per aspera ad astra

what makes this fragile world go 'round? ✨links start✨

[givrali]

Keeping all the fundraisers that have been shared with me on this page

https://givrali.tumblr.com/savegaza

Feel free to share more with me. I do not have a huge following here but I will do what I can!

[sobcat]

2026 half year report 🐎

yippee! 🍀

all in all, not bad 🦩

hoping for better... 🧍‍♀️

only a miracle can save 2026 now

despair and misery 🪾

Remaining time: 15 hours 20 minutes

[mmilhouse]

goodbye $200 helloooo 3 groceries

[jurassicpeanut]

No bond stronger than a disabled girl and her disabled cat

[girlbossfranziskavonkarma]

rise and shine to lesbians and bi women😍😍😍 stay hydrated and stay sexy 🥰 🥰 🥰 🥰 everyone else….😒 good morning i guess…. 😐

[hydrattan]

I was feeling agitated and artblocked yesterday so I decided to give my brain a rest by watching TV and then the next thing I knew these were in front of me

[lustcannibalism]

they should invent a way for me to do tasks without the mind torture

[lustcannibalism]

there is a world out there I can’t comprehend

[typecasto]

behold, context

[toweringclam]

[byjove]

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?"

[prismatic-bell]

Back in the 1960s, my dad was one of the first 100 successful open-heart surgeries in the world. He needed it to fix a hole in his heart, a condition that up until then was basically "take him home and make him comfortable."

He's lived long enough that three of his grandkids have been born with the same condition, and he's been there to assist with the recovery after the laparoscopic version of the same surgery he had.

He has a scar from collarbone to waist that's as thick as my finger--thicker, in some places. My nieces and nephews have scars so tiny you could mistake them for being from a particularly bad cat scratch. And their recovery was measured in weeks, instead of months.

Medicine has improved so much, so fast, that he's lived to see the research done on him save his grandchildren.

[vaspider]

Every time I inject my insulin, I think about the doctors that developed it, and every dog that died in that process.

There were a lot of them. Yes, it gets to me every time. I don't die in agony because of determined scientists and some unspeakably good dogs.

[bold-baddie]

[minmos]

kfc mobile app automatically put in my order under the name Nasty Ned and i cant change it can someone kill me expeditiously please

[minmos]

ITWONT LET ME CHANGE IT

[aromanticsky]

I think that if I unsubscribe I should stop getting the emails

[helenvaughans]

[zitasaurusrex]

[memegetter]

happy pride month.

in new zealand, our evil government are trying to legislate definitions of women and men, in ways that are legally incoherent but clearly trying to pave the way for more horrifically transphobic legislation. we have an election in a few months but our main opposition party, and all our mainstream news media, are so spineless and cooked that there's a good chance the ghouls will win reelection.

it took 2 whole months for local terf group 'speak up for women' to get 2,000 signatures on the petition that led to this new bill in our parliament.

it's taken five days for this pro-trans 'they don't speak for us' petition to get 17,000 signatures.

this is a show of support that is really heartening for a lot of trans people in our corner of the world.

cis/ish women, if you're from here but haven't signed yet, please do. and if you're not from here and you know any new zealanders, could you send them this petition? a full fifth of our population lives overseas, and there's a good chance they don't follow the news.

LINK

[cutecipher]

99% of users on tumblr are some sort of gay as fuck animal

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[threedollarsdotcom]

top ten hi moments that will have you helloing

[elorein]