#also she is obligated by law to report suicide risks and right now that's to the police so I can't blame her for that

[vtforpedro]

long, long health update - tw in tags please read them

I am going to speak very frankly about suicidal ideation; please don't read further if this is triggering for you ;3; but please know that I love you I had my follow-up appt with my neuropsych on monday to go over my results and whatnot. it was virtual, and I was in the middle of a head episode and I told her I wasn't doing well, but within about 5-10 minutes, she was saying I should probably go to the ER lkajflaj I guess it looked pretty bad lmao anyway I told her all the reasons I couldn't. medical trauma, being dismissed b/c I have doctors who manage my headaches, and I know it's not life-threatening even if it is 10/10 agonizing, so why are you here. they're so dismissive. she said that they have medication to possibly help break the cycle of constant migraines but I've been treated with those before and they didn't do shit migraines are secondary to iih. it's the iih that needs to be fixed ._. she said I still deserved to not suffer and that the ER is very strict about keeping covid patients away from other patients and I didn't have the heart to tell her they intubated a covid patient 10-15 feet away from me last time I was in an ER 😭 anyway so the results. she said she wasn't worried about anything going on that was concerning or indicating something wrong in my brain. I DID score quite a bit lower for someone my age on information processing (which is exactly what I said I was struggling with to my two neuros who were both like ehhh) and some issues with memory but they weren't super specific and so it could be something neurological, could be my migraines and constant agony lmao, could be my Emotional State. could be all of them at once, I suppose ;) she went into more detail about some of these things but it was the two questionnaires I filled out that were HNNN. so once all the data is entered from like 300 questions it shows a good look into my personality and perceptions and all that and it makes a cool little graph (OR SO I THOUGHT). the kind that looks like mountain peaks. so she points at the one that is waaay higher than the rest and nearly touching the top of the box and she's like 'do you see this one' me: yeah 😬 her: this is your feelings and ideations about suicide me: 😬 😩 😬 her: when I see a score this high, I stop what I'm doing and I call the police to have them escort you to a hospital me: 😬😬😬😬😬 her: but I didn't do that. because when we spoke in office you told me you felt this way and why you don't do it. you told me it's something you've lived with for a long time and the pain you are suffering is what makes it so bad. and I trust you me: 😭😭😭 okay her: do you see this line down here? this is people who have suicidal ideation recorded on this test. you scored 98% higher on suicidal ideation compared to people reporting suicidal ideation HNNNNNN. she said it probably wasn't surprising to me and asked me if I was safe again and all that. I assured her I was and said in my previous appointment; I've had suicidal thoughts since I was like 12? maybe earlier. there have been very few times in my life not surrounded by abuse and trauma so I'm never really free of it. I've had four traumatic incidents causing increasingly horrible episodes of ptsd in nine years. all through my 20s. still here woo, lol and she said she knew that and had a patient not long after my first appointment who had similar circumstances in their life. and they told her it's almost a comfort having it. cause I was saying it's in the back of my mind at all times and I won't do it, but yeah, it's always there. anyway she said they said the same thing; it's always there, always in the background as 'hey I'm an option!' even though we aren't going to harm ourselves. it's a comfort knowing there is an option even if we plan on never using it? idk it just spoke to me and I felt it in my soul we talked about some emotional stuff after and I cried and it was a thing. it felt really good to speak to a psychologist who, just as she was in the first appointment, seemed genuinely concerned and wanted to help

me. I told her I was ready for therapy and she said she'd already looked for therapists for me lkasjdlkja and gave me a group that I emailed yesterday. I don't think they'll take my insurance but she said to message her through the portal if they don't and she'll try to find someone who does I don't remember if I mentioned it, but since she knew about the head shit before I met her, she dimmed her office lights without asking if I needed it and like as soon as we started the virtual visit, she leaped up and dimmed them and said she should've thought about it before the appt 😭 (I keep my brightness really low on my computer and use the warming feature 24/7 on comp and phone and my apt is really dimmed but it still helped a lot when she did it) she kept saying 'you did nothing wrong. it was the choice of others to do what they did. you don't deserve to carry their choices. you deserve to be able to hand it back to them. you don't deserve to be in pain. you did nothing wrong. you deserve to be free of what they did and you deserve to not suffer in such physical pain' I'm so wary of doctors but I really like her and I feel fortunate to have been referred to her ;3; speaking for a long time and especially emotionally is hard for me, so I might try to do two sessions a month once I find a therapist and see if I'm ok with that. trying to keep everything virtual while delta is out there I read her report and her official diagnosis is uhh really strong for major depressive disorder, severe. and severe ptsd with disassociative symptoms so!!! I claimed both of those on my disability application and the person handling my claim told me when I had this appt to call and let her know because she wanted the info. I signed a release the day I was there when I told my neuropsych that cause MH stuff is different than other medical records. she said she faxed it to the woman handling my disability application but I was gonna call her and ask if she received it and also tell her I have a new neuro so she will probably request his stuff too I called today and her voicemail box is full so lol try again later today's been awful. last night was horrible. got a bill for over $800 from my colonoscopy/endoscopy even though I asked numerous times if insurance was covering it and was told yep, every penny. so I was on the phone with insurance and the surgery center for 45 minutes. insurance seemed confused af but the agent I spoke with got some help from people who handle this stuff I guess finally she told me not to pay it, they're going to send them a letter to get it sorted (idk if this means I won't have to pay it at all or if they're going to try to make it that way. but I think govt insurance, which is what I have, works differently. like doctors kinda have to follow what they say vs. the other way around) and not worry about it for the next 30 days. I'm still gonna worry about it lmao they used a nice scare tactic on the bill that this was the 'LAST AND FINAL NOTICE' despite the fact they've never sent me anything else. my mom and the insurance agent said nah that's just what they do to scare people into paying fuckin love america <3 land of the free. the american dream! greatest country on earth 💜🖕💜 I just don't want it to go to collections and have to fight credit bureaus to get it off my credit so it's not destroyed |: anyway my head hit like 10/10 bad while I was on the phone cause of the talking a lot and trying to PROCESS INFORMATION and stress and also the fucking hold music, which I have to hear in some way b/c I gotta know when they're back on the line hnnnnn bad day. it's 1pm and bad, bad, bad day. bad month all around. I want this shit to stop anyway. I'm sorry about the suicidal ideation talk, but it's important to talk about that stuff. it can get severe but it can also get better. it does, eventually, even if it comes and goes. it always does get better I'm sorry, I also really needed to get this down somewhere. feel like I'm going to explode emotionally AND physically and I need to talk about it. hopefully

soon I'll have a therapist to talk to so I can get a lot of this stuff worked on. got my whole life to chat about so it'll probably take a long time but I'm willing to let it lmao therapy doesn't usually work for me anymore but idk I've had a lot of shit happen in less than two years so maybe it will this time I'm trying! I really am trying if you read this rambling monster, thank you. love you all and please stay safe

[anything-advice-blog]

There's something seriously wrong with me (and my friend.

A little background first. I’ve been verbally and sometimes physically abused by my mother for my whole life. It’ll be so ironic if people here say the abuse contributed to my actions, cause everyone I have ever told didn’t take the abuse seriously and tried to downplay it since it was mostly verbal.

It’s only now occurring to me that this issue started when I was very young. Even when I was 8 years old the pretend play with my animal toys sometimes included torture, death and violence. Some really vivid memories involve a plastic lion torturing and killing an equally plastic fawn and a rat plushie that I stabbed with a needle. It never occurred to me I was doing anything wrong. And at that age I had never been exposed to any media that wasn’t appropriate for my age.

Like every other kid I was scared of PG13 horror movies and had a borderline phobia of human skeletons for most of my early childhood. Then at 10 something really disturbing began to happen. I started having fantasies about fictional characters I made up in my head being tortured via drowning and suffocation. I remember the characters were inspired from the gladiator movies I watched with my grandparents but inspiration for the torture didn’t come from anything I had witnessed. And I didn’t think it was disturbing cause I was young and it didn’t take up so much of my alone time.

At 11 those fantasies had largely dissipated and I of course was less affected by PG 13 horror movies, but another disturbing thing came up. It all started as I was researching something for history homework. With the related results I came upon some articles on Middle Ages torture devices and I read everything there was to read about them because I found it fascinating. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong because I reasoned it was part of history. Then, through the related results that came with the searches for medieval torture devices, I stumbled into the world of porn. Since it came up as a related search the porn was medieval themed (duh) but also torture themed. They were pics and illustrated comics (not real life people or actors) featuring naked women being tied up, raped and tortured. It was at that moment that I started to suspect I was doing something wrong and that something was wrong with me.

Then at 12 I got my first phone and I was able to browse the internet unsupervised and for longer times. Of course I kept seeing these comics and images and I even went to the websites. On these websites the adds claimed the comics were technically illegal but I don’t know if it’s true. The people on the website forums were atrocious and obviously men who had really sick fantasies about raping women. I often entertained the thought of signing up on one of the websites, going undercover as a guy and asking the men if what they were saying were just fantasies.

And so till the age of 16 I kept seeing these comics, I didn’t masturbate to them (I’ve never masturbated) and I thought the people who did were really disgusting. To me, my behaviour was exactly how someone would be fascinated with horror movies, nothing erotic. Though the fact of the comics being banned still worries me. Then again many horror movies were banned by entire countries…..

From 16 I also regularly checked out a shock website that features many real torture, suicide, crime and execution videos from people like ISIS and drug lords. From what I gather the videos are either submitted directly to the website or they’re quickly snatched from other internet platforms like youtube before they get taken down for their graphic content. The website gets into legal battles constantly and is holding on to the identity of ‘legal’ by a thread. Like the porn websites, the people there are sick. There’s no indication that they get off to the stuff but they are pessimistic, heartless, white supremacist conspiracy theorists with no compassion. Some of them I would say seriously have the potential to be the next mass shooter. And it is at this point that I wonder if I’m the only sane person in the world who’s interested in this stuff? I mean one good thing the website did is give me a better idea of what goes on in the world that the cops don’t release to the public.

At 17 I actually stopped seeing any illustrated porn and moved on to real porn. It took me a while to get over the disgust and even longer to turn on the sound. My tastes in real life porn don’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary, and when I stumble upon something that is clearly rape or abuse it disgusts me.

I’ve never really watched/viewed porn regularly. Sometimes I went months without seeing it and only went back to it when I was bored. Now I’ve decided I want to quit porn because of the amount of damage it does to viewers and participants.

Anyways, my porn preferences never translated into real life. I never wanted to rape or torture anyone.

Within the past year I admitted my ‘interests’ to my best friend who reacted surprisingly well and in turn revealed her own twisted fantasies. She had loving parents but had to undergo many surgeries and hospital stays throughout her life because of a medical condition. She told me when she was only 6 years old she fantasized about herself being raped with surgical instruments on an operating table. She swears she was never sexually or physically abused.

I mean on top of all this I realized I was bisexual within the past year. I’m immune to homophobia coming from religion because I’m an atheist and so it’s the people who actually attempt a scientific discussion that get me down. Like there’s the common idea that messed up childhoods create lgbt people and that most of them have perverted, twisted minds, and even though I never see statistics supporting it, it does make me wonder.

At this point in time I’m paranoid about my search history. Cause I’ve come across all types of porn be it intentional or accidentally. I even searched on illustrated child porn to see if it even was real. Of course when I saw it was real I was disgusted and never searched on it again. I’ve even gone to blogs that people were reporting for pedophilia and bestiality just to see if what people were saying was true. I’m scared that some time in my life I’ll get arrested for this. In fact I’ll never consider telling any of this to a councillor or therapist or help line because I’m scared they’ll be obliged to tell the authorities.

Sometimes I wonder if my lifelong abuse has contributed to this twisted side of me. I hope it has, because if it hasn’t then that means perfectly normal people would have this possibility. I don’t even know how to classify my actions. Twisted? Immoral? Uncommon? A relatively common thing that many people aren’t willing to admit?

More than being scared for myself though I’m scared of what effect the porn I’ve seen is having on other people and impressionable tweens who might not be so rational and sane. I marvel at how the severity of my actions didn’t enter my head until I turned 15. I guess I should be glad that I didn’t turn into a dangerous person.

