So I might as well fill you guys in regarding THE CONDITION:
It’s mostly me venting, hope you like Medical Horror.
CIPD is a neurological condition where your white blood cells go batshit and eat the myelin on the nerves of your peripheral nervous system when going after a virus that looks just enough like myelin that your immune system decides to go Dirty Harry on you and scorch the earth.
If you’re unfamiliar with myelin, it’s just like the plastic or rubber over electrical wiring-- it ensures that the path of least resistance is ‘through’. Without myelin, a short in the nerve actually causes a tiny electric shock, in a phenomena I like to call ‘Riding the Lightning’: when a nerve’s really fucked up, the shock is a radiating pain that feels like a beesting coursing through an entire nerve. Nerves are pretty long, and they react to an attack the way one reacts to a beesting-- clench muscles, turn and pull away. Since there’s actually nothing you can avoid, when multiple nerves are like this, you end up curling up into a twitchy, spazzy ball of suck-- I refer to it as “Roachcurling”
All these symptoms I mention are accompanied with pain.
It fucking hurts.
So long term damage is literally pure pain. Myelin is also responsible for indicating a more long-term pain response. It feels like a really bad sunburn combined with really crampy but really excited muscles-- it feels like your body wants to RUN to stretch the cramp out, but as CIPD also causes weakness and paralysis, wobbling around like a knob during an occurrence will result in a collapse or feint, because it can and will fuck with your blood pressure.
Which brings me to Autonomic damage-- CIPD is also unique in that it sometimes attacks the autonomic system-- which mine did. Now, the Autonomic Nervous system is your body’s firmware. It tells your stomach to digest, your throat to swallow, your colon to poop, your heart rate to stabilize, and your body to stand and move. CIPD causes escalating paralysis, and long-term damage is likely. For instance, my digestive system STOPPED. For a month. I couldn’t eat (I’d vomit), shit (nerves are dead in the large intestine so it just piles up. That also hurts, a lot. Imagine the pain of being horribly constipated and just make that forever.
I also got misdiagnosed and basically left to die in the hospital. I was released after a month with no diagnosis after spending a month in the ICU on “Hospice” levels of morphine. I was scared and angry. The opiate withdrawals lasted for months. It felt like Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Nobody knows why or how I’m suddenly a burden, but I become a burden, and nobody can help me.
Since it doesn’t attack the central nervous system, my head was completely intact, I was fully aware and alert, literally entombed in a numb flesh suit that felt like I had a full body sunburn that periodically electrocuted me. The built up tension, pain and boredom was really, really, REALLY bad. You know when you’re sick, the sickness taints everything you do and prevents you from fully enjoying an experience that is supposed to take you out of this nightmarish situation. I remember envying the characters of Dragon Age, because they’re so strong and their legs worked.
I was diagnosed (finally) on my 18th birthday in October. (I had my first attack in august). It was almost a joke. He looked at my chart, and instantly said, “You have a variant of Gillian-Barre syndrome, but it’s mechanically identical, your protein count is through the roof.”
It was incredible. He just opened with that. It was a phenomenal gift, a word to define that centerpiece of my new adult life, forever.
So that’s tale one. It gets worse. But, know that my passion and joy when ‘mirin’ something from another world, the unreal and heroic is colored by the fact that I am a sickly, scrawny fucker. Escape is a necessity for me- I can’t look this particular abyss in the eye for too long or I’ll go crazy.
Now, like, I’m all for creative people getting asspats occasionally; god knows we don’t get any goddamn fuckin’ respect in education; my life has been backed by a haunting 24 year chorus of ‘How’re you going to get a job with that?’ so bad that I’m neurotic about the whole damn ordeal, but, like, every single ‘We luv wierdo #ContentCreators, ur so valued and important to us’ makes me want to spew acid out of my damn eyes.
The problem here is I’m not sure of any better way to encourage and support creativity as a life goal. Like, man, I’m torn up enough about it that I write off any success story of someone making a livable wage off of art as someone getting ‘lucky’ in a million-to-one game of highlander with a players consisting solely of people exerting the creative output, qualifications, and production quality of ten men. Any affirmation from somebody who’s not in the ‘business’ is baseless wanking, and any affirmation of the value of writing/art by academics as pointless, idealistic drivel.
