Can I be nosy and ask how you got scurvy. In exchange you can take anything you want from my fridge vegetable drawer
oh totally. the fact that i had scurvy remains one of the weirdest twists in this ol life o' mine.
part of this story is funny, the other part not so funny. (TW EDs)
the not so funny part is I got to the point of developing scurvy in an insanely predictable way. I've had a clinical ED all my adult life and a lot of the PSAs warn you about the surface level stuff like "your hair will fall out!" "you'll be tired all the time!" which....yeah. but if you restrict hard enough and long enough youre basically doing a "stranded on a desert island DIY POV" simulation. not to sugar coat it but I was deeply unwell and doing some absolutely Insane things. i was living hot Sir Ernest Shackleton boy summer. except it wasnt hot it was horrible and Shackleton probably wouldve been deeply disappointed and confused by the whole situation.
but as one would naturally imagine if you are tit for tat nutritionally larping as a castaway, you will. Develop Diseases. I remember suddenly noticing that my teeth looked like straight ass and I was getting mouth sores but I wasnt sure why. I developed a fever for weeks that i couldnt shake, the skin on my hands kept chafing off and my fingers would lock up, in general my skin was really bizzare looking with weird scabs and dark spots, and overall i felt utterly awful. Ive been struggling with this for awhile so some of that was my ""normal"" at the time so I didnt really connect the dots until I was reading something about scurvy and went "haha funny sailor disease" only to pause and realise that with my dietary habits, i hadnt eaten fruit or anything containing vitamin C in well over a full calendar year. this caused me to look up the symptoms of scurvy with dawning horror that this mystery onset of symptoms was disturbingly close to scurvy, prompting me to go to the dr and low and behold I basically had la croix flowing through my veins with how terrible my blood levels were.
I was moving out for grad school within the season and i really didnt want to start that with a goddamn captain hook ass disease so for months I had to macrodose on vitamin C like I was a prized guinea pig. seeing those huge tablets still gives me flashbacks.
what gets funny is literally within the week of learning I had scurvy....I also had a major ocular melanoma scare. of which one of the treatments is to surgically remove the eye and/or have eyepatches involved. so for a few months in the summer of 2021 i was hobbling around with scurvy and an eyepatch on this beautiful green world of ours.
