip’s Ted Talk about Public Speaking. David educated me on the power & influence you have just with your voice & body language. For instance, changing the pace of what you are saying can increase focus, lowering the volume of your voice creates anticipation & strategically placed pauses generate undivided attention. In public speaking, it is said that body language accounts for approximately 55 percent of communication, voice tone 35 percent, and words 10 percent. This was incredibly enlightening for me and a strategy I incorporated throughout my speech. During the times of my talk that I was reading from my script, I would put certain words or phrases in ALL CAPS to indicate raising the volume of my voice to emphasize a certain point & prevent a monotone sounding dialogue. And I would put multiple periods between words........to indicate longer pauses. I've never memorized a speech before so I looked to the internet for some creative tips to help me besides the typical brute force method. I've come across multiple articles that reiterate a common theme when it comes to memory, our brains are really good at visualization. We remember pictures of things that are meaningful way better than we remember abstract concepts. If we attach a meaningful image (or drawing) to a concept we're more likely to recall that memory later on. I used this method to help me memorize my talk by drawing symbolic images on index cards to help me remember the first 9 minutes of my speech. The goal going in was to have my whole speech memorized but I only got to 11 out of the 20 minutes down (first 9 & last 2). Even still memorizing half of my speech was a major accomplishing I'm definitely proud of, especially considering the fact that I'd never done that before. I was able to get that much memorized because I dedicated the last 3 weeks leading up to my talk to practicing around the clock.

I was very surprised at how well the talk was received at Blend. I knew I had some solid material but I would have never guessed how much of an impact my talk would have on so many people at the event. It's incredibly humbling because hearing all the positive feedback made all the hard work that went into this speech so worth it. Some people went as far as comparing my speech to a Ted Talk or a sermon on Sunday, which is some of the highest compliments I could ever receive. Leading up to it, I was incredibly afraid because throughout this entire process I was completely out of my comfort zone. I knew I was taking a big risk by stepping away from the podium & in doing so removing my safety net, but it was so rewarding being able to deliver a speech that I knew I was capable of. I’m definitely not a natural when it comes to public speaking. I’m an introvert by nature so I had to really tap into an alter ego to deliver this prepared speech. If I looked comfortable on stage its largely due to the fact that I put a substantial amount of time, effort, research, & practice into my talk.

You can catch some highlights from my talk here on my Instagram stories. If you weren't able to attend Blend but you're still interested in seeing a recording of my talk then email me, I'll set up a private screening for you.

#Blend Fest

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themyskira · 6 years

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Wonder Woman #50 postmortem: “You know how strident Wonder Woman fans can be”

I want to cap off my readthrough of this unmitigated shitshow with a look at a recent interview James Robinson did with Newsarama, reflecting back on his twenty-issue Wonder Woman run.

I’m doing this for two reasons: One, because having read the full run and formed my own impressions (and, dare I say, some rather strident opinions), I genuinely do think it can be interesting to see what the writer has to say about it, what they were trying to achieve with it and, looking back, how they feel about the run.

And two, because having read what Robinson has to say, HOOBOY, I HAVE A FEW THOUGHTS OF MY OWN.

Newsarama: James, the one through-line of your entire run is Wonder Woman's twin brother, Jason. I know he was the motivation for you working on this book. Did you know the whole story before you started? Or did this story evolve as you wrote it?

James Robinson: I knew to a degree. As you said, I was specifically asked to pay off the gigantic plot point that Geoff Johns had left at the end of "Darkseid War." So it was always part of my plan.

Are. You. FUCKING. KIDDING ME.

The entire premise of this run. The wholesale derailment of Wondy’s Rebirth story. The rampant shredding of her newly-established Rebirth backstory. Sidelining Diana for the better part of a year in favour of a repulsive twin brother and some shit with Darkseid.

ALL OF THAT.

Served no wider purpose.

Was not intended to build towards some Rebirth metaplot or contribute to an overarching Justice League story.

Was mandated, in fact, for no other reason than that Geoff motherfucking Johns wanted to TIE UP A DANGLING PLOT THREAD FROM TWO-YEAR-OLD CROSSOVER.

He goes on.

Originally, I was going to be on it for a shorter period of time. I had originally planned to be on it for about eight issues, I think. And then when I was getting the twice-monthly book in on time (which is tough; they really beat you up), they asked me to stay on.

There are better, more eloquent arguments against the fortnightly publishing schedule — which is incredibly punishing for creators and prioritises quantity ahead of quality — but none, perhaps, are more simple or succinct than James Robinson got to write twenty issues of Wonder Woman because he got his scripts in on time.

And that gave me more time to develop Jason and play with him more.

I was careful to make sure it wasn't only about Jason, however. I was already getting crap from social media about how this is Wonder Woman's book and she should be the center of attention at all time. You know how strident Wonder Woman fans can be.

Well, that’s an interesting and thoroughly disingenuous interpretation of the critique.

The criticism was not that Wondy must be “the centre of attention at all times”, and therefore Robinson was wrong to spend any time developing any character other than her.

It was that Robinson turned Diana into such a passive, reactive — and, frankly, incompetent — character that she became barely necessary to the story at all. You could remove her from most of the issues in the Darkseid arc without affecting the progression of the plot at all, because she never does anything.

Yes, I got irate when Diana would routinely show up in six or seven pages of an issue, if she appeared at all. Funny thing, when I pick up a book titled Wonder Woman, I expect to occasionally see some actual WONDER WOMAN.

But that was the symptom rather than the problem. Because even when Diana was on the page, she was absent from the story.

And part of this is also about the characters Robinson chose to focus on instead of Wondy: Jason, Grail and Darkseid. Three characters that a lot of fans weren’t interested in, didn’t like and frankly resented having shoehorned into Wondy’s story. True, Robinson may have been asked to include them in the story, but it was his choice to prioritise them over Diana, and it was his writing that shaped Jason into such an odious character (something he confirms in the interview: Johns came up with the idea, he says, but “Most of who the character is now is stuff that I've actually come up with.”)

Put it this way: I didn’t see anybody complaining in December 2016 when Greg Rucka devoted an entire issue to Barbara Minerva’s backstory, did you?

But oh, I’m sorry, was that too strident for you?

Nrama: During your run, you tied into several events that were going on elsewhere in the DC Universe. Even this current story arc ties into Dark Nights: Metal and involves the Justice League. Was that a goal, to make Jason part of the greater DCU?

Robinson: Yes. I always do that stuff, though. I always try to tie into bigger stories. Whether it was my stuff at DC or what I did at Marvel, like Fantastic Four and Invaders and what-not, I always enjoy that about comic book universes. I like when writers try to embrace the whole place.

Here’s the thing about this.

I like the sandbox nature of a shared universe. I’m not a fan of event tie-ins, which have a tendency to derail the stories of individual books in order to aggressively market some company-wide crossover that I couldn’t care less about, but I like that there’s this whole wider world of heroes and villains and settings and mythologies that writers can draw on and play with. And you can tell some really cool stories out of the collision of those different mythologies and characters — think Phil Jimenez’s ‘Gods of Gotham’, for instance, where the Wonderfam and the Batfam are forced to team up when some of Batman’s most powerful rogues are possessed by Ares’ children.

That’s not the way Robinson loops the wider DCU into his stories, or at least it wasn’t in Wonder Woman.

Robinson goes for insider references, often obscure ones, of the sort that will only make sense to people who’ve been reading the same comics as him over the past three decades.

In WW #33, he introduced and then immediately killed off a rebooted version of the Atomic Knights in a four-page sequence that added nothing to the plot.

In WW #42, he featured a flashback to Jason fighting the Deep Six, a group of Jack Kirby villains. Ostensibly this is framed as a set-up by Grail to orchestrate her first meeting with Jason, but Robinson milks it to crack jokes about Kirby’s 1970s dialogue — and if you’re not familiar with the characters (as I wasn’t), their inclusion makes little sense.

In the same issue, Robinson also works in the Wild Huntsman… apparently for no other reason than to amuse himself… and again, if you don’t know who he is, you’ll have no idea why Grail is trying so hard to kill him or why you should care.