I think I’m a good person, I know the difference between right and wrong, I have empathy for people and I’m one of the kindest people I know. And ever since I first viewed porn I developed a critical attitude to sex, relationships and porn usage that I still carry with me. I don’t know man, I guess I just want someone to tell me that I’m not the only sane person who has these preferences and experiences.

Hello,

First of all, I want to say that we’re not professionals here so we can’t diagnose or even speculate about whether the abuse you’ve suffered has contributed to this situation. In order to get that type of advice or information, you would have to visit a professional. So let’s tackle that part first. I’m not sure where you live or what the laws are there but for the most part, the basic rule when it comes to psychologists is that everything remains confidential unless you’re a risk to yourself or someone else. Or, if you’re a minor and there is abuse taking place. In this case, you explicitly state that you’re repulsed by the idea of acting on any of these desires or fantasies, meaning that a psychologist wouldn’t have grounds for breaking confidentiality. But again, check the laws specific to where you live. If you do wish to seek help, my best advice to you is to look for someone whose area of expertise is in trauma or sex and meet with them to discuss your needs. If you have to change professionals a few times to find the right one, don’t get discouraged. Sometimes it takes a little trial and error to find the right person.

I can’t really comment on the normalcy of your behaviour or interests because again, I’m not a professional. However, I can say that it’s a good sign that you don’t have any interest in participating in any violent events. Do you search these things out of interest or are you aroused by them? Because those are two very different motivations that can indicate different things. In terms of helping yourself, I would suggest blocking all of the websites that you would normally visit and perhaps even consider turning on the safe search option on your internet to limit the type of things that you can search for. These are just some preliminary steps that you can take but I would highly recommend visiting a professional to seek some help, especially if this is something that you’re concerned about and wish to address.

-Livia

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/what-now-for-prince-andrew-royal-faces-scrutiny-after-ghislaine-maxwells-arrest-nbc-news/

What now for Prince Andrew? Royal faces scrutiny after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest - NBC News

LONDON — As the lurid headlines swirl in the wake of the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, questions again are surging over what comes next for Britain’s Prince Andrew, who is caught up in the high-profile affair.

Maxwell, a British socialite, is behind bars at a detention center in Brooklyn, New York, and is expected to appear in court in New York next Tuesday, having been arrested in New Hampshire last week. She will face charges on four counts in connection with the trafficking of minors for criminal sexual activity and two counts of perjury.

Maxwell, 58, has not entered a plea, but has long denied any wrongdoing. Her attorney declined to comment after her arrest.

Meanwhile, the scandal that has for years dogged Andrew, 60, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, does not appear to be going away.

“It’s a bit of a nightmare at the moment,” British public relations agent Mark Borkowski told NBC News. “He’s inextricably linked with this story, there is no exit strategy.”

Prince Charles, Princess Beatrice, Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Andrew, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, during Trooping The Colour, the queen’s annual birthday parade in London.Chris Jackson / Getty Images

Borkowski, who is not working with Andrew but has worked with celebrities including the “King of Pop” Michael Jackson and the comedian Joan Rivers in the past, said much now rests on exactly what Maxwell tells U.S. authorities.

He suggested Andrew should either stay silent or invite U.S. authorities “to come and meet him on home turf” in the United Kingdom and make public that he’s attempting to “take the heat off him” by explaining his relationship with both Epstein and Maxwell.

Andrew has acknowledged that he knew both Epstein and Maxwell, the disgraced financier’s formergirlfriend, but has denied any wrongdoing.

In a widely panned television interview with the BBC in the fall, Andrew said that he had been introduced to Epstein by Maxwell, and that he went to stay with him in New York for four days in 2010. The trip was to break off the friendship, Andrew said, after Epstein served time for soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.

Andrew has also denied allegations that he had any form of sexual contact with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has repeatedly said she was trafficked by Epstein when she was 17 and directed to have sexual relations with the prince.

Andrew said that he had no recollection of ever meeting her — despite a widely circulated photograph showing the pair together.

Virginia Giuffre with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell at Prince Andrew’s London home in a photo released with court documents.

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.

Epstein, 66, died by suicide in August while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Prosecutors accused the politically connected financier of preying on dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida in the early 2000s.

After his death, prosecutors vowed to continue the investigation and the case brought renewed attention to several high-profile people in Epstein’s orbit, including Andrew.

The royal abruptly stepped down from his public duties after the disastrous BBC interview, saying in a statement that he was willing to help “any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations, if required.”

After Maxwell was arrested Thursday, the acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss for the Southern District of New York told reporters: “I’m not going to comment on anyone’s status in this investigation. But I would say we would welcome Prince Andrew coming in to talk with us. We would like to have the benefit of his statement.”

Andrew’s lawyers have previously said that they offered his help as a witness to U.S. authorities on at least three occasions this year, while his team shot back that they were “bewildered” at the Department of Justice’s latest comments.

Because Andrew is only a witness, NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said, U.S. attorneys could not compel him to appear. Although he warned that “someone who may be considered a witness can quickly become a target, depending on what their answers to the questions are.”

He said that U.S. attorneys could travel to the U.K. to interview Andrew but could not compel him to appear.

“If I was defending Prince Andrew, he would never leave the U.K. again, and he would only give carefully vetted written statements,” Cevallos said.

If Andrew does travel to the U.S., Cevallos said that lawyers for Epstein’s victims could see him as a potential civil defendant and serve him with either a subpoena or a lawsuit.

But whether Andrew travels to America may not be entirely up to him.

If he is charged with a crime or sentenced in the U.S., he could face extradition proceedings, although legal experts say this is highly unlikely.

Both politically, because of the relationship between the two countries, and legally, as a member of the royal family, Andrew could be protected by crown or sovereign immunity.

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer at the London-based law firm Howard Kennedy LLP, who represented British cavalry officer James Hewitt after allegations of an affair with Princess Diana, said U.S. authorities were trying to “ensnare” the royal and that it was unlikely he would be extradited to the U.S.

Stephens said the principle of sovereign immunity — which makes certain individuals immune from prosecution — would make it difficult for Andrew to be summoned to the U.S.

If U.S. prosecutors wanted to gather information, they could do so through written testimonies or prosecutors traveling to the U.K. to collect evidence, Stephens said. This was done recently when U.S. authorities came to speak to U.K.-based survivors of the convicted rapist and disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Even if he was extradited to America, Andrew would be under “no obligation to give evidence,” Stephens added. “You can subpoena someone to court, but you can’t force someone to give evidence,” he said, citing an individual’s legal right to silence.

However, Juliet Sorensen, a former federal prosecutor and a professor of law at Northwestern University, said the royal would most likely not be shielded by sovereign immunity.

“Sovereign immunity would not apply to a case in which a sovereign has engaged in criminal activity,” she said. “If somebody is participating in sexual trafficking and exploitation of minors and young women, that has absolutely nothing to do with their duties as a sovereign, so sovereign immunity would not apply.”

Meanwhile, Maxwell remains behind bars after prosecutors said she posed an “extreme” flight risk because of her access to substantial funds and American, French and British passports.

Her arraignment and first court hearing will occur on Tuesday, according to a court order, and will take place online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Maxwell played a critical role in helping Epstein identify, befriend and groom minor victims for abuse,” Strauss, the U.S. attorney, said. “In some cases, Maxwell participated in the abuse herself.”

Andrew’s advisers should be “glued” to any testimony Maxwell gives, says Borkowski, the PR guru, as the case will continue to garner headlines, leaving the prince in the eye of the British media storm.

For now, “there’s nothing much more he can do,” Borkowski counseled.

[jeenatomsonnn]

By Richard Howard

If you are considering Christian counseling for the first time, chances are that you will have numerous questions that you would like to ask before committing to sessions. It pays to know that reliable centers have a suitable number of competent counselors who can lend a hand with eating disorders, marital and family therapy, depression and anxiety, trauma and grief and loss counseling just to mention a few. If you are interested in seeking Christian counseling Charlotte NC is an ideal place to start your hunt for dependable therapists. A question asked by most clients is whether their information will remain private and confidential. What you should know is that Christian counselors are bound by the ethical standards of their profession. Just like any other therapist, information you provide during sessions will remain under lock and key. You will get a safe environment where you can discuss your problems freely without worry of being judged or your personal affairs getting to other people. Confidentiality gives the client-therapist relationship a chance to thrive. Christian counselors are, however, obligated by law to report issues of elderly and child abuse as well as cases where a client is at risk of committing suicide or hurting other people. Because times are hard, it is normal for clients to want to know the cost of services. Christian based counseling centers are dedicated to offering help and not necessarily to generating profits. The services offered are therefore affordable and you do not have to be financially endowed to benefit from reliable therapy. Anyone can suffer from anxiety, depression, marital problems or even concerns related to having a dysfunctional family. Therapists are therefore dedicated to providing reliable services to people from all walks of life. You can schedule for sessions irrespective of your age. Apart from helping adults, seniors and teens, the counselors can also assist young kids suffering from concerns such as trauma and anxiety. Christian Counseling Centers offer an avenue where clients can receive help from Christian counselors who are compassionate, professional and caring. The specialist you visit will assist you in identifying areas of your life that may be triggering distress. You will get assistance on how to move past your current obstacles and thrive. Counseling can effectively help in changing ones behaviors, emotions and thought patterns. You should even so expect to be encouraged through not only therapeutic techniques, but also Biblical truths. It is true that most Christian counseling centers are associated with specific churches. Another frequently asked question is whether one can receive help if he or she is not a member of the allied church. Again, counseling is open to people from all walks of lives, regardless of their race, financial means, gender or creed. The highly trained and proficient counselors can provide sessions for couples, individuals and also families. You need to meet potential therapists for initial consultation. While it is important to consider the age and gender of a professional and affirm that you will be comfortable attending sessions, it is equally important to consider the stance and values of the counselor. The idea is to ascertain that you can effortlessly dedicate yourself to attending sessions and receiving the much needed help.

About the Author:

You can find details about the benefits you get when you use professional Christian counseling Charlotte NC services at http://bit.ly/2TmCvBN right now.

[peniseargementtips]

http://bit.ly/2sXrM5g <div style='font-style:italic;' class='uawbyline'>By Richard Howard</div><br /><br /> <div class='uawarticle'>If you are considering Christian counseling for the first time, chances are that you will have numerous questions that you would like to ask before committing to sessions. It pays to know that reliable centers have a suitable number of competent counselors who can lend a hand with eating disorders, marital and family therapy, depression and anxiety, trauma and grief and loss counseling just to mention a few. If you are interested in seeking <a href="http://www.bareitercc.com/">Christian counseling Charlotte NC</a> is an ideal place to start your hunt for dependable therapists.<br /> <br /> A question asked by most clients is whether their information will remain private and confidential. What you should know is that Christian counselors are bound by the ethical standards of their profession. Just like any other therapist, information you provide during sessions will remain under lock and key.<br /> <br /> You will get a safe environment where you can discuss your problems freely without worry of being judged or your personal affairs getting to other people. Confidentiality gives the client-therapist relationship a chance to thrive. Christian counselors are, however, obligated by law to report issues of elderly and child abuse as well as cases where a client is at risk of committing suicide or hurting other people.<br /> <br /> Because times are hard, it is normal for clients to want to know the cost of services. Christian based counseling centers are dedicated to offering help and not necessarily to generating profits. The services offered are therefore affordable and you do not have to be financially endowed to benefit from reliable therapy.<br /> <br /> Anyone can suffer from anxiety, depression, marital problems or even concerns related to having a dysfunctional family. Therapists are therefore dedicated to providing reliable services to people from all walks of life. You can schedule for sessions irrespective of your age. Apart from helping adults, seniors and teens, the counselors can also assist young kids suffering from concerns such as trauma and anxiety.<br /> <br /> Christian Counseling Centers offer an avenue where clients can receive help from Christian counselors who are compassionate, professional and caring. The specialist you visit will assist you in identifying areas of your life that may be triggering distress. You will get assistance on how to move past your current obstacles and thrive. Counseling can effectively help in changing ones behaviors, emotions and thought patterns. You should even so expect to be encouraged through not only therapeutic techniques, but also Biblical truths.<br /> <br /> It is true that most Christian counseling centers are associated with specific churches. Another frequently asked question is whether one can receive help if he or she is not a member of the allied church. Again, counseling is open to people from all walks of lives, regardless of their race, financial means, gender or creed. The highly trained and proficient counselors can provide sessions for couples, individuals and also families.<br /> <br /> You need to meet potential therapists for initial consultation. While it is important to consider the age and gender of a professional and affirm that you will be comfortable attending sessions, it is equally important to consider the stance and values of the counselor. The idea is to ascertain that you can effortlessly dedicate yourself to attending sessions and receiving the much needed help.<br /> <br /> </div><br /> <div class='uawresource'><br /> <div style='font-style:italic;' class='uawabout'><br /> About the Author:<br /> </div><br /> <div class='uawlinks'>You can find details about the benefits you get when you use professional <a href="http://www.bareitercc.com">Christian counseling Charlotte NC</a> services at http://bit.ly/2TmCvBN right now.</div><br /> </div><br /> Answers To Frequently Asked Questions About Christian Counseling Charlotte NC

