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parsley-the-crow · 7 months ago

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Jekyll’s original goal - in the novella at least - was to make himself a way to let go of his inhibitions a little without endangering his reputation. “Hyde” was a pseudonym that he went out under while wearing a chemically induced costume to go do shit he wouldn’t be able to get away with otherwise. I don’t think it was ever supposed to separate anything. Both of those instincts (charity and indulgence and shit) were already there. He makes a point that he was always fully capable of acting on either, he was just scared to without the anonymity. He didn’t need a separate consciousness for that - he just got carried away. The split personality is an adaptation thing. And TGS Jekyll seems to have the same respect for his baser side that novella Jekyll did. There’s no “he is a nightmarish parasite that I would eradicate had I the power,” like certain stories would have you believe. It’s “I should divide him off from me so that he can satisfy himself without dragging me and my interests with him.” I’m not sure, but I think the idea that Jekyll wanted to get rid of the “evil” in him comes from the musical.

I don’t feel strongly about this or anything, it just takes lots of words to point out the differences between these interpretations and the changes people made either on accident by misinterpreting the information or deliberately as a statement about human nature.

But anyway, the thing about him contemplating the fact that his experiments could have just as easily turned him Pretty brained! That��s what I said! That was my first idea! What if Jekyll reacted to this society that successfully extracted the aggression from human nature with horrifying dystopian results!

This is why it never made sense to me to say “Jekyll is the good side and Hyde is the evil side.” In adaptations where they are a split personality, Hyde is Jekyll’s impulses, aggression, and base desires concentrated and given a will of their own. But Jekyll hasn’t changed. Jekyll in his normal form hasn’t lost any significant traits. He’s still most of his whole self. I know what it would look like if he had lost traits, he wouldn’t be able to pretend to be the same guy in his daily life.

Let’s talk about how many things it’s common knowledge in this setting that humans figured out how to do that a gentleman of that era would’ve thought of as power only capable of being held by God. The monitoring, the way there is no where to go that they can’t see you and judge you, is one of those. The power to take one instant and annihilate a city, cursing the land it was on for millennia. The body modification, the complete control they have over everything about the way their bodies look and are built. Fuck. The creation. The hole in the wall that you can just get items out of. You can describe an object to a voice in the wall, and it will synthesize anything for you in moments. It needs materials first, which God doesn’t, but it can just make stuff instantly. No skill or time crafting it, you know? Can you think of any more?

Pretty Hyde? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. He IS the traits that get suppressed by the surgery. I say he would be bound up in the void because the lesions would put him specifically to sleep. Even if it were Hyde’s body they did it to, Hyde wouldn’t be able to surface or influence Jekyll at all once they went under the knife. Maybe Jekyll would be stuck in Hyde’s body in that case? But what’s left of him after the operation would certainly be the pilot.

Oh. Oh shit. Oh my word. Jekyll getting home while still under the influence of the Pretty surgery? Oh fuck. I assume the lodgers would eventually figure out how to cure him? Because I am a sucker for devastating angst with a happy or mostly happy bittersweet ending. Like, when the angst will affect them forever but they get to a place where they’re okay with that? That’s the stuff. But at first, imagine them discovering an addled, far too agreeable Henry and being heartbroken. Especially Lanyon, Rachel, and Jasper.

I think this post is too long at this point, we should just start tagging each other in new posts and linking the previous ones.

Another J&H crossover idea I had: Have you ever read the Uglies series?

Imagine Jekyll (could be the original book, could be TGS) ending up in Uglies because of plot contrived time travel stuff. Imagine the people there end up figuring out what happened to him (maybe the guy from the museum of Rusty technology knows something that could've done done this) but they assume he's from another city at first because it turns out that he's what they call a "natural Pretty." Inspired by TGS and how, not only is everyone he meets positively taken by his big amber eyes and his brilliant smile, there are so many stories of people getting the physical copy of the comic and all their friends flocking to comment on how handsome Jekyll is, kinda getting into the story themselves out of attraction to the guy. His sirenish charm even works in real life. Reminded me of the Pretties from Uglies.

But you know what about them reminds me of him even more than that? The lesion thing. That brain surgery. The one that inhibits your ability to feel your emotions very strongly or to be very alert or clearheaded. The one that increases your susceptibility to social influence and makes your senses dull. Puts you in a daze where time feels like a syrup and you feel pleasant always, but never pleasure. Where you're never fully there. For the purposes of suppressing their ability to get into destructive conflicts. To keep them away from "ugly" thoughts and feelings. Wouldn't do to have a group of people that picturesque spoiled by a capacity for behavior that doesn't match. The surgery that does the exact opposite of what the potion does. This is what it really looks like when you extract all there is in you that is unsocial or extreme. Imagine Jekyll finding out what happens to Pretties' brains and making the connection. Imagine him realizing this could just have easily been what happened to him and being horrified.

I think it would be fun.

@jekyllhyde-ballad, @m0ntylee, @lukas-broken-bow, @marisol-000, @beacedocrime,

@shyshyaaaaa

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uzumaki-rebellion · 3 years ago

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“Black Boys Bloom Thorns First: Volume 4, Chapter 16″

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"It's been a long time

It's been a long time

Days and days, nights and nights

Weeks and weeks, months and months

A year has gone by and haven't seen your face, baby

Holding on, lonely days

Hoping you'll come my way…"

Laurnea – "Been A Long Time"

Three years.

Erik N'Jadaka Udaku-Stevens slept in cryostasis under the Hall of Black Panthers with T'Challa's secret team of doctors, and no one else in the palace had wind of it.

Shuri stared through the protective glass covering that encased Erik's nude body. She stripped the prince naked and had every inch of him scanned several times. The wound in his chest was healed, but attempts to wake him proved challenging. She took the extra step and scanned his body for an empath signature and it was there, bright magenta and as strong as Joba's. His brain functions appeared normal, but the moment she injected him to wake up, critical organs shut down without the aid of the chamber. Shuri spent weeks studying a network of brain regions to help her pinpoint why he would not rouse from consciousness despite a healed body and no visible brain injury.

The team of doctors became her greatest aid in their three years of research and care for Erik. Hours of brainstorming and open communication helped her understand why T'Challa wanted Erik kept a secret. They couldn't wake the golden jaguar and the rebels could accuse them of lying, or worse still, purposely killing him if something went wrong. It was a delicate mission she took on. Shuri still wished that he had asked for her help. Perhaps she could've moved the research along faster. She was prepared to take on the weight of failure with him. Once she shared the extra information of Erik's empath network, the previous team felt they had more to go on and felt invigorated to pursue more paths toward success.

Late nights found her sleeping in her lab and devouring studies on patients in vegetative states and becoming intimate with how brainstems worked. Although Erik had been placed into cryostasis, there were similarities in the behavior of comatose patients when they tried waking him up. They were missing a crucial link and Shuri was determined to find it before another year passed. Erik guided her down a road that made her take a serious look at human consciousness. Arousal and awareness were the two components necessary for consciousness. She delved more into awareness, with a laser focus on two cortex regions. Mapping out his brainstem, she compared it to Joba's. There was a shadowy area in his parietal cortex, but the shadow form wasn't from any lesion on his brain. Her intuition told her that was the place to focus on her study.

T'Challa came to visit her in the lab every day, and she told him what she could. Progress hadn't been coming along as she had hoped. That is, until the fateful day when she used Sydette, Riki, and Joba's voices singing her a happy twenty-first birthday on her kimoyo beads as a ring tone.

She was alone in the section of her lab where Erik was kept, and her assistants were modifying serums to try to revive him without the physical chaos and thrashing his body did like Bucky's in his early stages. It stressed out his heart when he went buck wild being weaned from captivity. She had leaned over his chamber to collect data on his brainwaves and her kimoyo lit up. The children's voices broke the quiet hum of the lab and before she could tap the beads to stop the sound, Erik's eyes moved rapidly under his closed lids.

She turned off the singing voices.

"Erik? Erik, can you hear me? N'Jadaka?"

His eyes slowed down their movement.

She tapped a recorder on the chamber and played the children singing again. There was no reactions to their voices at first, and Shuri felt let down. It was probably a brain glitch or his eyes were reacting to the vitamins and fluids they pumped into him. But there was a part of the singing that turned into their laughter that his eyes reacted to again before going still once more.

Shuri dashed over to her computer and plugged in the singing voices, isolating the section of laughter. She clipped it from the original source and looped it before inputting it into Erik's chamber. She played the isolated clips of his babies laughing and his eyes moved again.

The tone.

He responded to the tone of the sound, not just the voices themselves. The acoustic rendering of the vibration kept his eyelids moving, and she stopped it before she stressed out his body. He was aroused to make physical movement while in cryostasis, but was he conscious of it?

Shuri's brain whirred with excitement. Her first breakthrough in weeks. Maybe there was a way to use certain sounds to help free him gradually from cryostasis.

"Everyone meet me in the debriefing room in ten minutes!" she yelled out to her medical team.

She ran to the lab restroom and locked herself inside. Placing her hands over her eyes, she allowed herself to cry as her hands shook.

"I'm doing my best, N'Jadaka," she whispered between tears.

###

T'Challa stood in front of Erik's chamber. Shuri's hopeful eyes gazed at him and he glanced down at his cousin.

"Do it," he said.

Shuri tapped the screen above the chamber and Erik's empath mapping appeared over his nude body.

"It's brighter," T'Challa said.

Shuri grinned and swiped the imaging until a 4D rendering of Erik's brain floated above him with the empath mapping crossing over it.

"Look at the shadow area," she said.

T'Challa stared at the image. He enlarged it and studied the section in more detail.

"There is no shadow," he said

His brow creased, and he looked at his sister.

"His empath neurons repaired that part of the cortex," she said with giddiness in her voice.

"Listening to his family did this?"

"I looped together specific tonal vibrations from Yani, Disa, and all of his children. It took all of them for me to figure out the right combination. I made a sound serum!"

Shuri excitedly swiped an image of Bucky Barnes's brain.

"Bucky had a similar issue, but he had actual brain lesions. Physical damage to his brain, unlike Erik. We could create artificial connections for Bucky, but we had to stimulate Erik's empath abilities to help his body, the unseen parts that we can't tangibly touch. He was able to heal himself, and that dark blemish on his mapping faded. We are going to take him out of cryostasis right now. Fully."

T'Challa crossed his arms.

"Standby," Shuri said to her staff.

Her nerves kicked up, and she had to slow down her physical movement around her brother. His eyes were wide with anticipation and… fear. She programmed the chamber to release Erik, and as they waited for their cousin's body to react to freedom, Shuri took on the fear that T'Challa had. Once they woke Erik up, how would their people react to the news? Would this stir up the rebels again?

The deeper question was Erik himself. Would he come for her brother again?

"We are ready, Princess Shuri."

Dr. Akoma, the head doctor of T'Challa's original care team, stood next to the chamber with her eyes focused on watching Erik's vital signs as they slowly brought him out of cryostasis. Shuri swiped her code into the chamber and stood back to observe Erik's form. His keloids and sharply cut physique were a distraction for some of her staff. He was an impressive-looking man, and for many there, it was their only opportunity to see the former rogue king up close. There was a softness to his face as he slept.

"Vitals are stable," Dr. Akoma said.

One by one, each part of the chamber that cared for his slumber shut down until the final release. Shuri held her breath. Erik's eyes moved under their lids.

"Erik?" she said in a soft tone.

The eyes stopped moving.

"Can you hear me?"

His lashes fluttered, and his eyes opened.

"Erik, can you hear me?"

Erik focused on Shuri's face above him and then his body jerked about.

"It is okay, Erik. Your body is just getting used to being out of cryostasis. The feeling will pass soon."

T'Challa stood back to give her room as the protective lid of the chamber opened.

"Is he alright?" T'Challa asked.

"Princess?"

"Don't try to talk, Erik. I just need for you to listen. Don't move or anything."

Weak muscles lifted his neck. His lips quivered. A bit of spittle dripped down his chin. Shuri wiped it up for him. He thrust his neck up harder and spasms throttled his weak body.

"Heart rate above normal… racing. Blood pressure rising…" Dr. Akoma stated with concern in her voice.

"Erik... please, do not move or try to do anything at all."

His arm shot up and missed her face by inches. A snarl ripped out of his throat and the gold slugs were even more menacing than the first time she saw them in the throne room. Pure hatred oozed from his pores.

"Put him under! Now!" she shouted.

Dr. Akoma tapped a panel on the chamber, and Erik was put under again.

"Heart rate steady. Blood pressure leveling off," Dr. Akoma said.

Shuri wiped the tiny bit of perspiration that broke out on her forehead. She quickly closed the chamber and ran scans across his body.

"Brain activity functioning at normal capacity. Empath levels are still high. Nanobots are going through his bloodstream to stabilize the switch back to cryostasis."

"Success?" T'Challa asked with caution.

Shuri looked over his body systems. Her forehead creased. Dr. Akoma took a closer look at the same screen.

"What is that?" Dr. Akoma asked.

"I don't know. It's riding on top of his empath signature," Shuri said.

Dr. Akoma tapped another scan. The bright white signature stayed on top of the vibrant pink glow of his empath mapping.

"Whatever it is, it's bonding with him. They are threading together. I will record everything," Dr. Akoma said.

"I shall let him rest for eight hours and will try to wake him again this evening. Let's say ten o'clock?"

"Yes, as you wish."

Shuri turned to T'Challa.

"We must tell mother and the council of elders. It is time they knew what we have been doing. We must prepare for the inevitable, T'Challa. N'Jadaka will be brought back from the dead and we have to get our house in order to deal with this."

"We can tell mother and the council—"

"Disa and Yani?"

"I will go tell them in person."

"You should bring them here."

"Not until N'Jadaka is up and walking around on his own. He is not out of the woods yet."

T'Challa put an arm around her.

"You have done well, Shuri. I am proud of you."

"I'll finish up here and we should inform the kitchen staff that wine and more food will be needed. I think the council of elders should have dinner with us to ingest the news down better."

T'Challa squeezed her shoulder and left her side with confident strides out of the lab.

###

T'Challa gripped the armrest of the throne as the elders assembled themselves. M'Baku sat at his immediate left with his hands resting on his massive thighs. The great Jabari king already knew something was up if they summoned him down the mountain to attend an unscheduled meeting in the throne room.

The River Tribe representative, Elder Bhira, had a leg crossed and eyes focused on T'Challa's face. He was salty with T'Challa because he wanted someone from his territory chosen to design the new international embassy villa in Birnan Zana. The king had chosen Disa for that honor and awaited her decision to take on the task. She was well-traveled, multi-lingual, and T'Challa believed she would bring the international flair needed to open Wakanda to the world with ambassadors. Her new design firm collected a few awards over the years in her world, and he trusted her taste in respecting the natural environment in her work.