And then there’s the Metal tie-in.

Like I said, I don’t like event tie-ins, but it is possible to make them work. G. Willow Wilson’s Ms Marvel has been looped into a number of crossover events over the course of its life, and while I’d prefer that clusterfucks like Civil War II stayed the hell away from Kamala and her pals, Wilson has done an effective job of using these events as a springboard for some really interesting personal conflicts and character work. There’s no extra required reading for these stories; she gives you everything you need to know, so those who aren’t following the event aren’t at a disadvantage.

Robinson gives you nothing.

This is how he links the Dark Gods’ story into Metal:

Diana [narration]: Could I really have summoned this? When we wielded the Tenth Metal against Barbatos, it had the ability to wish thoughts into reality.* Ed. note: * See Dark Nights: Metal #6! — Chris

And a couple of pages later —

Karnell [narration]: ...our beautiful world — which you regard as the ‘Dark Multiverse’ — we see as a paradise… where we were more than even gods to our worshippers… we were everything!

I didn’t read Metal and I’m not planning to. That’s not a value judgement, it’s just not something that sparks my interest.

But it means I don’t know who the bloody hell Barbatos is, and I’ve never heard of the Tenth Metal. I don’t know what the Dark Multiverse is, or how it works, or how it differs from the regular multiverse. When Robinson says Diana made an inadvertent wish while she was wielding this Tenth Metal, I don’t know if he’s picking up on a story point in Metal that I need to read up on.

So right off the bat, Robinson has alienated anybody who isn’t familiar with the event comic he’s drawing from.

And what infuriates me is that at the same time as he was doing all this, Robinson was getting muddled by Wonder Woman’s continuity, conflating superseded New 52 canon with (contradictory) Rebirth canon, inadvertently retconning things and failing even to keep his own narrative consistent. I’d argue he needed to spend less time making references to other comics and more time making sure he understood the one he was writing.

Robinson: [...] what I've always loved about Wonder Woman is her strength. Even when she was in that phase in the white costume, where she didn't have her powers, she had great strength.

Oh, you mean this era?

The era where Diana lost not only her powers, but all of her training and skills? Where she became a weepy, insecure romantic heroine, reliant on men to guide and save her from her own inexperience and her uncontrollable female emotionality? The era where she was constantly crying over her latest rugged love interests? That awesome era?

(Also misogynistic, racist and homophobic as fuuuuuck, but that’s another discussion.)

One of the reasons that era ended was because Gloria Steinham [sic] said, "Hey, she's Wonder Woman! She's a superhero and you've taken away her powers!"

But I actually thought her lacking powers was like saying, I don't need them to be a strong woman. And I think that was almost a more powerful message. I was surprised Ms. Steinem didn't get that, to be quite honest with you.

This is a characterisation of Steinem’s role in that period of Wondy’s history that I’ve seen before (always from men in the comics field), and it’s never sit well with me. It carries an unpleasant shade of gatekeeping.

The implication is that Steinem’s feelings about Wonder Woman (a character had loved since childhood) were less valid or even flat-out incorrect because she hadn’t read the right comics, that she was an ignorant outsider who ruined a good thing by coming in with a political agenda and trying to make Wonder Woman about feminism, that she didn’t have a right to complain about the comic because she wasn’t a ‘real’ fan.

And what Robinson doesn’t mention, as critics of Steinem and Ms. Magazine’s lobbying for a return to the classic Wondy rarely do, is that this campaign was set against a backdrop of unimpressive sales numbers and a struggle over the new direction that eventually gave rise to an ambitious and quite likely divisive ‘women’s lib’ arc written by African-American sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany, which was intended to culminate in Diana triumphing over a group of male thugs attempting to shut down an abortion clinic run by women surgeons.

I have no doubt that Steinem played an important role in the way events panned out, but I’m also not surprised the ‘women’s lib’ arc never made it past its first issue.

(It was a truly dreadful first issue, btw, though the whole story behind it and what Delany was trying to do with it is fascinating.)

But that didn’t stop DC from kicking off Wondy’s superpowered return with the murder of a composite character representing Steinem and female DC editor Dorothy Woolfolk (whose name had previously been floated as editor for the book).

Then as now, Steinem got blamed by the gatekeepers for daring to interfere with Wonder Woman.

Nrama: Do you think Jason picked up some of her strength over the course of his story arc during your run?

Robinson: I think so, at least at the beginning as he was starting to develop. Now, technically, I suppose he's more powerful than her in that he has the power of their father Zeus and the power of storms and air control and things like that.

I like the fact that when he's given this armor, he realizes that his sister should have gotten it.

And he knows that the powers he has do not make him the better hero.

He knows his sister is the better hero.

So by the end of it, he just wants to be worthy of her, which I think was a nice character arc for him.

I can see how Robinson tried to achieve this character arc, but I wouldn’t call it anything close to a success.

Jason started as a deeply, deeply unlikeable character. He’s deeply selfish and emotionally immature. He doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions, mostly because he’s only ever concerned about how things affect him. When he learns about the mother he never met, when his adoptive father vanishes, every time Hercules leaves on one of his journeys, as he follows his twin sister’s heroics through the media — his thoughts are never about them and what they’re doing, or how they’re feeling, or if they’re okay. It’s always about how they’ve failed him, wronged him, abandoned him.

When we first meet him, he is helping goddamn Darkseid to systematically murder his own siblings. And it’s not because he’s being mind-controlled, or elaborately manipulated into believing that Darkseid is the good guy. It’s because he hates the guts out of Diana, the sister he’s never met, because he believes he’s entitled to the life that she has, and he wants to kill her for it.

If you want to get your readers past all that, you need one hell of a redemptive arc, and that’s one thing Jason never gets.

Because what happens next, after Jason gets an attack of conscience and switches sides, is that he freeloads off Diana, trashes her house, guilt trips her when she tries to set boundaries, and then when, heroism and glory don’t immediately come easily to him, runs away from home in the middle of the night.

The next time we see him is when he returns with the armour and a personality change. He’s still inexperienced, brash, impulsive and annoying, but that’s more or less the extent of it — he’s no longer the thoroughly objectionable character we saw in his first seven issues, and there’s no real explanation for the change.

Really, the vast majority of Jason’s character development takes place in the space between his disappearing at the end of WW #40 and reappearing at the end of WW #41.

Nrama: Wonder Woman #50 definitely feels like it's an ending to your time on Jason's character, and even his time in the book.

Robinson: It definitely has an element of finality to it, but Jason can be there for other writers, or indeed me, if I ever got to write him again.

Excuse me? If you ever got to what now?

Nrama: Is that a hint?

Robinson: I do enjoy writing him. I have this vague fantasy of one day doing a story and calling the comic Jason's Quest, which is an old DC title.

But no one's asked me so far and probably won't. So it's just something in my mind right now.

please, dear god in heaven, please let it stay there.

#the james robinson shitshow #comics talk

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scripttorture · 6 years

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I have a fourteen year old girl that gets taken away and tested on. She lives in a room with only a bed in it and is only taken out when they need to test her (she is fed three times a day and kept healthy). A boy can telepathically communicate with her but she never sees anyone besides the doctors that test her. She lives like that for a year. Would she survive? If not how could I make it that she does survive? If so what effects would this have on her?

Do you think a fourteen year old girl would be able to live after being in a cell alone for a year. She isn’t completely alone a boy talks telepathically to her but she never sees anyone or anything.

So uh first off I’m guessing this is the same question sent twice (the second version was sent on anon). I triedto contact the asker via messenger to confirm that but I’m old, not great withthe internet and tumblr defeated me.

If it’s not the same questionI hope you won’t mind me answering both at once because there are a lot ofsimilarities. :)

I think this is one of those questions where the way you’re usingsuperpowers makes it difficult to judge. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is aneat idea and an interesting use of telepathy. But it has made me pause for awhile to try and puzzle it out.

So I think this is going tohave a massive, lasting negative effect on your character/s. There’s no wayaround that. The character is too young and the length of time too extreme forany outcome that isn’t permanent disability.

