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. 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.
For anyone who has ever had covid before, please be sure you are aware of stroke symptoms. Each successive infection raises the risk in a pretty major way, and a lot of people are dying young due to not knowing these signs or being afraid to act on them. Please take care of yourselves.
My wife had a stroke a couple years ago at like 40 (also possibly a covid thing, their BP wasn’t high and it wasn’t an obstruction thing) with basically no lasting symptoms. But we both have psych related degrees and decent insurance at the time so the MOMENT I saw the asymmetrical face droopiness I was on the phone with 911, followed by friends in the area who could stay home with kiddo. By the time the ambulance arrived they couldn’t walk. Now they’re back to exercise and almost all our old usual activities.
Hi im a librarian amd that's not now this works. If a library allows you to have a digital card and not live in the area, you are NOT taking away resources from other people, that's not how anything works. Please keep doing it!!! The more people that use our services, the more money we can get from funding sources!!! Please use us!!! We are not utilized enough, by people in or out of our community. Thanks.
Your cats are not "manipulating" you they are communicating with you. They do not understand why you're limiting their food supply or keeping them indoors or preventing them from ruining your furniture or whatever.
When they meyowl pathetically for more food, it's not because they're trying to "trick" you into feeding them again. They just want to be fed, and they're smart enough to notice the correlation between certain sounds they make and the responses they get from you.
They've figured out that if they want to communicate to you that they want more food, if they make those pathetic sounds, you're more likely to behave as if you've understood what they're trying to communicate.
When your cat waits for you to look away then yoinks food off of your plate, it's not because they love crime. It's because they're social colony creatures who instinctively share food with each other and they don't understand why you're not sharing the best foods with them.
Your cats are very intelligent, social creatures who see you as their Very Strange sibling.
They've learned how to make intricate sounds just to communicate with their humans. When the sounds they make elicit the responses they want, they learn that those sounds are the most effective way to communicate their desires.
Not because they're scheming about how to control you, but because they don't know how to communicate with you any other way.
Same with babies, I'm finding. Like, that's a eight-month old lil' creature or whatever, it doesn't know how to distinguish what it needs from what it wants, and so when they complain about not having what they want it's because they understand that the people around them are need-meeters and they have to let those people know when they have a need that needs met, y'know? Babies cannot manipulate, they can only communicate.
everyone rightfully complains about how the r word is back in vogue now but I think the people talking about how using ChatGPT makes you a small brained lazy degenerate are getting off way too easy
i think this stems from people who are staunchly anti-ai having their understanding of ai in great depth, then meeting your average person who uses LLMs to make a grocery list or something who knows nothing about it, and then not recognizing this difference leading to them seeing everything they do with the AI as malicious as opposed to uninformed, and the instinctual response to malice is to be cruel which is not only pointless but will just make the person more likely to dismiss your points because you've called them subhuman in four different ways.
IDK who needs to hear this but if there's something in your life that makes you feel better, but you never stick to it,
it's still actually perfectly fine to do it
and you shouldn't stop yourself from starting just because it won't be a permanent change.
Like if starting a new daily planner gives you an amazing afternoon of planning and four days where you feel in charge of your life,
why not do it?
It doesn't matter that it won't be a permanent change - 4 good days is still worth it.
If you ever catch yourself thinking, "I wish I could pray/stretch/prep/plan/do the thing, but I always get started on that and it never lasts more than a couple of days,"
what this really means is, "hey, I can feel better for a couple of days."
if this post is making you think of things in your own life that you wish you could stick to because of how good they make you feel,
just be aware:
you're not thinking of a list of ways you've failed to commit
you're thinking of a list of things that make you happy, and you should give yourself permission to start doing them as often as you want to
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
i wanna get something that's slim and easily maneuverable that has A SEAAAAT. i would love to be able to use my wheelchair more but literally nothing around here is wheelchair accessible, such that it becomes more trouble than it is worth. which sucks. really bad! but I think that the right rollator style thingy could really be a useful stopgap measure for being able to sit down whenever I need. i know many of u probably have experience and opinions about this. I would love if you could share them with me :) thank u!
A friend of mine was able to use her wheelchair less after she got a folding chair cane and a pop up seat.
Both have benefits and drawbacks, the pop up seat is easier to carry around then the cane, but can't be used to help with mobility in the same way. Also sometimes people don't recognize the pop-up seat as a disability aid, but the cane doesn't get questioned.
i CANNOT express how much more lovable my friends are to me at their most annoying. i'd rather hear the same story 3 times than not at all. i'd rather read a 22 message text rant about something totally inconsequential than not hear from you all day. i'd rather you tag me in the stupidest post i've ever seen than not know that it made you think of a conversation we had a month ago. BE ANNOYING AT ME. I LOVE YOU
So I volunteer with a local branch of an eco org, and just got out of a meeting to see if we wanna endorse a local candidate, and I was really heartened that this 60 year old white guy from HOA-ruled exburbia, running in that community with a good chance at winning, had his sights firmly set on clean energy, protecting water, and holding back AI data centers.
He and his family had also been part of ICE resistance, btw. Which I can not over-emphasize is the norm in much of the extended metro right now. The degree to which every rando you meet probably did at least a little something is very very high.
It’s really reminded us that more people care than you might assume.
Did another one. Another exburb that has traditionally been pretty white, pretty NIMBY. We were deciding whether to endorse an un-opposed democrat running out there.
