Cupcake (she/her) @cupcakeshed - Tumblr Blog

About me

Trans girl, neurodivergent, mad science enthusiast

Also I'm polyamorous, and mostly only made this account so my girlfriend and I could follow each other

Please go easy on me

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

lyricwritesprose

My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.

mutedtempest

I think about this a lot.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.

hyperactivehedgehog

Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"

#science #hopepunk

metalsonicmustdie

.smth about extremely repressed and suicidal trans girl having the “evil” version of herself tell her that she looks good in a dress. and then she tells that reflection that she wants her dead. Yeah

lesbianshepard

one of the funnier incidents of me assuming someone knew a meme irl was when a new coworker was talking about some woman who got arrested for tax fraud and I went "God forbid women do anything" and he got scared and thought I was accusing him of being sexist, so he started apologizing and saying how tax fraud isn't even bad, actually.

eggblackoutpoetry

“Egg [x5]”

just-another-cat-blog

pride month!!!

lemonsharks

Is that a miette?

jeanjauthor

Pride for you! Pride for a thousand years!!

lost-and-cursed

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

adz

reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

wiseguynephile

flashback to when I got a little too gnc in my new profile pic and my mom caught on that I had The Gender, but didn't want to ask about it outright. so she started making up never-before-seen euphemisms

could-estrogen-save-her

Could estrogen have saved Jax from The Amazing Digital Circus?

Yes, it could've saved her

No, it wouldn't fix anything

It would've made it worse, actually

Remaining time: 5 days 1 hour

A lot of people wanted to see this but I also wanna post it on my own anyways

serendippertyy

happy pride to transfem jax,,, anytime someone draws transfem jax fairies are born and flowers bloom...

wifefiber-deactivated-deactivat

conronorock

yuri of the week

softtaulette-deactivated2018032

What if birds could actually speak English and we were speaking bird the whole time. Like really how weird would that be?

galbos

the geese are back? God I hate them so fucking much.

darling-highness-deactivated201

what the fuck is this newspaper

literally my dad

alright nobody asked for this one, i drew it for me

ghostinthebathroom

I had a dream about Columbo at a drag show. This is what came from it.

somewhere-south-of-neutral

I'm waiting for him to explain to me how his newfound love of drag allowed him to prove I killed my business partner

evilvillain123456789

step one: replace entire personality with open, festering wound

step two: contort absolutely all stimuli in my environment to relate to the my wound in some manner, ideally one which justifies random acts of unbridled aggression and vengeance

step three: marry a girl with generational wealth

cupcakeshed

What's step four?