By Richard Howard

If you are considering Christian counseling for the first time, chances are that you will have numerous questions that you would like to ask before committing to sessions. It pays to know that reliable centers have a suitable number of competent counselors who can lend a hand with eating disorders, marital and family therapy, depression and anxiety, trauma and grief and loss counseling just to mention a few. If you are interested in seeking Christian counseling Charlotte NC is an ideal place to start your hunt for dependable therapists. A question asked by most clients is whether their information will remain private and confidential. What you should know is that Christian counselors are bound by the ethical standards of their profession. Just like any other therapist, information you provide during sessions will remain under lock and key. You will get a safe environment where you can discuss your problems freely without worry of being judged or your personal affairs getting to other people. Confidentiality gives the client-therapist relationship a chance to thrive. Christian counselors are, however, obligated by law to report issues of elderly and child abuse as well as cases where a client is at risk of committing suicide or hurting other people. Because times are hard, it is normal for clients to want to know the cost of services. Christian based counseling centers are dedicated to offering help and not necessarily to generating profits. The services offered are therefore affordable and you do not have to be financially endowed to benefit from reliable therapy. Anyone can suffer from anxiety, depression, marital problems or even concerns related to having a dysfunctional family. Therapists are therefore dedicated to providing reliable services to people from all walks of life. You can schedule for sessions irrespective of your age. Apart from helping adults, seniors and teens, the counselors can also assist young kids suffering from concerns such as trauma and anxiety. Christian Counseling Centers offer an avenue where clients can receive help from Christian counselors who are compassionate, professional and caring. The specialist you visit will assist you in identifying areas of your life that may be triggering distress. You will get assistance on how to move past your current obstacles and thrive. Counseling can effectively help in changing ones behaviors, emotions and thought patterns. You should even so expect to be encouraged through not only therapeutic techniques, but also Biblical truths. It is true that most Christian counseling centers are associated with specific churches. Another frequently asked question is whether one can receive help if he or she is not a member of the allied church. Again, counseling is open to people from all walks of lives, regardless of their race, financial means, gender or creed. The highly trained and proficient counselors can provide sessions for couples, individuals and also families. You need to meet potential therapists for initial consultation. While it is important to consider the age and gender of a professional and affirm that you will be comfortable attending sessions, it is equally important to consider the stance and values of the counselor. The idea is to ascertain that you can effortlessly dedicate yourself to attending sessions and receiving the much needed help.

About the Author:

You can find details about the benefits you get when you use professional Christian counseling Charlotte NC services at http://bit.ly/2TmCvBN right now.

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[andya-j]