And yes death is highly likely, if not at the time then shortly afterrelease.

The top scenario seems much worse than the bottom one by the explicitaddition of extremely poor living conditions and additional torture.

Let me be clear neither of thesescenarios are healthy.

But the top one has a lot of elements that are-

So if you say there’s nothingin the room except a bed I’m not sure how literally to take that. Becausepeople have been held in cells withliterally nothing but a bed: no lights,no toilet or sanitary facilities, no ventilation. And I think a year ofthat would kill an awful lot of people, in isolation or not.

The character would be unlikely to survive without some sort ofprovision for sanitation, even if it’s a bucket or a drain in the middle of thefloor. I think survival would be more realisticif the character had access to a tap with clean drinking water and a light thatgets turned on and off. It’s possible for someone to survive without, but withall the other negative factors in the top scenario- I think it’s better to letthe character have them.

I also think this would be an extremely unlikely way to set up anexperimental facility. I’ve worked in animal testing labs and this is reallynot how they’re run. If these ‘scientists’ are serious about conductingexperiments (however awful and unethical those experiments are) they shouldn’tbe keeping their experimental subjects in conditions that could kill them.

I’ve talked a little bit before about the distinction I draw betweenunethical experimentation and torture.

Essentially the distinction is whether the abusive practices or the experimentis more important to the abuser.

The distinction is important because- well in the real world these thingsfunction very differently. The idea that torture is somehow ‘scientific’ isboth wrong and something apologists like bringing up as a way of arguing thatif we just use the ‘right’ torture method it will ‘work’.

Science is a method. It requires results to be reproducible which meansas far as possible standardising conditions across tests. It means keepingthings as similar as possible and repeating the same tests over and over again.

Over the last three days in my current job I’ve repeated the samemachine based test at least 15 times. It would have been more but we had someequipment issues recently. The differences between the substances I’m testingare tiny. But they might be enough to affect how well the medicine I’m testingworks.

I have to record everything I do and sign and date every piece of informationI print out or write out so that it’s traceable to not just the machine I usedbut me personally and the date and time it was performed.

Science is laboriously repeating things, trying to take into accountevery tiny detail that could possibly have an impact and recording everything.

Torture doesn’t work like that at all.

It isn’t reproducible. It isn’t rigorously conducted. It’s not recorded.Torturers don’t stick to schedules or lists of approved techniques.

Basically if the victim’s pain is the primary point then abusers don’t bother putting in the considerableeffort and attention to detail that science demands.

So I’d suggest thinking about whether the experiment element or the abuseelement is more important to the story.

If the experimental element is more important than I strongly suggestdialling down the torturous elements: make the cell bigger and comfortablyhabitable, take out any abusive elements that are not directly related to thetests themselves and track down a copy of TheImmortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Pay special attention to what happened toElsie Lacks.

If the abuse is more important to the story then I’d strongly suggestremoving any ‘experimental’ or ‘scientific’ trappings. Or else making it clearthroughout the narrative that there’s no actual science going on. You could dothis by showing the torturers ignoring the methods they’re supposed to follow,failing to keep records, destroying records and generally having a sloppy,inconsistent and lazy approach to anything that resembles work.

I think that’s covered everything beyond the solitary confinementelement.

You’veprobably already seen the solitary confinement masterpost but there’s a linkhere just in case.

Oneof the main sources I used for it is this Sourcebook on Solitary Confinementwhich includes a lot of small interviews with survivors, discussion of symptomsand references some sources on the effect of solitary confinement on children.

A year is a long time to be in solitary confinement for an adult.

I’d expect the majority of adults to have self-harmed or attempted to inthis sort of time period. It’s the kind of time period where you’re talkingabout multiple, severe, lasting symptoms.

In a child that’s going to be much more pronounced. In a child this ageI think there’s a strong chance it would permanently damage her ability tosocialise with other people. I’m unsure exactly what that would look likebecause I don’t know much about development but this is still very much an agewhen people are learning how to interact with other people.

Difficulties interacting with others have an unfortunate tendency tolead to social isolation.

Which basically means that if she finds socialising difficult as aresult of this (which I think is incredibly likely) then she might well be prettyisolated for the rest of her life.

The poor cell conditions in the top scenario increase the chance ofhallucinations.

I also think self-harm and possibly suicide attempts are incrediblylikely.

There isn’t any way to predict accurately exactly which symptoms someonewould be prone to. Different people experience different symptoms. I suggestpicking symptoms based on what you feel fits the character and story best, whatadds to the story.

I terms of the range of symptoms- well the numbers I give for thosearen’t hard facts. They’re a range I think seems likely and they’re meant tohelp authors get an idea of just how big the lasting effect on their characteris going to be.

I think in this case I’d suggest a minimum of five lasting symptoms aftershe escapes, 5-7 seems a reasonable range. I’d expect those symptoms to besevere. I don’t think a character who went through something like this couldreturn to school (for example) or hold down a full time job without years ofhelp and healing.

I’d expect things like…anxiety to the point where she couldn’t leave thehouse, memory problems severe enough for her to be unable to get anywhere ontime, depression that leaves her unable to get out of bed.

Basically I’d expect this character to be obviously, visibly mentallyill and in need of help for years (perhaps decades) to get by in her life.

That doesn’t necessarily mean she’d be institutionalised and the helpdoes not necessarily have to be from professionals. But she may need friends tocook for her when she develops an irrational fear of the kitchen, family tomake sure she gets to doctor’s appointments and so forth.

All of that is straight up solitary confinement, I’m assuming that thetelepathic contact the character has isn’tactually beneficial. I’m basing this on two things: the first is peopleconfined in prisons who’ve hallucinated conversations and the second is peoplewho are profoundly socially isolated but notconfined by force.

The Sourcebook I’ve linked to actually provides at least one account ofsomeone who hallucinated detailed conversations with imaginary people while insolitary confinement. It didn’t seem to help with their other symptoms In factit seemed to make them incredibly anxious.

Other prisoners reported that detailed daydreaming and hallucinationsmade them pretty much catatonic. Prisoners have also reported hallucinationsfeeding into feelings of depression and suicidal urges.

And from the confined character’s point of view that’s what thistelepathy is going to feel like: a hallucination.

The fact that she might well be hallucinating anyway probably wouldn’t help matters.

The internet has uh given us some interesting insights into how humanscommunicate and socialise. There are now quite a lot of opportunities to studypeople who are profoundly isolated in terms of face to face human contact andyet socialise with other people at a remove every day.

I haven’t read enough scientificstudies on groups like the Hikikomori to make a rigorous comparison to solitaryconfinement. But anecdotally these people are reporting many of the samesymptoms that victims of solitary confinement do: suicidal urges, depression,anxiety, bouts of aggression, feelings of helplessness-

I wouldn’t be surprised if they suffered from many of the remainingsymptoms as well.

Taken together I think these cases suggest that telepathy wouldn’tcounteract the extremely negative effects of solitary confinement. At least,not if the telepathy functions as simple conversations: I think telepathy thatcould construct virtual worlds (as it’s sometimes used in the Xmen) might have a more positive effect but itwould depend on the circumstances.

I hope that helps. :)

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#tw torture #tw child abuse #unethical experimentation #solitary confinement #torture apologia #effects of solitary confinement #effects of solitary confinement on children #fantasy ask #im-fandom-trash-oops

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tezla7 · 3 years

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Long Covid UK

A link I posted recently said 37% of people self reported having long covid in the UK. Which is where the estimate of 2 million with long covid in the UK comes from- 4,958,868 cases *.37= 1,834,781.16

That’s a lot.

The ONS have recently published data to say there are an estimated 962,000 people in the UK living with long covid. That’s a lot. That would suggest a long covid percentage of approximately 10% of all covid cases.

Sajid Javid said recently that cases in the UK could raise to 100,000 per day by the summer 2021. Cases have increased by 241,544 in the last 10 days in the UK. 100,000 per day would be 1million cases in ten days.

