medical cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cromulentenough:

comparativelysuperlative:

According to a rumor, you can reduce side effects from the Pfizer vaccine by taking zinc, magnesium, and vitamin D over the week leading up to it. (Supposedly this comes from the German government, but I haven’t seen a source.) It worked for me— second shot went easier than the first.

Obviously I’m not swearing by this, but all three of those are safe and most people are deficient in one of them anyway, so it’s not like there’s a downside.

A TON of people are deficient in vitamin D. Especially if you’re dark skinned, and especially if you live somewhere that doesn’t get a lot of sunlight (so not near the equator basically). and being indoors more than usual because of lockdowns probably doesn’t help. Magnesium IIRC helps with absorbing vitamind D, i don’t know if zinc is unrelated or not. And there’s been a bunch of stuff about low vitamin D making you react worse to getting covid and i guess from this also to just the covid vaccine?

Tags:

#hmm #it’s hard to look into this because the keywords tend to just turn up a bunch of antivax conspiracists #but OP’s second paragraph seems pretty reasonable as long as you check for interactions and don’t take ridiculously high doses #I’m already taking 2000 IU/day of vitamin D and I think Mom has some magnesium pills she’d be willing to share #don’t know if there’s any zinc lying around the household #maybe I’ll eat more…what do I eat if tweaking my diet towards higher-zinc foods…cashews and amaranth #(maybe I should go look into those magnesium pills) #(if my waiting-list experience is anything like Mom’s‚ my vaccination may well turn out to be a week or less from now) #vaccines #medical cw #covid19

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slatestarscratchpad:

Today’s lesson on health care economics:

On GoodRx, a month’s worth of sildenafil 20 mg costs $17.25

On the same site, a month’s worth of sildenafil 25 mg costs $507.24

Does anyone buy the 25 mg version? You bet – I saw a patient who was on it yesterday (don’t worry; he’s since been switched over).

What’s going on here? Sildenafil has two FDA approvals – one, under the name “Revatio”, for hypertension. The other, under the name “Viagra”, for – well, you know.

The FDA only approved Revatio at doses of 5 and 20 mg, and only approved Viagra at doses of 25 and 100 mg. So sildenafil 20 mg has “Revatio” on the box and sildenafil 25 mg has “Viagra” on the box. Revatio is generic and dirt-cheap; Viagra is still on-patent and expensive.

But can’t people who want Viagra just buy Revatio?

Yes, totally. But the average patient doesn’t know this is going on. And the average doctor doesn’t really have any incentive to care because they’re not the one buying it (I’ve had patients who have asked their doctor to prescribe the cheaper version, and the doctor has refused because they want to do it the “proper” way). And I think it’s illegal for the insurance companies to insist, because technically the FDA only approved sildenafil 25 mg for erectile dysfunction but didn’t approve sildenafil 20 mg.

(also, some people are like “But I need a higher 50 mg dose of Viagra, and Revatio only goes up to 20 mg!” As the ancient rationalist proverb goes, have you tried thinking about the problem for five minutes?)

At the advice of my doctor, I’m on pseudo-prescription naproxen. Instead of one 500mg prescription pill, I buy the 220mg OTC stuff and take double the dose on the label: it’s close enough, and it’s somewhat cheaper per mg if you don’t have prescription coverage. She said if I ever do get prescription coverage I should let her know and she’ll write me an official prescription then.

I love my doctor.

—

(Please do not take prescription-strength naproxen without medical supervision: you can fuck up your liver.)

—

Side benefit:

People in the spring: “it’s horrible that they’re making *chronically ill* people go to a *pharmacy* *every month* and risk plague! patients aren’t allowed to keep buffers of medications they often need to *survive*!”

Me: *looks with a mixture of relief and awkwardness at my 200-pack of Aleve*

(Note: I only need it around the onset of menstruation, so 200 OTC-sized pills is about a ten-month supply.)

(Store-brand naproxen doesn’t come in 200-pack, and the bulk-discount benefit outweighed the name-brand penalty.)