Elder Zinzi held bright eyes for him. He wondered how she would react to the news of N'Jadaka. Elder Efetobo clasped her cane in her hand and her piercing eyes waited for the meeting to start. As the eldest council member, her opinions held weight. She was often in alignment with Zinzi. His eyes whisked over to Elder M'Kathu of the border tribe. That man would be a problem. Ever since W'Kabi's removal from the inner sanctum, M'Kathu had become more conservative and reactionary toward T'Challa.

Queen Mother sat next to Shuri facing him from behind the elders.

"Thank you all for coming on short notice. To make up for the abrupt disruption of your day, we have a palace dinner prepared for you all."

"This must truly be something special if a meal is involved!" Zinzi joked.

Efetobo leaned over and slapped her hand playfully and giggled, making her giant gold earrings move on her shoulders.

T'Challa made eye contact with his sister. Shuri nodded her head in silent affirmation and he leaned forward on the throne.

"Prince N'Jadaka Udaku is alive."

The smile on Zinzi's face wiped clean away in three seconds. The throne room stayed silent for a long time as all eyes stayed on T'Challa's somber face. He nodded to Shuri and his sister stepped forward and tapped her kimoyo.

Erik's body floated before them all as they watched the replay of Shuri waking up the prince.

"Why would you deceive us?" M'Kathu asked.

T'Challa rubbed his forehead and stood up before them. Shuri stayed by his side. He needed her support and was grateful for her presence.

"N'Jadaka wanted to die. I didn't allow that to happen. I healed his wound and placed him in cryostasis. As king, I wanted to honor his wishes, but he was not in his right mind. My plan was to heal him and bring him back once I took back the throne. Unfortunately, I could not revive him. Something went wrong when I put him under. I tried for years to fix him, but I failed."

He let the words sink in so they could grapple with the shock.

"You knew about this, Shuri?" Ramonda asked.

Ramonda's voice was laced with disappointment.

"She did not, Queen Mother. I hid this from her as well—"

"T'Challa brought me on board for a final try at reviving him. I was able to bring in some fresh insight, and with the help of his women and children—"

"Help? How did they help if they were overseas?" Zinzi asked.

"N'Jadaka only responded to sound therapy. I used their voices and manipulated them to help wake him. They were the missing stimulus to aid in his recovery. They know nothing about this. To them, he is still deceased."

"This is a travesty," M'Kathu said. "You would risk throwing our country back into turmoil? You should've left him in cryostasis. Your guilty conscience has no bearing on our fate as a nation. If the man asked to die, you should have let him."

"Is this how you all feel?" T'Challa asked.

Zinzi closed her eyes. Efetobo gripped her cane tighter. Bhira let out a sigh and spoke.

"My king, your hand has placed us in another quandary once more. However, I understand your choice. He was your blood, and your father wronged him. What is your plan when you wake him up fully? Will we have to go through another challenge day or will you step down from the throne? How shall you answer your critics and the former rebels who will want blood for this?"

Zinzi held up her hand.

"These are questions that will have to be answered. However, now is not the time. The issue at hand is how soon will the prince be able to survive without cryostasis?" Zinzi said.

"I do not have a concrete answer for you. Today was the first attempt at waking him, and the success is promising. I will try again late tonight. We have a team looking after N'Jadaka around the clock," Shuri said.

Efetobo tapped her cane twice on the floor. She stood up.

"This is an opportunity. We must look at it as the final, and true destiny to make amends to Prince N'Jobu. I will go to the rebels myself if it comes to that. Prince N'Jadaka is a lost child of Wakanda. The father's sins do not blemish his birthright as one of our own. We are a new people. The world is at our doorstep and we need to be one blade. Our reborn Prince has a family that our people adore. Is this not true?"

Efetobo glanced around, waiting for anyone to challenge that fact.

"Reuniting a man with a family he never knew he had trumps any and all ill will toward the Udaku clan. I say wake him up. Bring him back to life so we can finally end this stain on our royal house."

"And if he wants the throne?" Zinzi asked with fierce eyes.

"Give it to him," M'Baku said.

They all looked at the Jabari king. He stood to his full height and dwarfed T'Challa.

"N'Jadaka came to us and followed all the traditional protocols fair and square. He brought back an old enemy and laid his foul body at your feet. The man claimed his birthright. I fought against him to save Wakanda from the outside world, but guess what? The outside came anyway once King T'Challa showed them who we were. You changed the direct line of descent once you became Prince Riki and Princess Joba's protector. You cannot go back on your word now that their father has returned from the dead. As their direct elder, he gets the throne."

"Oh, my holy, Bast!"

Ramonda covered her face with her hand after her outburst.

"Are we willing to risk him weaponizing the diaspora again?" Bhira asked.

"Perhaps," M'Baku said, "But who better to deal with a horde of greedy foreigners banging at our door than a man who has lived out there and fought their dirty wars?"

"T'Challa, you would allow this?" Ramonda asked.

"The man has been asleep for three years. He has children. What do you think will be more important to him? Bending the world to his knees, or caring for children he has never met before?" T'Challa said.

Shuri stepped to the center of the circle.

"He may not want the throne after he meets Riki and Joba. I feel his true battle will be between him and the women he left behind."

A smile curled Zinzi's face.

"What is so humorous, Elder Zinzi?" M'Kathu demanded.

"I have never met an Udaku who didn't bend to the will of his woman. And N'Jadaka has two headstrong women who have been dealing with his messiness. He probably won't have eyes left to even look for the throne once they see him again!"

The woman laughed and her chuckles made Efetobo giggle. Even Queen Mother held a hand over her lips to hide a smile.

"I am willing to take the chance of losing my throne if it means uniting our family for good. I will still fulfill my duties as the Black Panther. That I will not give up," T'Challa said.

"This is fair and right.," M'Baku said.

"It is dangerous," M'Kathu grumbled.

"You are like a fly who will not leave a dead body. Get buried with it if you must, M'Kathu. The king has spoken," Efetobo said.

"Let us go to dinner and nourish our bodies. It will take some time to bring N'Jadaka into the world where we will face his decisions. Until then, I am still the ruler and I say we eat. Mother?"

T'Challa held out his hand toward her. She rose from her seat, still shaken by the news.

"Elders?" T'Challa said.

M'Baku held out an arm to Efetobo, and the elder slipped her hand around his arm. T'Challa walked with his mother out of the throne room. A different type of weight settled on his chest.

Facing Disa and Yani.

###

"Erik?"

Shuri peered down at his face.

"You have been in cryostasis. I am working to rehabilitate you. Your body has to become accustomed to the changes with release."

Shuri spoke in short sentences so that her cousin could understand as the fog from his brain lifted.

His eyes were open.

Dr. Akoma hovered near her.

"We're going to help you sit up. I will open the chamber," Shuri said.

His hand went to his throat.

"Thirsty…" he said.

She nodded and waited for the protective glass to disappear before she sent for water.

"I will help lift you up."

Kidada stepped forward and the other medical team members watched her with trepidation. Shuri asked that T'Challa watch the second test sequestered away from Erik. She feared that Erik's empath abilities would detect her brother and upset him.

She held onto his arm and helped lift him to a sitting position. Dr. Malidoma, a cheerful man with a wide grin, handed Shuri a glass of water with a straw. She helped Erik take his first sips of water by his own power. He touched his throat and took a deep breath.

"Welcome back," she said.

There was fire in his eyes, but there was confusion there, too.

"Not dead," he said with a gravelly, unused voice.

"No. You are very much alive, Cousin."

Erik spent the first few minutes out of cryostasis breathing. Inhaling deep. Exhaling deeper.

"How long?" he muttered with great effort.

"Three years," she said.

Erik closed his eyes.

"I told that nigga… I didn't… want to be saved."

His chest heaved with the effort to speak.

"He is the king. His word is law."

"Hmmph."

She helped him drink more water. It was hard looking at him. All she could see was Riki's face and the temptation to tell him everything bubbled on her lips. His anger was visceral. She could literally feel the heat of viral rage flowing from him. She was right to keep T'Challa away. Her staff recorded their interactions and her brother could watch Erik close up with scrutiny later.

"Blood… feels funny…" he choked out.

"Nanobots. We keep watch of every part of your body."

"Why is my dick hard?" he said, looking down at his groin area.

"Every part of you is waking up."

"At least give a nigga some draws to wear, shit."

Shuri ignored his complaints and kept her eyes on the probes that floated over his body. Erik touched the tubes that fed him, then touched his throat.

"Raw as fuck."

"Stop talking."

His eyes narrowed. Shuri tapped the chamber, and it shifted into a seat that supported his back.

"We will have to put you back under once your body reaches a certain amount of stress…"

His eyes rolled back, and she forced the chamber to return to its prone position. Dr. Malidoma quickly put him back under before his heart stressed out.

"Brain functions are erratic. Time of release held at fifteen minutes. Thirteen minutes longer than this morning. Good sign," Shuri said.

"Empath readings off the chart," Dr. Malidoma said.

Shuri turned around and found her brother standing behind her.

"He can sense your presence, T'Challa. I told you to stay behind the partition and observe from there."

"He speaks clearly and without confusion," T'Challa said.

"It's time you go to America and St. Thomas," Shuri said.

She swiped her finger across Erik's chamber.

"His progress was better than I expected. He should be back to normal in a month or so if we go by the way Bucky responded to treatment," she said.

"Thirty days before I disrupt Yani and Disa's lives again, eh?"

"This is a good reason."

"I know."

T'Challa stood close to Erik's chamber. Their cousin's empath scale was all over the place. Even in an unconscious state, N'Jadaka tracked the king's energy near him.

"Incredible," T'Challa whispered.

Incredible indeed.

###

Ayo greeted T'Challa immediately when he stepped into the M.I.T. lecture hall. The Dora Milaje warrior assigned to Disa and Joba nodded her head as she stood in the back of the room wearing a sleek black dress with low heels and a gold choker around her neck that could become a weapon at a moment's notice.

From the back of the lecture hall, T'Challa watched Disa speak to two fellow architects at her open symposium for M.I.T.

"Happy to see you, Your Highness," Ayo said.

"All is well?" T'Challa asked.

"Your family flourishes."

Ayo gave a head nod to General Okoye as T'Challa took an open seat near the walkway. The packed lecture hall had cameras set up to live-stream the event. It was Disa's fourth and final talk before the semester ended.

Lady Abdullah looked slick and sophisticated in all black. Her hijab made her face show a more pronounced beauty. The audience, enthralled with the discussion, ate up every word from Disa's mouth. T'Challa relaxed in his seat. He had forty-eight hours to convince Disa to return to Wakanda with him. After forty-eight hours, he was flying to St. Thomas to convince Yani to come back, too. He wanted to see them both in their element before he gave them what they most desired.

Reconciliation with the golden jaguar.

And perhaps more problems.

Chapter 17 HERE.

###

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#Black Boys Bloom Thorns First Volume 4 #Killmonger Fanfiction #Killmonger #Black Panther Fanfiction #Bucky Barnes #Steve Rogers #Avengers #T'Challa #Shuri #Ramonda #Dora Milaje #Captain America #Pantherverse #Uzumaki Rebellion

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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Malignant bone cancer has been diagnosed in a dinosaur for the first time ever

https://sciencespies.com/nature/malignant-bone-cancer-has-been-diagnosed-in-a-dinosaur-for-the-first-time-ever/

Malignant bone cancer has been diagnosed in a dinosaur for the first time ever

A palaeontologist, a medical pathologist, and an orthopaedic surgeon walk into a museum. No, it’s not the start of a joke, but the research team that has now diagnosed the first confirmed case of aggressive bone cancer in a dinosaur.

The specimen in question is a fossilised shin bone from Centrosaurus apertus, a plant-eating horned dinosaur that lived and died roughly 76 million years ago.

What looked – at least on first impression – like a poorly healed fracture turned out to be a tumour engrossing the upper half of the animal’s shin bone, or fibula. The centrosaurus was diagnosed with an osteosarcoma; it’s the most common type of bone cancer in humans, but marks the first confirmed case of any malignant cancer we’ve found in a dinosaur.

“Here, we show the unmistakable signature of advanced bone cancer in [a] 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur – the first of its kind,” said pathologist Mark Crowther. “It’s very exciting.”

The shin bone, with the main tumour mass in yellow. (Danielle Dufault/Royal Ontario Museum/McMaster University)

In humans, osteosarcomas often affect growth-spurting teenagers and young adults. If an osteosarcoma metastasises – grows beyond the bone – it most often spreads to the lungs, but can also form tumours in other bones, and even the brain.

However curious we are about the evolution of diseases such as cancer, soft tissues like tendons, ligaments, bone marrow and tumours, are rarely preserved in fossils. Given a few years – let alone a million – these tissues would decay. So even if dinosaurs were regularly struck down by cancer, any diagnostic samples are going to be hard to find.

Scientists have come across similar cancer-like symptoms on dinosaur fossils before. Unusual lesions in the tail vertebrae of a young hadrosaur resembled a condition called Langerhans cell histiocytosis, a complex cancer which leaves room for debate over its manifestation. In the case of this most recent discovery, the malignancy is far more clear.

The cancer-stricken fossilised shin bone of C. apertus was unearthed in Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada back in 1989, and had been stored at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, outside of Calgary, until its recent reanalysis.

Cross sections of the C. apertus bone were taken first with a CT scanner, the same machine used to identify bone fractures and tumours in people. The X-ray image ‘slices’ were reconstructed to see how the tumour grew through the fossilised bone.

In fact, it had spread through the bone quite extensively, which the team of medical specialists took as a sign that this centrosaur lived with its cancer for quite some time.

Artist’s impression of Centrosaurus apertus. (Royal Ontario Museum/McMaster University)

“This discovery reminds us of the common biological links throughout the animal kingdom and reinforces the theory that osteosarcoma tends to affect bones when and where they are growing most rapidly,” said Seper Ekhtiari, an orthopaedic surgeon-in-training at McMaster University in Toronto, who examined the fossil.

As the cancer was so advanced, the researchers think it might have spread to other parts of the dinosaur’s body, but we don’t have any of those tissue samples – such as the spongy lungs – from this ancient animal to make sure.

“The shin bone shows aggressive cancer at an advanced stage,” said paleontologist David Evans. “The cancer would have had crippling effects on the individual and made it very vulnerable to the formidable tyrannosaur predators of the time.”

After imaging the cancerous shin bone, thin sections were carefully sliced off the fossil and compared to a normal C. apertus fibula, along with one case of human osteosarcoma, from a 19-year-old man who had it in his lower leg.

In their paper, the authors note that ”a similarly advanced osteosarcoma in a human patient, left untreated, would certainly be fatal.”

But they suspect the dinosaur died with its herd mates, possibly in a sudden flood event, because the fossil was found in a massive bed of Centrosaurus bones.

