Aaaaaannnndddddd…We’re Back to Grateful. I Literally Forgot What a Full-Blown Crohn’s Flare Was Like.

So for the past week or so I have been in a full-blown Crohn’s flare.  Being sick as hell all the time anyway, even when my GI symptoms are relatively minimal (meaning, minimal for me as a person with a chronic and debilitating autoimmune and GI disease) I guess I had forgotten how bad things can actually get!  Despite having recently worsening symptoms like crippling fatigue, arthritis in my fingers, toes, shoulders, hips and spine, dizziness and trouble walking, my GI symptoms have been at a blessed minimum lately, consisting merely of having to ruthlessly police my own diet and avoiding most foods available in the supermarket or anywhere; waking up nauseated every single day and having to lay (well, writhe around) in bed for an hour every morning trying to fart (apparently extreme bloating makes one nauseated?  Who knew!); being hit randomly throughout the day with stabbing abdominal pains, gas and bloating, “heartburn” which is really esophageal spasms that feel more like a cardiac event than a gastrointestinal one, pangs of nausea and other distressing sensations, and being glad I live alone so I can accomplish this daily ritual/grind in peace.

Other than that (!!) I felt relatively okay until about 10 days ago when the dreaded intestinal gurgling began.  As far as I can tell the gurgling starts as I become more and more inflamed and less and less able to control my symptoms — is it masticated food trying to pass an obstruction?  Because that’s what it seems like to me.  In short order I was in a full-blown flare in which my abdomen feels, looks and is like a bloated whiskey barrel overstuffed with boggy loaves of bread, broken glass, 190 proof alcohol, and poison.  The broken glass, alcohol and poison are self-explanatory (severe sharp/gnawing/grinding pain, burning, smothering malaise).  The boggy loaves of bread are my inflamed intestines and that’s exactly what it feels like — for instance, instead of moving and/or bending easily at the waist, bending over becomes grueling and distressing and literally feels like I am working against a waterlogged loaf of Wonder bread where my appendix and terminal ileum should be (abdominal right lower quadrant).  There’s another loaf where my ascending colon should be and so on.  If I drop something on the floor whilst in this sorry state it better be something I won’t be needing for awhile because I literally cannot bend over (or reach!) to pick it up again.

Advertisements

On Futuregazing and Catastrophizing. Or, Is “Old Math Guy” Psychic?

Meet “Old Math Guy” as I call him, otherwise known as Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder.  In this vid, Old Math Guy (OMG) explains the concept of exponential growth, in this case, the very serious issue of exponential population growth on a finite planet.  Old Math Guy believes that “humans” are generally incapable of grokking the exponential function but I would have to respectfully disagree with him there, only because women — adult female humans — have obviously been able to grok the concept of exponential growth for a long time and it’s why we generally (meaning, globally and across time) oppose recreational sexual intercourse (and rape) where a teaspoon of semen in that context has the potential to grow exponentially into an actual human child in just a couple of months.  And no one has to tell women that resources are finite or otherwise limited where we are made literally insane attempting to keep things alive in a global necrophilic (patriarchal) culture.  But I digress.

I have been thinking for some time that what people know as “psychic” ability, including the ability or perceived ability to futuregaze or to “see the future” is really just extreme rationality playing out in a culture that neither appreciates nor understands it.  This is a similar idea to the idea that advanced technology would appear to be “magic” to relatively unsophisticated people who did not understand it.  And it would, wouldn’t it?  As this vid demonstrates, Old Math Guy can easily see into the future using principles of mathematics and logic.  Here, he wanted to see what the population and population-related issues of the town of Boulder, Colorado would look like “in the future” so he figured out its rate of growth and how many years in the future he wanted to go and saw that Los Angeles, California had that same population now.  To see into Boulder’s future, he looks at LA now.  And it doesn’t look good for Boulder.  Is Old Math Guy psychic because he can see into the future this way?  Yes he is, if extreme rationality and “psychic” abilities are the same thing and I am thinking they probably are.

No, I’m Not Okay. And Neither Are You. When “Empathy” is Just More Gaslighting Horseshit.

When anyone asks a chronically ill (or any) woman under capitalism and patriarchy whether she is “okay” what answer do they reasonably expect?  On our best day, women under this system are mined for our resources and used as targets for male perversion and violence and yes, we have thoughts and feelings about that, as pointless as those thoughts and feelings may be.  These are probably NOT thoughts and feelings of hope, pleasure, leisure, control, fulfillment, safety, gratitude or anything positive unless the woman being asked is a masochist (or pretending to be one to get by).  So what is the correct answer when someone asks us, in all seriousness, how we are currently faring in our lifelong role as useful object and target?

