not much of anything @disastervirgo - Tumblr Blog

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weltenwellen

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

theskullofjudgement

Skull of judgement am I evil for wanting to be loved

YUUUUUUP

rockshitty

Nothing reminds me what a goddamn miracle modern medicine is more so than hearing stories about people who contracted the black plague in the 21st century and were prescribed antibiotics for it.

Like yeah man you got the disease that wiped out half of Europe, like, a couple separate times within written history, and we have no clue how many times before that. To cure it you have to take 14 pills and drink lots of juice. You’re gonna feel kind of crummy for a while. It’s vitally important you take all 14 pills.

sapphoandvanzetti

the thing that blows my mind is blood transfusions. for literally all of human history up until about 100 years ago if you lost enough blood that was it, you were dead, and then people just figured out how to take blood from other people and successfully give it to you and now you can come in to the hospital with a blood pressure of ohfuck/nope, the same color as the linens and they just pop a tube in your arm and casually give you some stuff that another person donated on their lunch break, and you live long enough for the doctors to find and treat your gastric bleed. Insanely cool.

findingfeather

Honestly even more, just . . . IV fluids.

The fact that we can put fluids into people via IV saves more lives than I can actually communicate. There are so, so many more ways to die when we can't do that. You can go from literally at death's door from an illness you have no other cure for, to Basically Fine, You'll Feel Icky A Bit Longer But You're Otherwise Fine and Your Own Immune System Will Work Now, from sterile saline into a vein.

Or even fucking subcutaneous, under your skin. It still gets into your system faster and bypasses any fuckery going on in your gi-tract.

But you want the other end?

I recently got the answer to a crapload of symptoms of mine and it turned out to be Crohn's. Ileal crohn's.

For most of human history there was literally nothing to do about this but hope and pray that your immune system didn't decide to rip ulcers and lesions in your digestive tract to the point where you bled out, or the point where parts of it died and killed you with sepsis, or enough to build up stricture bands of scar tissue sufficiently to cause impactions or any other really gnarly and unpleasant ways you can die because for some reason your body decides the walls of your digestive tract are the enemy and need to be dismantled cell by cell. (Including a fuckload of cancers caused by the constant damage to the cell wall.)

Even as recently as when most of the younger people reading this were small children, mostly all you could do about it was take corticosteroids when you were in a flare. And that was better than Nothing. But at the same time, corticosteroids have a potential laundry list of side effects and you want to take them as little as possible and for as brief a period as possible. And there wasn't a lot else.

I am on a medication with the proprietary name "Skyrizi" and the generic name risankizumab. It's made from taking antibodies from a non-human source and then modifying their protein sequences to be more similar to human antibodies, after which they modify them further in order to make it so that the literal only thing they do is go into my body and bind to something called "tumour necrosis factor" so that this will stop flagging my own goddamn digestive system walls for destruction by the rest of the immune system.

Please feel free to read that paragraph over again.

Modern medicine isn't perfect; there are many things we're just as helpless against as we were in the Days of Eld, and there are many ways its practitioners fail us. But also we can make a thing that goes into my body and says "hey stop self destructing you MORON!" and I have a much better chance than at any other time of not dying young of bowel cancer or bowl impaction! This is fucking insane.

necarion

IV fluids are crazy in simpler ways too. One of the major killers of pregnant women was dehydration due to morning sickness (top two being that and just "death in childbirth"). But that just doesn't happen anymore, because we can give IV fluids (along with anti nausea drugs). Same mechanism is how food poisoning and cholera usually kills, so simple IV fluids mean that we can let the person get over the disease (which takes a day or two) and not die in the process.

starfieldcanvas

I tear up every time I read the shockingly poetic description of the first time someone managed to successfully (albeit temporarily) reverse lethal dehydration via the administration of IV fluids. The account comes from Dr. Thomas Latta during an 1832 cholera outbreak in Britain:

As soon as I learnt the result of Dr. O’Shaughnessy’s analysis, I attempted to restore the blood to its natural state, by injecting copiously into the larger intestine warm water, holding in solution the requisite salts, and also administered quantities from time to time by the mouth, treating that the power of absorption might not be altogether lost, but by these means produced, in no case, any permanent benefit, but, on the contrary, I though the tormina, vomiting and purging were much aggravated thereby, to the further reduction of the little remaining strength of the patient;

The reference to Dr. O'Shaughnessy is regarding O'Shaughnessy's then-recent experimental confirmation that what cholera patients were dying from was specifically the depletion of water, salt, and bicarbonate.

People had been attempting to introduce depleted salts and fluids into dehydrated patients for a while at this point, but cholera prevents you from absorbing these things intestinally the way you normally would; trying to skip the stomach and go straight to the intestines just irritated the system, triggered more vomiting/shitting, and accelerated the losses.

So Dr. Latta got creative:

Finding thus, that such [intestinal injection], in common with all the ordinary means in use, was either useless or hurtful, I at length resorted to throw the fluid immediately into the circulation…..

Forget the intestines! He's gonna go straight to the veins!

The first subject of experiment was an aged female, on whom all the usual remedies had been fully tried, without producing one good symptom; the disease, uninterrupted, holding steadily on its course, had apparently reached the last moments of her earthly existence, and now nothing could injure her—indeed, so entirely was she reduced, that I feared I would be unable to get my apparatus ready ere she expired.