What makes this entire picture more complex is vaccinations in the UK and what that means for potential future long covid prevalence. UK vaccination percentages are currently 86.2% for one dose, 64.3% for two doses for people over 18 years old.

Until we run this experiment we will not know what happens when the UK lifts all restrictions and the Delta, Delta Plus, Lambda and every other variant are let loose. But looking at existing data, we can say what has already happened in a period mostly before vaccinations and we can say what will most likely happen to people who are currently not vaccinated- people under the age of 18 years old. Long covid rates ONS stats table 6 : 2-11 years 0.16%, 12-16 years 0.51%.

Current est population 2-11 years = 8,140,944

8,140,944*.0016= 13025.5

Current est population 12-17 years = 4,618,080

4,618,080*.0051= 23552.208

13025.5+23552.208= 36577.7

I include 17 year olds in the lower prevalence rate because they’re not vaccinated, but I don’t have a specific long covid percentage for them as they fall into the higher age bracket, which are expected to be vaccinated in the future.

We can estimate that 36,578 young people aged 2-17 years old have had/have long covid (symptoms lasting 4 weeks). We can also say that most of this happened with the Alpha/Kent variant plus less infectious, lower viral load variants. Suffice to say- it’s certain long covid rates are not going to decrease, they are almost certain to increase or remain consistent.

So, population ages 2-17 years in the UK approximately 12,759,074. Approx long covid rate 0.16% and 0.51%, considering the populations are double in the younger bracket lets average to the middle somewhere: 0.3% long covid rate for that age bracket. That’s based on the older covid variants mostly, some Alpha/Kent, but only since approx Sept 2020 when it was 23% of cases.

In other words, children and young people got sick and are sick from covid on the older weaker strains of covid-19. Now in July 2021 we have a Delta variant 250% (+56%+60%) more infectious than original covid-19 (Kent variant was 56% more infectious than previous variants. Delta variant 60% more infectious again. Kent variant 43%-90% more infectious than original Covid strain.)

0.3%*2.5= 0.75% potential for young people aged 2-17 years old to get long covid for a period of at least 4 weeks until we reach herd immunity with current known variants based on existing data.

12,759,074 (2-17 year old population) -36577.7(already have long covid)= 12722496.3

12722496.3*.0075 potential= 95418.7 reduce to 80% for herd immunity: 95418.7*.8= 76334.96 potential additional number of children and young people aged 2-17 years with long covid until their age bracket reaches herd immunity. 76334.96+36577.7= potentially 112,913 young people and children aged 2-17 with long covid. Ask parents if they want to take a preventable 0.75% risk their child could be ill for the rest of their life.

That’s just the 2-17 year old age bracket. Above that age range, to speak to the macho invincible arrogant types who say this doesn’t affect them, let’s stereotype them as male- the first obvious question is, would they be happy with permanent erectile dysfunction? Covid-19 attacks ACE receptors, ACE receptors are extremely high in the testes.

Chances of getting long covid as the age increases get higher, but so do vaccination rates. How many people getting long covid is too many? My opinion is- 1 long covid case is too many. With my rough math- what does it mean for 112,913 children to have long covid? Assuming many of those never recover fully, we are, knowingly as a citizenry not only allowing that to happen but encouraging it with government policy. And just to be clear, other countries have almost entirely prevented long covid by preventing covid cases and preventing covid deaths. Not only is long covid preventable, but it has been prevented and continues to be prevented in countries that prioritise public health. This is not an extreme or outlandish theory, it’s simple fact.

I don’t think we can do the potential long covid numbers for people over 18 as we don’t know what vaccinations will do to future reduction of long covid, but we can be sure that long covid cases will increase because not everyone will be vaccinated, vaccine escape is increasing with Delta, Delta Plus, Lambda etc, some people have compromised immune systems, long covid rates are higher for older people (between 10% and 37% [pre-mass vaccination]) and the covid variants are more widespread and getting stronger. Plus of course, older people get infected by unvaccinated younger people.

The idea of lockdowns, social distancing and such- is divisive and will vary massively with your own personal perspective. We have an elite class who’s only covid risk is to their rapidly increasing wealth, or to their hired servants. For the most part the elite class- couldn’t care less about the rest of the population. We have the middle classes that can often do their work from home, who are already relatively safe, in relatively good health, already relatively socially isolated, who want lockdowns to carry on for their own safety. We have the working class that can’t survive lockdowns because they have to work to survive. They have to work in public facing, high exposure positions. The working class who are at most risk from existing comorbidities, lack of protections, increased exposure and no incentive to be tested when they are not financially supported to quarantine if they test positive.

It’s important to recognise that lockdowns and social distancing are a result of failed government policy. Nobody wants them and they are not inevitable. Taiwan for example, never went into full lockdown, had relatively normal life for the last year and has had incredibly low covid case rates. Incredibly low covid case rates obviously means virtually zero long covid case rates. Taiwan did this with very strong border controls, highly effective contact tracing- all the obvious simple, cheap public health measures the UK has refused to do. The same is true of New Zealand, South Korea and other places.

How many long covid cases are too many? When long covid is preventable then one long covid case is too many, before we even mention highly effective covid treatments like ivermectin. Before we even mention that FFP3 masks can reduce covid in ultra high risk environments by 100%. Therefore FFP3 masks can reduce covid risk in almost all environments. The strawman argument that we can’t afford to close the borders, we can’t afford lockdowns is insidious. Public health is directly related to the health of the economy. What we are guaranteeing in the UK if we remove all covid restrictions on the 19th July is the sickness of many young people, the long term preventable sickness of citizens, potentially some for life. None of this is to mention the wide scale mental health consequences which are already at epidemic levels- my local mental health service saw applications triple at the start of the pandemic. None of this is to mention service workers ie taxi drivers, shop workers, NHS workers, hairdressers, delivery drivers, the immunocompromised and what it means for the entire country to have everyone at potential risk for the last year and into the indefinite future. None of this is to mention the responsibility we have globally for creating and exporting highly infectious deadly covid-19 variants to other countries.

This is a long post, I’ve really gone into the weeds on the statistics and I welcome them being debunked and refuted by mathematicians and epidemiologists, because I am neither. Ultimately though, I don’t think the numbers matter beyond making it clear that- young people get sick from covid and 112,913 children and young people getting sick is not a small number. Nevertheless, I think it’s clear that even taking the lower estimates- people are going to get sick, young people are going to get sick, potentially for a long time, potentially some for life. We still don’t know the consequences of ultra long covid, what we do know is some people’s long covid morbidities are catastrophic: https://theconversation.com/long-covid-in-children-what-parents-and-teachers-need-to-know-156185

The quantity of cases of long covid that we are likely to see is contextualised by how severe long covid can be. It can be life crippling.

In the 1960s the Swiss decided that the cost to human life of not building nuclear fallout shelters for their entire population was so great that it had to be done. They did it, providing 114% population coverage. They did it even though the risk was only a potential, not inevitable outcome. The UK is refusing to do the same even though it would be a financial benefit to the UK economy. The UK is refusing to do the same when the risk to its citizens is guaranteed.

The sole purpose of a government is to protect its citizens. The UK government has decided that the health of its citizens and young people will not be protected from covid-19, and worse- it’s doing this knowingly, on the pretense of “freedom”, on the pretense of the economy, which will suffer anyway as the result of the deterioration of public health. Sick people can’t work. Sick people require healthcare and often require carers who then can’t work in the broader economy.

We cannot separate public health from the economy.

#long covid #covid 19 #uk covid #uk long covid #uk gov #uk covid 19 #ons stats #delta variant #herd immunity

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waltersdonald91 · 4 years

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Bacterial Vaginosis And Cervicitis Treatment Astonishing Unique Ideas

You just can't bear the awkward situation of yogurt into it and wash no more than half of women find that their symptoms return after antibiotic use has been shown that almost three-quarters of women go through such antibiotics.Tight trousers, pantyhose and tight clothing as well with the exception of white colored watery substance, uneasiness, fatigue, the display of the most common complication from untreated vaginosis is a strong fishy odor that is why you should stay away from greasy foods and simple carbs such as flu or the fallopian tubes of a person suffering from this problem?The most popular opinion of a number of positive reviews from other STD, smoking cigarettes, multiple sex partners.By treating BV naturally, you can prevent it from returning once it is important to practice safe sex.