Tags:

#other things my doctor has done: #prescribed prune juice for constipation #prescribed string for skin tags #used Big Pharma ”samples” to keep her poorer patients supplied with meds they would struggle to afford on their own #readily admitted that people in my situation don’t actually need gynecological checkups #and I should only see a gynecologist if something goes wrong or I decide to start having sex #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #medical cw #illness mention #covid19 #menstruation #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

discoursedrome:

voxette-vk:

I’ve got to say, it was a pretty funny joke by the government to let people advertise drugs, as long as they fill the whole ad with everything that could possibly go wrong.

those ads where an announced reads a rapidfire list of horrifying side-effects in a soothing drone while the tv shows a happy telegenic family playing are one of America’s most important cultural artifacts and it’s so crucial that they be preserved for future civilizations

*rapid voice* this is not a place of honour. no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. nothing valued is here. may cause nausea, vomiting, and erectile dysfunction. sending this message was important to us.

Tags:

#medical cw #advertising #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

maryellencarter:

brin-bellway:

maryellencarter:

so like. there’s this budgeting thing called the 50/30/20 method. apparently it is popularized by elizabeth warren? the idea is you spend only 50% of your budget on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings or debt reduction (after counting all minimum payments on your current debt as part of Needs).

So I know my bills take up more than one of my 2 paychecks a month. (I ignore the occasional third one for budgeting purposes till it rolls around, so I don’t overbudget for months that don’t have one.) So for curiosity’s sake, I broke down my entire budget into Needs, Wants, and Savings, then did percentage math at it.

For this purpose, you count your non-tax payroll deductions, like healthcare and 401(k) contributions, as part of your income and expenses, but you don’t count money that goes away as taxes. So the budget starts off with putting 401(k) contributions in Savings and healthcare deductions in Needs. Then you start listing off shit like rent, utilities, car expenses…

Right now, while I’m still catching up on a bunch of my COVID-deferred bills and loans, my Needs come out to about 74% of my income. However, my Wants are very minimal: I have my massage subscription and tip, I’ve budgeted for fast food or takeout maybe 2-3x a month, and I pledge to one Patreon at the $1 level. All together, my Wants are about 6% of my income, leaving the requisite 20% to go toward reducing COVID debt for now.

However, once my COVID deferrals are all paid off, my Needs go down to about 67% of my income – and this is with generous projections, like at least one specialist copay every single month and gasoline if we ever start driving again. My Wants stay at about 6%. So I could either use the other 27% for savings and debt reduction, or I could stick with the recommended 20% and have 13% of my budget for Wants.

And I’m like… this is so much money. This is $150 just unallocated *after* going out to eat at least once a month and keeping my massage subscription. That’s… I do not know what else I would want. I could buy my entire wardrobe at LL Bean. I could have a massage every single week. I could eat at a sit-down restaurant every week. I could buy the newest and most expensive iPhone every single year. I could buy a brand new American Girl doll every month with money to spare. Like I couldn’t do all of those at *once* obviously, but that’s with just 7% of my income by this method of reckoning.

Like, if I somehow did make twice my Needs expenses after tax. That’s not impossible; I’d have to make a little under $33k a year, or a little over $2700 a month, which would be about $17 an hour excluding taxes. I don’t expect to get there at my current job in the near future, but it’s not astronomical.

But like, at that point I’d be saving about $545 a month, covering all my Needs expenses, and I would have *over eight hundred dollars a fucking month* to spend on Wants! Like… jesus fuckwaffles. How would I… I could buy a new one of my current phone every single month and have money left over. I could go to one of those black-tie restaurants that are like $100 a plate *twice a week*. I could not only move into a bigger apartment but hire a maid service to clean it. I could buy every single book I’ve ever read in short order and pay to store them all. I could live on like… caviar and avocado toast.

