thoughts of an indigenous nursing student

rn '26 - psych and street medicine

[sapphling]

i don't know how to keep engaging with people re: justice politics who still fail to realize that 1. punishment's sole function is to soothe and assuage the conscience of the people assigning it and doling it out and 2. this is a bad thing

[penandinkprincess]

parenting commitment level 3000

[penandinkprincess]

apparently a requirement for working at poison control is a talent for stand-up comedy

[starsarefairylightsfornerds]

[aqueerkettleofish]

When I was training to be a paramedic, we had one student ask the instructor what to do in the event of a marijuana overdose. The instructor said "Tell him to take two twinkies and call you in the morning."

[actualbird]

i posted about my omegaverse pill bottles and how they help me take my bipolar meds more regularly and it became a hit tweet im wheezing

[stawberrifields]

Sorry to burst the bubble but be careful doing this because the containers that medication come in are designed to keep the medicine safe. You could potentially reconstruct the compound formula by doing this.

[actualbird]

eyyo, dont be sorry!! this is really important! on the original tweet, some people actually told me about the exact thing in the replies and i had NO IDEA about it before so it was actually a blessing in disguise that i posted this silly post because i learned about how to store my meds correctly!!

im still attached to my bottles though so now im just cutting the blister packets into tiny single squares so they both stay protected and contained and i still get to do my silly omegaverse ritual HAHA

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[avpdvoidspace]

Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being "venting", even if you're not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can't talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.

And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.

It's to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I'm literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.

[savouryduck]

when I was in high school, I overheard two older students talking about a friend of theirs.

One of them said something like, "it doesn't bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn't talk about it ALL the time".

The other replied, "Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say 'when I was in treatment,' it's like when you say 'last year'."

I try to remember that any time someone says something that sounds Shocking to me. sometimes one person's scary special crisis is another person's last year.

[wherethewildcatsare]

If you want to be accepting of mental illness, you need to accept the fact that some people's everyday lives are going to be terrifying to you. That doesn't mean they don't get to talk about it. Stop forcing hurt, isolated people to become even MORE hurt and isolated because you can't fathom toughening up a bit.

[theyaoimonster]

GRABS you by the THROAT. stop using "narcissistic", "slow", "depressed", "bipolar", "schizophrenic" and the literal R slur (i'm not saying it.) etc etc etc as insults. I don't care if you're neurodivergent and doing this you're still an ableist prick

[indigenurse]

I have ANXIETY ok

[kuttithevangu]

Being a calm, gentle, non-reactive person is really hard work, which is probably why many people are none of these things. Personally I think it’s worth it but sometimes one does want to just roll around on the floor wailing at the top of one’s lungs

[kuttithevangu]

People in my notes who think I’m repressed or dissociating: you will feel better when you learn emotions are not a binary of Not Feeling It vs Being Overwhelmed By It

[blorbospinninhouseplant]

Ok but How Do I Do That

[kuttithevangu]

Self-regulation for adults: Strategies for getting a handle on emotions and behavior - Harvard Health

Learn strategies for enhancing self-regulation skills, and discover the benefits of mastering this essential life skill to help emotional dy

There are many techniques (also, there are drugs)

[blorbospinninhouseplant]

Thank you, but do you have any advice for teens?

[kuttithevangu]

So my FIRST piece of information if you’re still a teen is that genuinely as you get older it will get easier to regulate your emotions. During adolescence our brains are undergoing a lot of growth and change that genuinely does make it harder to do this, on a scientific level. However, practicing emotional regulation skills can still help a lot and if you can find something that works it will make life easier going forward

This page has more information and recommendations for some basic exercises:

Emotional Regulation for Teens: Strategies to Manage Intense Feelings

Discover effective strategies for teens to manage intense emotions, develop emotional awareness, and improve overall well-being. Expert tips

[rythms-of-synthax-deactivated20]

Quote of the day

[baffledtreesquid]

I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych

[wheremermaidsdwell]

I've been meaning to make a post talking about my stroke because y'all got bits and pieces of the recovery but I never actually told the story of HOW it went down and the thing is the type of stroke I had is usually the type young people have and since having mine i've now heard multiple stories of people under 40 having very similar strokes and the scary thing is, is that they didn't get help right away. Because you're young and healthy and sure you feel weird but it'll pass right? but it doesn't, and it gets worse, and by the time you get to the hospital (some people literally take days to go) the deficits are worse and recovery is harder.

so here's a super long post about strokes in general, and mine in particular/what I went through.

So for strokes the signs are abbreviated BE FAST. Balance loss, Eyesight changes, Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, -> Time to call 911.