“The fact that this plant-eating dinosaur lived in a large, protective herd may have allowed it to survive longer than it normally would have with such a devastating disease,” Evans said.

And when we often marvel at the age of dinosaurs and their size, big and small, this latest medical discovery brings the plight of the dinosaurs a little closer to home.

“Evidence suggests that malignancies, including bone cancers, are rooted quite deeply in the evolutionary history of organisms,” the authors concluded. Yes, even dinosaurs.

The study is published in medical journal The Lancet Oncology.

#Nature

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erza-haninozuka · 5 years ago

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Always and Forever

Characters: Takashi Morinozuka x Female Reader

Words: 2,148

Warnings: Angst, major character death, mentions of a car wreck and aneurysm, and there is some fluff if you squint

A/N: Today’s fic is inspired by a song that makes me want to fall in love. I know it seems odd considering the lyrics but it’s just the meaning behind it that I find beautiful and is the reason I chose this song. Plus the other ones I had lined up didn’t strike inspiration the way I had hoped.

You sat at the table with dinner all made and set, waiting for Takashi to walk through the door any minute now with the items you asked for him to pick up on his way home from work.

But it was forty minutes past time he would usually arrive home and all he had to pick up was more milk.

He was never a man to dawdle in the grocery store unless it was the two of you together, debating and brainstorming ideas of what to make.

But those minutes slowly began to eat away as your dinner began to go cold and your heart began to sink.

He was a man of punctuality.

But today he was far from it.

You began to pace the dining room and checked your phone, but it was eerily quiet too.

No texts and no calls.

You needed to distract yourself so you let out a gentle sigh, sitting back down, and eating what cold food your stomach could muster with all the knots building up. However each bite you took down, your body was ready to throw it back up.

You only got half way in before giving up and pushing your plate away.

Calm down, breathe.

It was just traffic! Maybe the roads started to get busy like they usually do at a time like this.

Maybe he ran into an old friend in the milk isle and they got to talking, losing track of time.

Scenario after scenario and lie after lie, you told yourself something comforting to keep the anxiety at bay. But like many other times, your anxiety was winning.

You wanted to go out and look for him, but your body wouldn’t allow you the effort to leave.

Because you convinced yourself he could return when you’re gone. He would be home any minute now.

But he never came and those minutes you kept telling yourself, whisked away into hours like the food that now sat in the bottom of your trash can.

It was growing late and there was no way you could go to bed without your fiance when you had no idea where he was or what was going on- hoping with all your might that maybe it was one of Tamaki’s stupid ideas to drag him somewhere.

But Tamaki hadn’t heard from him. No one had.

Was it cold feet maybe? Did his insecurities finally win and convince him he wasn’t good enough for you?

With a shake of your head you tried to scatter the thoughts or with any luck shake out of your brain, but they just came flooding back.

You adjusted against the arm of the couch, tucking yourself into the blanket even more, closing your eyes for just a brief moment and replacing the warmth from the fuzzy throw with Takashi’s arms.

Your heart settled for just a moment at the thought, but it was all ripped away when the sound of your phone ripped through the house from the kitchen.

The silence was finally broken, startling you from your peaceful daydream as you walked, feet padding against the cold tiled floor as you made your way to the counter.

It wasn’t the person you were hoping for- in fact there was no name attached, just an unknown number you hadn’t seen before.

You gulped and quickly answered.

“Is this Y/N?”

“Yes, who is this?”

You could hear them gulp on the other end of the line before they spoke, telling you that you were the emergency contact on file and that Takashi was in intensive care. “I think it’s best if you make your way down here.He’s currently stable but we don’t know how long he’s going to have.”

Your heart dropped and shattered into a million pieces, before you could ask any questions you were letting them know you were on your way and quickly hanging up.

With the speed of light you grabbed your wallet and keys, slipping on the nearest shoes and pulling on a pair that didn’t even match.

But right now how could you care when the man you loved more than anyone in this world was slipping away at a speed you knew nothing about?

Your hand was shaking as you tried to push the key in the ignition, swearing under your breath as tears began to blur your vision. Finally on the third try you were able to get the key in, turning it quickly and bringing the car to life.

You wiped the tears that already spilled out and attempted to calm your nerves enough to drive. But you couldn’t remain calm as you drove.

Your foot seemed heavier than normal and your road rage infinitely much worse that matched something of a demon- yelling and crying at anyone who dared to drive below the speed limit.

In a matter of time you were peeling into the parking lot and hurrying to find a parking place, not caring if you were too close to the lines. Once your car was in park and shut off you scrambled into the hospital, the bright fluorescent lights blinding you as you made your way to the front desk.

The nurse behind the desk took one look, immediately giving you a face of sympathy as you closed the distance, hands trembling as you caught your balance on the desk.

The weight of what she might say was ready to crush you at any given moment.

“Takashi, Takashi Morinozuka. I received a call and was told he’s in intensive care?”

The nurse flashed a gentle smile, paging down one of the nurses to lead you there.

The gentleman gave you the same face as he led you down what felt like a maze of a million hallways before coming to the intensive care unit.

Takashi’s doctor was at the doctor’s station nearby, catching your eye and coming over before the nurse could directly take you to your fiance’s room.

The doctor wore the same, gentle smile as he told you everything they currently knew about Takashi. He filled you in on how he was brought in from a wreck and they had discovered that there was an aneurysm that was bleeding out, they were thankfully able to stop the bleeding before it got too serious.

But they didn’t know they had missed one that was still leaking out.

He told you of his broken bones, punctured lung, and lesions. How he had some bruises that were already showing, attempting to prepare you.

It was all muffled as your brain began swirling, but all stopping when you heard that he was conscious currently.

The doctor led you to his room, and you could see him through the pieces of glass. Before he even opened the door you knew Takashi looked and felt like hell.

But you still weren’t mentally prepared when he opened the door to see him with wires and tubes, cuts and already formed bruises decorated his face and arms that were currently visible to you.

You didn’t know just how much more damage he sustained away from the naked eye.

Takashi’s eyes fell on you once you walked in, giving you an apologetic smile as you made your way over, dragging the chair closer.

The sound of the metal on the tile drowning out the machines beeping.

“I’m sorry,” was all he muttered out.

“Takashi please don’t be sorry. This- this wasn’t your fault.”

He didn’t try to confirm or deny your words as he carefully took your hand in his, gently giving it a squeeze.

It was obvious how much he was currently fighting just to get to spend this time with you, and it was breaking your heart even more.

“Come closer.”

You obeyed, leaning closer to him, breaking when you felt his busted lip gently place a kiss to your head, hand coming up and carefully catching the tears that finally got to break free.

“Y/N.”

You looked to his eyes, discarding the fact one had a blood vessel busted, instead choosing to get lost in the storm gray of his eyes. They were currently a typhoon of emotions, and only half of them you could read.

“Let’s just be happy for right now?”

You took in a breath, knowing full well he was right. You couldn’t let the last thing he’d see be you breaking down, so instead you pulled back and finished drying up your own tears.

“Y/N, can you imagine the life we would’ve had?”

“It would’ve been an amazing one, Takashi. We would go wherever we wanted for our honeymoon before truly starting our lives together. How many kids would you have wanted?”

“As many as you’d allow me.”

You blushed a bit at the confession, “Three is a good number.”

He smiled softly, “Two girls and a boy.”

“Why two girls? We’d overrun the house,” you teased.

“Either way the queen would oversee them all. Their brother would protect them.”

“Yeah he would. He definitely would if he turned out to be anything like you.”

He hummed in response, “A dog would’ve been nice too.”

“Could you imagine if it was massive? We could probably stick Mitsukuni on it like a horse.”

Your heart jumped as you pulled a small laugh from him before he coughed.

“You’d make me happy for all my days- you have made me happy.”

“Takashi…”

“Y/N, let me finish. Don’t call the others until after I’m gone. Mitsukuni will help you. He’ll get you anything you need. Please, try to take care of yourself. Take care of yourself in the ways I couldn’t and that I won’t be able to.”

“Sweetheart, please…”

“I just hope I made you--”

“Please don’t do this to yourself right now. Takashi you’ve,” you stopped yourself blinking. “I have a crazy idea. It’s going to sound insane but what would you say if I wanted to get married. Right here, right now.”

He blinked, clearly not expecting you to say that before he smiled wider than earlier he had, reopening the wound on his lip. “The nurse button is on the remote.”

You nodded and quickly called for them to get the chaplain.

The two of you killed the time by continuing the talks of the life you’d live together. The life of grandchildren, being together through thick and thin, sickness and health, for richer or poor- the pets you would have and how you would grow old together remaining side by side. You even talked of the house you would’ve wanted, remaining close to the Haninozuka’s like Takashi would’ve wanted.

Your children would’ve been close to the Haninozuka’s like Takashi was so used to.

They would be raised in the Morinozuka way, but also given a freedom to choose the life they’d want to live

And when the chaplain came in it was clear he was expecting words of prayer by the way his face contorted into a bit of confusion when you asked him to marry you.

He looked at Takashi as if silently asking him if it’s what he wanted.

Takashi nodded his head and the chaplain began the service, doing a shorter version than usual given the circumstances.

You could tell as you watched him throughout, that he was slowly losing his fight.

And when it came time for his vows it took all the strength you had to not burst into tears right then and there. You would need to save them until after he was gone.

Takashi gave you a loving look as he gave your hand a gentle squeeze, “Y/N, I will always love you. Always and forever, from now until my last breath. I will love you even when I’m not here. You will always be my home and the one I love most. I will forever cherish the time we have spent together.”

The chaplain smiled softly, continuing on.

You could tell when it was time to seal your marriage with a kiss, that he was close to losing his battle.

You gently cupped his face, being mindful of the injuries and placing a gentle kiss on the lips to your now husband.

Takashi gently held your chin, giving you the same gentle and loving kiss to your lips.

You pulled away just enough to take one last look into those dark gray eyes that made you feel at ease and right at home, “It’s okay Takashi. I’ll be okay, you can go now. I will love you, always and forever.”

He gave you one last gentle smile, his voice barely coming out as he told you he loved you too before his voice broke off and the machines around you began to signal he was gone.

The tears you were holding back immediately came cascading down your face as you wept into the man you loved more than anyone else in this world.

#takashi morinozuka #takashi morinzuka angst #takashi morinozuka x reader #takashi morinozuka x female reader #mori x reader #mori x female reader #mori angst #mori x reader angst #ohshc angst #ouran high school host club angst #ohshc mori #ohshc takashi #ohshc takashi morinozuka #ohshc takashi x reader #ouran high school host club takashi #ouran high school host club takashi morinozuka #tw: death #tw: aneurysm #tw: car wreck

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filmhistorymptv1145 · 4 years ago

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Examine the ways in which films deal with social, political, cultural, and economic issues, both in direct and indirect ways. What is the political impact of cinema on audiences around the world and how do we see it? Should filmmakers directly engage with these kinds of issues or do so subtly? Discuss any of the films we have watched so far from this perspective, and draw upon other examples if necessary.

Social commentary exists in many forms. We read it in books and hear it in music of every genre. It does not discriminate, covering every issue from politics to economics. As film grew into its own medium, it became a new platform for artists to utilize in portraying their visions of the world. Whether they be whimsical and over the top, or down to earth and stunningly realistic, movies grew to become one of the largest entertainment industries. Directors and screenwriters, whether inspired by or displeased with their surroundings, came to use film as a method of sharing their thoughts and emotions. Be it through direct or indirect means, they would criticize politicians and governments to historic and current world events. Certain countries were more limited than others in controlling the content of films, pushing creators to become even more crafty and thoughtful when conveying their opinions on screen.

With the Motion Picture Production Code in full effect in the US, film makers who wanted to touch upon political issues in American society had to do so in a very subtle way. Take Force of Evil, for instance. On the outside, it reads like a classic gangster movie that was commonly seen in the 1940’s. However, it is deeply critical of the money and power-hungry American underbelly of society, digging into the Capitalism that has overtaken the country even in these earlier years. Irony is found in the two main characters, a pair of brothers. Joe is a lawyer who runs dirty deals with gang members, using his education and career to further their unsavory deeds. His brother Leo believes that his own line of work is earnest and respectable, when in reality it is not. Leo runs a ‘bank’ for the small number rackets that exist in New York City, mainly centered around bets that are placed on horse races. Leo strongly feels that he is not as morally corrupted as his brother, despite being in charge of an illegal business.

The mise-an-scene of the film is what really drives home the underlying critique of money and its corrupting force. Joe takes Leo’s former secretary Doris for a walk on Wall Street, taking her through a church cemetery. The church building is completely dwarfed by the towering buildings of Wall Street’s capitalist businesses. The implied message here is that money is the new God, that the hold it has over people is nearly as strong as religion.

For Polonsky, who was put on the blacklist by HUACC for his leftist ideals, this message is as true to him as it gets. In Polonsky’s eyes, people no longer feared God as much as they did losing money in capitalist America. Considering what the entire world had just lost three years prior in World War Two, it is almost insulting to showcase people like Joe and his associates on screen. Money grubbing is not what America wanted its people to think they had fought and died for, just the opposite. Justice and morality is what America wants people to think it stands for, not capitalism and the desire to supersede the people in their lives. Force of Evil is astoundingly subtle and simultaneously gritty, holding true to the film noir standard of the times.

At the end of the film, when Leo is killed by Joe’s nefarious associates, Joe goes to retrieve his brother’s body. Stairwells are used as a metaphor for an internal moral struggle. In a voiceover, Joe laments ‘I just kept going down and down. It felt like I was going to the bottom of the world.’ The decrepit area beneath the bridge is the exact opposite of the organized, shining city above. Finding his brother’s body is Joe’s moral rock bottom, both literally and metaphorically. It is a slap in the face for Joe, stripping away all of the justifications he has held for his less than moral behavior and actions.

Polonsky cuts to Doris as Joe says, ‘He is dead,’ juxtaposing the image of a living woman with the realization that his brother Leo is gone. It is jarring, but it also suggests a dual motivation rising within Joe. Inspired by Doris’ love and Leo’s death, Joe turns to make his way back up the enormous staircase. This finale leaves the viewers with some hope that Joe can possibly redeem himself after his selfish actions, but will it be as quickly as he ran down the stairs towards his brother’s corpse?

One wouldn’t think that in 1950’s America, a bold film would tackle such a hot social issue: equal rights for African Americans. Especially with the Motion Picture Production Code still in full effect. Typically, when reflecting on movies from that decade, our minds are filled with images of romantic melodramas, as well as musicals and other bright, cheery content. The Defiant Ones not only tackled the issue of racism in America, but it also set the standard for the ‘buddy’ films that are commonplace today. Two escaped convicts are chained together at the wrist, one white and one African American. The film goes back and forth between Johnny and Cullen’s escapades whilst on the run, and the officers who have been assigned to track them down and take them back to prison. The tone of the film is established in the first few minutes, when one of the officers refers to Cullen as the n-word. Later on in the movie, when Johnny and Cullen are apprehended by a group of townspeople after attempting to rob their general store, they start stringing up two nooses. Johnny is mortified, looking around at the townsfolk with terror in his eyes. ‘You can’t lynch me, I’m a white man!’ he pleads. The message is clear: lynching is something white people do to black people.

