#fuck you cancer!

[zionchubby14]

I wasn't sure if I was going to make a post about this, but this is something I feel like I need to do, especially for those who know and care about me (I know, people care on here? That's crazy.). I'm definitely going to struggle typing this all out, but...here it goes.

_____

So over the past month (and quite possibly earlier), Mom has been dealing some abdominal pain that radiates to her back. The pain would be so bad that it would cause her to throw up at times. She barely ate and slept while this was going on. On January 6th, things finally came to a head and we made the call to take her to the hospital.

When she first came in, she was diagnosed as suffering from pancreatitis (for those who don't know, it's inflammation of the pancreas that, if left untreated, can cause a high amount of pain and nausea to the person. There's two types of pancreatitis: acute, which is very treatable and will go away after a while, and chronic, which will last a lot longer and hurt more). They were able to treat her and she felt better for a while, discharging her after 3 days. When they released her, they wanted her to get a endoscopy test done up at a hospital in Royal Oak. With neither Mom or I having a car, this was difficult for us to do. But we would come to know why soon enough.

Mom came home and for a day or two, she seemed fine. She ate well and was able to sleep soundly, which I thought was the important thing. But the pain and nausea eventually came back with a vengeance We tried every the hospital doctors had told us: heating pads, soft to liquid diet, pain patches. Nothing was working. Her primary care doctor even had her go on some antibiotics and a stronger pain med than she had, but nothing seemed to help matters. We took her back to the hospital this past Saturday, January 20th.

When we initially got there, after they had done a CT scan on Mom, they said that the pancreatitis was gone. But what was left was a mass on her pancreas. Scared and unsure as to what it may be, they admitted her and has been in the hospital since. On Tuesday, they took her to the University of Toledo Medical Center for the endoscopy and see what the mass might be. They did the scope and drew fluid from the mass for testing.

On Wednesday, we get the news that it is cancer. More precisely, metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma. In layman's terms, it's Stage IV pancreatic cancer, not curable.

I could not believe it...

We don't really know how long she may have left, but the rough and harsh estimate is less than 6 months...

Needless to say, I broke down, not in front of Mom or my brothers (who have been with Mom and I throughout this whole thing).

I can't imagine being here on Earth without Mom and I'm somehow going to have to figure out how to...I panicked and wanted to run away...a moment of weakness...

I don't know what will happen between now and the inevitable day, but we all agreed that we're going to try and make the most out of the days she does have left. I know that there will be bad days ahead, and there'll be good days as well.

But it's tough, knowing that the last few years I've been taking care of her (and complaining about her behavior, which is making me feel guilty about, now that this is happening) and it's going to come to an end.

_____

I know this isn't the greatest of things to post on here, but I needed some therapeutic way to get some of the emotions I am feeling right now out and to inform you all of what has been going on. I thank you all for the thoughts and positive vibes before and coming in the future. It's going to be a rough time ahead and I hope you will all bear with me in the meantime.

I love you all.

[dangergggg]

A smol doodle- We love you Sammy <3

[an-adhd-infested-nerd]

I have no real connection to my Irish heritage but every time something bad happens to the royal family the 50% Irish in me jumps up and does a jig

[natjennie]

"we had to tell my six year old son that I had cancer... and he said... 'dada, did you know that when you touch a magnet to a piece of metal sometimes that metal also becomes a magnet?' and I was like, yeah I'm fucking hank green" AGDJFHSKRUEIDHKWISH

[essektheylyss]

presented without comment

[dem0lit1on]

Reblog if you agree

[sexhaver]

definitely one of the most difficult moments of my professional career was when i was doing tech support for [REDACTED]'s automated biomed research lab and like. hang on lemme greentext this

>tell them i can fix this issue in half an hour with a remote support session (aka Teamviewer)

>"you want to... control our computers???? over the internet????? like some kind of HACKER???????"

>their IT submits my request to upper management and after two weeks they reluctantly allow me to get remote access to their systems

>by logging into a virtual machine using a 20-digit password and then using a specific program inside of that virtual machine

>while sharing my screen with someone from their IT team the entire time

>finally get remote access to the PC with the issue

>go to open log files to start troubleshooting

>ERROR: User does not have read permissions.

>what the fuck

>ask their IT guy why it's saying that

>"...because we don't want you looking at our stuff, duh?"

>take deep breath before calmly explaining that i need to open files in order to fix their problem

>IT guy submits my request to upper management

>after another week i go through the whole process again but can actually open the log file this time

>cool, it's exactly the issue i thought it was and i know exactly how to solve it

>open the relevant settings file, change a single number, hit Save

>ERROR: User does not have write permissions.