Maybe it’s cuz I grew up around a buncha edgy ultra-utilitarian STEM-uber-Alles fedoralords who cudgeled it into me that art was inefficient, any inherent value in the creative process is produced by its’ market share. Expression is stupid, true artists apply their creativity to code linux or build machines, we should defund the humanities everywhere, ‘why do we teach any writing that isn’t technical writing’, etc, etc.
They were obnoxious people, but for whatever reason I picked up a habit of self-flagellating whenever I think I can get away with following anything that resembles a creative dream.
Usually only when I’m in a bum mood these days, though.
The unfortunate part about triggering a fight-flight-fawn-or-freeze with me is that I go literally insensate-- reason will not help, all of my training gets memory holed, and can only focus on a single point, which is making the pain and fear go away. This can lead to some dark places (I have a safety plan in place to keep them from amounting to anything, don't worry).
Now, I have a demyelinated vagus nerve-- this is the gut-brain that manages a lot of autonomic functions like heartbeat and most pertinently, panic. This is same nerve that causes that causes that sinking feeling when you're anticipating something awful. This causes constant anxiety on a cambrian-brain level. You cannot reason out of it, it does not care about the odds, or self-preservation, or the future. I've tried to recall these things in a Triggered and I can't.
Now, I also have other fried nerves that burn when aroused, this basically means I have a little detonator that you can trip by breathing too hard on it. Usually, putting me in a high stress environment causes that.
As that's a lot of pain to make stop, it causes a feedback loop that is uh, kinda like being tortured. My world recedes and I get combative, nihilistic, embittered and ruthlessly darwinistic, and all that brutality turns inward because I'm breaking my family's cycle of taking personal frustration out on someone else. This is, I imagine, the stuff of a healthy person's nightmares.
Worse, I'm also trans, with cPTSD (duh) and ADHD, which means that self-immolate button goes off for reasons so mundane as to be embarrassing, but make me curl up into a ball and cry, begging this phantom torturer to stop hurting me, frantically searching for any way out.
But to end with good news, it used to be much worse! I've made a lot of progress! I don't scream anymore!
So, as you might assume, I'll try any strat you Trigger Sufferers use to manage that if y'all know one. I'm already really good at advoidance, but sometimes the only way through is to open that door. ...Which is why my productivity is not particularly great. I've been fighting for disability for 3 years.
Ugh, considered making an app for Her to meet some locals, but my skin's so obviously fried from depression, and I got no makeup so I gave up, and I kinda hate all the pictures of me that I wouldn't show to anyone unless I knew 'em-...
I understand I'm hot in theory, but I really don't get it.
Paizo’s one wasn’t great so here, Giant Lore. Free if you want it.
[Specifically, it’s CC Share-alike, no attribution necessary, but would be super cool.]
“You ever have a super tall mate, and everyone wants to fight ‘em to prove they’re ‘ard? Imagine your entire species is like that. You’d be jumpy too.”
Society:
Giant societies can largely be measured by to what extent they interact with smaller humanoid -- or “smallfolk”-- populations, with whom Hill Giants have the most contact by far. Traditionally nomadic and building almost no permanent structures, Hill Giant culture features constant storytelling, all crammed in a Hill Giant’s near-photographic memory for later. Giant legends all share a cognate pantheon, and are heavily laden with implied tactics and garnished with allegory for the tribe’s prior successes and failures. They are unerringly bloody, for a Giant is always surrounded by violence, whether they start the fight or not.
The Hill Giant most commonly encountered is one that lives near a frontier town. A frontier Giant is most likely to be part of a tribe with a history marked by the legacy of attempts to civilize them, both from smallfolk and other, larger giant races. Hill Giants’ size and relative dullness makes them perfect laborers for either, a fact that the Giants realize as well. Such it is that Hill Giants are raised to scorn even diplomacy in good faith, for smallfolk lie and cheat so easily. A society may have well outgrown its slaving roots, but Giants don’t forget, ever. Giants further into the moors are less militant, but Hinterland Giant Tribes’ own story still often begins with a manumission, and includes plenty of stern warnings of the fate they avoid by remaining in the hinterlands.