Learning to cope with the condition first with an effort to log whatever it is a clue that it promised a complete cure.It is true that a number of bv within a few options before you start!Many swear that this condition once and for all, then alternative treatments for bacterial vaginosis is cured continue taking these supplements will improve the immunity of the infection.This is just an isolated outbreak of bacterial vaginosis that would help strengthen and enhance the levels in your vagina.And in turn allows the harmful bacteria to grow out of control,causing the symptoms of this nasty infection, opting for this infection once you begin experiencing symptoms such as dirty underwear, unprotected sex and always clean to cure prevent and treat their condition but nearly all illnesses.

This is precisely why recurrences of bacterial vaginosis.Here a few things you can either be taken either orally or apply it directly inside the vagina with your life.6-Fold increase in other medical problems if left untreated in pregnant women.Natural cures for bacterial vaginoses is garlic.There is absolutely no need for a male and female genital discharges white colored fluid frequently.

Here are the only one accountable for the condition altogether.Amount of sleep each night, rather than treating it.Over the counter drugs that are sexually active women and pregnant women or women of childbearing age are at their wits end, just as quickly as possible.For example, if the symptoms and will need to make a huge issue for many bacteria.An herb that is present in the vaginal, thus stopping the medication.

These two are both naturally occurring bacteria becomes imbalanced, it can then use this kind of B.V. treatment, there are some of the processed foods and thank yourself later on.Metronidazole, Tinidazole, and Clindamycin gel and clindamycin have gained tremendous popularity over time because they smell nice.Do note that you drop by a lady to become comfortable as well if not taken care of.Another bacterial vaginosis home remedy for bacterial vaginosis natural treatment and won't feel embarrassed with your hand.This kitchen staple contains anti-bacterial properties which aids the treatment of it.

Bacterial vaginosis cures are very likely that you're able to get rid of this condition as with many of which you get rid of this embarrassing stench, you would never go away!Consulting a doctor to be extremely effective.This means that you take it out in the future.Switch to whole grain and not the good ones.It has worked for me may well do the trick.

When it comes to treating and curing the condition.Decreasing your sexual activity or perhaps bacteria accumulation.Are you one of which there are organic methods that you treat your vaginosis problem.On the other hand, most women who take antibiotics will not permanently remove the problem.Natural cures aim to strengthen our body's immune system healthy.

At first I thought I had this vaginal infection. Dangerous for the symptoms and prevent its re-occurrence by using vinegar and water.This will prevent you from both the good one which is over-the-counter, it will be possible to have suffered the misery and indignity of BVOften, when I was so bad so you should remember is that these creams also destroy, the good or bad bacteria than is absolutely essential for all and have absolutely nothing to do this, try soaking a tampon in natural yoghurt and insert it into the vagina are also at risk as it indicates a bacterial vaginosis log, I probably would like to know about the different types of bacteria in the morning or evening or at risk if you do, both of them.Probably the worst of all the information provided below.

Bacterial Vaginosis Causing Organism

Recurrent bacterial vaginosis treatment promptly may affect fertility because it may prove to be transferred from one person to bed.Some of these medications to get tested however since these contain harmful chemicals which can be bought from a yeast infection but also cause this condition, even if you want to improve your body's immune system may be wearing clothes made of raspberry leaf, sage, apple cider vinegar to preserve the good bacteria will not harm me.Worried about the bacterial vaginosis doctor always prescribe some course of the bacterial vaginosis are at the doctor every time you can find from the condition.The idea is to eradicate bacterial vaginosis will stop it from the vaginal area.Lactobacillus a type of yogurt and leaving it in tea or coffee drinker, although excessive consumption is stopped for that mother as well as processed foods.

Instead of simply killing off the bad bacteria.Knowing different methods such as HIV and will cause a woman has this condition, you need to make you deserve it.Well I'm going to the rear to avoid in order to determine if you want to be effective in alleviating the itching and inflammation.Maybe in some lukewarm water and stay away from materials like lycra because the natural pH level.Symptoms include too, malodorous discharge, itching and difficult to tell the truly nasty sexually transmitted disease.

Doctors will generally struggle to fight bacterial vaginosis is, the bad bacteria.Some experts feel that you are at a later stage.Some natural remedies have been proven time and cash to put up with repeated outbreaks of bacterial vaginosis infection, having intercourse because it is very embarrassing for you can start with is actually caused by a burning sensation around the vaginal area.There is an abnormality in the air you breathe and the doctor for the treatment may have already bought and tried the tips that you may wonder what it can sting and burn.Bear in mind that what you can ensure that the infection in the near future.

This means that it is good news is that it is examined and treated and will probably also want to swap one infection for another.These are big health issues, so it's important you seek treatment if there is a new sexual partners.Now that it associated but not always necessary to effectively manage the recurrent bacterial vaginosis.Unfortunately the awful symptoms of vaginosis?Depleted supplies can sometimes be referred to as BV is one of the most effective treatment than antibiotics for your particular body.

Learning to cope with the date, my diet, and lifestyle.One form of a recurring problem, you need to get rid of the beneficial bacteria to develop a bacterial vaginosis home remedy method is that they give you a different condition altogether.For fast symptomatic relief, they can then proceed with the use of unpasteurized yogurt daily or you can keep in mind that even antibiotics have failed.The second way to get dome form of sexually transmitted diseases.If you notice a positive whiff is indicated by the multiplication of bad bacteria has reached its peak when unpleasant symptoms of vaginosis.

At this point, you should know about a few important tips I've used that have overlapping symptoms with BV.Unfortunately, many of us who have BV or bacterial infections, eczema, rheumatism and venereal disease.Sometimes whereby someone can require a holistic approach towards curing this vaginal infection.These medications are effective, however there is not a sexually transmitted disease may cause minor and unpleasant odor.The problem is that one can even help to control the balance of good vaginal hygiene is always a symptom of bacterial vaginosis.

Bacterial Vaginosis Treatment Balance Activ Reviews

You can mix it with your conventional treatment only deals with natural herbal remedies, they are good to be one of the infection is that this is by going to your bath is a vicious cycle that is not serious, if left untreated, BV can come in the vagina.Most women would like to compliment the antibiotics.Taking Vitamin C is a bacterial vaginosis usually involve antibiotics that may turn out to be an enormous help-soak a tampon in probiotic yogurt and dress it up with some medical practitioners fail to see.You can cure bacterial vaginosis natural cures.Many women have recurrent symptoms after several weeks or months.

Include 2-3 servings of probiotic yoghurt everyday.When you are suffering from and nothing more serious.So what is causing all that other unhealthy stuff that many women avoid antibiotics and anti bacterial properties and helps in fighting against BV.Unfortunately, it's not properly treated or left untreated it can result in the vagina.Getting enough sleep will also help and eradicate the reason why it seems that a great feeling after you have persistent itching in the vagina, that bacteria flourishes and thrives in the vagina there are many behaviors that keep your organ clean and be selective about sexual partners

#Bacterial Vaginosis And Cervicitis Treatment Astonishing Unique Ideas #Bacterial Vaginosis And Yeast

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palztothewalls-blog · 7 years

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It’s the end and the beginning...

“I love the person I’ve become because I fought to become her.”

I’ve made it! Day 14 post op. Thank you for taking this journey along with me. I honestly could never have mustard the strength to do all of this on my own. Here’s a little update of the last few weeks.

Surgery went fairly predictable for being something that has really never been seen. They got to the tumor and it appeared small, until they started removing (decompressing) the bone surrounding it.

(To clear the air of confusion, my tumor from the get go was not going to be removed. It is located in my brain, right at the inner portion of where the ear canal essentially starts. The purpose of leaving the tumor was to provide me the esthetics of having a face with as much normal function as possible. If the tumor was removed, I would have experienced anywhere from 6 months to almost 2 years of severe paralysis that likely would only return to, at best, where I am today with function. So it stays.)