>what the FUCK

>ask IT guy how i'm supposed to fix their system if i can't change literally anything on it

>takes 20 minutes of arguing to get him to admit that maybe i need write access

>he submits the request to upper management

>a week goes by

>upper management denies it

>says i can just verbally tell the IT guy on the call what to type and he'll do it for me

>deep breaths. deep breaths.

>start third remote session

>go to open the relevant .log file in notepad, which isn't the default program it opens with for some reason

>they fucking disabled right clicking

>[REDACTED] has a $118 billion market cap btw

>manage to walk the IT guy through using the command line (which he had never seen before and was scared of) to edit the relevant file

>three weeks go by

>new support ticket in my inbox

>"why didn't your fix fix this completely unrelated issue?"

>they still won't give me write access

>VP of [REDACTED] yells at me in our weekly meeting for taking so long to fix a third unrelated issue they never submitted a ticket for and is also not actually an "issue" but an intended feature of our software that they don't like

>i went to college for this

[thebitchesterbrothers]

I thought a lot about Hob meeting Death for the first time and of course they’re hitting it off straight away … but what if instead of Dream it’s Hob who accompanies Death while she’s working? Just because he’s a curious brother-in-law and none of the Endless can say no to his pleading cow eyes.

He witnesses how calm and peaceful it can be to leave the living world behind with someone as gentle as Dreams sister to guide someone’s soul.

It scares Dream; what if Hob decides he wants to end his life after all?

But in reality it heals a part of Hob that he never was able to piece back together before.

Eleanor. Robyn. The baby that never got the chance to take its first breath. His memories are still painful, still make him tear up.

But seeing Death do her job makes him feel … grateful. Knowing that she was with them at the end of their days, smiling at them, taking their hands, holding them in her arms.

It also makes him appreciate life even more and he promises to enjoy every single day as much as humanly possible.

[su-talks-about-things]

I haven't even seen it yet because I'm late but after what we've learned, knowing that Sam came back during a live show, with thousands of people cheering for him! Knowing this feels heartwarming and amazing because he got to return like the absolute king that he is. This man has made people laugh and cry for years, so coming back to such an audience after winning his battle against cancer feels like... I don't know guys, that is just what he deserved and I hope he felt the love and support and everything else.

[fandomestuff]

Gods, I am both so relieved and so sad and sorry for Sam. It's been an emotional morning I can tell you that.

The quickest and best recovery to Sam and I just wanted to say: Mr Riegel, your diction is impeccable and still better than mine.

[slugcatmusings]

What is the Rot? Why is the Rot?

Spoiler Warning and Holy Wall of Text Batman Warning. I got WAY too into questioning the turbo-cancer here, hopefully my rambling makes sense.

So, the Rot is… weird, from a biological standpoint. Really weird, if you stop to think about it. It’s most frequently described as some variation of cancer, and it certainly fits the criteria for it. Caused by damage to DNA? Check. Multiplies uncontrollably? Check. Comes in both benign and malignant forms, one stationary and the other mobile? Big fat check. Heck, even the Rot cysts eating other creatures kind of fits, according to some research I’ve done – there are apparently cancer cells that will eat other cells, which makes sense in hindsight since cancer cells are cells that have lost important genetic restrictions, which may include whatever lets cells identify other cells as “do not eat.”

(I ain’t a biology whiz and I’m doing research on the fly while getting my thoughts out here, so take whatever I say about biology with a grain of salt)

So, Rot is clearly cancer of some kind, right? Case closed. Except when me and a friend of mine were talking Rain World theories on Discord, she brought up some interesting points that got me thinking.

First point: Rot cells obviously mutate in a way that affects FAR more than just cell replication and termination. Some of the cysts can HEAR. As far as I know, cells in the body do not hear sounds. They communicate via chemical signals and maybe, MAYBE react to temperature. Hearing involves complicated, specialized sensory apparatus to pick up on vibrations in the air. Even if you simplify it and say that it’s only vibrations, that’s STILL a multicellular thing, not a single-cell thing. It’s something that took millions of years to evolve on Earth, if not billions.

And while Rain World’s timeline goes on for long enough that it those kinds of mutations might happen eventually, Rot cysts have the ability to hear pretty much right from the start – because even the Proto-Long-Legs react to your presence like the Daddy Long Legs do, and the Rot in Spearmaster’s campaign, where Pebbles has recently contracted it, reacts the same way as it does in later campaigns. It’s already able to hear.