Traditionally, Hill Giants compose themselves in tribes that are governed by a tetrarchy of some version of elder, shaman, judge, and warchief. Organization varies by tribe, but most are composed of 20 to 100 individuals-- Giants are big, so tribal numbers are significantly smaller than a comparable Smallfolk community; it’s just that much harder for the herd they to support every individual. Multiple tribes, or one tribe that grows too large, will split off, but those with shared aims will sometimes identify themselves as something that approximates a “nation”.
This is a matter of debate regarding translation, as Hill Giants use “nation” themselves as a term for a unit of giant society that literally means “People of the Sharer-family”. Nation to a Giant just means a shared lifestyle and a moot twice a year (usually around the equinox), to catch up and share stories. Emergency sessions able to be called to resolve regional scandals or existential threats, but as Giants are nomadic, organizing one with due haste is incredibly difficult so the threat must be grave indeed.
Moots also double as a festival. During the lead-up, Giants predisposed to raiding will escalate hits for alcohol or other luxury goods inorder to stock up and make their Tribe look wealthier, a matter young Giants conduct as a coming of age ceremony. Even Giant tribes who have forsaken raiding will still conduct this practice, but among friendly Smallfolk or other Giants these “raids” resemble more of a gift-giving ceremony with a lot of steps and plenty of chaos. Some Giants will share alike in the Smallfolk’s customs, contributing game to feasts and playing the “bogeyman” on holidays that feature one-- and living among Giants, they very often do-- to the shrieking delight of village children.
Ecology:
Most fraught among studies of Giants is the matter of their intellect. While they may share many practices with other nomadic humanoid tribes, Hill Giants aren’t Humans, and their brains are wired a little differently: While they might struggle to grasp certain abstract concepts, they have incredible memories and a knack for predictive reasoning, but find reading and arithmetic difficult. In practice, they are by no means stupid and are quick to prove their intellectual parity to smallfolk who mistake a brute for a fool.
All Giants are Omnivores, some vegetarian by choice, but Hill Giants will typically eat anything they can get their hands on, up to and including people. Such practices still highly taboo, even to Giants and are, with a few exceptions, practiced rarely, as all Giants all share a common dread: that the sweet flesh of smallfolk, once consumed, incites a craving for it that will never cease, and invites a fever of trembling madness in the process. It is from this practice that a common frontier slur, “shaking mad cannibal” is derived, Originally only restricted to Ogres, it has since spread to any Giant, and even some tribal Smallfolk. A subsequent stereotype-- that Giants think Smallfolk smell delicious-- seems to have some basis, but not even Giants can agree on the full truth of the matter.
Some unscrupulous (or desperate) Giant tribes will deliberately incite the shaking madness before battle, and a horde of Giants gradually succumbing to beasts of shaking, cackling primate rage would be cataclysmic indeed, for bitter revenge or to ensure whatever few Smallfolk remain will mourn the cost of a giant provoked for as long as the story is told.
Giants live long lives if not cut short by hardship, and Hill Giants are comparatively short-lived, but still only hit middle age at around a century. As such, Giants remember oaths and grudges verbatim, and take them as a matter of mortal gravity: a broken treaty is grounds for a vendetta that can span generations, and the entire tribe may never trust that deal with that family again except at swordpoint. A diplomat who shows appropriate respect and literacy in the language and ritual of Giant oath-swearing will get surprisingly far, and can earn a village of Smallfolk a staunch ally, stop an attack in an instant through a ritualized payment of appropriate blood money, or simply eak out a token of goodwill as proof that you can negotiate with a Giant.
Outside of these social strictures, however, honor leaves the equation immediately: Hill Giants fight dirty. Mercy is only reserved for slave stock, and the Giants will use anything they can get their hands on in a squall of violence that only stops when the Giants loot as much as they can carry. Some chiefs may use this to send a message, but others just use it to replenish their stock of booty to barter with.
Like pirates, Hill Giants share any prize evenly, with bonuses given to leaders (varying in amount by tribe) and a few prizes awarded as trophies to those most instrumental to the score. As such, Hill Giants are superstitious about their stuff, and will carry a sack of trophies with them everywhere as both a charm and badge of office. To Smallfolk, a lot of it can look like junk-- but asking a Hill Giant warrior about his trophies will reveal each was hard-earned. Like Humans, a lot of the time these stories are highly embellished, but Giants, due to their memory, find it very hard to lie to each other, and thus rarely even try with outsiders.