In spite of its dark history, the entrance to the Brotterling Cave complex, eleven miles south of Kremming, Kentucky, appears bucolic, even inviting—a rocky, green arch, swathed in bulblet ferns, Virginia creepers, and sumacs meandering in lazy zigzags along the slope of the hill. In summer, a sumptuous veil of ironweed and lobelia spills over the lava-dark basalt, and cavers, from novice to expert, grind up the mudhole-pocked logging road in their four-wheel-drives, leave their rides in the turn-around, and trek inside like ants marching into the maw of a sleeping triceratops. Most of the time, they come back just fine. I’ve caved in the Brotterling a few times myself, but never before alone and always in thoroughly mapped parts of the cave system. And even though I’d heard all the stories, I was never afraid. Now I’m terrified. Just before sunrise, a little over seven hours ago, I crept through the woods alongside the dirt road and slipped inside the leafy green mouth of the cave. Only Boone knew what I wanted to do, and he didn’t approve it, of course—how could he, when he’s captain of Bluegrass Search and Rescue? In the heat of our argument about how to find and extract the four cavers who are currently missing, he called me “reckless and goddamn delusional” and accused me of thinking I was invulnerable because “you’ve got that synthetic thing going on.” I bit back a laugh that would’ve embarrassed us both and told him the word was synesthesia and mine is a rare form in which sounds are “heard” through the skin as vibrations. I explained to him again how my ability could help in a situation where noises inside the cave appeared to be causing a neurological event in the brains of those exposed to them. I said I would go into the cave wearing the in-ear waterproof headphones I use on occasion to get relief from life’s general babble, which can prove overwhelming for someone with my sound sensitivities. He just shook his head and looked at me like I was contesting the curve of the earth. But this morning, no one was posted at the cave entrance to stop me, so I took that as his tacit blessing. Or maybe he was so desperate to get Pree and the others back that losing me is an acceptable risk, albeit one he won’t sign off on. As any caver around here will tell you, even minus the uncanny noises, the Brotterling can kill you in any number of ways. One is by tricking you into thinking it’s not a damn dangerous cave. The first two hundred feet or so are deceptively easy: after you’ve slithered and squeaked past a row of huge boulders crowded together like a mouthful of grey, diseased teeth, the cave opens up like a belly. A bit farther on, you stroll down a broad, pebbly incline while the natural light gradually dims. The vertical slit of the opening shrinks to the size of a peach pit. Suddenly, you find yourself in a constricted, mausoleum-black oubliette. You switch on your headlamp and commence the descent, scuttling through barely shoulder-width tunnels, snaking up vertical cracks, traversing a series of amber-blue lakes, some of which you can ford without getting your knees wet, others deepening into treacherous sumps where you’ll drown if you don’t have a rebreather or a damn good set of lungs. Piece of cake was my grandiose appraisal the first time Pree Yazzie guided me through the Brotterling, but I was twenty then, brand-new to caving, recently graduated from the University of Louisville with an altogether useless BA in English lit, and just out of a closet I had not fully realized I even was in. I was also in love with her and thought it was mutual, a conclusion based on nothing more solid than a couple of nights of hot sex. I didn’t realize then that the only thing Pree ever lusted for was adventure, which she found in equal measure in caves, beds, and underground rivers. She came, she saw, etc. We’d met at a meeting of Search and Rescue, where Boone gave a presentation on abseiling techniques. I paid scant attention; Boone Pike was just another fortysomething, hardcore cave rat with a granite-gray ponytail, a smile like a crack in an anchor bolt, and big, spade-shaped hands that looked like they’d been crushed and pinned back together a time or two. I kept sneaking glances at Pree, the only other woman in a room full of men who, as the bumper stickers boast, “do it in tight places.’ A line that would make me chuckle right now, if I could expand my squeezed lungs enough to get a full breath of air. Tight places, indeed. During that day when Pree and I explored the Brotterling, she filled me in on the cave’s not-so-savory past—how every few decades, a caver fails to resurface or, worse, crawls back out physically whole but with a maimed mind and homicidal intent. Not quite what I wanted to hear a quarter mile under the earth, but I loved the sound of her voice when she explained the cave’s frightening history. The first incident was Dr. Reginald Moore, a caver and Presbyterian minister who spent four days lost in the Brotterling in 1935. Lacking modern caving equipment and (perhaps a greater hindrance) a suitably arachnid-like frame, he was thwarted by narrow tunnels and unswimmable sumps, but eventually found his way to the surface and described the “eerie and infernal yodeling” of demons who tormented him by chanting the Psalms backward in fiendish, fist-thumping cadences. Widely mocked by the press, Moore later hung himself after setting fire to his house with his wife, father-in-law, and two young sons tied up inside. Twenty-seven years later, Garth Tidwell, a teenager who entered the Brotterling on a dare, killed himself, his parents, and a neighbor hours after exiting the cave, writing in his suicide note about singing that sounded like “a wild hallelujah of wind chimes and fornicating bobcats.” The lurid description was dismissed as psychotic rambling, probably exacerbated by the terror of being alone and disoriented. If Tidwell had heard anything at all, it was explained away as wind hissing through passageways or water burbling up from an underground stream. But now we come to the Hargrave brothers—Mathew and Lionel—experienced cavers who entered the Brotterling this past Sunday. Lionel, an Iraqi War Vet whose hearing was lost to a roadside IED in Mosel, is totally deaf. A few hours after the two men entered the cave, he emerged alone, battered and bloody. He described how, half a mile below the surface, Mathew had signed to him that he could hear music “coming from distant and delicate singers” and insisted they search for the source of the sound. For a while, Lionel obliged him, but when the way proved too difficult, he suggested they turn back. In response, Mathew became enraged, bludgeoned his brother with a rock, and left him unconscious and bleeding. When Lionel finally found his way to the surface and summoned help, three senior members of Bluegrass Search and Rescue were dispatched—obsessive, spearmint-gum-chewing Bruce Starkeweather, extreme ectomorph Issa Mamoudi, and the ever elusive Pree Yazzie. Boone’s Dream Team. That’s when things started getting weird. At nine that night, Starkeweather contacted Boone via cave phone to report high-pitched humming or chanting. Boone told him to return to the surface. The final transmission, a few hours later, came from a distraught, incoherent Mamoudi—mangled syntax and a garble of English, French, and Farsi that degenerated into choking and wails. No one’s heard from any of them since. Which is how I come to be half a mile under the earth, worming my way through a twist in the moist, black, and aptly named Intestinal Bypass, a wretched, rib-crushing, claustrophobia-inducing belly crawl. Nearing the end, just a minute ago, I came to a plug in the tunnel about ten feet ahead. I can see the bottoms of dirt-packed, lug-soled boots, a damp, filthy oversuit, and, if I crane my neck almost out of joint, I can make out the white dome of a mud-splattered helmet. It’s not Pree, who’s waif-thin and wears size six boots, but one of the men, Hargrave, Mamoudi, or Starkeweather. I crawl closer, scraping along on my elbows and toes, but get no reaction to the light flaring out from my headlamp. My initial thought is that the caver’s become wedged in the last few feet of the Bypass, where the tunnel cinches like a cruelly corseted waist. The first time I came through here with Pree, I tore a rotator cuff trying to shove myself through the passage. Now, four years later and at least fifteen pounds thinner, it’s still a brutal squeeze. My second thought, after I grab a leg and begin shaking it, is that while he may or may not be stuck, this guy’s stone-cold dead. Which means if I can’t push him out, I’m fucked. Shit. Panic pinballs around my ribs. My lungs rasp, and all the air’s vanished. Forget whatever’s inside the cave. Forget Pree and the chance of finding survivors. I want out of here—NOW! Then a soothing, calm voice that I’ve trained for just such situations begins speaking inside my head: Breathe, Karyn. Just breathe. You’re okay. We’ll figure this out. It’s my own voice, the voice I’ve heard in other bad situations above and below ground, and I heed it. I must if I want to live. Gradually, I coax a full breath past the terror constricting my throat. I’m not going to die down here. Not yet, anyway. A numb resolve settles in: I can do this. Trying to eject a dead guy out the end of a tomb-black tunnel while you’re flat on your belly feels like a sadist’s idea of a stunt on some nightmarish survival TV show. I push until my biceps blaze, but it’s impossible to get any traction. I might as well be trying to strongarm Atlas’s Dick, a colossal stalagmite cavers use as a waypoint in one of the Brotterling’s upper chambers. I strain and curse and hyperventilate. Drink tears and cold, musky sweat. The white noise churning through the headphones under my helmet provides an incongruous soundtrack to my struggle: monster breakers shattering on a raw, rocky coastline of black sand and a harsh sun (at least, this is the image I get of it). The sound’s meant to protect me from the singing, but right now—pinched like a thumb in a pair of Chinese handcuffs—the buffering noise only intensifies the terror of being stuck in a limestone tube with a corpse. Desperate, I decide to wiggle back out and look for another way to go on, but the tunnel twists and contorts at excruciating angles. It’s impossible to slither out the way I came in. All I get for my efforts are bruised elbows, torn knees, and the mother of all wedgies. Panic claws at my throat. I’ll never get out. I’ll die here, squished inside a stone straightjacket. But the voice in my head bullies and curses me onward, so I crawl back to the body. Since I’m not strong enough to rely on brute force, I devise a slow, minimalist series of tweaks that gradually loosens this obstinate flesh-cork in its stone bottleneck: nudge, twist, rock side to side, nudge again. The poor son of a bitch must have died two to six hours ago, because rigor’s setting in, which helps me extract him. He’s plank-stiff and (I discover later) both arms are arrowed out in front of him like a cliff diver, the body so rigid by the time it finally pops free, he could double as a javelin or a maypole. I wriggle out, shaking and sweat-slick, and aim my lamp down at the dead man, groaning when it illuminates the back of Mamoudi’s seamed, bloodied neck and reveals the muddy helmet to be a porridge of gray matter and hair glommed around a split, trepanned skull. I picture Mamoudi frantically trying to birth himself out those last crushing inches of squeeze, the irony of a rockfall shattering his skull just as his head poked free. It’s a reasonable theory, except that I don’t see any fallen rocks or broken stalactites to back it up. Looking around, I find myself in a wide, high-domed chamber forested floor to ceiling with dripstone. Farther back, overlapping ledges of white limestone crease and crinkle like bolts of brocade. The scene is enchanting and eerie, a grand Gothic hall carved out of calcite and ornamented with aragonite blooms. At one end glimmers a deceptively shallow-looking pond where eyeless albino salamanders laze on its mineral shores. I know from the survey map this is a sump, the entrance to a flooded tunnel leading into the next chamber, but whether it’s swimmable without a rebreather, I won’t know until I’m underwater. Before I can ponder this or Mamoudi’s demise any further, something more compelling than mere violent death snags my attention: a rapid-fire spitting of sound energy, like a mad tattoo artist bedeviling my nervous system with rhythm rather than ink. The energy natters against my palms and wet-kisses the space between my breasts. I get a sense of its volume and pitch, the aural equivalent of a blind person reading Braille, and I’m lashed with fear and euphoria. Although I’ve come down here to find Pree and the others, I also want to locate the mysterious noise. Boone must have realized that too. It’s why he didn’t want me to go. Displaced air caused by something big lunging out of a passageway makes me whirl around. A frenzy of shadows spills over the chamber as my lamp illuminates a surreal sight: Bruce Starkeweather, his naked torso smeared with geometric designs painted in cave dirt and gore, brandishing three feet of a blood-streaked stalactite. His shell-shocked stare tells me all too clearly I’m nobody he’s ever seen in his life, and my death is all he desires. As the sound energy from the faraway singing swells over me, he raises his club and charges. “You should wear headphones to block out the sounds,” I’d told Boone and the others less than twenty-four hours earlier. We were in a small conference room in the Timber Hill Lodge outside Kremming. A map of the known parts of the cave system was tacked up on a board, the shaded areas indicating parts not yet surveyed. Mamoudi and Pree sat together, guzzling coffee and wolfing down bear claws, while Starkeweather, ascetic as ever, stripped foil off a stick of Wrigley’s. Boone, unshaven and haggard-looking, had just come from the hospital where Lionel Hargrave was recovering from a concussion. He told us Hargrave had described his brother’s manic insistence on finding the source of the singing. In his deafness, of course, Lionel heard nothing and, probably for that reason (and because he evidently had a thick cranium), had survived to talk about it. At my remark about the headphones, Pree laughed. Boone looked away, and Mamoudi got up to refill his and Pree’s coffee mugs. I couldn’t entirely blame them. I was technically there as backup, but since I’m also the newest member of the team and never found time to get my cave diving certificate, my inclusion in the expedition was unlikely. Pree, looking fetchingly peeved, said, “How do we communicate if we can’t hear? What are we supposed to do? Use sign language? Text?” Starkeweather mimed headbanging. “Maybe it’s a death metal band down there making people go batshit. That used to drive my old man insane.” Met with such thoughtful responses, what could I say? I wanted to point out that noise isn’t always benign, that whatever’s down there might be the aural equivalent of lobotomy picks jabbed into the brain via the ears. But it’s only a feeling I have, and this group, Pree especially, is not into feelings. Starkeweather asked a question about the survival kits, and while Boone was responding, I went outside and paced alongside a thin strip of forest next to the parking lot. After a short time, Pree came up beside me and tried to slide her arm beneath mine. I swatted her off like you would a pesky mosquito. Only a few hours earlier, she’d stopped by my apartment to try to rekindle some romance. We’d smoked a joint, laughed about old times. Then she took everything off except Mamoudi’s engagement ring and made love to me like I was the last woman on earth. And I let her. Figured I’d hate myself for it later. Seemed like later had come sooner than I expected. “Seriously, Karyn,” she was saying, “if anything goes wrong down there, if there’s a problem, Issa and Bruce and I will deal with it. We know the Brotterling, and we know what we’re doing. So, don’t try anything heroic.” She should’ve stopped there, but she added, “I know it must be tempting, you with your superpowers and all.” I glared and walked faster. “Okay, sorry. It’s just that hearing sounds through your skin, that’s pretty bizarre.” That’s one word for it. It’s also a gift, this intertwining of hearing and touch, where sounds can be physically felt as everything from a shy tap to a punishing blow. It’s a door into something most people never experience. Pree’s voice, for example, feels lemony, tart. It fizzes under my nails and buzzes up my spine like spikes of Kundalini flame. Intimacy enhances the effect. Pree’s voice used to give me not just sensations but images, too: a fire crackling in the kiva of a house that must be from her childhood in Gallup, New Mexico, a young Pree popping figs into her mouth outside an adobe church, and a pale, bearded man who cooed to her while he lay over her body and pounded. My skin drank her life in through her voice. None of this, of course, I could tell her. “Bizarre’s not the word I’d have chosen,” I said. “But when you put it that way, I feel so special.” “You are special, though, aren’t you? You got written up in that magazine.” She was talking about a story that ran in Scientific American (June 2008), in which I was tested along with a number of other more “traditional” synesthetes. Some heard colors; others tasted or smelled numbers and words. An anomaly even among anomalies, I was the only one who could pick up tactile sensations and images via sound waves, even when I didn’t understand the language. “Aural imagism,” the writer of the article called it. I sat with my eyes closed and listened to a woman recite the same passage in a foreign language over and over. Later, I learned it was Finnish. Her vocal tones prickled the soles of my feet; it felt like dancing on tiny ball bearings. The vibrations of her voice formed images like patterns in a turned kaleidoscope. I described a dark red cup, a yellow rose, a strange bird on the wing. The man doing the testing glanced at his notes and paled. The speaker had read a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I’d just described the primary imagery. Pree laid a hand on my biceps, but I flinched, holding on to my indignation like it was a winning lottery ticket. I said sullenly, “Boone’s screwing up not to send me down with you. I’d be able to feel the singing before the rest of you even heard it.” She sighed and fell into step with me. “Look, Karyn, you’ve been inside plenty of caves. You know what the silence is like down there. Gigantic. A void you don’t want to fall into. Then all of a sudden, you hear something so spooky and so unexpected, you just about crap in your pants. If you heard it topside, you’d know it was nothing, maybe the caver in front of you farted or dropped a carabiner, but underground, it’s terrifying. Most cavers shrug that stuff off, but some people can’t. They have panic attacks; they hallucinate. For all we know, what Hargrave heard was a colony of bats or maybe a few million cave cockroaches.” When I didn’t answer, she snapped, “Dammit, Karyn, are you even listening?” (More intently than you can imagine.) “Maybe Hargrave went crazy because the singing he heard was too beautiful,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “There’s a line in the Duino Elegies by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s something to the effect that beauty is the beginning of terror we can just still stand. Maybe that’s the deal with the singing. It triggers a level of terror humans aren’t meant to endure. It’s too beautiful.” Her mouth set in a pinched line. I thought she was going to slap me. “Nothing’s too beautiful. That isn’t possible.” Then before I could argue, she gave me a punch on the arm that was too hard to be play. “Don’t worry, Karyn; it’s gonna be fine.” She looked back toward the motel as though somebody there had just called her name, although nobody had. She said, “See you on the surface, babe,” and hurried away. Right now, as the sound energy of the singing floods into me and Starkeweather charges, that surface Pree spoke of might as well be on one of Jupiter’s moons. Starkeweather halts just short of the sump. He spits out a lump of gum, bares his teeth in a cannibal grin, and takes a few warm-up swings with the club. I think he’s going to pound me to mud, but to any real caver, what he does next is unimaginably worse: he starts attacking the cave itself, swinging viciously, destroying elaborate lacework and yards of dripstone that have grown at a rate of a half inch per century. Clusters of wedge-shaped helictites explode overhead; stalagmites as tall as a man shatter and crash into the sump. The destruction sickens and horrifies me. Within seconds, something sublime and ethereal has been reduced to an empty mouth full of snaggled teeth. Starkeweather, surveying the rubble, cocks his head and does a bizarre little jig, like he’s shaking off a swarm of cave spiders. He shimmies and scrapes at his face while his lips form the words Shut up! Make it stop! When his eyes refocus, his red gaze finds me again. I switch off my headlamp, and the world floods away in a torrent of black. I drop to the ground and start inching along the cave floor. The headphones are a real hindrance now; they prevent me from hearing which way Starkeweather’s moving. The only sound I can feel is the singing, and that has receded to a shivery caress, a centipede skittering over my eyelashes, a salamander disturbing the roots of my hair. A hail of stones peppers my back and pings off my helmet. Suddenly, Starkeweather’s big hands paw at my legs. I kick out blindly. My boot thuds meaty groin. Then he’s on top of me, spearmint breath hot in my face, mud-slick fingers fumbling for my jugular. A blacker, thicker shade of night starts shutting down synapses, accompanied by a dazzle of sizzling white stars expiring behind my retinas. Under my hand I clutch a slab of smashed dripstone and heave it in the general direction of his head. He releases my throat but then latches on to either side of my mouth and tries to unsocket my jaw. I bite down on a finger until my teeth close on a nugget of bone, then roll away as blood fills my mouth. Next thing I know, I’m underwater. The sump’s frigid and inky, and— Starkeweather be damned—I switch my headlamp back on. I’m inside a flooded tunnel where so much silt has been stirred up, it’s like swimming through horse piss. I look for an air pocket overhead but can make out only jutting mineral walls and the segmented bodies of albino worms ghosting behind swirls of particled water. My lungs bleed for air. The sump narrows into a long, jagged throat, where beyond, water splashes over a pale, fluted ledge. Between me and the air glitters a gauntlet of stone cudgels and knives. My cave pack rips off and my oversuit’s torn. Dark red snakes squiggling too close alarm me until I realize I’m batting away my own blood. My head punches the surface, and I heave myself onto a milk-white dome of flowstone, then collapse across it, teeth wildly clattering. Eventually, I rally enough to fill my hands with rocks and wait to see if Starkeweather follows me. A short time later, he pops to the surface floating facedown. I let him stay like that for five minutes before I grab his belt and haul him up next to me. His neck and cheeks are grotesquely ballooned. When I turn him over, jagged pebbles and mineral chips mixed with shattered enamel gush out of his mouth in a torrent of red. I want to think Starkeweather was already dangerously unstable and would have acted out sooner or later, but I don’t really believe it. I know the singing has unhinged him to the point of attacking the cave with his teeth—the same sounds Mamoudi and Hargrave must have heard, and that Pree, if she’s still alive, is hearing right now. It feels stronger and a helluva lot closer than it did before I passed through the sump. Those previously faint waves of energy are now sharp and urgent, a persistent scratching at various parts of my body, like a frantic child seeking entry to a house at one door and one window after another. But the images accompanying the sensations aren’t so innocuous: a debased horde of humanity crammed into a stadium of bleeding, cruelly crushed bodies, on their knees weeping and howling. Heads thrown back, ready for the knife, keening mad invocations to an obscene deity. Their blood soaks the earth, out of which bloom stone flowers brimming with nectar and death. The vision claws at my heart and I hear my own voice telling me to get moving, to find Hargrave and Pree and get out. It’s hard to obey. I go on. The next chamber confounds me: a sprawling catacomb dripping with soda-straw stalactites and mounded with nodular masses of calcite popcorn. Crystals of moonmilk, a carbonate material the texture of cream cheese, festoon the floor. None of it corresponds to any maps I’ve seen. Even worse are the braided mazes of lava tubes offering a bewildering array of possible paths deeper into the cave’s interior. But the cave, in its infernal sentience, appears to respond. The energy of the singing amplifies, the frequencies becoming imperative, like the head of a silky mallet pinging a flesh xylophone. Letting it guide me, I scramble up a succession of ledges to access a passageway midway up the wall. Its coiled path empties into an angular chamber that resembles a vandalized ossuary: stone pillars surrounding a scattering of femurs, ribs, clavicles, and fragments of skull. That the bones have lain here since long before cavers first discovered the Brotterling is made clear by the centuries-old webs of calcite deposits that veil them. I pick my way through the boneyard as quickly as possible. Beyond it, my headlamp illuminates the area from where the sound energy seems to emanate—a lavish display of boxwork about four feet overhead, where calcite blades project at angles from the cave walls, creating a dense and elaborate honeycomb. Between the mineral blades gleam dark seams, fistulas of ebony pulsing like fat heaps of caviar that vibrate with an avid, luminescent life. Fine, blood-red webbing threads through the black, a network of alien capillaries that carries not blood but warm, coppery sound—it seeps under my scalp and teases behind my ears, seeking to peel back and penetrate the soft, vulnerable creases of brain. If I get out of here alive, I know what I’ll tell Boone: the singing’s not random or chaotic; it has distinct meters and color tones, and it pulses with dark languor underlaid with vicious intent. I will tell him the creators of this song are not human, but not unsentient, either. And if the term life-form applies to them at all, it’s a life in service only to the obliteration of all others. Long stretches of spellbound time pass as I stand here, watching the tiny caviar mouths pulse and burble out a black saliva of sound that feels ripe and almost sexually decadent. Avid and succulent and, yes—Mathew Hargrave nailed it—delicate, too. I want to slather my hands in the mineral meat between those basalt blades, squeeze up fistfuls of its alien iridescence and lather it into my pores, let it replace all the blood in my body with its unholy wails. I take off my helmet and hurl it away. Then I reach up to remove the headphones. And stop. Above me, imbedded into the hivework, loom strange columns worked into the stone, skeletal formations lifting toward the obsidian sky. Sections are patterned with ovoids and creases of lighter stone, the pale areas inlaid with vertical striations of crimson. The sight wallops the breath from my chest. One of the columns is watching me. Basalt doesn’t bleed, but burst eyeballs and lacerated skin weep red down the sides of the dripstone cloaking two human forms in their mineral shrouds. Mathew Hargrave has been almost entirely consumed. Crusts of muscle and gashed bone jut out from his stone sarcophagus. Only his upper chest, the arms tucked into his torso like folded wings, and his slack, swollen face are still recognizably human. His remains are being played like a bone flute as torturesong rasps from his mouth. But Pree, oh Pree, is another matter. Her time inside the Brotterling has been briefer than Hargrave’s; less of her has been entombed. Rigid and ashen-faced, she balances on a narrow outcrop a few feet above, tarry squiggles of hair falling over the rags of her clothing. Her mouth convulses in torment. Skeins of sound tangle in her teeth and snake from her lips. Tendrils of it adhere to her face. The frequency of the vibrations chugs to the lowest registers, rich and mellow, bassoon-like, the notes unspooling in hypnotic spirals, so that each births the next lower note on the scale, and all the while, Pree’s terrified eyes tell me the truth: it’s a death song and she can’t help but sing it. Black rings frame the edge of my vision as Pree’s silent screams flail me. Her body spasms. A rent opens under her breast as the slender spear she’s impaled on exits her chest in a gleaming red fist. Behind two snapped ribs, I glimpse a gray, pulpy thing beating feebly. The ledge is slick and cushiony, weirdly flesh-like, when I climb up, wrap my arms around her, and try to lift her free from the stone. Crimson bubbles erupt from her mouth. She tries to form words. I put my face close to hers as she exhales. Her death-rattle breath goes into me like an intubation tube, rancid and chokingly floral. There are no last words, no blessing, just a sob that’s a truncated ode to damnation as she bleeds and convulses in front of me. And I leave her. God help me, I abandon her there and begin the torturous trek to the surface, a wet, nasty, soul-crushing ordeal, while with every step, I expect the cave to crush or consume me. Most of the way, when I’m not using my hands to climb or to crawl, I clutch at the headphones, terrified they’ll fall off and the singing will overpower and annihilate me. Yet despite hours of exhaustion and terror, somehow I prevail. The passages, in fact, seem to widen as I pass through, the skin-you-alive cold of the sump is less heart-stoppingly frigid, the waypoints more easily spotted. Even the terrifying Bypass, outside of which Mamoudi’s body still sprawls, feels smooth as a tube and excretes me effortlessly. When I finally reach the surface, blinking and bedazzled by the afternoon light, a small army of cavers, media, and National Guard are assembled, as another team of cavers prepares to go down. Boone’s there among them. Seeing me alive, his eyes well, as do mine. I tear off the headphones and sweet sound rushes in, the wind whistling, a truck backfiring, the crowd erupting into ecstatic cheers to see someone come out alive. Then they get a good look at me and my appearance—soaked, shivering, smeared with cave dirt and blood—shocks them silent. As one, they reel back. Finally the braver ones gather their wits and being firing off questions. What happened? What’s down there? Is anyone else still alive? But these are not words the way I remember them. What I hear is a saw-toothed cacophony, an unwholesome chorale—discordant, repellant, impure. I want to rush back inside the cave to get away from their cawing, but I remember that first, I have something important to do. I must warn them of the terrible danger, so I focus my mind and conjure the sounds I will need. When I know what I must say, I run toward Boone, who is already beckoning me. I scream, Get back! Get away from the cave! Everyone inside is dead! But that’s not what comes out. An excruciating hitch unlocks in my chest as an arcane melody, a kind of cryptic trilling, slithers free and soars to the winds—the feral and wondrous, delicate song birthed from the mouths of monsters, from Pree’s mouth into mine—into theirs. Madness made tangible. Contagion by sound. It spews from my lips—a song of such deadly beauty and unholy allure that I experience only the briefest frisson of horror—an emotion something inside me instantly quells—when their mouths fall open, songstruck, enthralled, and they begin to rend their own flesh and tear each other apart. I understand this is how it must be. I go on, unfazed by the carnage, undeterred by the din. For I am the throat of the Delicate Singers. In the cities, the towns, in the streets, and beyond, I know others are waiting to hear me.