As far as I know, cancer just means the same cell duplicating over and over again. Are more mutations possible with each division, as errors are made in the DNA during splitting? Probably. But not to THAT extent. There’s no way a lump of cancer somehow mutated the exact complicated genetic blueprint needed to grow organs, at least not without outside interference.

Second point: Cases of Rot are way too consistent across the board. Now, we don’t have a huge sample size to work from, but from what we see from both Pebbles’ Rot, and Hunter Long Legs, they’re… pretty similar. Hunter Long Legs is basically a mobile Rot cyst. They move the same way, seem to grow the same way (starts as a growth inside/on the body before eventually freeing itself from whatever wall/flesh it grew from in some capacity and moving elsewhere), they have the same senses, and they even eat the same way, via something like phagocytosis (how white blood cells “eat” invading organisms via engulfing them and breaking them down in a sac in their main “body.”)

Now, this doesn’t tell us much, because cancer, when it does emerge, is pretty consistent in symptoms/what the mutated cells do once they start replicating. It’s pretty much the same regardless of whatever organism the cancer is happening in. But what ISN’T consistent is what causes the DNA error in the cancer cell in the first place. IRL, cancer can be caused by all kinds of things – smoking, radiation poisoning, being out in the sun too long, drinking deadly chemicals and whatnot, anything that damages DNA. But in RW, the only time we ever hear Rot talked about, or see it present, is in the context of an iterator having f*cked up while mucking around with DNA. Pebbles was trying to create an organism that could change his own genome, and No Significant Harassment created Hunter as a messenger and probably mucked something up in the process in his haste to get them to Moon.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other causes of it, of course, we’re working with a sample size of two in an apocalyptic world with who knows how much potentially DNA-damaging stuff around, but… that’s still awfully consistent.

So, combining these points and everything we know to be canon, Rot is:

an organism that lives inside another organism

Until a certain condition is met, it cannot harm said host organism.

Once said condition is met, it goes out of control, wreaking havoc on the organism’s systems and mutating, giving it sensory capabilities and an appetite

Said condition is apparently someone messing up when re-arranging genomes, in yourself or others

It is widespread across multiple different species, at least iterators and slugcats but potentially other species as well.

Once you have a bad case of it, it is apparently NOT CURABLE. Pebbles tried everything he could think of but apparently exhausted all of his options by the time of the Survivor/Monk campaigns.

So, with all the context FINALLY laid out, here’s my wild theory: Rot isn’t a cancer. It’s a symbiote turned parasite. Specifically, I believe it’s a symbiotic microbe that lives inside the cells that make up every other creature in Rain World, and is held in check by a specific gene that all species share, and altering or getting rid of that gene causes it to go berserk, taking over and eventually mutating the host cells.

Yeah, I did watch Parasite Eve let’s plays as a kid, why do you ask? Anyway, hear me out here.

There is precedence for single-celled organisms living inside of other single-celled organisms. They’re referred to as intracellular endosymbiots (hopefully I got the spelling right there), and the most well-known one is probably the mitochondria. The powerhouse of the cell is thought to be descended from some bacteria way, WAY back that was engulfed by a larger cell and not only survived it, but BENEFITED from it. Since then those ancient proto-mitochondria and eukaryotic cells have mutually evolved to be dependent on each other. So it’s entirely possible for something similar to have happened in Rain World.

However, I don’t think it happened NATURALLY, here. Because something that’s able to take over a cell entirely and begin wildly mutating it is NOT something your average cell wants inside of it. There’s a VERY high chance of extinction if you do that. Which means that of course those funky bio-tech loving Ancients either took a look at a wildly dangerous cellular parasite and went “hmmm we can use this” or made one themselves.

Why did they do this? Who knows! Currently, I’m tied between “they needed a better powerhouse for the cell to power the various weird adaptations they’re building into various creatures,” “there was some sort of disease that this parasite gave immunity against and they wanted to make use of it,” and “it gave their creations massively powerful regeneration factors that made them much easier to maintain.” Possibly it was all three. Whatever the reason, the Ancients either found or created this parasite, and put it into their creations’ cells, hoping to reap the benefits.

Well, they got the benefits, but they also got a microbe that hijacked the cells and harnessed their pre-existing DNA blueprints to build organisms disguised as great big blobs of cancer. Which is not exactly ideal, but hey, they just had to figure out a way of keeping the cell hijacking from happening! And the way they ended up going about it was to alter the thing so that so long as there was a specific DNA sequence in the cell, it laid mostly dormant. All the benefits, none of the risks – so long as that specific string of genes remained intact.