Tribes run the ethical gamut, but many practice slavery. Though obviously despicable, it also can seem hypocritical for a people so often made chattel to perpetuate such practices upon new victims, and many Giants agree: about half of Hill Giant tribes regard it with particular abhorrence, and will kill any slavers on sight, and in some regions this division is the primary grounds for long, bloody feuds between Hill Giant tribes. Among those that do take slaves, they are more hostage than investment: Regarded as little more than a sack of Gold that you have to feed, Slaves are put to the same work the Giants do, universally excessive for their size, both to exhaust them and convey how mighty even the lowest Giant is. It’s a pride thing. This only lasts until they can be bartered off or ransomed at the first opportunity, hopefully before they die from disease or exertion. As tribes are always moving, it can still take months before the tribe finds a buyer, so slaving tribes are easily identified at a distance by the small gang of shackled prisoners following their pack-beasts.
Hill Giants can reproduce with Smallfolk, albeit with some difficulty, creating a half-giant offspring. The child is typically sterile, but rumors of giant blood running in many families on the Frontier implies the matter is less clear cut than it seems. Half-Giants are regarded with the same suspicion and rumors as Half-Orcs, but some Smallfolk will elope with their giant lover into tribal life, or settle down in whatever Smallfolk society accepts them.
Relations:
It’s not unheard of for a society to fully welcome Hill Giants: often these societies are dwarves, happy to give the Giants the surface while the dwarves dig down, and gates into the underground can often be seen lined with stalls where Dwarves and Giants barter as peers. Other societies have learned to coexist with the Giants by either giving a tribe stewardship of the woods or integrating Giant families who leave the tribe into a nearby village as shepherds, free laborers or artisans. These instances of harmony are always uneasy, however well intentioned, but they are living proof that it can be done.
Hill Giants speak a dialect of the antediluvian language group “Giant”, which is deceptively complex and inflective, making it versatile and starkly beautiful when arranged in poetry. Hill Giants have an ideographic writing system reserved for shaman, but are largely illiterate and find written language excruciatingly difficult to learn.
Curiously, this willingness to trust doesn’t extend to Halflings. To a Hill Giant, the Halfling symbolizes every attempt their kin has made to exterminate them. Historically, the two were both nomads-- competitors-- and the Giant genesis legend is quickly followed by the first tales of war between Giant and Halfling, a crushing Giant defeat, and their subsequent scattering to the wastelands of the world, of which Hill Giants got the moors. This was followed by the commissioning messengers of messengers by the Halfling Great King, all bearing a declaration of the bestowal of a curse upon the Giants. The messengers spread to all lords of the world and their priests conveyed their message to their gods above: that the Giant must be scorned, and that no Giant take refuge in a land that bears a member of the Halfling people for more than a year. They’re a little bitter.
Thus, as the Giants filled the world, they were shunned, and wars soon followed. Yet, this loathing may not be truly eternal, as this combination declaration-curse is prophesied to be broken by a Giant hero, but the Hill Giants will keep the lifestyle that would sustain them in what was now their home until then, or perhaps even after.
Been getting some interesting Biopsy results recently...
Now that I’m out of work and strongly examining and treating my health, It’s literally been an unending chain of “holy shit” responses from the imaging and biopsies I’ve been going through.
On one hand, it’s vindicating to have evidence of what I’ve been experiencing that can be bounced around in a medical setting to inform treatment (such that it is, nerves are hard to fix), and I kinda feel like a badass when the doctor says that damage like the stuff I live trough is typically debilitating and it’s amazing how I function at all.
On the other, I look back and go “holy shit” myself, seeing all the mechanical failures that cause the stuff that I’d put in the back of my mind and ignored, endured, or glossed over, and seeing just how abnormal that is… looking at me, recounting my patient history, my surgeries, my meds, how much I’ve lost and how much I might never get back again– seeing my body like a burned house, unsteady and condemned upon blackened foundations, fathoming just how long it will take before it collapses– what the stress and strain will do– that’s existentially disturbing on a deeply, deeply visceral level.
That’s really why I’m a Transhumanist. I crack jokes, but, the triumph of the machine is necessary for me to have a future at all.