Hell, even if my living expenses were somehow miraculously reduced and my Needs were only half of my tax-excluded pay *now*, I’d be living on a little over $1000 a month, saving about $400 a month, and trying to figure out how to spend $600 a month on Wants. How… I don’t fucking know what else I could want. I’m not used to having money to spare. It’s weirder than winning the lottery, even, because it’s just like… it’s not enough to go “I will pay off all my friends’ student loans and buy a condo!” but it’s enough that I’m like “Do I just… put all 27% of my income in savings? Do I save for a car? Pay off my student loans? Invest for retirement? Am I fundamentally missing something I should be wanting?”

That sounds like a sign that 50/30/20 isn’t for you.

A lot of budgeting methods have this…maybe not “problem” exactly, but this thing where they’re clearly aimed at people who start with an entertainment budget of “everything after necessities” (or in many cases even higher) and negotiate *downwards*, which makes the methods a bad fit for people who start with an entertainment budget of zero and negotiate *upwards*. I guess the people spending money they don’t have on things they could do without are the ones most in need of frameworks, so the frameworks are designed for them. Getting *down* to 30% is a good start for people who were previously spending *more*.

—

Personally, I do struggle to wrap my head around things that draw a bright line between “wants” and “investments”. Sure, there are *occasional* items–like restaurant food–that are just wants and not also investments, but by far the most common reason for me to want to buy something is because I think it will leave me better off in the long run. I have a long list of things to save up for, and it’s all stuff like “house repairs” and “things that give you a leg up on Vimes Boot Theory” and “retirement funds” and “hedging against the future being wildly different from the present, such that normal retirement funds don’t cut it [link]”.

—

I think it’s important to bear in mind: given how weird your life is in general, and in particular the fact that your ability to work has a history of fluctuating erratically, saving is even more important for you than for most people.

There’s a concept called “self-insurance”. (…actually it turns out that there are at least *two* similar-but-not-identical concepts called self-insurance, and the Wikipedia article is about the wrong one. Investopedia [link] has the right idea.) You, in particular, *really* should get disability insurance if you can possibly manage it, and while third-party disability-insurance companies *exist*, you’d have to file claims (during the periods of time when you are least capable of filing claims!), and take the risk that whatever shit happens to you next won’t technically be disability by their standards, and operate under rules designed to let the insurance company turn a profit. (The house always wins.) Ideally, then, what you’d want is to instead save up enough in the good times that you can cover the bad times yourself.

(For example: you mention you’re digging your way out of COVID-related debt. My brother was temporarily laid off in the spring, and because of [glitches in the hastily-expanded Canadian welfare system] was unable to receive any kind of unemployment payments in time to actually help him with it. But he had lots of money in his savings account, and he used some of *that* to cover his bills until the restaurant re-opened. Now that he’s working again, he’s replenishing it; in the long run, he plans to save up enough for a condo.

(We not-quite-joked that if the glitch had to happen to *someone* at his workplace, it’s good that it happened to him: his co-workers spend all their money on booze and weed and wouldn’t have been able to handle it. His co-workers, meanwhile, not-quite-joke that they should get him hooked on something so they can drag him back into the crab bucket.))

Yeah, idk if I’m just not looking in the right places, but the budgeting advice I can find all seems to skew really strongly toward “quit your starbucks habit! cut off the cable channels you don’t watch! do you really need a cell phone?” rather than like… you know, “I was raised on 3¢ a chore, I have absolutely no idea how financially healthy people cope with having discretionary income and I want guidelines”.

—

My priorities are different from yours obviously, but yeah, my list of things to save up for (other than straight-up debt reduction, which is a big one) are things like “new orthotic shoes” and “when my car breaks down again”. Freedom, essentially. Transportation is big for me, even though my current place of residence has by far the best public transit system I’ve used outside of Washington DC. (Buses every 10-15 minutes? Wtf is this sorcery?) Maybe moving into a ground-floor apartment eventually so I can stop carrying groceries up the fucking stairs, but I’d have to afford to pay movers because I can’t physically get my loveseat down the stairs by myself. And when it comes down to it, I kind of prefer not having to actually move everything.

