leukopilled lymphohead

izzy . she/they . 20s . blood enjoyer i'm here to be normal about cell bio

[thymodyke]

here's my deal:

i am a lab rat working in immunotherapy at great cost to my sanity.

[thymodyke]

here's my new deal:

i am a grad student studying immunology at great cost to my sanity.

[sioltach]

I love being an animal I love that everything I am can only be because I am a recycled material sculpture sourced from the random but beautiful bullshit of planet earth

[sioltach]

How it feels when it's my turn with the oxygen, carbon and hydrogen + other trace elements (arranged in such a way to be a terrestrial mammal)

[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"

[wtf-scientific-papers]

Wang and Lai (2014)

[gemstone-gynoid]

[thymodyke]

wrapping up a long protocol will have you sitting at your desk like this

[loveridden1999]

top 3 hobbies for young adults:

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

3. agonizing over the present

[vamplire]

are you freaky about vampires? have you been freaky about vampires? will you be freaky about vampires? when will you be freaky about vampires?

[hbmmaster]

[hbmmaster]

are you a bacterium

[magnetothemagnificent]

I am begging people to understand that reproductive rights is as much the right to become and remain pregnant as it is to terminate a pregnancy.

Encouraging all people capable of being pregnant to get their tubes tied or get a hysterectomy isn’t the solution you think it is.

Most people who get abortions do so because they want to be able to get pregnant in the future.

Back-alley abortions often leave people unable to become pregnant again, even if they want to. Legal, safe abortion ensures that a person can terminate a pregnancy while still retaining the option and ability to become pregnant again.

PoC, disabled people, and trans and intersex people have historically been barred from the right to get pregnant and reproduce. These marginalized groups have faced sterilization and maternal mortality for a long time.

If you think reproductive justice is only about the right to *not* be pregnant, you are woefully misinformed.

Reproductive justice means people should be able to control their own bodies, whether it means ending or preventing a pregnancy, or becoming pregnant and remaining pregnant.

Reproductive justice means that healthcare providers should and must address the barriers and dangers PoC, disabled people, and trans and intersex people face when it comes to obstetrics and gynecology.

Reproductive justice means lowering the maternal mortality rate for black people in America.

Reproductive justice means not sterilizing disabled people and providing safe options for disabled people who want to become pregnant.

Reproductive justice means acknowledging that trans people may want to become pregnant and not mandating they be sterilized in order to legally transition.

Reproductive justice means not sterilizing intersex babies and children in the attempt to make them fit into a dyadic, binary sex.

Reproductive justice is not just about abortions.

[gayvampyr]

are you squeamish about needles?

yes

yes but only shots/injections (not IVs)

yes but only of IVs (not injections)

no

nuance

Voting ended onMay 23

[tanadrin]

dislike the digestive system. do not need my flesh to randomly gurgle.

[tanadrin]

off the cuff ratings of various elements of human anatomy and physiology:

eyes: very nifty design only a little undercut by the viscera horror of something terrible happening to them. 8/10

nose: a lil goofy ngl but it works in context. 6/10

ears: also goofy, don’t like them, why do they produce wax and get infected. but the core concept is fine. 4/10

brain: very cool, does lots of neat stuff without having to gurgle, ooze, or twitch. 10/10

liver: like most good organs it is a calm, steady machine. a tranquil filterer of the blood. don’t like the whole oozing bile thing though. 6/10

kidneys: piss is actually slightly less gross than bile. 7/10

bladder, gall bladder: i strongly feel organs should not grow random rocks in them. 4/10

bones: very aesthetic. functional in sort of a primitive mechanical way but they give us an extremely useful set of imagery for death and time. 8/10

skin: terrifically design, though it does sometimes flake. 7/10

tongue, lips: crudely mechanical but in kind of a cool way. 7/10

digestive tract: why does it gurgle and ooze?? why must it engage in peristalsis and jerk and shudder? it’s not even the products of digestion I object to—it’s that so many organ systems in the body are at least on a macroscopic level serene and still and almost plantlike, quietly performing their function without calling any attention to themselves. and then we have the system that farts and burps and generally reminds you you are trapped in a prison of wet red meat. 1/10, only because eating is often pleasant.

heart, lungs: for such crucial organs the fact they have to continuously move feels so… primitive. we should respire by like passively absorbing air through our skin. our blood should be whisked around our body by millions of tiny invisible cilia in our veins. what is this rube goldberg shit, with an extremely vulnerable single point of failure? 3/10

hair: almost completely unnecessary. mostly functions as a way to further customize our flesh-prisons. that’s actually pretty neat. 8/10

[tsarina-anadyomene]

Can we stop just like. Lying? This just isn't true!!