And then BECAUSE it was so beneficial, they spread their artificial symbiote and it’s genetic reins throughout ALL of their creations, from the smallest pipe-cleaning slugs to the iterators. Which meant that as their purposed organisms replaced most of the original ecosystem, they spread the symbiote as well. Thus making it possible for pretty much ANY creature on the planet to come down with a bad case of the Rot. And with the iterators, I wouldn’t be surprised if this symbiote is tied to their self-destruction taboos. Try to cross yourself out? Well, it’s gonna maybe happen now, but it’ll be a slow painful death as you’re eaten alive from the inside and all your own parts turn against you, so was it really worth it?

And they never told their creations this perhaps even actively hid it, because why tell them the cause of the main deterrent to them mucking with their taboos? They might find a way around it. The iterators were left ignorant of how Rot works, and because of this they never figured out that Rot HAD a cure after all: rebuilding that genome that reins in the symbiote. Because why in the name of the Void would they repeat the same mistakes that gave them Rot in the first place, and potentially make it worse?

[therabbitthatpostthings]

Post-Shibuya Nanami fics are bread and fucking butter okay. Reader reassuring him that he is loved and admired-

I read one where he complained that looking at thier wedding photos made him depressed and this bitch was like “Ken let’s take new photos on our anniversary.” CAUSE THEY LOVE HIM SO MUCH AND O WOULD DO THAT SHIT TO CAUSE I LOVE HIM SO MUCH-

[princessbutler1316]

Do you know why we don't have More scenes with Hugh Jackman shirtless or showing more skin?

Because he is a skin cancer survivor and he have to take some precautions

So

FUCK YOU CANCER

[brainrotcharacters]

THEY'RE ALL ADORABLE

[arkiwii]

welcome to rhodes island, my pharmeutical company. here we want to restore equality in society and cure a terminal disease. let me present you to some of our operators

we have dorothy franks. she's a very brillant scientist and created an huge amalgam resulting from an experience using innocents lives, which almost destroyed the entire country it was in. she's really nice and kind

there we have loughshinny dublinn, they served as the leader of a terrorist revolutionary group that caused several assaults in victoria. they did not meant it

here's w. she's also a terrorist but she meant it

hey here's lappland saluzzo. her disease has rendered her completely mad and she is behind countless slaughters. i forgot why she's here

and here's ho'olheyak, she did several murder attempts on me. we can change the subject if you want

[alliumdykes]

The fact that when I came back from the cinema wanting to see some cool art and people talking about interesting stuff after something so flipin awesome and the first thing i see was the dream team being so fucking rude during a CHARITY EVENT for their DEAD FRIEND is honestly so disheartening.

My grandfather was so lucky to get cancer twice and survive both times, I knew someone who lost her dad to cancer. I know someone who survived childhood cancer. One of my great grandparents died of cancer, my family on both sides is extremely family oriented if he never died I would have met him. The fucking disrespect that they showed should not be laughed at, it shouldn’t be encouraged.

The fact they were playing airhorns during Technodad’s speech, one that should have been respected and really quiet durning and no one interrupting is the fucking worse. I don’t care if dteam fans say that it’s funny and Techno would have laughed because it’s not the fucking point!!!

The whole festival was a charity event in honour of their friend, and for Technodad his fucking son. No one should have gone though this. I don’t care if this comes across as rude or overreacting because the dteam need to grow the fuck up and learn that their actions have fucking consequences for once.

This isn’t supporting a brand that’s actually a scam, this isn’t saying something offensive by accident. This is being rude and disrespectful.

And it even hurts that none of their fans are going to care a single bit because I don’t fucking know maybe they’ll say “but it was a joke” or “dream has ADHD your being ableist” because none of that shit matters when you realise that neither of those things matter when it’s about respect.

These are the same fans who will defend these mother fuckers to the grave but when someone like Niki Niahchu accidentally uses avae because she doesn’t know about American history or what avae is because she lives in Germany(or any non American country because the world doesn’t revolve around you fuckers) and is called overreactive during mcc and having a lot of stress put onto her and BREAKS DOWN ON STREAM it’s ok because they think it is.

I want dteam fans to see this post and be uncomfortable, I don’t care if I’m being mean to your pretty white boys because they have been allowed to do anything with a platform that is way to big for them for too long. I’m allowed to be angry as well, I’m allowed to be mean, I’m not apologising to you if you feel sad that I’m being mean about them because they need to grow up.

Charlie had every right to tell dream to shut up during that stream.

Edit: I’m not going to be answering anymore asks about this post, I want my blog to be a personal space for me. This post wasn’t supposed to get as big as it has and just for me to rant. I’m only going to be accepting art requests and general asks and nothing about this. I’m 14 please leave me alone.