In spite of its dark history, the entrance to the Brotterling Cave complex, eleven miles south of Kremming, Kentucky, appears bucolic, even inviting—a rocky, green arch, swathed in bulblet ferns, Virginia creepers, and sumacs meandering in lazy zigzags along the slope of the hill. In summer, a sumptuous veil of ironweed and lobelia spills over the lava-dark basalt, and cavers, from novice to expert, grind up the mudhole-pocked logging road in their four-wheel-drives, leave their rides in the turn-around, and trek inside like ants marching into the maw of a sleeping triceratops. Most of the time, they come back just fine. I’ve caved in the Brotterling a few times myself, but never before alone and always in thoroughly mapped parts of the cave system. And even though I’d heard all the stories, I was never afraid. Now I’m terrified. Just before sunrise, a little over seven hours ago, I crept through the woods alongside the dirt road and slipped inside the leafy green mouth of the cave. Only Boone knew what I wanted to do, and he didn’t approve it, of course—how could he, when he’s captain of Bluegrass Search and Rescue? In the heat of our argument about how to find and extract the four cavers who are currently missing, he called me “reckless and goddamn delusional” and accused me of thinking I was invulnerable because “you’ve got that synthetic thing going on.” I bit back a laugh that would’ve embarrassed us both and told him the word was synesthesia and mine is a rare form in which sounds are “heard” through the skin as vibrations. I explained to him again how my ability could help in a situation where noises inside the cave appeared to be causing a neurological event in the brains of those exposed to them. I said I would go into the cave wearing the in-ear waterproof headphones I use on occasion to get relief from life’s general babble, which can prove overwhelming for someone with my sound sensitivities. He just shook his head and looked at me like I was contesting the curve of the earth. But this morning, no one was posted at the cave entrance to stop me, so I took that as his tacit blessing. Or maybe he was so desperate to get Pree and the others back that losing me is an acceptable risk, albeit one he won’t sign off on. As any caver around here will tell you, even minus the uncanny noises, the Brotterling can kill you in any number of ways. One is by tricking you into thinking it’s not a damn dangerous cave. The first two hundred feet or so are deceptively easy: after you’ve slithered and squeaked past a row of huge boulders crowded together like a mouthful of grey, diseased teeth, the cave opens up like a belly. A bit farther on, you stroll down a broad, pebbly incline while the natural light gradually dims. The vertical slit of the opening shrinks to the size of a peach pit. Suddenly, you find yourself in a constricted, mausoleum-black oubliette. You switch on your headlamp and commence the descent, scuttling through barely shoulder-width tunnels, snaking up vertical cracks, traversing a series of amber-blue lakes, some of which you can ford without getting your knees wet, others deepening into treacherous sumps where you’ll drown if you don’t have a rebreather or a damn good set of lungs. Piece of cake was my grandiose appraisal the first time Pree Yazzie guided me through the Brotterling, but I was twenty then, brand-new to caving, recently graduated from the University of Louisville with an altogether useless BA in English lit, and just out of a closet I had not fully realized I even was in. I was also in love with her and thought it was mutual, a conclusion based on nothing more solid than a couple of nights of hot sex. I didn’t realize then that the only thing Pree ever lusted for was adventure, which she found in equal measure in caves, beds, and underground rivers. She came, she saw, etc. We’d met at a meeting of Search and Rescue, where Boone gave a presentation on abseiling techniques. I paid scant attention; Boone Pike was just another fortysomething, hardcore cave rat with a granite-gray ponytail, a smile like a crack in an anchor bolt, and big, spade-shaped hands that looked like they’d been crushed and pinned back together a time or two. I kept sneaking glances at Pree, the only other woman in a room full of men who, as the bumper stickers boast, “do it in tight places.’ A line that would make me chuckle right now, if I could expand my squeezed lungs enough to get a full breath of air. Tight places, indeed. During that day when Pree and I explored the Brotterling, she filled me in on the cave’s not-so-savory past—how every few decades, a caver fails to resurface or, worse, crawls back out physically whole but with a maimed mind and homicidal intent. Not quite what I wanted to hear a quarter mile under the earth, but I loved the sound of her voice when she explained the cave’s frightening history. The first incident was Dr. Reginald Moore, a caver and Presbyterian minister who spent four days lost in the Brotterling in 1935. Lacking modern caving equipment and (perhaps a greater hindrance) a suitably arachnid-like frame, he was thwarted by narrow tunnels and unswimmable sumps, but eventually found his way to the surface and described the “eerie and infernal yodeling” of demons who tormented him by chanting the Psalms backward in fiendish, fist-thumping cadences. Widely mocked by the press, Moore later hung himself after setting fire to his house with his wife, father-in-law, and two young sons tied up inside. Twenty-seven years later, Garth Tidwell, a teenager who entered the Brotterling on a dare, killed himself, his parents, and a neighbor hours after exiting the cave, writing in his suicide note about singing that sounded like “a wild hallelujah of wind chimes and fornicating bobcats.” The lurid description was dismissed as psychotic rambling, probably exacerbated by the terror of being alone and disoriented. If Tidwell had heard anything at all, it was explained away as wind hissing through passageways or water burbling up from an underground stream. But now we come to the Hargrave brothers—Mathew and Lionel—experienced cavers who entered the Brotterling this past Sunday. Lionel, an Iraqi War Vet whose hearing was lost to a roadside IED in Mosel, is totally deaf. A few hours after the two men entered the cave, he emerged alone, battered and bloody. He described how, half a mile below the surface, Mathew had signed to him that he could hear music “coming from distant and delicate singers” and insisted they search for the source of the sound. For a while, Lionel obliged him, but when the way proved too difficult, he suggested they turn back. In response, Mathew became enraged, bludgeoned his brother with a rock, and left him unconscious and bleeding. When Lionel finally found his way to the surface and summoned help, three senior members of Bluegrass Search and Rescue were dispatched—obsessive, spearmint-gum-chewing Bruce Starkeweather, extreme ectomorph Issa Mamoudi, and the ever elusive Pree Yazzie. Boone’s Dream Team. That’s when things started getting weird. At nine that night, Starkeweather contacted Boone via cave phone to report high-pitched humming or chanting. Boone told him to return to the surface. The final transmission, a few hours later, came from a distraught, incoherent Mamoudi—mangled syntax and a garble of English, French, and Farsi that degenerated into choking and wails. No one’s heard from any of them since. Which is how I come to be half a mile under the earth, worming my way through a twist in the moist, black, and aptly named Intestinal Bypass, a wretched, rib-crushing, claustrophobia-inducing belly crawl. Nearing the end, just a minute ago, I came to a plug in the tunnel about ten feet ahead. I can see the bottoms of dirt-packed, lug-soled boots, a damp, filthy oversuit, and, if I crane my neck almost out of joint, I can make out the white dome of a mud-splattered helmet. It’s not Pree, who’s waif-thin and wears size six boots, but one of the men, Hargrave, Mamoudi, or Starkeweather. I crawl closer, scraping along on my elbows and toes, but get no reaction to the light flaring out from my headlamp. My initial thought is that the caver’s become wedged in the last few feet of the Bypass, where the tunnel cinches like a cruelly corseted waist. The first time I came through here with Pree, I tore a rotator cuff trying to shove myself through the passage. Now, four years later and at least fifteen pounds thinner, it’s still a brutal squeeze. My second thought, after I grab a leg and begin shaking it, is that while he may or may not be stuck, this guy’s stone-cold dead. Which means if I can’t push him out, I’m fucked. Shit. Panic pinballs around my ribs. My lungs rasp, and all the air’s vanished. Forget whatever’s inside the cave. Forget Pree and the chance of finding survivors. I want out of here—NOW! Then a soothing, calm voice that I’ve trained for just such situations begins speaking inside my head: Breathe, Karyn. Just breathe. You’re okay. We’ll figure this out. It’s my own voice, the voice I’ve heard in other bad situations above and below ground, and I heed it. I must if I want to live. Gradually, I coax a full breath past the terror constricting my throat. I’m not going to die down here. Not yet, anyway. A numb resolve settles in: I can do this. Trying to eject a dead guy out the end of a tomb-black tunnel while you’re flat on your belly feels like a sadist’s idea of a stunt on some nightmarish survival TV show. I push until my biceps blaze, but it’s impossible to get any traction. I might as well be trying to strongarm Atlas’s Dick, a colossal stalagmite cavers use as a waypoint in one of the Brotterling’s upper chambers. I strain and curse and hyperventilate. Drink tears and cold, musky sweat. The white noise churning through the headphones under my helmet provides an incongruous soundtrack to my struggle: monster breakers shattering on a raw, rocky coastline of black sand and a harsh sun (at least, this is the image I get of it). The sound’s meant to protect me from the singing, but right now—pinched like a thumb in a pair of Chinese handcuffs—the buffering noise only intensifies the terror of being stuck in a limestone tube with a corpse. Desperate, I decide to wiggle back out and look for another way to go on, but the tunnel twists and contorts at excruciating angles. It’s impossible to slither out the way I came in. All I get for my efforts are bruised elbows, torn knees, and the mother of all wedgies. Panic claws at my throat. I’ll never get out. I’ll die here, squished inside a stone straightjacket. But the voice in my head bullies and curses me onward, so I crawl back to the body. Since I’m not strong enough to rely on brute force, I devise a slow, minimalist series of tweaks that gradually loosens this obstinate flesh-cork in its stone bottleneck: nudge, twist, rock side to side, nudge again. The poor son of a bitch must have died two to six hours ago, because rigor’s setting in, which helps me extract him. He’s plank-stiff and (I discover later) both arms are arrowed out in front of him like a cliff diver, the body so rigid by the time it finally pops free, he could double as a javelin or a maypole. I wriggle out, shaking and sweat-slick, and aim my lamp down at the dead man, groaning when it illuminates the back of Mamoudi’s seamed, bloodied neck and reveals the muddy helmet to be a porridge of gray matter and hair glommed around a split, trepanned skull. I picture Mamoudi frantically trying to birth himself out those last crushing inches of squeeze, the irony of a rockfall shattering his skull just as his head poked free. It’s a reasonable theory, except that I don’t see any fallen rocks or broken stalactites to back it up. Looking around, I find myself in a wide, high-domed chamber forested floor to ceiling with dripstone. Farther back, overlapping ledges of white limestone crease and crinkle like bolts of brocade. The scene is enchanting and eerie, a grand Gothic hall carved out of calcite and ornamented with aragonite blooms. At one end glimmers a deceptively shallow-looking pond where eyeless albino salamanders laze on its mineral shores. I know from the survey map this is a sump, the entrance to a flooded tunnel leading into the next chamber, but whether it’s swimmable without a rebreather, I won’t know until I’m underwater. Before I can ponder this or Mamoudi’s demise any further, something more compelling than mere violent death snags my attention: a rapid-fire spitting of sound energy, like a mad tattoo artist bedeviling my nervous system with rhythm rather than ink. The energy natters against my palms and wet-kisses the space between my breasts. I get a sense of its volume and pitch, the aural equivalent of a blind person reading Braille, and I’m lashed with fear and euphoria. Although I’ve come down here to find Pree and the others, I also want to locate the mysterious noise. Boone must have realized that too. It’s why he didn’t want me to go. Displaced air caused by something big lunging out of a passageway makes me whirl around. A frenzy of shadows spills over the chamber as my lamp illuminates a surreal sight: Bruce Starkeweather, his naked torso smeared with geometric designs painted in cave dirt and gore, brandishing three feet of a blood-streaked stalactite. His shell-shocked stare tells me all too clearly I’m nobody he’s ever seen in his life, and my death is all he desires. As the sound energy from the faraway singing swells over me, he raises his club and charges. “You should wear headphones to block out the sounds,” I’d told Boone and the others less than twenty-four hours earlier. We were in a small conference room in the Timber Hill Lodge outside Kremming. A map of the known parts of the cave system was tacked up on a board, the shaded areas indicating parts not yet surveyed. Mamoudi and Pree sat together, guzzling coffee and wolfing down bear claws, while Starkeweather, ascetic as ever, stripped foil off a stick of Wrigley’s. Boone, unshaven and haggard-looking, had just come from the hospital where Lionel Hargrave was recovering from a concussion. He told us Hargrave had described his brother’s manic insistence on finding the source of the singing. In his deafness, of course, Lionel heard nothing and, probably for that reason (and because he evidently had a thick cranium), had survived to talk about it. At my remark about the headphones, Pree laughed. Boone looked away, and Mamoudi got up to refill his and Pree’s coffee mugs. I couldn’t entirely blame them. I was technically there as backup, but since I’m also the newest member of the team and never found time to get my cave diving certificate, my inclusion in the expedition was unlikely. Pree, looking fetchingly peeved, said, “How do we communicate if we can’t hear? What are we supposed to do? Use sign language? Text?” Starkeweather mimed headbanging. “Maybe it’s a death metal band down there making people go batshit. That used to drive my old man insane.” Met with such thoughtful responses, what could I say? I wanted to point out that noise isn’t always benign, that whatever’s down there might be the aural equivalent of lobotomy picks jabbed into the brain via the ears. But it’s only a feeling I have, and this group, Pree especially, is not into feelings. Starkeweather asked a question about the survival kits, and while Boone was responding, I went outside and paced alongside a thin strip of forest next to the parking lot. After a short time, Pree came up beside me and tried to slide her arm beneath mine. I swatted her off like you would a pesky mosquito. Only a few hours earlier, she’d stopped by my apartment to try to rekindle some romance. We’d smoked a joint, laughed about old times. Then she took everything off except Mamoudi’s engagement ring and made love to me like I was the last woman on earth. And I let her. Figured I’d hate myself for it later. Seemed like later had come sooner than I expected. “Seriously, Karyn,” she was saying, “if anything goes wrong down there, if there’s a problem, Issa and Bruce and I will deal with it. We know the Brotterling, and we know what we’re doing. So, don’t try anything heroic.” She should’ve stopped there, but she added, “I know it must be