Not only does the movie look at the harsh reality of life for African Americans at the time, but the relationship that develops between Johnny and Cullen is in itself socially and politically charged. Over the course of the movie, the two convicts go from being at odds with one another to developing a close friendship. Not even Johnny’s mistake to trust the woman they holed up with can break their bond. Johnny leaves the woman behind to rescue Cullen from the dangerous swamps. At the film’s end, Cullen is cradling Johnny, who is wounded from a gunshot to the chest. They are collapsed on the grass together, sharing a cigarette while Cullen sings and the police detective approaches to apprehend them.

Not only has Johnny moved past his racist ideals, but one could also say that their positioning at the end of the film is borderline sexual. The way Cullen holds Johnny is almost as if it is in a lover’s embrace. Cullen’s portrayal in the film is especially bold, since he was portrayed to be well-spoken, intelligent and overall good. A far cry from films like Birth of a Nation where African Americans are put in the most negative light possible, portrayed as thieves and rapists while the Ku Klux Klan members are seen as heroic and noble. The Defiant Ones, supported by Sidney Poitier’s phenomenal acting, gave rise to a much more positive role for African American actors to portray on screen. Though the ‘righteous Black man’ did end up becoming a trope in Hollywood for many years, it was still a positive step in the right direction for civil rights.

Outside of the US, films were not constricted by strict standards of morality and content. They were much freer to openly criticize the societal norms and political atmospheres that were in place at the time of their creation. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a French made film that touches on the devastation of the nuclear bomb drops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the movie itself seems to be mainly centered around a couple who cannot be together due to extenuating circumstances and their own inner demons, it is also direct commentary on how Japan remembered the bombings, and how different it is from the perspective of the rest of the world.

The first ten minutes of the film are composed of an almost poetry-like sequence of shots of Hiroshima before and after the bombs paired together with the two main character’s voice overs. The characters, a French woman, and a Japanese man, are in bed together in a loving embrace. The opening shot features ash falling onto their naked bodies, which we can infer mimics the death ash that fell onto Hiroshima after the atomic bomb’s detonation. This frame cross fades into nearly the same image of the naked couple, but the ash is gone from their bedroom.

The woman is stating that she knows all about what happened in Hiroshima, from having seen the newsreels that aired after the bombs had been dropped. The man argues that she has no idea what really happened. She states that in the newsreels she viewed, bugs were already crawling up through the debris and dirt on the second day and that flowers were growing all over Hiroshima just a few days after the bomb had been dropped. This voiceover is paired with the footage of a young boy being treated for burns and lesions on his skin, the exact opposite of new life springing forth from the ashes. The obvious pain that the boy is enduring is starkly contrasted to how the French woman describes all the different kinds of flowers that began blooming after the bombs had been dropped.

The Hiroshima that exists in the French woman’s mind is completely different from the Japanese man’s. This speaks to the overall theme of the movie, that collective and individual memories, as well as one’s identity can be corrupted. That the human brain is not a perfect organ and at times, it can even be our worst enemy. The French woman protests that she has seen Hiroshima. She had been to its museums, she knew how it had been over ten-thousand degrees in Peace Square at the time of detonation, and she had seen the films that had been made about the devastation. Her partner states over and over during this intro sequence that, ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.’ Her experience of the disaster when compared to his is hollow, a clever way of illustrating how two people can think of the same event so differently.

Even if the trend of filmmaking has changed, shifting from film noir and melodrama to the blockbuster and action movies, social commentary still persists throughout the media. As the world around us changes and moves forward (be it for better or worse), so does the real-life content that directors and screenwriters are inspired by. Seeing politically and socially charged movies, whether they are extremely subtle or right up in your face, helps us both cope with world events and immortalize what occurred. As if to say, ‘We were here. We saw what took place. This is how we remember it.’

#abraham polonsky #force of evil #the defiant ones #hiroshima mon amour

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themedicalstate · 5 years ago

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He Had a Temporary Blast of Amnesia. What Was Going On?

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. (The New York Times)

“Where am I?” the 68-year-old man asked. His daughter explained again: He was at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. He had been found on the ground in the parking lot of the grocery store near his apartment. The man nodded, as if taking it all in, but minutes later asked again: Where am I? He had never had any memory issues before, but now he couldn’t remember that it was Saturday. Didn’t remember that he spent the morning moving the last of the boxes he had stored at his daughter’s house to his new apartment. He didn’t even remember that he had spent the past few months hashing out a pretty messy divorce.

His soon-to-be ex-wife was also in the E.R., and again and again he asked her: Are we really getting divorced? Why? What happened?

Earlier that day, his daughter received a call from the hospital saying that her father had fallen outside the supermarket and was brought in by an ambulance called by a good Samaritan. No one could tell her any more than that, and her father clearly didn’t remember. He had a scrape on his right cheek and over his eye, but otherwise he seemed fine. Except he couldn’t remember the events of the recent past. When asked his name and address, he responded promptly, but the address he gave was the house he shared for many years with his future ex-wife. He seemed stunned to find out he no longer lived there.

Everything Looks Normal

The doctor in the E.R. was also surprised by the extent of the man’s memory loss. He seemed to have lost both his retrograde memory, recall of the events of the recent past, and his anterograde memory, the ability to form new memories from the present. But on examination, everything else seemed basically normal — except that his blood pressure was high, and he had the scrapes on his face. There was no sign of infection. His kidneys and liver seemed to be working just fine. A head CT scan showed no injuries to the bones of the face, the spinal cord in the neck or the brain. There was no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system. After a few hours, the man’s memory was still not functioning properly, and he was admitted to the hospital.

Early the next morning, Dr. Kathryn Zuchowski introduced herself and the other members of her team to the patient. They would be caring for him while he was in the hospital. Zuchowski was in her first year of residency and planning to specialize in neurology, so she was excited to have a patient with such an intriguing neurological problem. Over all, the man’s memory seemed much better that morning than it was the day before. He was still a little vague about time — he thought it was April, but it was September — and he couldn’t recall anything about the day before, until he “woke up” in the hospital. But now he was nearly back to normal. He knew he was getting divorced and remembered his current address.

Zuchowski first suspected that the man had suffered some kind of seizure. This would explain both the fall in the parking lot and the subsequent memory loss. Patients are often confused for a short period of time after a grand mal or tonic-clonic seizure. But when she got the results of the patient’s EEG, there was no sign of a seizure disorder. An M.R.I. of the brain was read as normal — just as the CT had been.

Zuchowski considered disorders that could cause this brief blast of amnesia and leave no trace. A concussion can cause memory loss, but it usually lasts for days, not hours. And most kinds of strokes would leave a lesion that would have shown up on one of the scans. A transient ischemic attack (T.I.A.) is a would-be stroke that fixes itself before any injury is done to the brain and therefore doesn’t show up on a scan. But it’s still important to determine if a T.I.A. has occurred, because it puts a person at much higher risk of having a stroke within the next few days. But the symptoms from T.I.A.s rarely last more than an hour. And the patient’s spell of forgetfulness lasted eight to 10 hours once he arrived at the hospital. He didn’t seem to fit in any of the diagnostic boxes they had at hand — until a new clue emerged.

Photo illustration by Ina Jang

The M.R.I. of the man’s brain was originally read by a radiology trainee, who thought it looked normal. When the attending radiologist reread it, he noted a tiny bright spot on the left side of the man’s brain, in the area responsible for making and retrieving memories. This could be a sign that the man had a small stroke. But the radiologist also suggested another possibility — one that Zuchowski had been silently considering since she first met the patient. It could be an unusual disorder known as transient global amnesia, or T.G.A.

Zuchowski had seen a couple of cases of this neurological oddity when she was in medical school in Syracuse, N.Y. But because it was such an unusual diagnosis, she had felt hesitant to suggest it. Still, she was fascinated by how, seemingly out of the blue, patients just forgot the past day, week or year. They don’t forget who they are or any of the basic skills they’ve acquired, like cooking or driving. But they can’t remember the recent past, and they can’t form new memories. This may explain why they so often ask the same questions over and over. The desire to know is there. The ability to hold onto the answer is not.

An Unusual Memory Disorder

T.G.A. was first described in 1956. Why or even how it happens is still not understood. On average, people who experience it are in their 60s. The episodes of memory loss typically last from four to eight hours and are mostly resolved within 24 hours. After that, the ability to form new memories comes back, and memories of the past are restored. The patient, however, will never be able to remember his or her experiences during the hours of memory loss. The events that occurred during that time period were simply never recorded by their brains.

Emotional and physical stress are often associated with T.G.A. This man had been experiencing both: He was going through a difficult divorce, and he had been lifting boxes all morning.

Distinguishing a T.G.A. From a Stroke

How can T.G.A. be distinguished from a stroke? Both can initially show up on an M.R.I. But there are other clues — and Zuchowski thought that in this case, they pointed toward T.G.A. rather than a stroke. First, most strokes are associated with changes in how the body works as well as how the brain works. And those changes are usually limited to one side of the body. In this patient, the only symptom was the memory loss. He was examined many times, by many doctors. None noted any changes in the way his body functioned.

The second characteristic was the repetitive questioning over many hours. That’s rarely seen in strokes and frequently seen in memory disorders like dementia or T.G.A. To the neurologist who was asked to see the patient with the profound but transient loss of memory, this was a classic case of T.G.A. No further testing was needed. In cases in which the symptoms are not as typical, a repeat M.R.I. will show another difference. In a stroke, the lesion revealed by M.R.I. will still be there on the next scan. In T.G.A., the lesion will simply disappear — like the symptoms themselves.

A ‘Twilight Zone’ Feeling

The patient has completely recovered. He remembers everything right up to when he got out of the car at the grocery store. The next thing he remembers is finding himself in a hospital bed, listening to a bunch of doctors. It was as if he walked into the middle of a conversation; as if he were transported in time and space, from the parking lot to the E.R., instantaneously.

The patient is still anxious about his brief episode of amnesia. Why him? Why then? And he is worried that it could happen again. For up to 92 percent of patients with T.G.A., it’s a one-shot deal — it’s the other 8 percent that worries him. The only thing he knows for sure about this weird episode is that he’ll never know what happened in those few lost hours.

#medicine #science #medblr #academia #neurology #neuroscience #diagnosis

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cruelfeline · 6 years ago

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Being in a medical field, I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about Hordak’s defects. And I think it’s high time I made a proper list, don’t y’all?

Come. It’ll be fun!

kind of I mean it’s kind of depressing to look at it all in one go but whatever let’s go!

Altered Pigmentation/Possible Scarring

We now know that a Horde clone should have a white face and an otherwise blue-grey body. The white on Hordak’s trunk and arms shouldn’t be there, though whether the skin there is normal and simply missing color, or actually diseased, is unknown.

The darker blue, somewhat vein-like tissue located where white meets the normal blue-grey does look like it is legitimately abnormal. It is hard to say if this is diseased tissue, scar tissue, or some other problematic lesion. It may be directly due to the defect, or perhaps it is a result of attempts at self-cure.

Cachexia (vs. Emaciation)

Hordak has the typical look of what should be a fairly large humanoid man who has lost a severe amount of weight and muscle mass. The bones of his arms, his spinous processes, and his ribs, are overly visible. One can also appreciate the odd-looking, sharp definition of his shoulders: this exists because his arm, neck, and shoulder muscles have wasted significantly, leaving the bones very sharp and prominent. This gives the illusion of large shoulders, when really, his limbs are so wasted, that the clavicles and shoulder bones simply overshadow them.

Emaciation refers to severe weight loss, involving both fat and muscle, due to starvation or malnutrition. Generally, fat is lost prior to muscle, as this is a condition caused by inadequate caloric and nutrient uptake. It can be a result of simply not getting enough food, or of not being able to digest and absorb that food properly. Once the lack of nutrients is addressed, emaciation can be reversed.

Cachexia, on the other hand, refers to severe weight loss involving predominantly skeletal muscle tissue that is not entirely responsive to appropriate nutrition. This is a complex syndrome that is associated with multiple serious illnesses in humans, including but not limited to muscular dystrophy, neurodegenerative diseases, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and cancer. It differs from emaciation in that it is not predominantly due to inadequate nutritional intake, but rather due to metabolic changes caused by various illnesses. Even with good nutrition, it cannot be entirely reversed.

It’s hard to be absolutely certain which issue Hordak suffers from, but given that Horde nutrition is likely efficient and complete, I’d guess that the defect causes cachexia rather than emaciation. Even if Hordak had issues digesting nutrients, I’m sure he could find a way to intravenously feed himself. Such feeding, however, would not be able to fully address cachexia.

The predominant symptom of cachexia would be weakness, though more dangerous issues can occur as certain muscles are affected: if throat muscles or the diaphragm are affected, swallowing and breathing issues can occur.

Muscular Atrophy and/or Aplasia

Hordak is missing a significant number of muscles in his forearms, along with the interosseous membrane that should be connecting his radius and ulna. I’ve got a lovely post specifically about this right here. to be brief: he is missing the muscles that would allow him to move his hands and fingers. The nerves and blood vessels crossing that region are also either missing or moved to run along his bones, leading to potential vulnerabilities.

It is uncertain, as of now, if these missing tissues are the result of atrophy or aplasia. Atrophy refers to a tissue wasting away, while aplasia indicates that the tissues never formed in the first place. Either way, the clinical signs are likely similar: inability to perform the movements said muscles are responsible for. In addition, his arms are likely more fragile due to the missing muscle and connective tissues. His ability to lift heavier objects is probably impaired without technology, while an enemy’s ability to seriously injure his forearms is likely higher.

I suspect he’s using internal cybernetics to compensate for this when bare-armed, while the armor provides him with appropriate strength for all of his rage-throwing needs.

Altered Mucous Membrane/Ocular Pigmentation

I am putting one fucking cute picture of him in here you can’t stop me

Hordak’s red eyes and mouth are, according to one of the character designers, part of his defect. Whether this is simply a coloration issue, or whether it is connected to his individuality and free will, remains to be seen. Likely something we’ll learn more about next season!

Syncope

At this point, we have witnessed Hordak suffer an episode of what appears to be syncope once.

Syncope is the medical term for what most know as “fainting” and can be defined as a sudden loss of consciousness due to transient inadequate blood flow, and thus oxygenation, to the brain. Recovery is generally spontaneous. Syncope is thus different from loss of consciousness due to other issues, such as seizures, low blood sugar, or stroke. Given that Hordak’s loss of consciousness was rapid, with likewise rapid recovery and no evidence of convulsions, it is likely that the episode was one of syncope, rather than a seizure or other issue.