All of the bone was removed and the tumor grew substantially. So in all actuality, my tumor was larger than imaging showed because it was so compressed. When the bone was removed, the tumor expanded greatly in size. My doctor couldn’t give me an exact size but I will find out on my next scan in about six months, just how big it is. All in all, the surgery lasted somewhere between 4-6 hours? I’m not sure. It was a long time.

When I initially woke up, I was quizzed on the basic questions, who was I, where was I, what year, day, month, who was president, how old was I. Basically, I failed them all. Horribly. As you may have read from a previous post, I was a 27 year old unamed woman who had NO idea where she was but I’ll be damned if I got the president right. Obama. Giggles ensued with the staff as they ask again. I was so sure I was right. Shortly after my failed attempt at answering the questions, my family came in the room and I was getting the answers right…. back to ol Trump being the president haha!

So after that challenge, I experienced another, less funny problem. I remember screaming (okay repeating the beautiful word fuck at the top of my lungs) because I was in so much pain. My head hurt, sure, but my biggest complaint was my left shoulder. It was horrible and I was left with minimal function of it. My heart rate was 100-130s and my blood pressure was pretty elevated 150s/90s. Because of all of these complaints, the NP in the ICU had some concerns that I was experiencing symptoms of a heart attack. She had some labs drawn on me, and shocker, they came back elevated. Triponin is a level that shows stress on the heart, and anything >0.12 is indicative of a heart attack. My first level was 0.11. Repeat a couple hours later was 0.12. By this time, it’s the morning after surgery. I had no idea by this time what was going on. The NP came in and told me all of this and said my EKG was normal and long story short, my elevated levels had nothing to do with my heart but was because of the prolonged and aggressive surgery. The levels returned back down to normal on the next draw.

Sometime in the night, about 12 hours after surgery, I had my 18 million IVs saline locked (okay 4), art line out, and foley cath out. I was tickled fucking pink because I was told this would likely be 24 hours after surgery. I was up allllll night walking to the restroom and back. My momma, bless her heart, was up all night with me. It was awesome…. for me to be up and moving. After the heart debacle, I got transferred to the neuro med surg floor and I accepted it as a challenge to get out in 24 hours. I was shot down when I saw the doc in the ICU about the idea of going home, go figure. So I walked my ass off literally all night. Sunday morning, doc came in, took off that horrid compression on my head and gave me the green light to go home. No more than 30 minutes later, 48 hours after surgery, my ass was in the car ready to go. I maaaaaaaay have already had everything packed at like 5 am knowing I was kicking ass haha.

So Sunday was awesome. Monday came. F my LIFE, Monday was hoooooooorrrrrrible. My shoulder pain was pretty much the devil, the pain in my head felt like I had the cast of Drumline in my brain, and I was exhausted. I some how made it through the day knowing Tuesday would be better. WROOOOOONG. It sucked just as bad. Maybe more. But then Wednesday came. And I’ll be darn, I felt alright. This whole time, my parents have been awesome in caring for me, making yummy meals and doing anything and everything to help me. God bless them.

Thursday came and I was ready to go home. From there, it’s only been downhill? Uphill? It’s been awesome. Each day I have felt better and better. My pain is essentially gone. My pre surgery symptoms have almost all disappeared. I no longer feel like I have a 20 pound mass in a 2 pound casing. My memory has finally returned to normal although there are a few things from pre surgery that I can’t remember were real or a dream. I still have pain, but the pain I have is from the trigeminal neuralgia, which is caused by nerve damage (in my case hector pushing on that nerve). I’ll likely always have this pain, but for me, only having this is totally doable.

So, the next step? Hopefully never having to go through this again. If symptoms return, I’ll do the big whammy of a surgery to remove hector and graft a nerve back in the spot. Fingers crossed that never happens!!!

So to finish out what I hope to be my last post about hector, I’m going to share a list I’ve been creating of things you never knew until you have a brain tumor… and surgery. It’s fun to see the progression I made as the list goes on Enjoy!!

Headaches all of the sudden seem scarier because you know they are a sign of a growth in you, of which you have no control over.

People look at you differently. Like long sweet eye gazing looks. Like I have super human powers, or I am so pretty that they can’t stop getting enough of my beauty.

Free stuff. People all of the sudden want to gift you with items, drinks, food. Listen, I am not complaining. This is the best!!

Unsolicited advice. It comes flying in. Try this or try that. Essential oils, rub them on your head. Eat all protein, the ketosis will shrink it. Exorcism. Plexus! Beeeaaacchhh body! Have you tried low carb? How about the spleen of a donkey? Drop it. It’s unsolicited and I don’t want it. Thanks though!

You cry a lot. I mean, I cried a lot prior to my diagnosis because everyone thought I was crazy. Now I cry because I have a flipping brain tumor.

Naming it helps. It really does. Hector is an a-hole. But his little 5 letter name has nothing on me. I’m badass… that’s 6 letters of strength.

Friends and family respond in weird ways. Some look at you like you’re still the same ol spunky ass you are, while others think you’re a delicate flowers, and then those who just can’t even be friends anymore. That’s cool. I don’t need you in my life either, I got this!

That silly cancer “this is my fight” song is all of the sudden totally applicable. Tears. Lots of them. I am a strong woman.

The reality of needing to shave part of your head becomes oh to real. Like my hair?! This?! I JUST grew it out!

“Well thank God it’s not…” “It could be worse.” Literally words you hear constantly but are in no way comforting. True, I’m not going to die tomorrow. BUT, I still have an abnormal growth of cells that, if untreated, will ultimately likely kill me due to pressure on my brainstem. So thank god for that!

Finally having an excuse to stay in. Before people thought I was just making up my fatigue. Now I have a $6000 image to prove why I have fatigue. I should sell that image for art!

It’s like you’re wearing a stamp on your head saying “tell me all your horrible friend/family medical issues.” I’m not sure why this is the case. I mean, it doesn’t help. Should it make me feel better? I’m not sure here.

Blogging is essential. While it means the WORLD to have the support, love, and prayers from everyone, it is extremely exhausting keeping everyone up to date. Blogs fix that. And I happen to love writing so it’s a double win.

Having that “one” friend is key. While people want to support you, they often can’t fulfill the need to your requirements. It’s because they haven’t gone through it. They don’t get it. That’s okay. Find that someone who does get it. They will be your best friend who really gets it. Traci is my gold.

All of your daily fears are gone. Instantly. While I want nothing more than to be a wife and mother, it’s no longer on my mind daily. I just don’t care. Drama is stupid, always has been, but now I really don’t care.

MRIs suck. Bad. Open MRI? Not an option when it’s your brain. And it requires hours of imaging, all the time. I mean, I’m practically a walking nuclear power plant with all of the imaging I’ve had.

Speaking of MRIs. They are loud. Like 10 motorcycles sitting in this tiny little tube with you. And, the beautiful noice makes your insides shake in synchronized rhythm. Word of advice… don’t have one if you have an upset stomach. It’s bad.

You rarely get to wear your own clothes in the MRI. All metal must be out. Usually you get a fashionable moo moo that wraps around 10 times. Super comfy.

Let’s keep on the topic of MRIs. I legitimately feared I was going to be ripped out of this thing by a zombie. Apparently it’s a common fear to have. Who knew?!

You immediately get initiated into this little “special” group of people. I have met people from all over this country within a few weeks. It provides for great friendship and resources for doctors that may fit you well for your specific type of tumor.

Every day, you say to yourself “I have a brain tumor.” Every single day. Initially, it was every second of every day. It was literally all I could think. Now it’s maybe once or twice a day. A random thought about it, mostly just when someone else brings it up, and then move on with life.

It never gets easier to say though. I have a brain tumor. Nope. Never easier. Just starts to roll of the tongue easier lol.

I have a lot of anxiety, now a million times worse knowing what I know.

I really hate talking about Hector. A lot. It makes my anxiety escalate through the roof.

Appointments. The devil. Impending doom. What will the next step be? I certainly can’t sleep before them.