In the same vein, how is someone with an untreatable, incurable, progressive chronic illness expected to respond when someone asks us if we are “okay” when they already know we aren’t?  What are sick people supposed to come up with when what our interrogators are really asking, in essence, is for us to take time out of OUR day and energy out of OUR reserves to make THEM feel okay about the fact that WE are never going to be okay ever again, where in fact we were never really okay in the first place even before we got sick on top of everything else.  And neither is the person asking probably okay themselves if they are honest.  No, I’m actually not ok, mkay, and more than likely neither are you.

I am not a masochist and after living in this body and mind for over 40 years I can report that I am fundamentally incapable of and disinterested in lying about being “okay” or about anything.  Out of both exhaustion for mind-fucking rituals and principle, I generally no longer ask other women how they are or tell them that I “hope they are okay” and if I do it’s only because I know they aren’t okay but I’m hoping they are relatively okay and that things aren’t getting demonstrably worse.  Implicit in my fauxquest for information I already know, I hope they will feel free to tell me honestly how things are including if they are getting worse but really, I expect that if something is going on that they want me to know about that they will just tell me without the mind-fucking, gaslighting ritual of waiting to be asked first.  Perhaps unsurprisingly to those who perform and expect these rituals, I have lost friends (well, acquaintances) due to my failure to reliably make fauxquests for information I already fucking know but guess what?  If I ever had the energy to do that, and I never really did, I certainly don’t have it now and I also don’t have the energy to entertain fauxquests for information from other people who should fucking know better than to gaslight a sick woman under capitalism and patriarchy by asking whether she is “okay.”

Whenever a woman asks another woman under capitalism and patriarchy whether she’s okay, a puppy dies.  And whenever a woman under capitalism and patriarchy, when asked if she is okay, responds that she’s fine, the woman responding dies.  Most of us have fallen on this sword a million times and unless and until we are too sick to perform this gaslighting ritual, will fall on it a million more.  This is what passes as female friendship and female empathy under capitalism and patriarchy in fact: forcing each other to vocalize — literally vocalize — our contentment with being oppressed.

What is Allergic Rhinitis? Why Can’t Millions of People Breathe Without Nasal Spray? Is Ricky an Autoimmune Patient?

Guess what y’all!  Allergic rhinitis aka. chronic stuffiness is an autoimmune condition!  Who knew!  I didn’t until I started seeing the autoimmune patients talking about it on an autoimmune message board.  I had no idea this was the case, but apparently like the situation with acne, chronic nasal stuffiness is a fucking autoimmune disease.  Just like literally anything and everything else that implicates chronic inflammation — it’s not a small deal, it’s not an inconvenience or a quirk, in reality, whenever you experience inappropriate inflammation anywhere in your body, it’s your defective immune system wildly attacking you.  This also includes “stuffiness” of tear ducts, salivary glands and probably a hundred more things I can’t even currently think of or have yet to come across and I have had reason to intensively investigate autoimmune conditions for 6 years now.

So congratulations sufferers of dry eye, dry mouth, and a million other tiny annoyances you probably never thought were actually extremely, extremely serious: you are now a member of a club you’ve never even heard of and definitely do not want to join.  The “club” of autoimmune patients who are incurably, progressively ill who will only get worse over time and who can therefore reliably watch their quality of life and their “lives” — meaning their social and financial presence — degrade and disappear like a fart in the wind.  So now considering everyone with the biggies like MS, Crohn’s, RA and other very disabling (yet still maddeningly invisible) autoimmune diseases as well as everyone with the unacknowledged ones like acne, allergic rhinitis and even autism, does anyone have an appropriately functioning immune system anymore?  Do they?  This is frightening.

Here is a vid that has gotten a stunning number of views on YouTube considering it’s just some dude talking for 12 minutes about how to wean yourself off of over the counter nasal spray.  Of course this only begs the question, why can’t so many people breathe through their noses? Why are people losing sleep — and having full-blown panic attacks — because they can’t breathe normally anymore if they ever could?  What the fuck is going on with widespread chronic “inflammation” aka. people’s immune systems?

Anxiety = Trying to Keep Things Alive in a Necrophilic Culture. Depression = Knowing That’s Actually Impossible + Being Gaslighted About that Fact. PS. Everything Dies.

What is anxiety?  What is depression?  Why are females in particular often anxious and depressed?  Why are the chronically ill?  Why are the chronically poor?  Why are new mothers?  I hardly think this even merits its own post but I did want to toss it out there because we are clearly being lied to so consistently and so overwhelmingly about the source(s) of our mental, emotional and psychic suffering.  Hint: it’s not an individual problem where some 1/6 of modern Americans — that’s one in six — are taking psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants, and mostly taking them long-term.

Here, I would add our intellectual suffering to that list, where particularly women are tasked with keeping things alive under capitalism and patriarchy, including kids, partners, elderly parents, pets, plants, and ourselves, but where literally every facet of our necrophilic culture is stacked against us successfully doing that and where even under the best of circumstances, everything “living” eventually dies.  Thinking beings would tend to react negatively to being gaslit about that or anything — in this case, that it is possible to stop death even under the most biophilic circumstances and capitalism and patriarchy are hardly biophilic.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  This might be a short post.