tempting, you with your superpowers and all.” I glared and walked faster. “Okay, sorry. It’s just that hearing sounds through your skin, that’s pretty bizarre.” That’s one word for it. It’s also a gift, this intertwining of hearing and touch, where sounds can be physically felt as everything from a shy tap to a punishing blow. It’s a door into something most people never experience. Pree’s voice, for example, feels lemony, tart. It fizzes under my nails and buzzes up my spine like spikes of Kundalini flame. Intimacy enhances the effect. Pree’s voice used to give me not just sensations but images, too: a fire crackling in the kiva of a house that must be from her childhood in Gallup, New Mexico, a young Pree popping figs into her mouth outside an adobe church, and a pale, bearded man who cooed to her while he lay over her body and pounded. My skin drank her life in through her voice. None of this, of course, I could tell her. “Bizarre’s not the word I’d have chosen,” I said. “But when you put it that way, I feel so special.” “You are special, though, aren’t you? You got written up in that magazine.” She was talking about a story that ran in Scientific American (June 2008), in which I was tested along with a number of other more “traditional” synesthetes. Some heard colors; others tasted or smelled numbers and words. An anomaly even among anomalies, I was the only one who could pick up tactile sensations and images via sound waves, even when I didn’t understand the language. “Aural imagism,” the writer of the article called it. I sat with my eyes closed and listened to a woman recite the same passage in a foreign language over and over. Later, I learned it was Finnish. Her vocal tones prickled the soles of my feet; it felt like dancing on tiny ball bearings. The vibrations of her voice formed images like patterns in a turned kaleidoscope. I described a dark red cup, a yellow rose, a strange bird on the wing. The man doing the testing glanced at his notes and paled. The speaker had read a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I’d just described the primary imagery. Pree laid a hand on my biceps, but I flinched, holding on to my indignation like it was a winning lottery ticket. I said sullenly, “Boone’s screwing up not to send me down with you. I’d be able to feel the singing before the rest of you even heard it.” She sighed and fell into step with me. “Look, Karyn, you’ve been inside plenty of caves. You know what the silence is like down there. Gigantic. A void you don’t want to fall into. Then all of a sudden, you hear something so spooky and so unexpected, you just about crap in your pants. If you heard it topside, you’d know it was nothing, maybe the caver in front of you farted or dropped a carabiner, but underground, it’s terrifying. Most cavers shrug that stuff off, but some people can’t. They have panic attacks; they hallucinate. For all we know, what Hargrave heard was a colony of bats or maybe a few million cave cockroaches.” When I didn’t answer, she snapped, “Dammit, Karyn, are you even listening?” (More intently than you can imagine.) “Maybe Hargrave went crazy because the singing he heard was too beautiful,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “There’s a line in the Duino Elegies by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s something to the effect that beauty is the beginning of terror we can just still stand. Maybe that’s the deal with the singing. It triggers a level of terror humans aren’t meant to endure. It’s too beautiful.” Her mouth set in a pinched line. I thought she was going to slap me. “Nothing’s too beautiful. That isn’t possible.” Then before I could argue, she gave me a punch on the arm that was too hard to be play. “Don’t worry, Karyn; it’s gonna be fine.” She looked back toward the motel as though somebody there had just called her name, although nobody had. She said, “See you on the surface, babe,” and hurried away. Right now, as the sound energy of the singing floods into me and Starkeweather charges, that surface Pree spoke of might as well be on one of Jupiter’s moons. Starkeweather halts just short of the sump. He spits out a lump of gum, bares his teeth in a cannibal grin, and takes a few warm-up swings with the club. I think he’s going to pound me to mud, but to any real caver, what he does next is unimaginably worse: he starts attacking the cave itself, swinging viciously, destroying elaborate lacework and yards of dripstone that have grown at a rate of a half inch per century. Clusters of wedge-shaped helictites explode overhead; stalagmites as tall as a man shatter and crash into the sump. The destruction sickens and horrifies me. Within seconds, something sublime and ethereal has been reduced to an empty mouth full of snaggled teeth. Starkeweather, surveying the rubble, cocks his head and does a bizarre little jig, like he’s shaking off a swarm of cave spiders. He shimmies and scrapes at his face while his lips form the words Shut up! Make it stop! When his eyes refocus, his red gaze finds me again. I switch off my headlamp, and the world floods away in a torrent of black. I drop to the ground and start inching along the cave floor. The headphones are a real hindrance now; they prevent me from hearing which way Starkeweather’s moving. The only sound I can feel is the singing, and that has receded to a shivery caress, a centipede skittering over my eyelashes, a salamander disturbing the roots of my hair. A hail of stones peppers my back and pings off my helmet. Suddenly, Starkeweather’s big hands paw at my legs. I kick out blindly. My boot thuds meaty groin. Then he’s on top of me, spearmint breath hot in my face, mud-slick fingers fumbling for my jugular. A blacker, thicker shade of night starts shutting down synapses, accompanied by a dazzle of sizzling white stars expiring behind my retinas. Under my hand I clutch a slab of smashed dripstone and heave it in the general direction of his head. He releases my throat but then latches on to either side of my mouth and tries to unsocket my jaw. I bite down on a finger until my teeth close on a nugget of bone, then roll away as blood fills my mouth. Next thing I know, I’m underwater. The sump’s frigid and inky, and— Starkeweather be damned—I switch my headlamp back on. I’m inside a flooded tunnel where so much silt has been stirred up, it’s like swimming through horse piss. I look for an air pocket overhead but can make out only jutting mineral walls and the segmented bodies of albino worms ghosting behind swirls of particled water. My lungs bleed for air. The sump narrows into a long, jagged throat, where beyond, water splashes over a pale, fluted ledge. Between me and the air glitters a gauntlet of stone cudgels and knives. My cave pack rips off and my oversuit’s torn. Dark red snakes squiggling too close alarm me until I realize I’m batting away my own blood. My head punches the surface, and I heave myself onto a milk-white dome of flowstone, then collapse across it, teeth wildly clattering. Eventually, I rally enough to fill my hands with rocks and wait to see if Starkeweather follows me. A short time later, he pops to the surface floating facedown. I let him stay like that for five minutes before I grab his belt and haul him up next to me. His neck and cheeks are grotesquely ballooned. When I turn him over, jagged pebbles and mineral chips mixed with shattered enamel gush out of his mouth in a torrent of red. I want to think Starkeweather was already dangerously unstable and would have acted out sooner or later, but I don’t really believe it. I know the singing has unhinged him to the point of attacking the cave with his teeth—the same sounds Mamoudi and Hargrave must have heard, and that Pree, if she’s still alive, is hearing right now. It feels stronger and a helluva lot closer than it did before I passed through the sump. Those previously faint waves of energy are now sharp and urgent, a persistent scratching at various parts of my body, like a frantic child seeking entry to a house at one door and one window after another. But the images accompanying the sensations aren’t so innocuous: a debased horde of humanity crammed into a stadium of bleeding, cruelly crushed bodies, on their knees weeping and howling. Heads thrown back, ready for the knife, keening mad invocations to an obscene deity. Their blood soaks the earth, out of which bloom stone flowers brimming with nectar and death. The vision claws at my heart and I hear my own voice telling me to get moving, to find Hargrave and Pree and get out. It’s hard to obey. I go on. The next chamber confounds me: a sprawling catacomb dripping with soda-straw stalactites and mounded with nodular masses of calcite popcorn. Crystals of moonmilk, a carbonate material the texture of cream cheese, festoon the floor. None of it corresponds to any maps I’ve seen. Even worse are the braided mazes of lava tubes offering a bewildering array of possible paths deeper into the cave’s interior. But the cave, in its infernal sentience, appears to respond. The energy of the singing amplifies, the frequencies becoming imperative, like the head of a silky mallet pinging a flesh xylophone. Letting it guide me, I scramble up a succession of ledges to access a passageway midway up the wall. Its coiled path empties into an angular chamber that resembles a vandalized ossuary: stone pillars surrounding a scattering of femurs, ribs, clavicles, and fragments of skull. That the bones have lain here since long before cavers first discovered the Brotterling is made clear by the centuries-old webs of calcite deposits that veil them. I pick my way through the boneyard as quickly as possible. Beyond it, my headlamp illuminates the area from where the sound energy seems to emanate—a lavish display of boxwork about four feet overhead, where calcite blades project at angles from the cave walls, creating a dense and elaborate honeycomb. Between the mineral blades gleam dark seams, fistulas of ebony pulsing like fat heaps of caviar that vibrate with an avid, luminescent life. Fine, blood-red webbing threads through the black, a network of alien capillaries that carries not blood but warm, coppery sound—it seeps under my scalp and teases behind my ears, seeking to peel back and penetrate the soft, vulnerable creases of brain. If I get out of here alive, I know what I’ll tell Boone: the singing’s not random or chaotic; it has distinct meters and color tones, and it pulses with dark languor underlaid with vicious intent. I will tell him the creators of this song are not human, but not unsentient, either. And if the term life-form applies to them at all, it’s a life in service only to the obliteration of all others. Long stretches of spellbound time pass as I stand here, watching the tiny caviar mouths pulse and burble out a black saliva of sound that feels ripe and almost sexually decadent. Avid and succulent and, yes—Mathew Hargrave nailed it—delicate, too. I want to slather my hands in the mineral meat between those basalt blades, squeeze up fistfuls of its alien iridescence and lather it into my pores, let it replace all the blood in my body with its unholy wails. I take off my helmet and hurl it away. Then I reach up to remove the headphones. And stop. Above me, imbedded into the hivework, loom strange columns worked into the stone, skeletal formations lifting toward the obsidian sky. Sections are patterned with ovoids and creases of lighter stone, the pale areas inlaid with vertical striations of crimson. The sight wallops the breath from my chest. One of the columns is watching me. Basalt doesn’t bleed, but burst eyeballs and lacerated skin weep red down the sides of the dripstone cloaking two human forms in their mineral shrouds. Mathew Hargrave has been almost entirely consumed. Crusts of muscle and gashed bone jut out from his stone sarcophagus. Only his upper chest, the arms tucked into his torso like folded wings, and his slack, swollen face are still recognizably human. His remains are being played like a bone flute as torturesong rasps from his mouth. But Pree, oh Pree, is another matter. Her time inside the Brotterling has been briefer than Hargrave’s; less of her has been entombed. Rigid and ashen-faced, she balances on a narrow outcrop a few feet above, tarry squiggles of hair falling over the rags of her clothing. Her mouth convulses in torment. Skeins of sound tangle in her teeth and snake from her lips. Tendrils of it adhere to her face. The frequency of the vibrations chugs to the lowest registers, rich and mellow, bassoon-like, the notes unspooling in hypnotic spirals, so that each births the next lower note on the scale, and all the while, Pree’s terrified eyes tell me the truth: it’s a death song and she can’t help but sing it. Black rings frame the edge of my vision as Pree’s silent screams flail me. Her body spasms. A rent opens under her breast as the slender spear she’s impaled on exits her chest in a gleaming red fist. Behind two snapped ribs, I glimpse a gray, pulpy thing beating feebly. The ledge is slick and cushiony, weirdly flesh-like, when I climb up, wrap my arms around her, and try to lift her free from the stone. Crimson bubbles erupt from her mouth. She tries to form words. I put my face close to hers as she exhales. Her death-rattle breath goes into me like an intubation tube, rancid and chokingly floral. There are no last words, no blessing, just a sob that’s a truncated ode to damnation as she bleeds and convulses in front of me. And I leave her. God help me, I abandon her there and begin the torturous trek to the surface, a wet, nasty, soul-crushing ordeal, while with every step, I expect the cave to crush or consume me. Most of the way, when I’m not using my hands to climb or to crawl, I clutch at the headphones, terrified they’ll fall off and the singing will overpower and annihilate me. Yet despite hours of exhaustion and terror, somehow I prevail. The passages, in fact, seem to widen as I pass through, the skin-you-alive cold of the sump is less heart-stoppingly frigid, the waypoints more easily spotted. Even the terrifying Bypass, outside of which Mamoudi’s body still sprawls, feels smooth as a tube and excretes me effortlessly. When I finally reach the surface, blinking and bedazzled by the afternoon light, a small army of cavers, media, and National Guard are assembled, as another team of cavers prepares to go down. Boone’s there among them. Seeing me alive, his eyes well, as do mine. I tear off the headphones and sweet sound rushes in, the wind whistling, a truck backfiring, the crowd erupting into ecstatic cheers to see someone come out alive. Then they get a good look at me and my appearance—soaked, shivering, smeared with cave dirt and blood—shocks them silent. As one, they reel back. Finally the braver ones gather their wits and being firing off questions. What happened? What’s down there? Is anyone else still alive? But these are not words the way I remember them. What I hear is a saw-toothed cacophony, an unwholesome chorale—discordant, repellant, impure. I want to rush back inside the cave to get away from their cawing, but I remember that first, I have something important to do. I must warn them of the terrible danger, so I focus my mind and conjure the sounds I will need. When I know what I must say, I run toward Boone, who is already beckoning me. I scream, Get back! Get away from the cave! Everyone inside is dead! But that’s not what comes out. An excruciating hitch unlocks in my chest as an arcane melody, a kind of cryptic trilling, slithers free and soars to the winds—the feral and wondrous, delicate song birthed from the mouths of monsters, from Pree’s mouth into mine—into theirs. Madness made tangible. Contagion by sound. It spews from my lips—a song of such deadly beauty and unholy allure that I experience only the briefest frisson of horror—an emotion something inside me instantly quells—when their mouths fall open, songstruck, enthralled, and they begin to rend their own flesh and tear each other apart. I understand this is how it must be. I go on, unfazed by the carnage, undeterred by the din. For I am the throat of the Delicate Singers. In the cities, the towns, in the streets, and beyond, I know others are waiting to hear me.