While many different conditions can result in syncope, the cause can generally be divided into three main categories: reflex, orthostatic hypotension, and cardiovascular.

Reflex syncope is the most common kind and involves a neurologically-mediated drop in blood pressure. Some sort of trigger activates an inappropriate cardiovascular reflex via the autonomic nervous system (the part of our nervous system responsible for unconsciously regulating our bodily functions). For example: stimulation of certain nerves due to emotional stress, pain, coughing, or a variety of other triggers can lead to simultaneous vasodilation, decreased heartrate, and low blood pressure, resulting in interruption of cerebral blood flow and, therefore, syncope. This is the most common cause of syncope and what most people think of when imagining people fainting in fear, for example.

Orthostatic hypotension refers specifically to a drop in blood pressure upon standing. While this is something that can, in mild form, happen to anyone, orthostatic hypotension is most often seen in the elderly and in those on certain medications or with certain medical conditions. It is essentially an issue caused by the body not being able to properly account for the blood pooling caused by gravity, leading to decreased blood flow to the brain and thus syncope.

Cardiac syncope encompasses loss of consciousness caused by a failure of the heart itself to pump blood to the brain, either due to structural defects in the heart, or due to cardiac arrhythmia that prevents efficient cardiac output. Low output leads to low blood flow to the brain, leads to syncope.

Given that Hordak was already up and standing when he fainted, orthostatic hypotension seems a less likely cause for his episode, though given that he raised his upper body suddenly, it is still possible. Both reflex syncope and cardiac syncope appear viable, though without physically examining him and/or knowing specifics on his cardiac health, it is impossible to tell what the true cause was. Given his emotional outburst, reflex syncope is a real possibility, but if his defect involves his heart in any way, altering either structure or rhythm, then cardiac syncope is likewise a reasonable differential. Or, if he’s particularly unlucky, he could potentially be at risk for suffering from syncope for multiple reasons, mediated by both neurological issues and cardiac problems.

Well! I think that about covers what we’ve seen at this point. I will say that it’s hard to put a specific name to Hordak’s condition (though I feel like some sort of neuromuscular disease or dystrophy, genetic or otherwise, appears likely) without knowing all of the specific ins and outs of his issues, but this list at least covers the visible, clinical signs.

I didn’t really go into the armor-related shocks that he experiences in times of over-activity or stress, as these seem less biological and more mechanical in nature and can likely be mediated by improvements to his armor.

As the series goes on, I’ll likely update this post with additional information, if we get any! For now, I hope it serves as a fun curiosity for some of you, or even a writing resource, if desired. Enjoy!

#hordak #entrapdak #she ra #i legit only put these things into the entapdak tag because i know where y'all live

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thejoshuaglenn-blog · 4 years ago

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You're a Good Boy, Charlie Brown

The key purpose of a Tumblr blog here is really a brain dump: logging thoughts, feelings, narrative and such is easier in long form than via a brief Facebook post that generates half a dozen "oh no, what happened" comments. As I'm writing this, most of it seems like bullet points and organized timelines. If you're looking for a TL;DR or current state of thoughts, it's the last section titled The Day After, and the Day After That.

A few days ago, Niko and I said goodbye to our first dog, Charlie Brown.

I'm not keen to chat about it a lot. There's more to process than I have time to type; most of it centers around being fair to myself and to Niko, taking the time to appreciate his life without beating ourselves up, and avoiding the overwhelming mire that grief can become.

Joining the Family

CB was a rescue, a hapless victim of the 2016 Louisiana floods and a happy-go-lucky participant in a "dog for a day" event hosted by a local shelter. I fully expected to rent him out for a day, give him a few great experiences, and return him. For myriad reasons, we never did bring him back to Pet Rescue by Judy, and he's been with us ever since.

At adoption, he was estimated to be around 4-8 years old. With a kicked-in shoulder that offset his collarbone and ribcage, some assorted dental issues, and other little signs of damage (cigarette burns, what the heck is wrong with people), it was tough to really gauge his age. That means he left this world at the ripe old age of something like 9-13, which isn't terrible considering all he'd been through.

Charlie Brown was the iconic good boy. He seldom barked, he never licked or jumped, and just wanted to be in the same room as his favorite people. He had a few toys that he cherished, never ripping them up, just carrying them with him from room to room and whining a bit, unsure of where he could store them for safekeeping. Apart from some separation anxiety issues and an occasional urge to bolt out the door and book it as far as he could, CB was by all accounts an easy first dog: more like a low-effort cat than anything else.

Slowly Falling Apart

Over time, the health issues increased. Intermittent but predictably regular upset tummy. Bad gums, bad teeth. Random gooey skin lesion. Eye ulcers. Since October, we've been averaging 2-3 unplanned vet visits a month — many incurring some hefty bills. We'd take out another credit card, find another financing plan, but it adds up. So does the emotional toil on the family; so does the anxiety toll on the dog.

You start to think about quality of life for the dog, you know? He'd had a few teeth removed to sew up his gums after they kinda detached and fell apart from his jawbone — so he couldn't chew anything hard. Couldn't even chew a tennis ball, which was the only toy he took interest in anymore. Couldn't have any fun treats like peanut butter or other soft chews, as his tummy would have bad flare-ups that usually ended up with him attached to an IV bag. After finally settling in and learning to play well with Atlas, Charlie Brown started to get pretty irritable whenever Atlas got frisky.

He still loved running around outdoors, and was in otherwise great health.

I can't tell you how guilty that makes me feel, even now.

Moving to Waltham

Before we left Orlando, there were so many crisis moments in emergency vet offices where Niko and I talked about how long he could ride this roller coaster. CB obviously was not a fan of vet visits: loved the staff, but was notably anxious and panicky when separated from us, and he had grown very loathe to the process of poking, prodding, and whatnot.

Shortly after moving to Waltham (he was a champ in the U-Haul), Charlie Brown had a severe colitis flare-up. He was losing so much fluid and was growing very lethargic over the day. Vets are hard to get into these days: with the sweep of "pandemic puppy" adoptions, the vet industry as a whole is saturated with demand, and practices are responding as best they can. There were just no emergency clinics available to us within 20 miles, except one that noted "we have no availability, but you can come and wait, and we might be able to see you in 4 or 5 hours." So we did.

It was a very late night. Charlie Brown came home with us with another round of the same antibiotics he'd been taking almost regularly since December for his assorted ailments, and some probiotics. The next day, CB seemed a bit better and brighter, and Niko and I went into the city for part of the day. We came home to find he'd had an accident, but it was just... blood. So so much. And he looked so in pain, so ashamed, so guilty, so anxious.

So we went back to the vet ER. It was another very late night. I didn't know how many of these late nights we could afford; neither of us knew how many of these late nights it was fair to expect Charlie Brown to endure.

Do you plan on letting a pet go after an extended crisis visit? Do you plan on letting a pet go in a time of relative peace?

Camping Analogy, and a Best Last Day

When you're off on a long hike, and you see daylight start to fade as the sun begins to set, you begin to think about finding a good place to set up camp for the night. It's abysmal to do this after the sun has already gone down: where you could have had preparation and structure, you have chaos by flashlight.

A dog's life is in your hands. You're his whole world: all food, adventure, pampering, challenge, treatment, and care come from you. More than anything, we wanted Charlie Brown to have a peaceful, restful life. Now that we started thinking about it, we wanted to be able to give him a peaceful, restful passing as well: not as the climax of another overnight crisis with injections and yelps and beeps and cowering and anxiety and fear, but in the still quiet of familiar sounds and smells.

His very last day was a great one. Fresh Pond in Cambridge: a massive stroll around a colossal lake with an absurd bounty of new smells, kind people, happy dogs, and a brisk New England breeze. He got to swim in a little side pond — that boy lived for jumping into random lakes. He ran around the broad field that is Kingsley Bowl, chasing a thrown ball the very very farthest his sad pop could throw it — and he brought it back. We bought him a steak. We told him how much he brought to our lives.

And then we waited.

Lap of Love is a sort of home delivery service of dignified passing for pets. There's more to say on that hour than I care to pen, but throughout the procedure, we never left him. Charlie Brown passed enveloped in our arms and laps and sobs and hugs.

The Day After, and the Day After That

The rest is just thoughts. Your head starts to feel like a coffee shop where your grief comes in, sits at a table with you, and unloads. You nod, listen, and wish them well. I hope I can keep processing this way — I find it helpful, and less overwhelming.

I wish he had been able to play with his tennis ball more. Since his jaw surgery — even out on Kingsley Bowl, nearly a month and a half after he should have been fully healed — any kind of chewing would cause renewed bleeding and pain.

I wish we had hugged him more. But truth be told, he didn't like hugs. They made him uncomfortable. So we gave him a hand to lay his head on, or a knee for him to pop his head upon, as often as he liked.

There were so many times I felt inconvenienced by owning a dog at all. They weren't the majority, but... now each remembered time feels like a splinter of selfishness.

I miss how familiar the back of his neck felt under my hand, just behind the ears, where the waves of fur meet and crash and make a long cowlick of foof and fluff.

His happy smile and his stressed smile were very similar, but you could still tell which was which.

I loved being there for him in thunderstorms.

When you think about it, we sort of were hospice care for him. We weren't his original owners; we just wanted the rest of his life to be painless and fulfilling. He had so many trust issues when he first came to us. And in the end, he loved anyone he met.

I miss feeling around with my feet to make sure I don't step on him on my way to bed. I miss setting my feet on the floor as I wake, stooping down, and giving his head a good squishy rub.

He never did get to see Boston snow. I mean... thousands of dogs never get to see snow. But I was really looking forward to sharing that experience with him.

I wanted so badly to bring him to a point of health, and then say goodbye when he was feeling well. Seeing him have his Best Last Day, part of me whispered "murderer" with cold accuracy, and I have a hard time shaking it. He was so happy — but between jaw bleeding after playing with a tennis ball, seeing him scratch his eyes that were starting to ache with ulcers again... I know the unbridled happiness came with the reality of his declining health.

Atlas was the best thing that ever happened to that boy. I know Charlie Brown was at least a little disgruntled that his easy-going day-to-day had been interrupted by a chompy puppy, but Atlas brought out the young pup in CB: ripping palm fronds to shreds, playing tug, playing tag, meeting new dogs with confidence and assurance.

I used to get so mad at my mother-in-law for feeding Charlie Brown cinnamon donuts. I wish I'd given him more. Heck, I wish I'd given him more peanut butter. I'm frankly surprised he hadn't died of peanut butter overdose years ago.

Where Charlie's health had limits, we kept going with Atlas. That might mean taking Atlas out to play with a ball or a tug toy, because CB couldn't. It breaks my heart now to think of Charlie at the glass door just watching it happen, all because he physically couldn't play the same. I know he didn't understand that.

We took him out to Park Ave maybe once or twice. I wish it had been more. Truth be told, it was the same as the dog park, though: he was kind of a loner. Loads of people or dogs made him anxious. So while I might idealize the past and wish he had sat at our legs for lunch after lunch at an outdoor thoroughfare, ... I think he would have been miserable. I think he would have rather just curled up at the base of the couch and dozed while we watched a show.

He was so trusting. I could just drag him onto his back and onto my lap for cuddles and a good tummy rub. No complaints.

He looked so gaunt these past few months. I keep looking at earlier photos, and I really didn't realize just how grizzly and drawn he had become lately.

I miss seeing him randomly waiting for me outside the bathroom door — or curled up on the bath mat while I was in the shower, having sneakily nosed the door open and wanting my company while I was rinsing.

For his first few years with us, he was incredibly playful. I've been going through old videos — it's like going outside just blew his mind, and toys were either for cherishing daintily, or thrashing about and throwing to oneself and gnawing. He lost that after a time. He regained it a bit when Atlas joined the party. But it still faded. I'm sure that's inevitable, but it makes me sad to see the early vibrant puppy in those old recordings, and how different he had been in recent months.

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media-on-the-mind101 · 5 years ago

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Turtles All the Way Down: OCD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (Book)

* May contain spoilers*

I recently finished reading Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, and it is now one of my favorite novels. The story hit me close to home because it deals with a disorder that I was diagnosed with. I thought writing an article about it would be a good way to educate you readers, while also sharing a little bit about myself.

Turtles All the Way Down is story about a teenage girl named Aza Holmes who suffers from OCD or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The story shows how the disorder impacts her daily life as well as her relationships. Because the author suffers from the disorder in real life, the depiction is fairly accurate. However, I spotted a few things that might suggest a whole different diagnosis whatsoever. The story also covers Aza’s treatment which I felt was missing a lot of important things.

According to the DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a disorder where a person gets caught in a cycle of obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are intrusive thoughts that trigger distressing feelings, while compulsions are repetitive behaviors that are performed to relieve anxiety or prevent something bad from happening. OCD is often confused with OCPD (Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder) which is characterized by extreme perfectionism, order, and neatness. OCPD is often portrayed as OCD in the media which means that stereotypical OCD is really OCPD.

While Aza does have obsessions that involve cleaning, they are more about health and less about being organized. People with OCD often have a specific thing they worry about, and for Aza it is contracting an infection from a parasite called C-diff which essentially causes food poisoning and stomach damage. While she doesn’t really do anything to neutralize or cancel her thoughts out, she repeatedly reads articles online and uses hand sanitizer to relieve her anxiety.

As you may already have figured out, people with OCD often have illogical thought patterns and they are fully aware of it. But their anxiety makes them perform their compulsion anyway “just to make sure.” This is seen in the book when Aza drinks a bottle of hand sanitizer to insure that all bad bacteria inside her body are cured. Of course we all know, that drinking hand sanitizer would actually be more harmful then helpful.

“Drinking hand sanitizer is not going to make you healthier, you crazy fuck. But they can talk to your brain. THEY can tell your brain what to think, and you can’t. So, who’s running the show? Stop it, please (pg. 210).

In this scene, Aza knows that drinking hand sanitizer is actually more harmful then helpful, but she feels as if something is controlling her brain. The “they” refers to her OCD and she tells it to stop but isn’t able to control it.

While reading the book, I noticed that some of Aza’s symptoms don’t quite fit the diagnosis of OCD, such as her feeling of not knowing if she is awake or dreaming, real or non-existent. In one chapter she says the following:

“the pressing of my thumbnail against my fingertip had started off as a way of convincing myself that I was real . . . every time I thought maybe I wasn’t real, I would dig my nail into my fingertip, and I would feel the pain, and for a second I’d think, Of course I’m real” (pg.106).

