#not going to share all my symptoms

[morethan-oatmealandfruit]

Kinda struggling with how bloated I am tonight. the acid reflux/stomach problems aren't helping. Can't stop burping. Gross recovery problems; my digestive system is not happy. The starving was hard, but familiar. This constant processing of food is hard to get used to.🫤

Still better than starving though. For sure.

[goldkirk]

Got my first meeting with a psychiatrist in over a year since the last one demanded details about trauma when I was visibly sweating and shaking! Let’s hope today goes much better and that I have the prefrontal cortex online enough to leave if necessary instead of tolerating that kind of thing again

[theygender]

The more I think about it the more I really feel like the recently coined term mesosex might fit me and it's been shared by several intersex education/advocacy blogs I follow now so I know there's support for the term but I'm still like. Scared I would be Intruding™ on intersex issues if I started using it. Like I mean. I'm an afab & (afaik) perisex person with a reproductive disorder that's likely caused by a (non-intersex) hormone imbalance which I'm now essentially having to take feminizing HRT to fix, and as a result I'm now growing tits and undergoing female-pattern fat redistribution at the age of 25 after years of having little to no secondary sex characteristics. I've always identified with intersex issues but now that I'm essentially having to undergo HRT to make my body match my asab that connection to intersex issues feels even stronger. And like that's what the term is for. But my anxiety is still like "but what if you're intruding tho" lol 🙃

[redrockbutch]

I feel like "do you feel an accomplishment after completing a task" discourse is going the way of so many, where people who claim not to feel this are deciding they're the perfect ones to explain how they believe it would feel and ascribing an exaggerated level of emotion that few people ever reach, which means that more people read those posts and decide they also must not feel Sense Of Accomplishment Emotion: The Ticker Tape Parade when in fact everyone involved does, it's just small and weak bc they don't nurture that feeling and instead as soon as they complete a task they wallow over their belief that they're chemically incapable of being happy for themselves

[bluesey-182]

haha major yikes. we're supposed to have family dinner at my grandparents on sunday for father's day and my dad doesn't know if it's just my parents and us or if the whole family is invited, and the latter will be a problem bc i blocked my cousin on absolutely everything months ago with zero explanation and that will be suuuuper fucking awkward if they're gonna be there

[edwardshundredyearoldspunk]

…

[belladonnafey]

y’all are just saying shit now huh

[ID: a tumblr reply that reads “Common addage that ND people absorb what is interesting to them, and NT people absorb only what they see as useful. But I've come to realise that many NT people don't see very many things as useful. “END ID]

[pepprs]

awesome so today we (my colleague besties and me) were potentially exposed to covid by two different people we spent the morning with because nobody gives a fuck anymore and we’re all going to get sick and die. awesome! i love being alive in fall 2023 when nobody gives a single shit about covid anymore and this nightmare country has apparently decided to move on even though the danger has not subsided and arguably has increased and we no longer have access to resources or information to keep ourselves and each other safe. fuck the world

[narrator-navigator-storyteller]

it is far too late at night for me to open my dash to a post that says ADHD doesn't exist and is just a symptom set of autism.

[ef-1]

Hi dear, I was diagnosed with Optic Neuritis yesterday and I struggle to wake up for work today. Everything that I'm trying to see is in double and I can barely read a single word. Seeing your post regarding (tw) MS and Optic Neuritis makes me feel less lonely.

Just stumbled upon your profile and turned out you do F1 blogging as well. ;)

I'm really sorry you're going through that and I'm more glad than i can put into words that this clowny blog made you feel less lonely.

if its any consolation, it gets better. it'll never stop being painful or difficult but you will be better.

[bunnyb34r]

Bleugh gotta go shower before I can lay down to nap but dont have the energy/motivation to get up and do that

[jamboreeartsupplies]

smh im sorry for being gone, tbh things have been a bit stressful irl and also i still haven't been able to customise any of my furbs so i feel bad and i never leave the house so i dont have fun and cool pics to share :(

[calico-kiwi]

someone save me helllpppppp

[togekissesofgrace]

I Would Like For Things To Stop Happening For A Single Fucking Second.

[intersectionalpraxis]

My kid Kinan trying to stop me from going out because there’s bombing | Gaza [@/ MuhammadSmiry on X. 01/08/24.]

This baby is still learning to talk but he says "قصف"= "bombing" loud and clear. He lost his childhood before it even started. [@/ RudaynaIbrahim on X.]

The IOF continues to steal the childhoods of countless Palestinian children. I've seen so many videos of very blatant symptoms of PTSD -seeing emotional and psychological responses to triggers from sudden sounds and movements. You can see stress and anxiousness and fear in their eyes -even when we see videos of them smiling/being hugged and comforted by journalists, doctors, and neighbors/relatives in their communities -they have been robbed -so many of them for decades now and continuously of just being able to be children -to be free from violence and oppression.

I have also seen videos of their entire lives being changed instantaneously with a debilitating injury or amputation due to their communities/hospitals/homes being air-striked, to losing their entire families and being orphaned. I've seen videos of them lifeless in their parents arms -something no parent SHOULD EVER have to record and share to get the world to fucking pay attention.

These are 'experiences,' and circumstances NO child should EVER have to face in their life. I'd say where the hell has UNICEF been -because aren't you supposed to be protecting children's rights ALL around the world? Are Palestinian children not worthy of protection? Over 10,000 of them have been MURDERED by the IOF.

Children shouldn't have to be worried about hearing BOMBS -they should be talking about their school lives, their friends, how excited they are to go to the beach, to try new foods at a restaurant they want to go to, to travel -to do so many wonderful things but THIS is what they have to live with right now even with glimpses of light and hope...

I will say this time and again -the United Nations is disgraceful.

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)