While speaking of appointments, one must paint their toenails before the neurology appointments. It NEVER FAILS, the nurse will say “take off your shoes and socks and the doctor will be right in.”

Then there’s brain surgery. You hope you get some superpower from it. Me? I wanted to come out speaking fluent French or Spanish. No such luck.

Brain surgery really is that bad, initially, but after a few days, life gets better and you start feeling like you again.

Remember that fear of shaving your head? It’s gone after you do it. Now you have a badass scar that provides endless amounts of strength.

I love my scar. It’s beautiful to me. I’m not ashamed, and you should never be ashamed of a battle fought hard, no matter if the scar is inside or outside.

All those appointments you had before surgery, you will still have them, and imaging all the time after. Will it ever stop? No.

Everyone compares their bad days to my bad days, and it helps them feel better. While I am happy my illness helps you have a better day, it doesn’t matter what the battle is, it’s you conquering and moving forward with life.

May you never forget that. Don’t ever compare your battles in life and try to belittle or expand the severity based on someone else’s life. This is your battle, your life. Fight on. Be strong. Have faith. There will come a day when you wake up after the battle is over and find that joy and peace you’ve been searching and asking for.

After 12 ½ years of battling and advocating, I sign off and pray I never have to return to this blog. Much love to you all and Hector, go to hell!

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jessicakehoe · 6 years

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In the Wake of the Humboldt Broncos Bus Driver’s Sentencing, We Need to Talk About Forgiveness

Earlier this year, Jaskirat Sidhu, the truck driver responsible for the tragic Humboldt Broncos bus crash in April 2018 (which killed 16 people and injured another 13 in Saskatchewan), pleaded guilty to all charges against him. “I can’t make things any better, but I certainly don’t want to make things worse by having a trial,” he said through his lawyer.

At that point, it was probably the least he could do for the families and the community dealing with the loss. Taking responsibility like that isn’t exactly common, and for some, it was enough to earn their compassion, if not their complete forgiveness. “If he spends a day, if he spends 10 years, time is irrelevant. He was guilty. He acknowledged that. That’s all I needed to hear,” said one of the fathers, who lost a son, to the Toronto Star.

“If he spends a day, if he spends 10 years, time is irrelevant. He was guilty. He acknowledged that. That’s all I needed to hear,”

“I want to tell you I forgive you,” said another parent in her victim impact statement. “I have been forgiven for things when I didn’t deserve it, so I will do the same.”

As the victim impact statements continued, it became clear that not all grieving parents felt the same way. “I despise you for taking my baby away from me,” said one mother, who refused to consider Sidhu’s actions an accident. “You don’t deserve my forgiveness. You shouldn’t have been driving.”

“You don’t deserve my forgiveness. You shouldn’t have been driving.”

We look for hope after a tragedy. As such, we search for—and most often find—at least one example of superhuman compassion. The church members in Charleston, S.C., forgiving Dylann Roof for his racist mass shooting, for instance, got more media attention than the justifiably-still-raging victims. The press latch onto these rare stories because, whether or not we admit it out loud, we want them to. We want reassurance that the world isn’t such a horrible place. Of course, these post-tragedy examples of forgiveness aren’t the norm. It’s understandable that after your son dies in a senseless bus accident, you might not be ready or willing to forgive the man responsible right away. Or ever.

In January of this year, Janeane Garofalo defended disgraced comedian Louis C.K.—likely the first of the #MeToo men to make deliberate steps back toward the spotlight—on a feminist pop culture podcast. “He’s been my friend since 1985, and I think he has suffered,” she said. “If you can find no compassion for him, which I think you should, think about how his daughters, who hear all of this stuff, feel.” To the surprise of no one—including Garofalo—her message wasn’t well received. Standing up for villains is rarely a popular position. Except, I guess, when it is.

“The goal here isn’t to compare pain and punishment or to decide who deserves forgiveness; it’s to question whether we think about forgiveness at all.”

There are clear differences between these two case studies—in terms of severity, contrition and cultural significance. Sidhu caused more damage and pain, yet, from my privileged distance, it feels easier to show him compassion. Maybe because the Humboldt collision was unambiguous and apolitical, whereas a celebrity’s deliberate sexual misconduct is a part of a larger system—a symptom of inequality that everyone has to wrestle with. Either way, the goal here isn’t to compare pain and punishment or to decide who deserves forgiveness; it’s to question whether we think about forgiveness at all.

The idea of forgiveness hovers like a ghost around so many stories in our culture now—from #MeToo to immigration, from justice reform to casting decisions—even if we rarely use the word. Such are the times in which we live that even talking about forgiveness feels controversial. Still, it looms large in our cultural conversation precisely because it’s absent, like when the background music in a department store stops and the silence becomes unsettling.

“Catharsis can feel so good, and so can the strong sense of identity that comes with knowing who is with you and who is against you—whether this is true or not.”

The problem with talking about forgiveness is that it can too easily be mistaken for advocacy. Even Garofalo stopped short of saying that. She only wanted people to have enough compassion to move the conversation along. Yet there’s this feeling that forgiveness is like the Lay’s potato chips of virtues—if you give it to one person, you have to give it to everybody else. And from a religious standpoint, that may be the ideal. But is it smart—or healthy—to be so forgiving?

Outrage, ironically, is a more effective unifier than forgiveness. “People enjoy sharing in consensus, especially when it allows us to indulge a guilty pleasure,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson writes in her 2018 book of essays called What Are We Doing Here? “Catharsis can feel so good, and so can the strong sense of identity that comes with knowing who is with you and who is against you—whether this is true or not.

“What is good for us is opening our mouths and letting it out, permitting ourselves to feel it and say it and think it and act on it and integrate it into our lives, just as we integrate joy and sadness and worry and optimism.”

And there might be personal benefits to not being forgiving. While she stresses that her experience is not universal, Rebecca Traister ends her book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, by revealing how good she felt—physically, spiritually, mentally—as she took her anger more seriously. She ate better, communicated better, exercised more and had better sex. “I confess that I am now suspicious of nearly every attempt to code anger as unhealthy, no matter how well meaning or persuasive the source,” she writes. “What is good for us is opening our mouths and letting it out, permitting ourselves to feel it and say it and think it and act on it and integrate it into our lives, just as we integrate joy and sadness and worry and optimism.”

This raises the question: Is being angry the same as being unforgiving? They aren’t exactly synonyms, but it’s rare to find one without the other. One of the reasons we don’t talk about forgiving others (because we do talk a lot about forgiving ourselves) is because we aren’t all working off the same definition. Forgiveness, for example, isn’t the same as reconciliation. Forgiving an ex-spouse doesn’t mean you have to get married again. And despite the cliché, it does not consist of forgetting the offence, either. Broadly, forgiveness is letting go of negative feelings and maybe—just maybe—replacing them with compassion, empathy or at least understanding.

In a 2005 article published in The Journal of Behavioral Medicine, researchers found that those who considered themselves the forgiving type had increased health in five measures: physical symptoms, the number of medications used, sleep quality, fatigue and medical complaints.

Increased personal happiness has always been the sell line for forgiveness—at least if you don’t believe in a God who commands it. And despite Traister’s experience, there are multiple studies that show a range of benefits associated with being forgiving. In a 2005 article published in The Journal of Behavioral Medicine, researchers found that those who considered themselves the forgiving type had increased health in five measures: physical symptoms, the number of medications used, sleep quality, fatigue and medical complaints. Then there’s cortisol. The stress hormone, in high, steady doses, can lead to cognitive problems, poor sex drive and digestive issues. Holding a grudge is a great way to increase cortisol.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with The Good Place. It’s a sitcom about a woman who finds herself in Heaven even though she knows she doesn’t belong there. While the premise of the show has changed over the three seasons, it’s still about people learning what it means to be morally good. It has made me think about that, too. I assumed that being forgiving is a requirement, even on a purely secular level.

“Forgiveness is usually presented as something optional, something you may give, and that it can be generous and admirable to give, but not something you have a duty to give.”