The feeling of disconnect she has from her own body and surroundings are actually symptoms of DDD (Depersonalization - Derealization Disorder). According to the DSM, the disorder is characterized by persistent feelings of being a stranger to yourself or your surroundings. According to Psychology Today, however, you have to have no signs of other mental illness that can explain your symptoms, in order to be diagnosed with DDD. This is when diagnosing a patient becomes challenging; so many disorders can have similar symptoms or be co-morbid with each other that it they can difficult to differentiate.

The other symptom I noticed that is actually its own disorder, is the fact that Aza has a habit of digging her nail into her fingertip to the point where her finger becomes scarred. While picking of the skin is often comorbid with OCD, it is actually a separate disorder called excoriation disorder or dermatillomania. According to mhanational.org, this disorder is characterized by picking of the skin that creates skin lesions and that causes disruption in everyday life. It is true that the disorder falls under the category of obsessive compulsive disorders in the DSM, but excoriation disorder is not the same as OCD.

Now we’ve defined what OCD is, but another important part of how the book portrays it is in the treatment. According to Mayoclinic.com, the most common treatments for OCD include CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), exposure therapy, and medications such as SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). These are the treatments that I had during my childhood, and they have been statistically proven to be very effective.

In the book Aza sees a therapist and takes medication, but she doesn’t get exposure therapy, one of the main treatments for OCD. Aza mainly gets CBT which is essentially talk therapy, but she is not forced to face her obsessions without performing her compulsions. An example of this would be touching a dirty substance and then forcing herself not to take out her phone or use hand sanitizer.

The last important thing is how OCD effects a peoples relationships. Throughout the story, the characters in Aza’s life talk about how hard she is to deal with. One scene toward the end really emphasizes the importance of this issue. In this scene, Aza and her best friend Daisy get into an argument because Daisy feels that Aza is too self-centered.

She says “and you’re so, like, pathologically uncurious that you don’t even know what you don’t know.” And later she adds “I don’t mean that you’re a bad friend or anything. But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you”(pg. 216).

Daisy is frustrated because she feels like Aza is so caught up in her own thoughts that she never shows any interest in the lives of others. When she says Aza is “tortured” and it makes it painful for everyone around her, this shows just how much her illness impacts her relationships with other people. Basically, people find her difficult to be around because they, in a sense, have to experience everything with her and they begin to lose patience. At the end of this scene, the two girls get into a car accident because they weren’t paying attention to the road.

Aza’s other important relationship in the story is with is Davis, who is like a friend with benefits. The reason he never becomes Aza’s boyfriend is because of her social anxiety and fear of contamination that prevents her from being physically close to people.

“I enjoyed being with him more in this nonphysical space, but I also felt the need to board up the windows of myself. Me: I feel kinda precarious in general, and I can’t really date you. Or date anyone. I’m sorry but I can’t. I like you, but I can’t date you” (pg. 162).

I this scene, Aza reveals that she communicates better online then in person and this suggests that she has some form of social anxiety.

Another scene tells us just how much her fear of germs effects her life: “billions of people kiss and don’t die just make sure his microbes aren’t going to permanently colonize you come on please stop this . . . then you’ll get C. diff and boom dead in four days please fucking stop just kiss him JUST CHECK TO MAKE SURE. I pulled away” (pg. 152).

In this scene, Aza has difficulty being physically intimate with Davis because her fear of germs prevents from enjoying it like most people would. Based on this fact, we could predict that Aza will have difficulty in her future relationships because of her mental illness and this is a great example of how it effects people in real life.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, the author John Green himself suffers from OCD. Compared to his own experiences, the book is pretty similar. Like the main character, Green suffers from obsessions about contamination. In an episode of the Vlogbrothers Youtube channel, Green explains that

“I might worry out of nowhere that my food is contaminated or somehow poisoned and then somehow suddenly that will be the only thought I'm able to think . . . I can lose all control over my thoughts for an extended period of time to the extent that I can't follow what's happening in a TV show or read a book.” (Green).

*John Green, author of Turtles All the Way Down*

So like Aza, he worries about contamination to the point where he can’t focus on anything else. He also has the same kinds of thought spirals :

“the compulsive behaviors I use to cope with these obsessive thought spirals, repeatedly checking my food for contamination, for instance, or spending hours Googling what will happen to me if I eat moldy bread.” (Green).

As you can see, the characters compulsion of checking in internet comes straight from the author’s real life experience. According to the New York Times, John Green developed the disorder at around seven years old and eventually got it under control with the right medication and CBT. It was not said weather or not he underwent exposure therapy. So the treatment that Aza receives is based on the way some treatments work in real life.

While reading Turtles All the Way Down I often found myself feeling nostalgic because my own experience with OCD is very similar. Although I do not have an obsession with a specific thing like Aza does, I have the same types of intrusive thoughts. I also have similar compulsions to seek reassurance from the internet or other people about my health, as well as other compulsions to neutralize, or cancel out my thoughts.

Because I had Tourette Syndrome (a neurological disorder that causes physical impulses) as a child, I developed what is called Tourettic OCD. It is pretty much exactly what it sounds like; Tourette Syndrome and OCD combined. The reason this occurs in some individuals is because the ability to filter out and thoughts and the impulse to move, take place in the same brain area, the basal ganglia. As a result of this, my compulsions tend to be more physical, such as moving my eyes excessively whenever I see negative words in a book, or someone getting sick in a movie.

Like Aza, I went through CBT but I also went through several years of exposure therapy and I take an SSRI in conjunction. I think exposure therapy is a very important part of the treatment of disorders such as OCD and PTSD and I was disappointed that the book did not include it. I think that if you are going to educate a person about disorder, then you have to educate them about the treatment as well. In conclusion, Turtles All the Way Down was a great novel that captured OCD more accurately then any movie I have seen. The fact that the author has the disorder makes it all the more realistic and personal, and I have to say as a person with OCD and a psychology major, I was quite pleased with the way the character was portrayed. The story may have been missing a few important elements but overall it provided a realistic way of educating people about the disorder.

#john green #turtles all the way down #ocd #mental health #mental illness #books and literature #psychology

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sahbibabe · 5 years ago

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Hii, how are you? So I was thinking about Sephiroth with a s/o and Hojo found about them being together and have done experiments with her with Jenova Cells. Sephiroth discovers about him and her have been through the same thing. Can be a headcannon or a drable, what you think it's best. Thank you!!

I'm good, thanks for asking! <3 I'm totally able to do that for you! I think I'll do headcanon format because I've only done one of those so far. Enjoy! This is Part One because it didn't make sense in one giant post? If that's okay?

When you were a little one, there was very little trouble that you didn't get into. Getting arrested by Shinra MPs for throwing rocks at their windows, falling down a rusted pipe and barely managing to escape without a wound, stabbing someone for trying to steal your food, you've probably done it all and with no one to keep an eye out for you, your fate was as good as sealed.

So one day, during your usual shenanigans, you come upon a truck full of Shinra workers, except these ones don't look like the ones you've seen before. One of them is a woman; one is a man who creeps you out and gives you the weirdest smile; another is a man in a crisp looking suit who looks designed to manhandle people. You'd heard about people being snatched up in broad daylight for experiments, but had always thought yourself immune or invincible. Oh, how the mighty fall.

You were not invincible or immune. They didn't even let you run before you were subdued and made pliant with a cocktail of drugs you weren't even sure of the names of. Sewer rats didn't get the pleasure of learning about the things that went into their systems. It was do or die, and you--well, you certainly weren't going to die. Not if the scientists had anything to say about it.

So high and faded on medication, you never did realize when, exactly, you met Professor Hojo before then. It wasn't as if the man left his laboratory for extended periods of time. He was quite content to dwell there and check in on his experiments for the rest of his life, if he could. But you had met him--you just couldn't remember where.

He told you his plans for you through a bulletproof, shatterproof window, laughing all the while. He wanted to see if he could replicate Jenova's basic reproductive functions within your body; since all they had was her cellular material and genetics, they would need a replacement soon enough. Despite having the real deal, one of the guards told you out of pity, they wanted a second subject in case something went wrong with the original. That nice guard had also told you, with a sad lilt to his voice, that your name had been wiped from the database and replaced with your official experiment name: HIVEMIND.

It didn't take long for you to realize just what that name meant. Hojo regaled you on Jenova's processes, usually in half mumbled comments to himself while he allowed the assistants to run exams on you, and revealed that Jenova had the unique ability to communicate with all of her separate 'parts' or 'pieces' by using her genetic material inside them, and call them to her whenever she pleased, desiring to reunite with her remnants.

He also told you, to your mild confusion, that 'she' wasn't actually a 'she'--that Jenova, in essence, was pure genetic alien material. Her host body was female, but he lamented that he could not tell when the complete merge began or where Jenova had originally infected the host.

A Cetra, one of the kinder women there told you, was what Jenova had taken the form of. A woman just a bit taller than normal people, a little out of proportion given the types of the human race, that gave them supernatural ability predisposed to them before Jenova's takeover. It was what was sustaining her existence, besides the mako infused water that kept her life force running, but only just.

You were tested in a myriad of ways before being subjected to Hojo's experiments. You were given samples of her brain tissue implanted into your own, as well as a graft from her female body's ovarian system to encourage a partial shift of your own. You had no clue if this would, later down the road, allow you to overpower your captors and escape.

The change was slow, but also immediate. You had this uncanny sense that Jenova watched you, not with her own set of eyes, but with the material that had been given to you. It was as if she tried to speak with you but was muffled under feet of water, walled off far deeper than the human mind could comprehend.

Her muffled voice was all you had when Hojo left you in the dark to succumb to your transformation. You counted the days by counting your meals; at first you got nice meal rations, the kind you'd find at a last dinner or something before your execution. When you finally couldn't stomach it, they settled on breads, crackers, and water, and eventually just water, although Hojo had given you a glass of pure mako, just to see, and found you could survive off of that, too.

Given time, you could survive off of anything they gave you; the electricity thrumming off of the walls, the morphine they gave you that eventually had no effect, even the dust in the air. You were resilient in every aspect--but it came with a price.

Your body couldn't handle the trauma of the grafts from Jenova. Your body expelled it, all of it, in one rapid movement, and if not for Hojo's assistants and that little voice whispering in your ear, you would have died.

After that, Hojo deemed you a failure. You had not succeeded in achieving what he wanted. He left you to survive on your own breath and air, even though the assistants took pity on you and gave you bread and crackers.

The years went by, you matured into a fully grown woman, and the voice grew stronger, more clearer, pushing past the naivety of a child. Hojo never returned, though you knew they kept an eye on you.

You had given up hope by then, staring listlessly at the sliding metal door, wondering what the sun lamps felt like, what an actual sun felt like. It was hard to remember when everything was fuzzy.

And then, one day, you were set free. The door slid open for the first time in years, revealing one of the blips you followed in your mind, brighter than the rest. You knew his name from Hojo: Sephiroth.

He looked angry, or confused, or both and you just couldn't tell. He switched rapidly back and forth as he brought his blade down on your shackles, that voice cooing incessantly in your mind.

My children, united at last...

You rubbed your wrists where the shackles had burnt lesions into the skin. They healed rapidly, scabbing over and disappearing from your eyes in seconds. "Why are you helping me?"

"We are the same." He turned his back to you; you followed blindly, following the light that binded you: Jenova. "You spent your life in a cell. I spent mine outside of this place."

You stopped before he could lead you out of the laboratory. You looked back towards Jenova's tank. She called to you. "I can't leave Mother."

"We will return for her," he promised you. He held out a hand to guide you forward. "Hojo will not remove her so long as she lives."

So you looked back, if only one more time. Watched those eyes stare at you as the doors shut behind you.

#final fantasy #final fantasy 7 remake #sephiroth x reader #final fantasy vii remake

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anotherbeingsworld · 5 years ago

Text

Always and forever.

Pairing: Bryce Lahela x F!MC (Casey Valentine)

Book: Open Heart

Word Count: 4211

Warnings: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, mentions of death.

Disclaimer:All the characters belong to Pixelberry. I do not own anything, except the storyline.

A/N: *hides myself*Hi! This is officially my second Bryce x MC fic that I manage to write! This is a different take on the story, its a storyline that I have wanted to write for a long time. It is a pretty cliche’ trope for me to write, but I am a sucker for those stuff. Its a bit angsty-ish aswell! In this universe, it was years after the incidents from the first book! And, i apologize in advance for any grammar mistakes since english is not my first language! I want to thank @maria-soederberg for checking for errors, and for all the medical reference in this book! <3 AHH, i am freaking out inside since its my new story, i felt a bit giddy, anxious everything while typing this! So, I hope you all enjoy! Also, missing Bryce Lahela hours :’)

Tags: @choicessa @annekebbphotography !

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Always and forever.

The wind was blowing on Casey’s face, as she stared at the view upon her. She had felt everything that life had thrown at her - love, friendship, happiness, and even loss. As a doctor, she faces something different every day in her life. It's either, a new decease or the death of a patient.

Some people she meets tend to leave a mark on her life. Mrs Martinez who had passed away after getting a medication injected that promised to be a cure for her Rhodes diseases, having the chance of fulfilling her dream.

She had faced it all - pain and happiness. She didn’t know much about life before she met Bryce Lahela, a surgical resident she met on her first day of her medical residency. He had shown her what life is about – that life has more to offer than work and medicine.

His brown eyes shone every day as he walked through the halls of Edenbrook, his smile made those around feel a bit giddy. He also gave people a wink, especially female co-workers. It became his signature and a way to boost his confidence. No one would know what really goes on his mind, as long as he has this cheerful demeanour.

Casey recalls the second day of her residency as if it wasn’t long ago. She remembers she had messed up the patients’ charts, and on top of that her boss Dr Ethan Ramsey gave her hell. He was used to her being a good doctor, knowing what to do. But on that day he was disappointed and so was she. Her confidence was shaken, she felt hot tears stung in her eyes. Casey hurried up to arrive in the empty and hollowed hallway of the hospital where nobody ever goes. It was an old wing where the surgery rooms used to be. Now that they had moved into another part of the hospital, no one ever goes through these halls. A perfect place for Casey to calm down.

Her legs gave in and she slowly slides down the wall towards the floor. She felt like she failed in her dream to become a good doctor. She worked so hard to get here and she feels like she had ruined her chance. When that realisation hits her, she feels the tears rolling down her cheeks. She buries her face into her hands and sobs quietly. Casey is so in thoughts that she doesn’t notice the presence next to her.

"Hey, rough day?" He spoke in a comforting tone.

She just nodded as she wiped away the tears that were still forming. At this point, she didn't mind the company anymore. She had become too exhausted to shoo the person next to her away.

"Me too, I became too over-confident and ended up making a mistake. Dr Tanaka already taught me about the surgery and how to proceed. But yet I still made the mistake so he threw me out of the surgery and took over.”