From Horror photos & videos July 03, 2018 at 08:00PM

[benchgenderstudies]

The Empathy for Necrophiliacs Out of A Case Of Confederate Incest:

A Gender Professional's adventurous survey and discussion about Steven Pladl's Incestual Indoctrination of his daughter

 by Michael Bench

<Submitted to the Oregonian> 

It's the evening of April 12th ; less than a week after hearing about the stalled media reports of a father daughter couple arrest. Tonight their bodies are lifeless. Their childs' body is lifeless and Katie's stepfather is dead. Where we start with this story is Steven Pladl's selfish , reckless gratifications and the results of living for himself. About 20 years ago his now exwife Alyssa had a first child. They were young reckless teens having unprotected sex without the means to support pregnancy. Who was more reckless I don't know. Alyssa was pregnant at age 17 and gave up this child to adoption. That child was Katie. She's less than two hours dead right now.

 Approximately 18 years later, Katie sought out her biological parents and was invited by Steven Pladl, her father, to move in. This time unprotected sex also seems to have occurred  and in a situation no sex normally occurs. No innuendo can shield a father's lusts from taking their full social disgust to opportune sex with his daughter. She is/was cute, mind you. And, now there's a nearly warm Steven Pladl's body offering a welcome tight pucker for any Necrophiliacs that are into his type.

 Just tonight I was on social media reminding the blogosphere of my disappointment in conservatives who weren't advocating for this antiscience traditional confederate example of family values. Do Americans  living against science have an obligation to notice genetics? Is incest a rally of free speech against evolution? It was a love child (as Fox called it) made in conservative heaven and they wanted nothing to do with it.

  Only 2 days and 45 minutes ago I had sent emails to ACLU and the Judges of Henrico County, VA citing a very simple point that consenting adults are not owed to state law biasing toward or against religion. Only 2 days and 45 minutes ago , I was led to believe any female voluntarily marrying their father would have to be convinced love was real. Shee would have to be equally into him; consenting adults have a right to their decisions. Would Sarah Palin defend them? No; She wouldn't shoo the arm of state law out of a marriage of one man and one woman. She wouldn't rail against Trump's use of celebrity video prostitutes either. He owes the national government $12,400 in taxes if he filed a joint return. Terms of marriage are terms of taxation.