Having inserted a tube in the basilic vein, cautiously—anxiously, I watched the effects; ounce after ounce was injected, but no visible change was produced. Still persevering, I thought she began to breathe less laboriously, soon her sharpened features, and sunken eye, and fallen jaw, pale and cold, bearing the manifest impress of death’s signet, began to glow with returning animation; the pulse, which had long ceased, returned to the wrist; at first small and weak, by degrees it became more and more distinct, fuller, slower and firmer, and in the short space of half an hour, when six pints had been injected, she expressed in a firm voice that she was free from all uneasiness, actually became jocular and fancied all she needed was a little sleep; her extremities were warm, and every feature bore the aspect of comfort and health.

Sadly he didn't immediately realize that he had to keep monitoring the patient to periodically inject more saline until she was fully out of danger, so his patient died just under 6 hours after her miraculous recovery. It would be many decades of further trial and error before IV injections really became the miracle cure they are today. But what an amazingly vivid description of that nigh-magical first success!

Here's where my information is from, if you want to know more:

The “bench to bedside” (BTB) paradigm of translational medicine (TM) assumes that medical progress emanates from basic science discoveries t

june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be

npdclaraoswald

A doll youtuber I watch has made a video about the history of Polly Pocket, and she's describing the plots of the dvd specials, one of which features an elderly woman named Ms. Throckmorton, and my reaction was

inkskinned

the men in my life are all good men, or, at least, they are men who are not violent - and that is enough for a man to be considered good; that he could be violent but is not.

the men in my life are good men. recently at a hardware store one of the men in my life let me stand behind him, just a little, in that ghosting way that girls can learn. the disappearing technique we master of shadowing behind our Good Men. this was to protect me from a man who was not-being-good.

i fall down. one of the good men in my life offers me one arm like a knight, we are laughing while i clamber back onto my feet. i give the good men in my life piggy back rides because i like to show off how strong i am. i give the good men in my life run-at-them hugs. i let the good men in my life pick me up like i am a sack of grain; i get the good men in my life coffee, i make them sandwiches, i teach them dancing.

i am a man-hater, obviously. i am gay enough the insult is sort of funny. waiting for the bus, where there are men who are not-known-to-be-good, i google how to make a fist. i can never remember if the thumb goes on the outside or the inside, only that it is imperative that i do not fuck it up or i will break my thumb at the same time the man tries to break me.

i walk my dog around the track only-at-dusk and-no-later. i made that mistake once, in august, hoping i could take a later run and maybe see the stars - i romanticized the idea of being able to skulk like a fox. the man that followed me across three lawns, two road-crossings, and back to my car - he spent the whole time whistling. the good men in my life say - oh, do you need me to come with you? and are actually asking - do you feel safe?

i fall down in a supermarket. a man i do not know grabs the inside of my knee. i do not know if the man is good, but i am supposed to give men the benefit of the doubt, so i laugh while standing. a man trying-to-be-in-my-life says what, no hug? and i have to decide if it worth it to just take off or put up with it. a man who-might-not-be-good stares at me while i walk by - i have to calculate if he’s just looking or if he’s watching. other men have badly hurt me, physically. the casual remark made is that those men are not real men. but they were real enough, to me.

there are many men who are mad at me. an entire reddit thread once was dedicated to how to dox me for feminist ranting - it was kind of funny, when it wasn’t downright scary. i have been stalked and harassed and treated horribly. they are all good men, in their own lives, you know. they are not violent, usually, unless provoked, and all it takes for a man to be good is for him to not be violent unless provoked, and i am, of course, always provoking.

a man in my life rolls his eyes. “i am sick of hearing this. we get it, all men are fucking evil. get over it.”

a man who-is-not-good shouts something unwritable at me. i have to tell the good man i am standing next to - it’s okay, this is nothing compared to what-could-be, this happens, it’s really not that big of a deal to me.

“but it should be,” he says. “it should be.”

lakemojave

Happy Pride Month everyone! Remember 4 months ago when the CEO of this platform harassed and chased a trans woman off this website just for posting her transition timeline, then chased her to other social media platforms to continue harassing her, and threatened to call the FBI if she continued disputing the multiple dubious terminations of her blogs that did not violate tumblr's terms of service in any way? And despite tumblr staff insisting that the CEO was acting against their interests, the broad transmisogyny evident in the site's culture and moderation policy has still not been adequately addressed?

lakemojave

Remember that staff is continuing to nuke the blogs of trans women even after all of this. Remember this post when they call this site the queerest place on the internet again this month

lakemojave

It's 2 years later. It's gotten worse. Happy pride month.

oldmanpusspuss

most euthanizable mutuals of 2026

enbaluka-tokyo-drift

elexecution

there are too many things happening this summer that i'm thinking we are going to need an extra 6-12 months of june and possibly another 3-4 months of july. probably no extra august as the problem should hopefully sort itself out by then. we are also looking into extending the day night cycle to 55 hours and extending the human lifespan to 10000 years.

tieflingkisser

delicatefury

And this is why I’m putting Windows 10 on my new PC.

jellycaustic

It's in windows 10 too :( I just checked my system and had to turn it off.

Time & Language > Language > Spelling, typing, & keyboard settings > "How AI has helped you" Typing Insights

insertusernameici

unicornempire

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

theheroheart

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

jack-the-bear

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

lets-go-steal-an-ot3

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

gay-jesus-probably

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

mikkeneko

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

melyzard

Reblogging for the website.

nianeyna

yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.