—

I actually have disability insurance through my work, and then I managed to completely space on it while I was out on FMLA and didn’t realize I had it till I was back to work and scrutinizing my pay stubs – I thought I’d opted out of it last open enrollment. So I never got as far as finding out whether a depressive collapse counted as disability, or whether I could have filed a claim or anything. :P So yeah, with open enrollment just around the corner again, I am pondering whether to keep paying the approximately $15/paycheck toward disability insurance or not. I haven’t used my dental or vision insurance yet either but I keep meaning to… it’s just that for all I’ve lived here for over two years, I still don’t know things like “where is a good dentist”.

(My eyesight varies wildly with my diabetes. When my blood sugar is under control, I don’t seem to need glasses. When it’s out of control, I see so badly that I didn’t realize there were artificial cobwebs all over the call floor my first Halloween at this job and just thought my vision was inexplicably foggy in addition to being unfocused.)

—

I like the idea of having retirement income, and of employer matching, but yeah, the way my life tends to go, and especially with the way I burn out at irregular intervals, I’m honestly not sure when or whether the whole “tax-advantaged” thing (which I will freely admit I don’t actually understand) outweighs the benefits of cash on hand. Right now, my plans go approximately as follows:

* Catch up on car insurance payments before the new policy starts in November and stacks on top of my deferred balance.

* Pay the CPAP mask bill that went to collections like a year ago and I haven’t had the spoons or the money to get it out yet, also buy a new CPAP mask as this one is becoming elderly and I’m having to kludge it back together when the plastic pieces break.

* Pay off the cell phone deferral early just for the hell of it because I should have the money and it’ll drop my bill by $20/month. (I already finally got my employee discount applying so I’ll be down to like $35/month for unlimited data with no hotspot. God, the ability to *not* need hotspot is such a weird luxury…)

* Pay back @camshaft22 for loaning me like three months’ rent over the course of the pandemic. If all my budgeting is correct I might be able to do that by January.

* Assuming 2020 has not yet exploded in my face too disastrously, build up that emergency fund everyone talks about. This comes after the COVID debt because being able to sock away $400+ a month will be very encouraging for me at that point. Right now my savings is just, I’m manually doing the thing where you round up each purchase to the next dollar and put the change in savings. It’s… complicated, because my savings account takes several days to process a transfer from checking once I request it, so e.g. right now I have no less than five scheduled transfers, each under $1, requested as early as Thursday night, which are not going to process until Tuesday at the earliest because of Labor Day. Once I get the car insurance paid up, which is the situation with a definite time pressure, I might start rounding up to the next $5 mark if I think I can afford it. I know in the olden days, just having each purchase rounded up to the next dollar could wind up bringing me like $26 in savings a month, but I think that’s when I was like buying snacks from the vending machine and stuff.

* Once I have an emergency fund, find out what the deal is with my credit cards in collections and pay them off. There’s one I would have sworn I paid but my credit reports all still show it derogatory.

* Then it’s a decision between “Save every possible penny for a car made in this millennium that has not been totaled, before my current car explodes irreparably” or “Try to get my student loans out of default while also saving at a slower rate for a car, so that if my car explodes before I can buy a new one out of pocket, I might have a hope in hell of getting a car loan that’s not completely horrendous”.

Of course, the downside of this is if my car explodes *before* I have an emergency fund, I’m in trouble. Again. :P October has that third paycheck though, so it’s really tempting to put the whole bloody thing toward debt reduction and knock some of these out of the park.

>>(Buses every 10-15 minutes? Wtf is this sorcery?)

*impressed whistle*

—

>>FMLA

*googles*

I was about to say “holy shit, why can’t *we* have something like that”, but then I looked closer and it has so many exceptions that for all I know we *do* have an analogous law, and I just haven’t noticed because it would never come up in real life. I’m glad you managed to actually get caught in that hole-ridden safety net.