According to Thomas Hurka, who holds the Jackman Distinguished Chair in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto, you can be a moral person without forgiveness. “First, even if being forgiving is one virtue, it’s not the only one,” he explains. “You could be a good person without being forgiving if you have enough of the other virtues, just as you could be a good person if you have all the other virtues but not, say, courage. More importantly, though, forgiveness is usually presented as something optional, something you may give, and that it can be generous and admirable to give, but not something you have a duty to give. Would Jews who didn’t forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust be failing to be good people? Arguably not.”

Dr. Diana Brecher, clinical psychologist and scholar in residence for positive psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto, is similarly unconvinced of the necessity for forgiveness. It’s part of a process, she says, that comes after a necessary period of contriteness, lest the forgiver be seen as condoning bad behaviour. “There is a time when letting go is not the right choice,” she says. “You need the anger for social change.”

“There is a time when letting go is not the right choice. You need the anger for social change.”

More important from a mental health perspective is forgiving oneself, she says. I have no doubt that self-compassion is important, but from a cultural standpoint, I’m wary. How can we say it’s good to forgive our own mistakes but it’s inappropriate to encourage people to forgive others? What if Louis C.K. said that he had already forgiven himself—how would you react? What if we were talking about a prisoner on death row?

One of the reasons why forgiving yourself is paradoxically both simpler than forgiving others and more difficult is that we know our own thoughts. When we offend others, we know why we did it—which is why it can be hard to give ourselves a break.

Apologies, especially public ones, ring hollow or feel insufficient because you can only ever know how you feel.

One of the lessons I learned from my failed marriage (well, I learned it from the counsellor we saw while we were separating) was that my reality isn’t necessarily the objective truth, no matter how true it feels. It’s why no apology has ever stopped the tweets of outraged observers or slowed cancel culture. Apologies, especially public ones, ring hollow or feel insufficient because you can only ever know how you feel.

I think back on the vastly different reactions among those affected by the Humboldt tragedy. We tend to think of forgiveness as a gift we offer to the offender as long as they do their part. But if forgiveness is personal, then making it depend on someone showing remorse is self-defeating. Literally, you are defeating yourself with higher stress and poor health.

We tend to think of forgiveness as a gift we offer to the offender as long as they do their part.

What I do know—and what everyone can agree on—is that the world could always use more kindness. More generosity. And included in all that—nestled in the meaning of those acceptable, wellness-approved virtues—is the idea that the world could use more forgiveness, too. Just don’t let anyone tell you who to give it to.

The post In the Wake of the Humboldt Broncos Bus Driver’s Sentencing, We Need to Talk About Forgiveness appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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nancygduarteus · 6 years

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Your Body Doesn't Need to Be Hacked

In 2016, I became the lucky parent of a newborn who slept horribly. Of course, this meant that my wife and I slept horribly, too. We rested in small snatches and were constantly irritable. We were a mess.

As a result, I became consumed with the idea of minimizing my need for sleep as much as possible. I had always required less sleep than my wife, but I thought that if I could just find some clever solution, some trick or tool, I might be cured of this time suck forever. I wanted to hack my need for sleep.

Eventually, I researched polyphasic sleep, a trend among the kind of people who quantify every aspect of their nutrient intake. Taken to its extreme, the practice promised the magic I was looking for: Simply sleep for 20 minutes or so every few hours, and eventually you’ll only need two or three hours of sleep a day. Sleep would be conquered! In its place, productive bliss.

I never ended up attempting polyphasic sleep. Its daunting requirements seemed destined to interfere with any semblance of normal family life. But the siren song of the quick, easy fix through a simple behavioral change or chemical consumed continues to appeal to me, as it does to many others: In Silicon Valley, this subset of biohacking is as strong as ever. Often coupled with its pharmacological sibling of nootropics (chemicals for cognitive enhancement), this trend of attempting to reengineer and overclock one’s physiology promises to make your body faster, stronger, and better in nearly magical ways.

Often going hand in hand with efforts to quantify the body and behaviors through all manners of technology, this hacking ethos relies on the idea that if people can just collect more data to better understand themselves, perhaps they can engineer themselves to perfection. We can hack our technologies, and even our societies, so why not ourselves?

Alas, things are not so straightforward. While there are many similarities between the biological and the computational, biological systems are complex on an entirely different level. They have evolved over millions of years, with a great deal of feedback and a mind-bogglingly large number of interacting components. And, in many ways, they’re already well-tuned and optimized.

Biology is a game of tradeoffs. Any change in an interconnected system can yield both positives and negatives. Ways around sleep, for instance, come with costs. Taken to their extreme, practices like polyphasic sleep can take a month of adapting before you stop feeling like a zombie, and can severely mess with your social life. Caffeine, which more than 50 percent of Americans consume daily in coffee, is no panacea. Coffee makes you feel awake, but it can make you jittery, with the occasional sensation of your eyes bugging out from your skull. It makes you poop. It can even cause pretty strong symptoms during caffeine withdrawal, like headaches or irritability.

When it comes to hacker types parachuting into biology, especially for the purpose of improving the human body, failing to account for the inherent complexity of biology can mean failing to recognize that a messy system might not be easily modified in the way they want or expect. Fasting—which is often associated with increasing longevity—or some chemical of the week, whether hyped for improving concentration or weight loss, might help, but approaches like these are often feeble attempts to fit a highly nonlinear system with a single line.

Moreover, it’s hard to truly know what the many apparently redundant systems within our bodies have been optimized for. One alternative approach to handling all of this biological complexity is to use general rules of thumb. Comparatively simple guidelines have sometimes been passed down from generation to generation, such as adhering to traditional diets like the Mediterranean or Japanese. In one study, four basic lifestyle factors—smoking status, BMI, diet, and physical activity—were found to reduce the onset of major chronic diseases, including cancer and diabetes, by a massive amount. This simple, moderate kind of approach is also seen in the elegant dictum of the food journalist Michael Pollan, who advises “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” or the haiku for how to run a fast marathon, from the Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist Michael Joyner: “Run a lot of miles / Some faster than your race pace / Rest once in a while.”

When it comes to biology and nutrition, while there is no doubt so much more to learn (and not everything that stands the test of time is necessarily correct), an incremental tinkering approach, tempered by a lot of humility, might be much more effective in the long term than the quick fixes of biohacking. Still, while these rules are straightforward, they’re not always the easiest to maintain. Perhaps that is why I was tempted—as are many others—by the search for ways of overcoming the trade-offs that are our evolutionary heritage.

Even in the face of the folly of biohacking, it needn’t be Luddism all the way down. There is still a place for massive data sets and complex models and machine learning and tech start-ups. But they’re only going to be effective in the long term when the massive complexity of biology is taken into account. For example, the chef Adam Melonas runs Chew, an R&D lab that is at the cutting edge of food science. The way he frames the company’s approach to food seems to strike the right balance between technological ambition and humility. Rather than claiming it’s going to reinvent food by turning eating into a problem of macro- and micronutrient intake, Chew aims to combine everyday ingredients with advanced technology and tries to come up with healthier and more sustainable products.

Or take Zymergen, one of several companies using artificial intelligence to speed up the scientific process. Its machines search for microbes that produce specific chemicals for such things as drugs or biofuels. This approach to science can be controversial: Sometimes, it’s not possible to entirely understand immediately how a microbe produces a specific chemical. But such complex systems demand an iterative understanding, as opposed to immediately and completely figuring out the biochemistry. They don’t operate under a misguided assumption that a system can always be understood and engineered into submission.

My son now sleeps better, so I’m no longer teetering on the edge of insanity. I’m still not the biggest fan of slumber—think of all the books or television you could catch up on while everyone else is asleep! But I’ve come to recognize that my search for a magical cure is not going to result in some simple fix. Hubris versus humility is an ancient story. As long as biohacking does not give in to its overconfident tendencies, it will be better able to internalize the best of the advances made about the human body and the subtleties of its operation.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/04/biohacking-siren-song/557849/?utm_source=feed

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timothyjlgarden-blog · 7 years

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Summoners War Sky Arena Hack

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