Had I known those MAYBE I would have figured it out but my symptoms were a little mixed. I was reading (fanfic!) in bed because it was a sunday morning and i had nothing pressing to do and suddenly got dizzy. I put my laptop aside because my eyes were blurring (Eyesight changes - symptom #1), and laid down, thinking it would pass, it didn't, it's a little vague how it progressed because I'd been having headaches and neckpain for about 3 weeks leading up to it so I was like 'idk is this a migraine?' (headaches can be a stroke symptom so symptom #2) but i got nauseous and eventually got up and to my utmost surprise I immediately fell over as if I was the drunkest of frat bros. The room literally spun before my eyes as I fell to the floor (Balance loss - symptom #3). I have had some Nights and I had never been that unsteady before. I crawled my way to the bathroom, threw up (nausea - not a common stroke symptom) , took 800mg of ibuprofen, and crawled back to bed.

if you know anything about ibuprofen you might know it's a mild blood thinner and that's a high dose. I may have inadvertently helped myself with that one. I was just feeling like shit and thinking 'idk this might help'

At this point I still thought we were still in Normal Land. Sure, it was a weird morning, but Surely There Was A Reason. (Yes There Was) Anyway, as I'm lying there willing my body to stop suffering I realize my arm is going numb (stroke symptom #4) and I switch positions, because weird, but it doesn't go away, and I gave it a good little while. I'm on a medication that can make my limbs tingle but it usually just does it to my fingers and it dissipates quickly but this wasn't dissipating, and then I realized one of my legs was also going numb. Then one side of my face is going numb.

(at the time I did not look in the mirror but I had a drooping eyelid - symptom #5)

Those all seem bad. I grab my computer and google 'when to go to the hospital for dizzyness' as that felt like the worst of my problems. and indeed the list I found highlighted that if you are also experiencing loss of balance, blurred vision, nausea, and limb numbness, you should see a doctor. That seems like far too many symptoms to be having all to be listed. I grab my phone (thankfully plugged in and by my bed), and start layering on more clothing because it's about 10 degrees out and i'm in a pajama dress. The very nice man at 911 talks with me and sends an ambulance, I tell him I don't think I can get out the front door of my building on my own and he asks if I can get to MY apartment door to which I say yes and he assures me that's fine they will have keys to my building.

(I have been since informed they love to chop down doors but no, I could get that far)

I wait by my door laying down on the ground and they arrive pretty quickly. They see to me in the hallway, which is more of a lobby in my building and the only place with room for me to lie down (I cannot stand unassisted at this point) they ask me a bunch of questions, take vitals, and ask me where I would like to be taken. Me, having never had to go to the fucking hospital in an emergency before, simply go 'wherever is close' because I again, I am having a stroke and do not have the wherewithal to think through these things.

A big firefighter helps me down the stairs (it's only a half flight and I still almost did not make it) and we get underway.

At the hospital they wheel me into triage and I mostly lie there gratefully and answer some questions and respond to some tests (grip strength, following a pen with my eyes, that sort of thing) and then I hear what is great when you've been at urgent care for two hours but what is Very Bad when you just arrived in an ambulance and that's 'She's next'. I jumped the line for a CT scan and an MRI. I was there less than ten minutes before I was actively being scanned. honestly closer to five.

my active symptoms seem to have been worse than some of the stories I've heard, not being able to walk AT ALL in particular, although some other are pretty equal (Footless Jo on youtube had a stroke around the same time I did of the same type and has discussed hers, she delayed going in despite the severity for a variety of reasons and it sounds like her recovery has been difficult) My recovery was pretty easy because i was actively being cared for and on blood thinners right away. My stroke was caused by an vertebral arterial tear, aka the inner part of an artery tore which can cause a clot. This tends to be the type of stroke young people have although I'm sure it's possible to have a different type.

I was pretty out of it in the beginning, but I was only in the hospital for 6 days and then in a rehab for another 4 to relearn how to walk and balance, then i was released unto the world and just spent time going to physical therapy and recovering for awhile. I was out of work for about 8 weeks total. I basically had the best outcome for a stroke. I recovered almost fully back to 100% (I'm about 2% less sure footed than I used to be, but it's rarely noticeable), my face still feels a little weird but has markedly improved so I live in hope it will eventually get back to normal. It massively sucked. But strokes can fuck you up for life and I came out a weird medical story to tell and have to take some extra medication now/precautions to take (i cannot do certain types of yoga, no weightlifting, no push ups, no going on rollercoasters.... things that could strain my neck essentially) but overall I escaped very lucky.

[northstareclipse]

Springing off of my addiction post once more, I am also skeptical at best of 12-step programs, because their framework has just never remotely aligned with my actual experience.