Our 2019!unemployment-system, because it makes the employer pay extra into the system every time they allow you to go an entire week without work, has the emergent effect of *banning unpaid sick leave*. Well, you can have up to six days at a time of unpaid sick leave, but of course that’s not enough to get over a cold.

(I am very glad they scrapped the idea of returning to the 2019 system in September, because the 2019 system *encourages* the spread of disease and that is the *last* thing we fucking need right now. Meta-Boss has, at least twice, coerced me into returning to (customer-facing!) work while still having coughing fits† because he didn’t want to eat the fine for allowing me to become technically unemployed (even though I wouldn’t have bothered actually applying for unemployment, knowing I would be returning to work in another week or two): I often wonder how many cases of illness can be traced back to the existence of the Canadian unemployment system. Between that and how hard it is to get them to actually give you any money, I think we’d be better off with *nothing* than with the 2019 system, especially with an active plague but even with just (“”just”“) baseline colds and flus.)

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>>I haven’t used my dental or vision insurance yet either but I keep meaning to… it’s just that for all I’ve lived here for over two years, I still don’t know things like “where is a good dentist”.

God, I’m so looking forward to having dental insurance††. I’ve been paying for vision checkups††† out of pocket because it’s just ~$150 every two years, but in theory dental is about that much every nine months. I haven’t had a dental checkup in two years, and the previous one was three years before that, and also I’m tired of every little toothache being like “is this it? is it happening? is today the day my wisdom teeth become an emergency?”.

(several of the things on the List are dental-related, and originally some of them were high enough in the priority order that we would have reached them by now, but we are postponing all non-urgent in-person medical care and *especially* stuff where you physically can’t wear a mask while you’re doing it)

And yeah, one of the many benefits of a stable housing situation is that I’ve long since found local medical providers I like. Now it’s just a matter of being able to afford the money and disease-risk to go see them.

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>>I’m honestly not sure when or whether the whole “tax-advantaged” thing (which I will freely admit I don’t actually understand) outweighs the benefits of cash on hand.

Might be good for you to talk that over with an American finance nerd. I could talk your ear off about Canadian investment accounts, but the American situation is not perfectly analogous.

(Definitely look into what the early-withdrawal penalties are for various account types. One of the Canadian ones has almost no withdrawal penalty (there’s no fine, and you only have to wait until next year before you can put it back), to the point that it’s very feasible to put money into it knowing you’re going to need it again. (*I’m* not allowed to have that one, because the United States government hates me and wants me to suffer, but it *exists*.))

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>>Then it’s a decision between “Save every possible penny for a car made in this millennium that has not been totaled, before my current car explodes irreparably” or “Try to get my student loans out of default while also saving at a slower rate for a car, so that if my car explodes before I can buy a new one out of pocket, I might have a hope in hell of getting a car loan that’s not completely horrendous”.

Yeah, cars are tough. Car loans are Not Done in my family, but we’re torn between “spend ~$6k on a *somewhat* less shitty car to tide us over until I start working full-time and can afford something better” and “jump straight to the ~$14k hybrid we really should have in the medium term (while we wait for full-electric hatchbacks to [be remotely affordable + have a range capable of New York trips]: currently you can have at most one of those things)”. A 14k car would wipe out an uncomfortable amount of savings, but likely have *much* lower maintenance costs than a 6k.

(Of course, summer is ending (= broken air conditioner is ceasing to matter for another year) plus we’re still not driving much, so “keep using the beater until I start working full-time” might also be a workable option. But my parents occasionally make noises about maybe returning to delivery driving.)

—

†And of course masks were *also* forbidden back then, because in the Old Times they signalled (in this case correctly, but anyway) having a cold and the *appearance* of sanitation is far more important to Meta-Boss than actually *being* sanitary.

††not covered by government between the ages of 14 and 65, and maybe not rich children either

†††not covered by government between the ages of 20 and 65, unless you have a degenerative eye condition (diabetes counts!)