 This evening I see that love is a "not". Steven Pladl's love was as transient as his interest in a reputation. He is believed to have killed his wife-daughter, his grandson-son, his daughter's stepfather and himself; traveling from North Carolina to New York. If a guy is going to have a child with his daughter, lets be sure he understands it’s a symbol of commitment both tragic and karmic that he better damn well support her like any other wife. A consenting daughter, that is. These aren't ideals I craft, I'm more dusting off what advocacy Charlottesville supremacists would take no white pride for. When I decided to take the defense on behalf of religious freedom from Evolution, be sure you understand I'm okay with the southern confederates polluting their gene line into crosseyed idiots. I didn't put them up to it. I didn't tell Katie to go see her father of all people for a hot beef injection. These are the type's of details to send Katie's mom straight off for divorce.  In North Carolina , two generations of the (Pladl) females didn't demand condoms. The conditions of stupidity are undereducated sexual maturity skills. What do Necrophiliacs feel about this? I wondered.  How similar do they feel this is to Josef Fritzls abuse of his daughter. It really did now turn to abuse.

  There's still these bodies around and leads us to our survey: Texting local Necrophiliacs:

Is Steven Pladl a good piece of ass? If you were going to judge this situation, How would you react to the opportunity to get on this fresh piece of meat?

Reacting to what you know about Stephen Pladl : What pickup line best expresses your opinion of this situation?

 A: There is something broke in you. I think we can both agree we have irreconcilable differences and  I'll hate fuck you.

 B: Dahmmmn you freaky, I can top your bottom all rot long.

 C: Well, Usually I 'd let you mourn your wife and kids but I guess since YOU KILLED THEM I'll ask for your blessing for marriage over your shoulder. I've been on a dry spell since they installed cameras at the local cemetery. Something monogamous of yours just fell onto the road.

 D: No way. If I were ever going to pole you, It would be with a fishing gaff right out of your mom before you did anything else stupid.

 Now why would I ask this? Superficially Necrophiliacs are our litmus test of decency. Has Steven Pladl done something to his identity so awful not even a necrophiliac would get on his pudd?  Now, the deeper issue… approximately 7 inches deeper into his chilling colon. Inmate equality. Normally sexual activity is not allowed between inmates. We know these inmates are making each other their pleasure domes. Unfortunately , tonight I have sympathy for incarcerated necrophiliacs that have had no good luck getting at the shiv victims. Or worse, maybe inmate corpses are just too fresh. I don't know the fetish.

As a guy looking for the very top federal offices, I see this as a moment to look out for the little guy. To bring around just a little bit of happiness and affection out of this tragedy. Wouldn't you agree Steven Pladl treats women nothing more than an orifice of pleasure? It's Karmic. The exception case feeds the exception cases.

 And where affection is not: When I contacted Henrico court, Virginia, I was not asking to discuss anything with Steven Pladl. Katie was left in jail while Steven was out on bail. Hasn't this girl been abandoned once already? I called for her release well after her freedom was already secured. It was a fresh story retelling dated material; her jailers ignored she had a child to take care of and a husband no matter how society felt about it. The state was neglecting the child and discriminating against her.  She wasn't looking to reconnect for a new boyfriend and simultaneously she had very little biological inhibition to regard Pladl as her father. Just products of the good ol boy environment not caring a damn.  Recklessness created this entire scene. I type of recklessness that no necrophiliac can share blame for. The crimes of the living southerners against each other made footprints past a step too far. The charges as well: We have murderers in the court system pleading down to jaywalking. IS that who should be free, really? Warrants by Henrico seemed fully ignorant of the outcomes of incarcerating only Steven Pladl while Katie would be locally weighed down with childcare. Her flight risk was low.

 Four things I'd like to see come of this:

I 'd like the wedding party of surviving adoption family members to be detailed about the entire situation of Katie's seeking out her parents to her deathbed. Televised interviews.

 Second, If daughter and father somehow find cause to consensually start a relationship.. despite the fact I call this Incuban Fetish related… and genetically incompetent… that a functional relationship has emotional fairness no matter who the partners are.

 A scorn of conservatives for only playing the easy field for anti science and not protecting one man-one woman marriage. Distinct failures include Trump, Pladls and the ambivalence to cashing in on 'gay mental illness' by regulating the fashion model anorexia industry. Even when republicans have creationist means on their side they're too lazy to regulate for good purposes.

 Finally, the medias attention to this story was delayed to an umpteenth degree so seriously compromising that it may have led to this extreme series of reactionary steps to undo what Steven came to believe was a mistake. Sex is not a mistake. Born children are not mistakes. Asking your daughter to marry you is not a questionably hazy intent.

 Tonight Steven Pladl killed people to save his reputation. Tonight lives ended. To Pladl, they were only objects in his kingdom of wants. Had Steven truly 'brainwashed his daughter' into physical relations,  this case would truly adhere to my definition of Incuban Fetish.  In the very same as-yet-unpublished article , I divulged a similar ego/narcissism disorder known as "Pharaoh Hex".(2014) When you see homicide suicides by males concerning their families, it tends to be an episode of lack of control.

A lawyer firm partner gets pushed out, he feels out of control of his reputation. The double murder suicide of Wrestler Chris Benoit was captioned by his suicide not indicating preparedness to leave this Earth. With him he took 'his familial possessions".

Benoit was regarded as having serious brain damage from his wrestling career. We can suspect Steven Pladl might also have some problems. After all, make no hesitations to wonder if he thought this was normal and how. Was he molested? Does he have some form of undisclosed derangement that only white people get? Fox news went so far as to call the birth a "love child", such a mitigating sympathy press that Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics would not.

 It's now exactly 3 days after we first read about Steven Pladl and Katie Pladl. They're dead sooner than initial press reaction has had its time. I found purpose to write this article in caution to other parents who have an abnormal affinity for your daughters or sons. I will hope that you have more sense than tarnish the family unit relationship. If for some reason your adult children go along with it; like a funny roleplay of incest; I hope you see it's not innocent. Can it be all that bad to reenact from the porn movies online? the people in your family are more than role play characters. Using them for your wants is not what families do. A family of enemies nurtured to hatefuck each other will most likely abuse each other in other ways. That closes to wonder if Katie Pladl is a dead now or dead later case. Will Steven plays the father card too often in disagreements? As disagreements do happen; a control issue that started as recklessly as forgetting to pull out has now killed her. What else might've happened that would've killed her? He was capable of murder for his own means. He'd go so far as to kill two of his children and an adult and that’s what we know.

 So keep the body fresh and lets have an inmate lottery

[mrlongkgraves]

There’s a lesson or two in Utah nurse’s shocking arrest

By now you probably have heard about and seen the video of the Utah nurse who was arrested for protecting a patient’s rights. I am sensitive to issues on both sides.

My sister is a police chief and she does a wonderful job connecting and building trust in her community. But incidents like this can shake our trust.

Our country has seen plenty of incidents involving the abuse of power and authority. These incidents can lead to animosity and divisiveness between different groups.

“Our country has seen plenty of incidents involving the abuse of power and authority. These incidents can lead to animosity and divisiveness between different groups.”

If you haven’t heard about what happened, here’s a quick play by play: A Salt Lake City police detective requested that a University of Utah Health nurse draw labs on a patient. According to news reports, the patient was involved in a vehicular accident but was not the cause of the accident. The person who supposedly caused the accident died at the scene. The patient was not able to give consent for the labs, was not under arrest and there was no warrant. If this detective or officer came to you with this request, what would you do?

Know your hospital policy

There is a reason hospitals have policies, and this is a great example. While you may not be able to remember every policy off the top of your head, you can always pull up a policy and review it if you need clarity on the details and protocol. If you follow hospital policy and something happens, you will be protected by the hospital in case of a lawsuit — “protected” in terms that the hospital will defend your actions.

If you choose not to follow hospital policy — say, for instance, you drew the labs on the request of the detective, without a court order or patient consent, and on a patient that wasn’t under arrest — you open yourself up to many potential legal ramifications. These can include a civil lawsuit (battery-no consent), practicing outside of your scope of practice and HIPAA violations. The issue in this case is whether to draw the labs requested from the detective to “save for later” versus drawing labs requested by a provider per an order before the draw.

Of course, labs were drawn for other reasons with this patient, although he could not consent. The justification here is the assumption that the reasonable person would not want to be denied necessary medical care because they are too incapacitated to consent. However, there are rules for ordering labs that are in place to protect an individual’s rights when he or she cannot consent, and if the labs go beyond the emergency and acute care treatment that person needs.

“If you choose not to follow hospital policy — say, for instance, you drew the labs on the request of the detective, without a court order or patient consent, and on a patient that wasn’t under arrest — you open yourself up to many potential legal ramifications.”

Code of ethics

The American Nurses Association Code of Ethics provides the ethical guide for nurses in these types of situations. Provision 1.4, The Right to Self-Determination, speaks to the respect for autonomy. In this case, the respect for autonomy was at risk. This provision states that patient decisions are to be autonomous, which requires the patient to have adequate and accurate information, and their decision needs to be voluntary. In clinical practice, this is gained through the informed consent process.

The emphasis for respect of autonomy, voluntariness and informed consent was in large part a response to the Nazi medical atrocities of World War II (ANA, 2015). During this time, nurses were complicit in these atrocities. If voluntariness cannot be obtained, then a surrogate can be the decision maker. The role of the surrogate is to make decisions that are in the best interests of the patient.

The second provision that applies is Provision 2.1, Primacy of the Patient’s Interests. Here, the Code of Ethics notes that since the nurse’s primary commitment is to the patient, it carries the greatest weight and can lead to conflict (ANA, 2015).

The nurse stood up valiantly for her patient when the patient could not speak for himself. Standing up in any situation can be a very uncomfortable, if not scary feeling. Based on the video, I am not sure who was around that could have helped de-escalate the situation and if anyone could have effectively helped. In addition to nurses knowing policy, scope of practice and the Code of Ethics, programs such as TeamSTEPPS can be effective in providing a higher quality safer patient care environment. Having a team of individuals stand with you to support you should be a goal in any organization.

“The nurse stood up valiantly for her patient when the patient could not speak for himself.”

TeamSTEPPS

Unfortunately, there are many situations that can occur in our healthcare organizations daily that compromise ethical and legal boundaries. The TeamSTEPPS program is a teamwork system designed for healthcare professionals to improve patient safety and produce highly effective teams. It was developed with more than 20 years of research by the Department of Defense’s Patient Safety Program in collaboration with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The training and materials for this program are located on the AHRQ website.

At this point unless other details surface, the detective was in the wrong, the nurse was in the right. Hospital policies and protocols exist for a reason, which are always aligned and updated with current laws and regulations.

I am thankful the nurse stood up for her unconscious patient’s rights. Her actions demonstrate why nurses remain the most trusted profession.

“I am thankful the nurse stood up for her unconscious patient’s rights. Her actions demonstrate why nurses remain the most trusted profession.”

  Courses Related to ‘Pediatric Nursing’

60097: Everyday Ethics for Nurses (1 contact hr) This course provides an overview of bioethics as it applies to healthcare and nursing in the U.S. It begins by describing the historical events and forces that brought the bioethics movement into being and explains the concepts, theories and principles that are its underpinnings. It shows how ethics functions within nursing, as well as on a hospitalwide, interdisciplinary ethics committee. The course also explains the elements of ethical decision making as they apply to the care of patients and on ethics committees. The course concludes with a look at the ethical challenges involved in physician-assisted suicide, organ transplantation and genetic testing.

CE548: Protect Yourself  (1 contact hr) Nurses have an obligation to keep abreast of current issues surrounding the regulation of the practice of nursing, not only in their respective states, but also across the nation, especially when their nursing practice crosses state borders. Because the practice of nursing is a right granted by a state to protect those who need nursing care, nurses have a duty to patients to practice in a safe, competent and responsible manner. This requires a nurse licensee to practice in conformity with their states statute and regulations. This course outlines information about nurse practice acts and how they affect nursing practice.

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