She's one of the thousands of environmental scientists fired by the current regime, with a history in international diplomacy, running on a ecological justice platform. On making sure the environment is protected and the most vulnerable be first protected. She could name those vulnerable populations without mincing words of flinching. She loves landback and mass transit and helping voters vote.
She's going to win this big chunk of midwestexburbia.
And, again, she was key in her area at ICE resistance. This has become next to a prerequisite for running in Minnesota, now.
I want you to think about that.
Resistance to a federal agency as a key prerequisite to holding state office. We keep seeing it. People want to know- people ask- when we and our neighbors were in danger, what did you do about it?
I am gonna keep saying it- the democratic party belongs to the people who show up to steer it. So show up. Not just once every 4 years. Every time. Every chance you get. It's free. It's important. It needs you. Caucus. Vote in local elections. Go to town halls. Hell, run for something! She wasn't in politics 6 months ago and she's gonna win! Grab that steering wheel in your own hands and pull.
The first rule of fandom is have fun. The second rule of fandom is find an enabler and become an enabler. Yes you should write that fic. What if it was even hornier? What if it was angstier? What if you wrote it just for me?
I've been doing this thing on youraislopbores.me today where I ask people what one of their favourite fanfics is, and every time somebody gives me a specific answer, I locate the fic and let the author know in the comments that when an anonymous stranger was asked for their favourite fic, they answered with this one
they should invent a high ponytail that doesn’t give me a headache and they should invent a low ponytail that doesn’t make me look like a miller’s apprentice going off to enlist in the continental army
Let me share with you guys a product that super helps me remember if I took my meds or not (because while the above is great, I still would manage to confuse myself):
They count as soon as you put the top back on. So if I don’t know if I’ve taken my medication for the day, I can check the cap to see how long ago I opened the container! It’s brilliant!Â
Being trans is like being given a house that sucks. The pipes are leaky and the wallpaper is so ugly and the beds are lumpy and you feel uncomfortable every time you set foot in there.
Everyone else seems to really like their houses though, and you can’t see inside of them, so you just assume that you’re being weird.
And then you hear about the construction project that’s happening down the road. And you didn’t know that was an option. You can just…fix your house? It can be better? You don’t have to live with the horrible lighting and weird furniture?
But other people scoff at the construction. They complain about the noise. “Why can’t they just be happy? The plumbing is great and the furniture is so comfortable! Why would you change it? And why do we have to deal with all their issues anyways? They could just do it quietly, away from us!” And you thought everyone hated their houses, at least a little. And it’s so much work to renovate. It’s fine in your house. It sucks, but it’s fine.
Then one day you try putting up a new painting. Something small. Just for you. Just to try it. And it feels like you. It feels right. And you didn’t know anything felt that good, ever. So you start to do more. And more. And eventually you might even start construction. And it’s inconvenient, and loud, and people complain, but you didn’t know that it could feel good to go home.
And then, one day, your renovations are done. And you get to have a home like everyone else. And that joy you felt looking at that painting? It’s everywhere now. And it’s normal.
It’s hard to build the home for your soul all on your own. But it’s worth it. It’s so worth it
I don’t know who needs to hear this but it’s okay for writing to be a HOBBY that you do because you enjoy, and that you don’t want to do when you’re not enjoying it. No one’s up in the business of knitters telling them they have to be willing to SUFFER and SWEAT or they’ll NEVER FINISH THAT SWEATER and they can’t expect good things to come to them. I don’t know why our current culture around writing is so intense, but I’m here to support your casual, relaxing writing habit. If people can glue pompoms together or knit a scarf or watch hours of streaming shows with their spare time there’s absolutely no reason writers can’t waste time writing just for pleasure, without any expectation that they’re going to Achieve something Amazing and Important or make a bunch of money or whatever.
I don’t know why our current culture around writing is so intense
The image of the tortured writer (and more generally, artist) isn’t new, and neither is the notion that great art must be the result of great suffering. I believe there are many hobby writers who suffer needlessly because of these expectations, but there are also many who, consciously or not, uphold the tortured writer image just because it’s a thing to do on the internet.
I hesitate to make this a sweeping statement, but I do think that to be a writer, you have to on some level love words as an artistic medium. Words can't just be the annoying limitation that make it more difficult to share your beautiful daydream. They can't just be the storytelling method you choose because you don't have the skills or resources to make any other kind of media.
You have to love the art of words for its own sake. Love the sound of words--how you can make music of a million different rhythms and moods, how the words and sentences you choose can make a million different atmospheres. Love what you can do with words--paint an image, share an emotion, put a person into a scene that only exists in the world of imagination. Love the different ways you can use words--different points of view and tenses, different formats and styles that can each provide a different experience of the story for the reader. You have to love words as your artistic tool and delight in learning new ways to wield them and new effects that you can create with them.
If you don't love words, there are other ways to tell a story. Writing is an artistic medium with it own strengths and weaknesses, and using it as your artistic medium should be a deliberate choice made out of love for this artform.
I love working on a paragraph or sentence until it says exactly what I want it to say. I whisper the words under my breath, gauging the emotion, intensity, description, flow of them. Sometimes the amount of description and detail itself conveys the overwhelm of emotion and action--but sometimes withholding words conveys the exact same thing. Sentences and paragraphs have rhythm and flow and a kind of poetry, even if I'm mainly writing prose.
There are so many words in the world, and each one means something different. Even if they're synonyms, every word has a shade of meaning that can change the feel of a sentence or paragraph. It's like putting together a puzzle, piece by piece.
Full disclosure: sometimes this process drives me insane. But overall? I love it.