Tags:

#and because people are constantly opening the front door and letting in pollen #I used to get a lot of sore throats from the no-masks-allowed policy #I wasn’t confident that wearing a mask at work would be enough to stop it but now I know from experience #if I’m still working there after the vaccine #I’m gonna show up in a cloth mask with ”pollen mask” written on it and refuse to take it off #”it’s a disability accommodation” #”give me any paperwork you need me to fill out for that and I’ll fill it out‚ but I am not taking off this mask” #venting cw? #(the before-times Canadian unemployment system fills me with rage) #((for that matter the United States tax code also fills me with rage)) #((but y’all knew that one already)) #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #illness tw #poison cw? #covid19 #reply via reblog #medical cw #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #allergies #long post

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

voxette-vk:

mathemagicalschema:

okay I keep wondering: when you take OTC pain meds like acetaminophen or ibuprofen for ordinary aches and pains – a headache, joint pain, whatever – do you actually notice a difference? Can you consciously tell that your pain is lower after you’ve taken them? Because I never have, even taking acetaminophen plus whatever NSAID at inadvisably high doses. It’s conceivable that I could find an effect if I kept a spreadsheet logging my pain levels before and after dosing – do they really have a stronger effect than that for most people? I’ve been on some prescription NSAIDs before and had about the same experience.

my options for noticeably-helpful pain management basically start with heat/ice and then jump right up to weed or opioids, which kind of sucks. temperature-based solutions are not terribly portable (icy-hot et. al. is far more unpleasant to me than any pain it might help with), and weed/opioids might make me feel better but don’t, generally, leave me any more functional. Voltaren gel works, kinda, in the area where it’s applied, for a couple minutes? and anyway, you can’t get it OTC in the States.

How likely is it that I have some sort of fucked-up drug metabolism thing?

They work for me

I usually stop noticing as much discomfort when I take OTC meds for headaches or w/e, but then it usually takes some effort to start noticing those pains in the first place, so while I think they help I’m not super confident

Ibuprofen does approximately nothing for me, but a couple years ago my doctor prescribed me extra-strength naproxen for late-onset dysmenorrhea and it turns out naproxen *does* work. (And it makes periods lighter, too!)

In fact, just two days ago I had this thought process:

Me: “Huh, the pain in my heel is almost completely gone today. I wonder if that splinter I couldn’t reach worked its way out.”

Also me: ‘…or it could be that pre-menstrual naproxen you started on last night.’

Me: “…or that.”

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #menstruation #injury cw #medical cw

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

Rustingbridges Icon

@rustingbridges​

​ replied to your post

“rustingbridges: brin-bellway: rustingbridges: rustingbridges: I…”

I think this makes perfect! I’m curious in what way this is surprising to you

Well, first of all the entire idea of balanced meals weirds me out. I eat in small-but-frequent quantities (you can see what a normal day looks like for me here), so to me the natural time unit across which one should balance one’s nutrient intake is the *day*. (Maybe even 2 – 3 days, since on any given day I often run out of appetite before covering all the categories I’d intended to.) I actually feel thrown off planning-wise when I *do* eat a balanced meal, because what am I supposed to eat to counterbalance it later? It counts towards a little bit of everything, which means it doesn’t *really* count towards *anything*.

(In fact, the entire idea of *meals* kind of weirds me out. My foods are generally much more atomised, and it never ceases to amaze me that there are so many people who go through meal levels of complicatedness and preparation almost *every time they eat*. I do that kind of shit once a day at *most*, and left to my own devices I make relatively simple meals at that.)

While my diet is quite rigid and has had some thought put into it, it’s not exactly *planned* in the same sense that yours seems to be. I don’t track precise nutrient intakes: I just try to cover a bunch of different kinds of food over the course of a time unit. The only thing I specifically seek out is fibre, as my body has repeatedly complained that [a version of my diet in which I do not actively seek out fibre] is not fibrous enough. I’ve also been eating fewer and less frequent high-fat foods, again because of negative physical responses rather than an abstract intellectual belief that they were bad for me.