Casey nodded in understanding as they sat in comfortable silence with each other. The silence was therapeutic for both of them. And that moment was the beginning of something special. Something by far greater than birthdays or festive. But, it all went crashing down on the 5th of October.

Bryce Lahela had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He saw it coming because his childhood was a rebellious stage in his life. He had joined all the gangs that someone possible could join, which include illegal activities including a huge amount of cigarettes and other harmful activities that can hurt the lung.

He remembered the day of his diagnosis. How he suddenly felt nausea and difficulty in breathing. It caused him to faint in the middle of the halls of the hospital . The difficulty of breathing caused the brain to not get enough oxygen. The result was him passing out before he even hit the floor. He doesn’t remember how he got into the treatment room, but he remembers after waking up that Dr Ramsey was standing in front of him. A patient chart in his hand – his patient chart. He only explained they have to make a few test before being sure. And of course, Bryce followed through. After he was finished with all the test, he was assigned to a patient room. He heard footsteps echoing outside his patient room. And then Dr Ramsey, Dr Emery and Dr Valentine – Casey came into the room. Casey had red eyes, as if she had cried. Dr Emery and Dr Ramsey look at him as if they had lost a fight. She makes her way first to him, pulling him into a tight hug. He was surprised by the hug but welcomed it. Bryce didn't let go of her He knew something was wrong when Sienna, Elijah and Jackie enter the room as well. One time, he explained that whenever he gets a terrible diagnose, he doesn’t want to be alone when he gets the revelation.

Dr Ramsey makes his way to him with his results.

"Dr. Lahela, how are you feeling now?" He asked. Dr Emery steps forward and stands next to Ethan.

"I feel better but my head hurts a little." He replied gesturing to his head that was wrapped in a bandage.

"We have your results and, we have bad news." Dr Emery said.

Bryce raised an eyebrow and his voice was filled with uncertainty, "What does it say?"

"I'm sorry Bryce but you have been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. We had seen several symptoms that matched. As you might have noticed we brought you into a CT to see what could have caused the symptoms. On the pictures we have seen space-consuming lesion. After a few more test we found out that this space is a malignant tumor. We also have found out that it had unfortunately spread beyond the lungs." Dr Ramsey explained to him.

He nods expectantly, accepting the diagnosis that was given to him. Casey felt her heart stop at the word 'cancer'. She didn't believe what she was hearing, she doesn't want it to be true. She shook her head in disbelief as she glanced at him.

"It can't be, please tell me it's not true." She screamed in disbelief, Bryce immediately placed his arms around her waist pulling her into him.

"It’s gonna be okay Cas." Bryce pulled a crying Casey into his arms.

"We have set up a treatment for you, we will include you for chemo and we are suggesting radiotherapy or ERBT (External beam of radiation therapy), which delivers high doses of radiation to lung cancer cells from outside the body to kill cancer cells. We need you to stay in the hospital for a few weeks to make our examinations easier. We can let you go for a few days, but we need someone to supervise you during those times. Do you have any family Dr. Lahela?" Dr. Ramsey asked him.

He shook his head, his family was never in the picture. He was cut out from his family except for her sister Keiki. They had been in contact with each other but she couldn't look after him. And he doesn’t even know if he should tell her any of this. She just found a place in college and works out a plan for her life. His illness would just get in the way, and he really doesn’t want this.

"I can." Casey said as she stood up from Bryce's hospital bed and make her way towards Dr. Ramsey.

"Rookie, are you sure?" He asked for confirmation and she immediately nods without hesitation.

Bryce was speechless. She would take him under her care, she would be his assistant.

"Cas, are you sure? I don't want to be a burden to you, and with my condition it’s gonna be a hard one." Bryce questioned her decision.

"I want to Bryce, I owe it to you.. You’ve done so much for me. Now it is time that I do something for you. And it isn’t just me, all of us, we are here for you, we are going to help you." Casey gestured towards their friends.

He smiled at her response, and nod in appreciation.

"Can I have a minute alone with Dr. Lahela? Thank you." Dr. Ramsey said as all of his friends leave the room including Dr. Emery too.

"What's the details Dr. Ramsey?"

"I don't want to break this news in front of the others but, based on your condition now. There is a 4.7 percent chance for you to live for the next five years. We don't have the exact calculations but, the tumour inside your lungs had been spread throughout your body, almost hitting some major parts of your body. Even with treatment, we cannot promise you to win the fight against the cancer. We can only help the cancer to not continue to grow. And to give you a bit more time. At the end, we calculated that you might have approximately 6 months to live. Only with the treatment, without the treatment, you might not survive this month. " Dr. Ramsey stated with a sad tone in his voice.

Six months, 183 days.

After his conversation with Ramsey, Bryce unexpectedly pulled him into a sudden hug. Ethan didn't question his intentions instead he gave into the hug. It lasted a few moments before he leaves the room, leaving Bryce with his thoughts. He knew back then, he knew the risk from his actions before but he was stubborn. He let himself get into the wrong group and ended up with a decease that can’t be cured anymore because his cancer is too far.

He glanced around the room, his days were numbered and he decided to make the most of the life he was given. He immediately dialed Keiki's number, to drop the news leaving no details behind. He decided to give her a chance to know what is going on in his life. Maybe she wants to visit him and have at least the last moments with her brother before he leaves them forever.

After the conversation ended, Casey makes her way back to the room. He smiled at her presence, and he took a deep breath.

"Casey, where are the others?" He asked looking around for their friends.

"They went to get some food for you, and I think Elijah is making a stop to the restroom." She replied as she took a seat beside his bed.

Bryce smiled at the thought, he was debating on telling her about the final detail.

He took a deep breath, and said: "6 months." He said quietly, louder than a whisper but quieter than a shout.

Casey didn't understand what he meant, until a few moments later. Her eyes went wide at his words.

"Is it what I think it is?" Her voice breaks as she said it. She is in disbelief, he knew the truth would break her but he didn't want to leave her in the dark.

"I'm still here, Cas, and I'm not going anywhere now." He said softly as he traces circles on her back. She sat on the bed, and felt her tears flowing once more. He is still here, he is going to make it. 6 months, is just a number. And just an assumption. There were many cases where people with stage four cancer lived longer than the number they were told. Maybe Bryce is one of them.

They sat in the position for a long time before she decided to go back home. As soon as she arrived at home, she curled into a ball, as she silently cried in her room. The night was hard, she barely slept. She doesn’t know how life will be like when he is gone.

The next day, she managed to make it through her shift with a smile plastered on her face. It was not easy to get through the shift. Ethan sometimes asked if she is okay, but after she said ‘yes’ all the time, he noticed that she doesn’t want to talk about it.

Back at home, she heard a knock on her door, and Sienna makes her way inside the room. She was in her pajamas, and with a couple of stuff. She brought some ice cream and a few pillows.

"Hey, let's have a sleepover together. I want to cheer you up." Sienna explaines as she sat on her bed. Casey sat on her bed and smiled weakly at her.

"Thank you, Sienna, I just thought that I could be strong. I want to be strong for him, but I can't." She explained which ended up with her crying again. Sienna placed the pillows and ice cream down before she started holding a crying Casey in her arms.

As the next day arrived the truth hit her harder than before. She packed herself an overnight bag to bring to the hospital with her. She decided to look after Bryce after she finishes her shift. After she was done working her shift, she finally was able to go to Bryce’s room. She finds him eating his dinner alone but judging by his face, he doesn’t like the hospital food much.

"I wished I had some ice cream now, Cas. This hospital food is killing me." Bryce says as she laughs at his antics.

"Well, I could bring you a scoop if you promise to finish up your food." She offers which made his eyes light up in joy.

"Thank you, you're a lifesaver." He expresses his gratitude and continues finishing his food.

She smiles at him, and continues to accompany him for the night. She ended up falling asleep as well. The days keep being like that for them, she would be there for him every night until the day arrived where he was released from the hospital. He was released from the hospital by one condition. He had to be monitored at home. Casey has to make sure that his heartrate continues and that his oxygen saturation is constantly above 85%.

The day he was released, Keiki made her presence at his apartment. Casey was introduced to Bryce's little sister, who is not that little anymore. In the mornings, Keiki would be his assistance while Casey was at work. All of the hospital staff had taken the opportunity to help him any way they can including Dr. Ramsey himself.

One day, Keiki and Casey were having lunch together.

"Thank you for looking after Bryce, Casey." Keiki suddenly says.

"It is nothing, I knew he would do this to me as well." She says as she glances at his room.

"He told me the other day, he was grateful for you. Everything you've done for him. I know I didn't have a chance to get to know him properly because of mom and dad but, I get to know him now before it’s too late and it’s everything." Keiki explains, her voice soft.

"I am grateful for him, and I feel like when it comes to him. It is one of my weaknesses. I care about him a lot, and hearing the news makes me feel sad. I am not ready to lose him yet, he …" She stops, realizing she's been crying.

Keiki rubbed her back and gestures to his room.

"I believe that you should tell him how you feel, life isn't stopping for anybody. Six months for him is all that he got." She suggests before making her way to the living room, leaving Casey alone in the kitchen.

Casey takes a deep breath, and makes her way to his room. She sees him on the bed, he is resting after a long day of treatment. She takes a seat beside his bed, and his head shots up at her presence.

"Hey Lahela, how are you doing?" Casey asks while checking his vitals. So far heart rate looks good, no extra syncopes on the ECG, and his saturation is constantly between 89% and 95%.

"I'm doing good, although I feel like my energy is drained out of me, every day."

"Hey, you're still here. It's all that matters." Casey says to him and he smiles weakly at her.

"So, what's the purpose of your visit to Casa de Lahela." He gestures at his room.

"I wanted to check on you and, I have something to get out of my chest." Casey smiles at him, as she squeezes his hand.

"Consider me checked, did I ever tell you how lucky I am to have you here." He admits quietly as his eyes gaze into hers.

She feels her cheeks burn from the sensation, she decides to lie down beside him. She squeezes herself into the space left on the bed.

"I don't want to lose you." She admits quietly as she lies her head on his chest.

"You will never lose me, Cas, I am always here with you. You can’t get rid of me easily." Bryce explains to her with the same amount of confidence that he always has.

"I know, I just can't bear the thought of knowing that you are sick. I-I love you Bryce. These few months had made me realize that I am in love with you, and I am not ready to lose you yet." She confesses while looking him straight into his eyes.

He placed a kiss on her forehead, "I love you too, Cas, being a sick dude made me realize it. You are the one person who wanted to accompany me after a long day of work, the way you bring me ice cream every once in a while make me fell for you, Casey Valentine. I-" He stops suddenly, gasping for air. Casey’s head shots up to the monitor. His heart rate shows ventricular fibrillation and his saturation went down to 65%. Casey stood up and called the hospital to send an ambulance immediately. After that she starts with chest compression, as long as the doctor needs so they can use the defibrillator.

Clueless, Keiki stepped into the room and stop in her tracks. She saw her brother lying on the bed, unconscious, Casey on top of him trying to reanimate him. Keiki doesn’t know what to do, she has never helped before.

“Let the paramedics in!” Casey orders.

After a few moments, the paramedics arrive and instantly build up the defibrillator. After they shocked him two times, Casey decides to intubate him so that he is not having any lack of oxygen. After a successful attempt, they load him into the ambulance and rush him into the ambulance and into some tests to see how much worse his conditions are.

In the hospital they rush him onto the ICU where gets put onto life support. Dr Ethan Ramsey looks over his vitals and looks at Keiki and Casey who stood there shocked.

“Keiki, you’re his sister. I have to give you the decision. Your brother only lives right now, because he is on life support. He will not wake up again, his cancer is too far for him to survive. The cancer made his lungs collapse which means that he will never breathe on his own. So, I ask you, Keiki. Shall I turn of the machines and help him die peacefully.”

Keiki sobs and Casey puts a comforting arm around her. She closes her eyes, not wanting to witness the situation in front of her.

“I love my brother, but I know he would want to leave the world as soon as he has no chance to live without support.” Keiki starts. “Turn it off, Dr Ramsey.”

Ethan nods and turns off the machines, he injects Bryce an amount of morphia to save him from pain or any other obstacles.

After a while fighting, Bryce finally let himself go. The monitor showing flat lines, no breathing rate, no heart rate and no saturation left. Bryce Lahela has left the world.

Time of death, 8 p.m.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The whole Edenbrook community was shocked at the news of his sudden death. Casey felt her heart break into bits and pieces. She thought about their conversation before and let herself cry a bit longer.

A few weeks later, Bryce's funeral was happening. The rain is pouring as the day went on, she never imagined that this would occur to her. Losing the one you love is the greatest pain that one could ever go through.

Many of his co-workers had come to say their farewell and even his family made an appearance. Casey stood there with her friends close by, she dreaded this day. The sadness, the emptiness she felt at that moment. It was unbearable. There was this emptiness that Bryce had left behind. This funeral made the loss of someone she loved dearly more realistic. At first, she was able to pretend that this was just a nightmare of hers, but seeing he was buried in front of her, she has to accept the fact that he will never come back.

After it ends, Casey lingers at the cemetery for a while along with Keiki by her side.

"He left you this, I found it when we were cleaning up his place before. I think he wants you to have it," Keiki says as she hands her a letter that is sealed.

"Thank you, Keiki."

"No, thank you, Casey for all you've done for him." Keiki pulls her into a hug, and make her way back to the car.

Casey starts to head back leaving the cemetery behind. She decided to live not only for her but also for Bryce. During that time she wasn’t able to read the letter yet. It was too heart-breaking.

It’s been a year since the event that no one ever expected. She makes her way up to a hill. Rocket Hill was one of Bryce's favourite spots to hang, and hike during his days. She holds a polaroid of him standing on top of the exact hill proudly making his mark for the world.

The wind was blowing on Casey’s face, as she looks at the view in front of her. The view from the hill was spectacular. The city of Boston could be seen from a distance. After a few moments, she takes a seat on a bench facing the city. The letter from Bryce was in her hand. She knew she needed a perfect time, and now that time has come. She took a deep breath and slowly opens the letter

Hey Casey,

It's me or Jackie would call ‘the scalpel jockey’ here, I feel like I'm healing every day but I know that's not the truth. We all gotta end somewhere, and I can feel my end is coming closer. I don't want to make you worry but well, I did make you worry, right? Love, I have no idea what to write or say now but Keiki forced me to write and well, we gotta start somewhere right? So, If I'm writing this... It means my time is uo. I just want to speak some truth here. I was cut off from my family when I finished high school. I have been living on my own for a long time. Keiki was the only family I knew, and med school was hard because they knew to whom the name Lahela belongs. But, being here at Edenbrook made me realize I have a family after all. My family are my friends. We may not be related by blood but we're gonna stick together till the end. My time here also led me to you; Casey Valentine, the future of Edenbrook. You stood by me from the beginning until this very moment and I want to say thank you. Life with this decease had made me realize that time is precious, and it should be spent with those we love and cherish. Every day was a special one because you were in it and I wouldn't have it any other way. Well, that's enough of cheesy Bryce for one day. If you ever doubt yourself in anything, remember that you are enough as a human, a doctor, and a friend. Okay?