[tsarina-anadyomene]

i just think there are a couple of venues where trans people talk about their experiences in philosophy PhDs and they just seem completely divorced from my experiences. The article raises this dichotomy twice. I pay for everything involved in the upkeep of my life out of my stipend. The only major expense that my parents pay for at this point is a plane ticket home to visit them once a year around Christmas. I do not do sex work. In the article she says she's paid 15k CAD/year which is on the extreme low end of financial support. I make more than twice this amount (albeit in a much more expensive city) and I know people at other universities who received significantly larger offers. She also suggests sex work is ubiquitous but the article she cites gives a single-digit percentage for how many students turn to sex work.

This could be a case of extrapolating too much from her own experience rather than a realistic statistically-grounded analysis, but in this case I think it's deeply irresponsible!

[fullmetalfisting]

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

[mysteryteacup]

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

[alarajrogers]

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

[chekhovs-raygun]

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

[hawkpartys]

[thymodyke]

tissue culture rated #1 place to try not to cry in the lab for the 100th consecutive year

[tepkunset]

when you ask a knowledge keeper something and they say "good question"

[penny-anna]

the current twitter discourse du jour is cervical smear tests for some reason and here is my take: there absolutely is a widespread assumption that if you have a vagina and are over a certain age you'll be habituated to vaginal penetration and this is self-evidently heteronormative and sexist and im honestly amazed that more people don't seem to register it fdkjghfdjk

[penny-anna]

it's not just an issue w smear tests. was investigated for PCOS not too long ago and when i was referred for an ultrasound absolutely nobody thought to mention that it would be a transvaginal ultrasound. if i hadn't happened to do my own research i would literally have found out on the day of the appointment?? i remain baffled by this

[penny-anna]

anyway a lot of people on twitter responding to 'actually smear tests are painful for some people' with 'oh well I suppose if you have some kind of medical condition it might be painful' and it's well the thing is people with medical conditions exist in real life

[penny-anna]

oh the other one is 'well the nurse will be super nice and will make sure you're comfortable and will switch to a smaller speculum if necessary' and i'm like you must know that isn't true. like c'mon. even if all your cervical smear experiences have been positive you must be conscious of the fact that some medical practitioners are assholes about stuff like this. a more helpful statement might be 'your nurse should make sure you're comfortable and if they don't then you don't have to put up with it'.

[penny-anna]

They are doing this discourse again and as a result I have a couple of working examples of the problem described in the OP:

'speculums open you up less than sex' *loud incorrect buzzer noise* what kind of sex? Not all kinds of sex involve penetration. Why are you assuming that everyone who has a cervix is having penis in vagina sex?

'if you can have penetrative sex you can get basic medical care' ok. If I can't have penetrative sex then what??

'so all these people who are afraid to get a pap smear have never had sex?' yes some adults have never had sex. I don't know what's so unfathomable about that.

[penny-anna]

anyway so i realise the OP is kind of, mid-argument so here is my actual point best as I can express it:

there is a widespread assumption that if you are an adult with a cervix then you will be having penetrative sex and that, therefore, vaginal penetration in a medical context will be no big deal for you.

this is untrue as a) not everyone is having penetrative sex and b) not everyone who is having penetrative sex finds penetration in a medical context painless and untraumatic.

the result of this is that people for whom cervical smears are significantly painful and/or emotionally distressing are not universally properly accommodated and supported in medical settings.

which is a problem bcos the cervical smear is a very important cancer screening and if a person knows or suspects their medical needs will not be accommodated they might opt not to do it.