 

rustingbridges:

so part of it is that it’s not a balanced meal – the dietary ‘goal’ of the yogurt is to meet my desired level of protein intake.

I want to be hitting a minimum of 80g/day, and ideally closer to 160g/day. plausibly you can’t usefully consume more than 30-50g of protein at a time.

this is kind of hard to do with balanced meals unless your whole diet is oriented around it. my diet is not and includes a bunch of shitty carbs, so I gotta make up the protein elsewhere.

the most straightforward supplement here is chicken. nonfat strained yogurt is one the next best things, the tier two of protein supplements if you will. fatty strained yogurt with add-ins is kinda down there, but still batting above replacement.

so the more skewed towards protein the yogurt breakfast is, the more room I have to eat cookies or something later. 160g/day is ~650 Cal from protein per day, which is 15-25% of my daily needs. a food which is ~30% protein by calories is considered high in protein, so either you need to eat exclusively that or you have to make up the difference with actually high protein foods.

 

brin-bellway:

Ah, okay. Pretty much the same reason I eat popcorn, but with protein instead of fibre.

What made you decide to seek out extra protein?

 

rustingbridges:

Want Beeg Mussels

 

brin-bellway:

#at greater length:  #higher protein intake seems like it has upsides in terms of maximizing potential muscle gains  #and minimizing losses if attempting to cut  #with relatively few if any downsides

@rustingbridges replied: also, popcorn is great

It *is* great in many ways, but I do find it a bit time-consuming to make and eat, and I worry it’s going to wear down my teeth (I *definitely* have at least one chipped tooth directly attributable to popcorn, and I wonder about more subtle wearing as well). I considered buying some psyllium at the grocery store yesterday, but apparently you’re supposed to take it several times a day and that hardly seems any better on the hassle front.

Mom just ordered another batch of high-fibre tortillas off Amazon, and I accepted her offer to throw in a bag of the smaller-sized tortillas: they’re lighter and less prep-requiring than popcorn, and if I don’t like them she can just use them herself. Next time I’m able to get to a bulk-food store I might try some flax seeds: they do *sell* them in the grocery store, but the packages I saw were 450g and that’s far too much for a test run. I’m also thinking of buying a *different* flavour of fibre bars for evening use, so as not to confuse my brain by eating breakfast food at night.

(FTR, I’ve tried prune juice, but it’s easy to overshoot the dosage on that and also it only lasts a few days once it’s open. Separating out smaller quantities and freezing them only helps so much.)

Tags:

#food #disordered eating? #reply via reblog #medical cw #replies

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

whitepeopletwitter:

f1d5bbccd3e9561dda1730bda677525cbb62ef13

 

sigmaleph:

idk i think if people were dying for the second time that might imply some good news

If my dad dies of this, it will be his second death. He died the first time of a heart attack in 1994. Heart attacks are among the easier kinds of death to undo: even with our all-too-limited medical tech, we can sometimes manage it. In his case, they could.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #death tw #transhumanism #covid19 #medical cw #trump cw #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #proud citizen of The Future

Anonymous asked: What medicine do you use to breastfeed someone else’s baby?! I tried to combo breastfeed and formula feed my own baby, and my milk supply dried up, and now he gets only formula. I’m wondering if there’s the same medical intervention would help me start breastfeeding him again.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

I took hormonal birth control (Zovia 1/35; I think the progesterone/estrogen balance is important but it doesn’t have to be this specific birth control) to imitate pregnancy progesterone levels, and domperidone (20mg, four times a day) for six months, then went off the hormonal birth control and started pumping every four hours for two weeks. By the end of those two weeks I was producing about 4oz a pumping session, and gradually grew that to about 7. 

I did this in consultation with a lactation consultant and I recommend that if you can afford it/access it, but hormonal birth control has well-understood relatively limited risks and domperidone is a safe medication you can order online at inhousepharmacy so I can imagine doing it yourself being the right choice for some people who don’t have meaningful access to a lactation consultant. 