The substance I was addicted to was heroin. While I was actively addicted, it absolutely came before everything else. My life shrank around it. I kept using despite very real, very obvious negative consequences. If you’re looking for something that fits the “compulsion + harm + loss of control” model, that was it.

But what’s always sat strangely with me is what happened when that context changed.

Once my abusive relationship ended and I was no longer in an environment where it was readily available, it was shockingly easy to stop. I’m not saying it was physically comfortable. My body was pretty pissed off for a while. But psychologically, it just didn’t have the same hold anymore. I wasn’t spending my days white-knuckling cravings or constantly thinking about it. It dropped out of my life in a way that, according to the 12-step model, is not really supposed to happen.

And that’s where my issue with that framework starts.

Because 12-step ideology tends to assume that if you have ever had that kind of relationship with one substance, it reveals something fundamental and permanent about you. That you now have a generalized “addictive nature” that will attach itself to other substances or behaviors if you’re not constantly managing it. That you are, in some essential way, always on the verge of transferring that pattern onto something else.

And that just hasn’t been true for me.

I was a near-daily cannabis user for years. When it started consistently making me feel physically uncomfortable instead of good, I stopped. No drawn-out battle, no existential crisis, just “this isn’t giving me what I liked about it anymore” and I moved on.

I drink occasionally, in social or celebratory contexts, and I genuinely find alcohol kind of boring outside of that. It doesn’t have much pull for me.

I tried gambling once, got annoyed at how tedious and overstimulating it felt, and left the casino in under an hour. I have not felt remotely compelled to revisit that experience.

I use the internet a lot, and I play a handful of video games, but I can also go on a camping trip with no signal and be completely fine, unless you want to try and find something pathological about nature photography, in which case you can blow it out your ass. If anything, I generally enjoy the change of pace. There’s no sense of panic or withdrawal or “I need to get back to my computer/consoles immediately.”

So when I hear the idea that addiction is this broad, transferable trait that will latch onto anything with quick reward or low friction, I just don’t see it reflected in my own life.

What does make sense, looking back, is context.

When I was using heroin, I was in an abusive relationship. My environment was unstable, stressful, and honestly pretty bleak. The substance didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It fit into a specific set of conditions where it functioned as relief, escape, and regulation.

When those conditions changed, the behavior changed with them.

That doesn’t mean there was no dependency. There obviously was. It doesn’t mean there were no consequences. There very much were. My grades suffered. I dropped out of college. I lost my apartment because staying out of withdrawal and numbing out from the abuse felt more important than paying rent.

But it does suggest that what we call “addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait that needs to be managed forever. Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.

When that’s the case, then a framework that assumes universality - “if this happened once, it will always be waiting to happen again, with anything” - is going to miss a lot of variation.

I’m not saying 12-step programs can’t help people. Clearly they can, or they likely wouldn’t exist in the way they do. But I do think they’re often treated as the model of addiction rather than a model that fits some people and not others, and when your experience doesn’t match that model, many people who swear by them will assume that you are misunderstanding yourself, in denial, or “not taking it seriously enough.” This paternalistic attitude only serves to make me even more skeptical of the framework.

For me, what mattered wasn’t declaring myself permanently “addictive” or treating every pleasurable behavior as a potential threat.

What mattered was getting out of the environment where that pattern made sense in the first place.

Rat Park, people. Stop forgetting about Rat Park.

[hug-your-face]

“addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait... Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.

I have helped change more individual behavior by changing the environment around them than I have by working on their behavior.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

"America is so young compared to other countries, we have no real history!"

We have archeological sites that are thousands of years old with evidence that people have been here for much longer, you just don't consider Native people part of this country's history unless we're being killed by colonists.

[rabbiteclair]

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

[leafcabbage]

sometimes people will make you feel stupid for being kind. this makes it hard to stay kind. it is important that you do anyway. if you have become unkind, it is important to remember that you can become kind again. it's a skill, not an inherent trait.

[myalgicencephalomyelitiscfstom]

Somebody shared the following today saying: "I found this video on tiktok and it explains m.e so well" and "I saw it and thought to myself I relate so much" Here's the TikTok link: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyandrewdavis/video/7135061608316833070

[only-tiktoks]

[catchymemes]

[vtmb2spoilers-deactivated202112]

hope u dont mind me keeping ur tags because ur right:

[calmdowncalmdown]

I’ll reblog this every time I see it.

[moki-dokie]

this is why i steer clear of hard drugs. i’ve seen a fair share of stories similar to this. it’s good and great and awesome until it’s not and then there’s little hope for escape if you either don’t have help or can’t break out of the cycle for a second to realize you need to get that help.

anti-drug campaigns should absolutely be run by recovering addicts. shit, that’s what the anti-smoking campaigns do.