Love,

Bryce 'Scalpel Jockey' Lahela.

PS: Don’t be afraid to fall in love again, Casey. I want someone to make you as happy as I made you. I want you to have a family of your own, and please take care of Keiki. <3

Despite the sadness from the letter, she feels herself smile at the letter, holding it tight not wanting it to get away. She looks up at the sky, seeing the sky had changed its colours. She smiles at the scenery upon her and starts to enjoy it. She knows Bryce would have wanted it. And even though she has lost the one person she has loved so much, she will continue to live her life for them. But Bryce Lahela, will always be her first love, and she will never love anyone the same as she loved him. Bryce is her forever, and he will always be.

THE END

A/N #2: Hey! I hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it, I never had any particular experience from what I wrote but, I have been wanting to write this for a long time! I really hope I get to deliver it, it was hard to share this to you guys, but I wanted too! Don’t forget to like, reblog and even comment anything! It would really mean a lot! Once again, thank you for reading it! <3

#playchoices #choices #bryce x mc #bryce lahela #casey valentine #open heart fic #fanfic #choicesgame

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 6 years ago

Text

Humans are Space Orcs “The Plot.”

This is the continuation of both Zombie and The infection. Things are staring to heat up, so I hope you all enjoy.

The interior of the GA galactic laboratories was bright white and bustling with frantic movement. A group of straight backed humans marched down the center of the hallway in unintentional synchronization causing an additional unintentional aura of power to bubble up around them pushing the bustling alien scientists to the side wide eyed and staring, when they possessed eyes.

Behind them, a cluster of GA representatives struggled to keep pace with the powerful strides of the humans, all accept for the chairwoman of the GA assembly, who followed with her easy stride, not all that dissimilar to the movement of an ostrich, on her long three toed legs, and the tall, regal silver plated Drev in his ceremonial armor.

The group of humans drew to a stiff halt in synchronization two figures stepped into the hall to block their passing, one human and the other Drev.

The newcomer raised his hand in a sharp salute, which was returned crisply by the other uninformed humans. A single green eye glittered from under the brim of a captain’s cap. Two sets of wings glittered on the man’s lapels. As he lowered his gloved hand, and shifted into a more comfortable position, a glimmer of blue alien carapace peered out from under his grey pant leg.

“I hope you have some answers for us, Commander.” The woman at the spearhead of the group stated lifting her chin in minute challenge to the man.

At the back of the group, the GA chairwoman shifted, pressing her way up and through the group of humans keeping her head high and her posture calm despite being surrounded by her more intimidating UNSC counterparts, “Yes, Commander, the assembly is particularly interested in your findings.” She glanced at one of the humans as the large dark pupil turned to examine her with a disapproving look, “Of course we understand the importance to your species if what we have heard is, in fact, true.”

Commander Vir gave a sharp nod unsettling many of the committee members with its alien swiftness, “All of your questions will be answered in due time.” He turned on the spot and motioned them down the hall after him, “You will forgive me if my involvement in this seems somewhat personal, but you must understand, all of these incidents have had a direct affect on my crew in one way or another.” He took a corner with the small female Drev marching at his side.

“At first we thought all the incidents were unrelated, but as we took a closer look, things changed, and not for the better.”

“Are you going to continue to be cryptic Commander, or do you plan to give us answers at some point.” The Large silver Drev barked voice mostly drowned out by the subcutaneous translation implants.

Commander Vir took another corner and stopped in front of a doorway before pausing to look around the group, “Are any of you particularly susceptible to telepathy?”

“Telepathy.” one of the humans scoffed, “What do you mean telepathy, boy.”

The commander turned to look at him, “I mean Colonel, the mind to mind communication employed by the race of extraterrestrials common known as Starborn?” The group turned to look at each other before, one by one, shaking their heads.

“Good.” He turned as the female drev pulled open the door for the group of him, and they stepped inwards to find a large room filled with equipment on one end and maps on the other end staffed by a team of humans, drev and others.

At the far end of the room, near the energy containment units stood a tall, dark haired female human, and a Vrul. Floating beside them was a strange eerie creature, humanoid in appearance surrounded by a fanning of hundreds of white ribbons spilling off its quartz white skin.

It turned to look at them with large dark eyes.

“Keep it Civil, Convict.” The commander snapped as he walked forward passing the bustling group of scientists and towards the strange creature. The UNSC and GA representatives stepped hesitantly into the room as the ethereal white creature gilded towards them. It stopped just in front of the admiral who grew very still very quickly back ramrod straight as it stared into the creature's eyes.

“Apologize” The commander suddenly snapped glowering at the eerie white alien.

It turned to look at him expression relatively passive.

“She may not be able to hear you, but I can, so apologize.”

The creature lifted its long skeletal arms in an exasperated motion and turned to look at the admiral. It made a few quick signs with his hands, and to their surprise a voice burst through their translation systems, “I am sorry, human, you are not decrepit and old, that was rude. Please forgive me for my out of place, but accurate description of your face.”

The commander glowered on while all the admiral could do was stare.

“You taught it sign language?” One of the humans at the back wondered.

“I think the better question is why can YOU hear him. Humans aren’t telepathic.” The colonel from earlier pointed out.

The commander stopped a few feet from the containment unit, “That is exactly right colonel. Humans are very much NOT meant to communicate telepathically, but we are capable of it. We recently became aware of the reason for my….. Strange gift whilst conducting these experiments. As it turns out certain types of lesioning in the brain can affect a human's ability to receive telepathic transmissions. In my case.” He lifted a hand to his missing eye, “A freak accident caused damage to the area of my brain that is generally responsible for ignoring these signals, though at a cost.”

He turned towards one of the containment units hands clasped lightly behind his back.

“What cost?” The admiral wondered

The Commander stood staring into the containment unit, “The stronger, or more numerous the signals are can cause electrical storms within the brain. In this case I am prone to sudden bouts of both major and partial seizures around the creatures temporarily beginning form he temporal lobe and then moving outwards, but this isn’t about me is it.”

At that moment, something moved inside the left containment unit. All of the humans jumped, two of the delegates turned to run, and the Drev leveled his weapon as the creature slammed itself up against the glass. It was a horrible twisted thing, humanoid in looks with spidery fingers and skeletal bones covered from head to toe in tight flaking skin of reddish brown, livid like it had been burned and was beginning to peel away, a mummy or a side of beef jerky. Its large strange eyes were coated white like cataracts, and it leaned against the glass hands splayed mouth wide open head tilting back and forth as it stared at them. Thin tattered ribbons of burnt cloth seemed to trail out from behind it. Like the clothing of a charred corpse

“What the HELL is that thing!”

The commander turned to look at them one eye squinted a bit as if he was fighting back a headache, “That, is an infected starborn.”

The group of them glanced back and forth between the pearly white creature, both beautiful and eerie and then back towards the nightmarish creature with its gaping mouth and thin, grasping fingers,

The commander nodded against their unbelieving stares, “They showed up on one of our outer scouting missions. I nearly died in the ensuing scuffle, and hundreds more of them were killed, but we managed to take one alive aboard the ship. From what I know of starborn, they can communicate in any language, as long as you are familiar with it. They can read your inner dialogue and anything that you happen to be thinking about at that moment which makes them relatively easy to understand. However these made absolutely no sense when I made contact with them. The exact quotes being something like ‘come out of your prison of flesh Deus, come and speak to us in your true form.”

One of the humans tilted their head in confusion, “Deus, isn’t that latin?”

Commander Vir nodded, “Yes, and I didn’t teach them that. So I suspect they had some human contact before me. However that isn’t the strange part.”

He went silent and glanced over at the small Vrul scientist who turned to look at the assembled committee members adjusting himself studiously, “I performed a remote medical assessment on the specimen, and found that the skin degeneration and the cataract-like structures on the eyes are, indeed, caused by a virus.” He held up a hand, “But not by just any virus, this was a retro-virus. Someone had to directly and intentionally inject these creatures with the virus. A virus which contains human DNA.”

The faces around the room grew tight with shock. They glanced back and forth between each other in confusion, “But…. why-”

Commander Vir shook his head, “That is where we aren’t sure. We have a few theories, that someone is attempting to give the Starborn the ability to communicate with humans that still have what we are calling, the neural dampener, another theory is that they might have been attempting to genetically harden the starborn against air pressure or Gravity. I mean think of the tactical possibilities, an army of telepathic creatures that can look inside your head and steal whatever information you want without having to lift a finger, not only that, but they could incapacitate an entire crew from outside a ship without a trace of their presence.” He glanced back at the starborn, “Luckily for us this experiment seems to be a failure.”

The small Vrul handed a holo-pad over to the dark haired human, “From what we can tell most of the changes seem to have a negative impact. Those burns you see there on the skin are a direct consequence of solar radiation, to which humans happen to be very sensitive. The white structures on the eyes seem to be an immune response to the forign human DNA. Whoever injected these creatures only succeeded in slowly killing them. This specimen here will expire after another few days.”

Just then, the healthy starborn floated into view movements flowing and graceful like a swan upon open water. It lifted its hands and began its quick sharp movements, “I have been examining the creature’s mind closely as much as I can manage. It is a strange landscape of madness and pain. I cannot spend long there or suffer myself. It sees…. As if in darkness staring into bright lights as humans pass by. It screams about Deus, though I cannot make much more form it’s strange thoughts. Perhaps with more time I can puzzle out it’s intentions, but for now I am none the wiser.”

The group shifted in confusion and unease as the creature spoke. At the front of the room, Commander Vir placed a hand to his head and swayed slightly on his feet. Two of the humans stepped forward to steady him. The woman stepped forward to take a look at his eyes as the others stared on in worry. Eventually he snapped out of his unresponsive state. He waved the others off, “nothing more than an absence seizure. I should be fine, the dangers of being in the room with a maddened starborn.”

He turned towards the second containment unit before anyone could comment, “This next specimen is far more worrying I would think.” He motioned them a bit closer to the glass, and the group crowded around nervously.

He lay on his back strapped down by a seemingly excessive six point restraint. Wrists, ankles, a vest about his chest and one around the top of his head. Even as they watched the man strained against the padded restraints, and despite the padding, his wrists were worn raw, and the bedsheets were tinged with streaks of blood. With crazed wide eyes, sclera eerily white against his deep skin, he turned to look at them. A burst blood vessel in one eye gave rise to a palpable feeling of dread.

He bared his teeth at them, and they could see most of the enamel was cracked, some of his teeth were missing. His arms and legs were horribly bloated with swelling and bruises. His fingers held evidence of attempted splinting, that been ripped away by his numerous escape attempts. He was stitched together in multiple places and as he turned his head the light above glittered over multiple surgical scars all around his head and down his neck.

“What kind of Frankenstein shit….”

The man in the room began to laugh and tug at the restraints working himself up into a maddened furey.

Commander vir turned to look at the staggered GA and UNSC representatives, “This….. Is what a super soldier looks like.”

“The hell does that mean?”

Commander Vir turned to look at the small vrul doctor once more who busteled over to look at them, “Someone, with impeccable surgical knowledge, cut into this human’s brain, over, and over, and over again. They managed to isolate neurons in the spinothalamic pathway carrying pain information without damaging motor neurons. Unfortunately this human can also no longer sense temperature or pressure though he is completely without pain. They also leasoned the amygdala, and areas of the hippocampus leaving him virtually without empathy. Lastly they leasoned the part of the brain that, as commander Vir mentioned, we theorize blocks transmission with the starborn.” he motion back and forth between the two containment units, “The two of them, can speak with each other though both of them are likely to die within the weak. “

Commander Vir nodded in worry, “When we captured the human, as you know, he had managed to kill 13 members of a relay crew dismembering at least five of them with his bare hands as well as crack a door rated for 1000 lbs of force. His resulting injuries include nearly completely ripping the muscles in his legs and back from the skeletal structure, the complete destruction of ligaments, as well as rupturing a few other internal structures. We can’t medicate him, and he refuses to hold still. Not to mention he doesn't feel hunger, pain or even the need to relieve himself. We expect him to also perish within the week.”

He motioned to the brain scan on the wall, “His ability to speak with the starborn, and the clear INTENTIONAL listening to allow it makes us think that these two events might be related.” He motioned to the starborn, “We had Conn do a little digging inside the human’s head as well, and he seems to be under the impression that other, what we assumed to be unrelated issues, could be connected as well. The gathering of cultists, the earthquake on the Tesraki homeworld, and the protests may all be connected.” He held up a hand, “This is where things are rather fuzzy. We aren’t sure how, but know you know as much as we do.”

The assembly stood quiet for a long moment just staring on in discomfort and disbelief, “So…. what you’re saying is someone is weaponizing humans.” The Drev representative, General Magnus wondered nervously switching his battle staff from one hand to the other.

Commander Vir nodded, “And you remember how things turned out the last time someone tried to experiment on humans?”

The GA representatives shifted uncomfortably.

“You don’t really think the Gib scientist could be behind this. We locked him away for good after the incident.”

Commander Vir turned his single eye on the speaker, “Perhaps, perhaps not. I would suggest checking in on him though. Perhaps if he is still there he might be able to offer some insight on what is happening, and what the endgame of our mysterious enemy could be.

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whatsthepointofphilosophy · 6 years ago

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Zeitgeist Disease

Something a bit different today. Paul Graham describes himself as “a programmer, writer, and investor”, although he studied philosophy in university. In January of 2004 he wrote a blog post, and I’m posting the entire thing here. Again, I didn’t write any of it, apart from this opening bit, and it’s fifteen years old.

It’s fundamentally a vigorous defence of philosophy and it’s more relevant now than ever before. I’ve called this post Zeitgeist Disease, but he calls it What You Can’t Say.

What You Can’t Say

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves.

Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.

The Conformist Test

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.

Trouble

What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for.

Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.

Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.

To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?

Heresy

This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?

Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.

So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.

In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

Time and Space

If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.

Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.

We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.

So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?

You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.)

You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.

I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones that are universal, or nearly so. Murder for example. But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.

For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

Prigs

Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads.

Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think.

You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent.

Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?

I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our taboos-- and in mint condition, because they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.

How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter-- just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say.

Mechanism

I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.

Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.

The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin.

Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.

So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?

This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.

Why

Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?

I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.

Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them.

Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.

In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from.

A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks.

Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)

Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.

It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands-- something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem.

Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.

Pensieri Stretti

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.

When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.

I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.

The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

Viso Sciolto?

I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".

Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.

If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.

Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."

Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved."

ABQ

A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.

And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?

Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.

Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.

To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.

Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.

Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.

You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.

How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?

#philiosophy #heresy #morality #fashion

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