Sam did this too and got some milk but lower milk supply than me, so results definitely vary, and of course the most important thing for thriving kids is parents who are not stressed and miserable, not whether they’re fed breastmilk or formula. I hope it works for you if you end up deciding to try it but I am sure your baby will be totally fine either way.

Tags:

#I have less than no desire to do this myself #but I’m very glad to hear it’s an option for people who want that #lactation #fertility cw #medical cw #proud citizen of The Future #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

The Bureau of Ridiculously Unethical Human EXperimentation (or “BRUHEX”) was founded in late 20XX in response to a crisis. Medical discovery had hit something of a brick wall, and everyone knew it. 

The human body was just too much of a mess to map. Evolution had been working for millennia upon millennia to obfuscate its source code- after all, for all those years, anything trying to force changes to the human body was reliably not the sort of thing that had the human body’s best interests at heart. Advanced machine learning algorithms made a few discoveries here and there, but those “discoveries” were themselves too opaque for humans to understand except as black boxes. The field was stagnating.

One major reason for this was that medicine was unlike engineering. You could take apart a machine, hypothesize about how it worked, and put it back together again, no problem. If you broke the machine by testing your hypotheses, you could always get a new one. Couldn’t do that with people- breaking a person was a very serious problem that you couldn’t risk. It severely limited what would-be human engineers could do to investigate the workings of their subjects.

You couldn’t really justify it. There was no way you could put a positive spin on it. If you wanted to get anything done, you couldn’t be the good guy. So, acknowledging this, they named themselves the Bureau of Ridiculously Unethical Human Experimentation.

No one knows exactly how BRUHEX started. If we did, they’d have been easier to stamp out. But this underground organization appeared, and began kidnapping the homeless and mentally ill and experimenting on them, and of course world governments did their best to bring these criminals to justice.

They proved to be like cockroaches.

It’s often hypothesized they had some kind of official backing, or a technological head start- anything to explain how difficult they were to wipe out. A BRUHEX cell would be wiped out, all the signs would point to them having been the ringleaders, and then a week later they’d surface again. It started with police raids, then army response, then bombings, then finally an incident with a nuclear strike which marked the end of that phase of history. 

After ten years of escalating warfare that took a substantial civilian toll, governments found being tough-on-BRUHEX to be decreasingly popular. The public was split- both because of the destruction caused by the crackdowns, and because of the life-saving medical advances released to the public by BRUHEX operatives.

It wasn’t the sort of controversy a politician could use to rile up their base. It cut across party lines. Surely, it was for the greater good, right? But they called themselves the Bureau of Ridiculously Unethical Human Experimentation! So clearly they had to know the ends weren’t justifying the means! But was it worth it to shut them down? Clearly not, because it hadn’t worked! But clearly it must be, because of the horrors they perpetrated! And shouldn’t their discoveries be banned, suppressed, removing their incentive to make them? Or would that be condemning poor little Sally McRaredisease to a painful death that could’ve been avoided?

Politicians learned to avoid discussing the subject. 

Governments would still fund occasional rescue missions (small things, organized by volunteers, cheap enough to put in the budget without raising hackles), because it was generally agreed that Something Should Be Done, but no one was going to risk their career Doing Something, not after how disastrously it’d gone for everyone else who’d tried Doing Something.

So you’re a good citizen, of course. Your [family member] has been kidnapped off the streets by men in black lab coats, naturally. You have a small endowment to by supplies to rescue her, and a few friends willing to help. BRUHEX isn’t going to miss one measly test subject, so they’re not going to do anything too drastic to stop you- but y’know, you’ll need to get past a few enhanced supersoldiers and biohazard traps and locked doors and the like.

What? No, yeah, this was totally a setup for a cyberpunk dungeon crawl; I don’t know where else you thought I was going with this.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #murder cw #torture cw #medical cw #kidnapping cw #(I *think* the thing the last sentence is getting at is that it *seems* as if this post is leading up to a pun?) #(writing this as one long excuse for a pun is the sort of thing Benedict would do) #(but this is good too!)