It seems that some people, perhaps women in particular, are intelligent, thinking beings who may therefore be particularly prone to experiencing crippling cognitive dissonance when we are essentially being asked to believe 2 or more contradictory things at the same time.  In the case of women’s sex (not gender) role under capitalism and patriarchy women are literally tasked with stopping death.  Anxiety much?  We are tasked with keeping things alive but are not granted easy (or any) access to clean (or any) food, water, air, or to shelter, sunlight, exercise, healing medicine, or to the peace we need to make that actually possible but what we are told about any of this does not match the reality of it.  Cognitive dissonance much?  So is so-called depression actually crippling cognitive dissonance?  I’m starting to think it is and that the reason more men don’t suffer from depression is that men aren’t that smart in the first place, where crippling cognitive dissonance would seem to be reserved for frankly the cognitive (and crippling O-pression is reserved for the oppressed).

Query: if so-called depression is actually crippling cognitive dissonance, and I think it probably is, why is it treated (or even treatable) with drugs?  Discuss.

NBC’s “New Amsterdam” Wants Viewers to Believe the Medical System is Broken. The Evidence Shows The System is Working Exactly as Intended (and Does NBC Have Nuclear Interests?)

From the IMDb page for NBC’s new medical drama “New Amsterdam”:

A new medical director breaks the rules to heal the system at America’s oldest public hospital.

From the horse’s mouth: NBC’s tagline for its new show:

Break the rules.  Heal the system.

This is just such basic SJW bullshit I’m tempted to not even respond at all — the belief that oppressive systems of social control are oppressive because they are “broken” and not because they are, well, systems of social control.  For those who don’t know, SJW is a pejorative term and short for the also pejorative “social justice warrior.”  The term is normally used by conservatives in the same vein as “politically correct” is used meaning, essentially, that American movements for social justice are unnecessary and that the market should decide who and what has value and the market has decided it’s white men so everyone else should just shut the fuck up.

SJWs would agree with the assessment of the market value of human beings except that they think it’s unfair that cis white men have all the value while everyone else can go pound sand.  SJWs aren’t critical of the market itself, meaning capitalism, and of course there is no criticism of SJWs own favorite capitalism-related pastime, what is essentially consumerist hedonism.  SJWs believe that white male transgenders, capitalism and consumerism/hedonism are all to be defended at any and all cost, including the cost of literally the efficacy, coherence and internal consistency of their own movement(s) which is supposed to center “fairness” including rejecting privilege and leveling the playing field.  Wow, that was harder to explain than I thought it would be!  Did I get it about right?  If not, I’m sure someone will tell me.

Anyhoo, while I agree that American political, institutional, corporate and interpersonal systems are unfair to almost everyone at some point, clearly I am not a fan of SJWs and their work and I am tired, just completely exhausted and bone-tired of the SJWs 100-year long legacy and indeed baseless generational insistence that things are unfair because they are “broken” and that therefore, things can and should be fixed.  What SJWs do not seem to recognize is that “things” are the way they are for a reason and are not broken at all but are working exactly as they are meant to.  And how, just how in the fuck do you fix something that’s not broken but is actually working exactly as intended?

In the case of a medical system that drains people of their resources, upholds patriarchal institutions and male power, robs sick people of their agency (and problematically, also defines who and what constitutes “sick” so can rob anyone of their agency at any time and for whatever reason they want to) and where Western medicine in particular causes additional trauma and injury known as iatrogenic illness and injury — illness and injury from medical evaluation and treatment itself, sometimes known as side effects, medical mistakes or medical malpractice — the fact that it does those things at all is prima facie evidence that those exact outcomes are what was intended all along.  Isn’t it?  I mean think about it — powerful people created these unnatural systems out of whole cloth and they could’ve made them do whatever they wanted them to do.

Gastrointestinal Symptoms in Hurricane Florence Evacuees. Norovirus or Radiation Sickness? Please Read to the End.

These videos were created by a respected anti-nuke activist calling himself Strontium Milks.  He notes that the catastrophic flooding created by Hurricane Florence last week, where water currently continues to rise a week later, has likely overcome the nuclear reactors at Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant causing releases of nuclear fuel into the environment.  Brunswick NPP declared a state of emergency last Saturday as flood waters rose, stranding plant workers on the property and preventing outsiders from accessing it.  Of course, no releases were admitted to and none probably ever will be, so it is up to us to make sense of what happened there and to decide for ourselves whether we have experienced yet another nuclear disaster and what to do about it, if anything, including how and whether to hold anyone accountable for lying to us.  Relevant to the discussion of how high the waters rose, where the water was coming from, and what kinds of releases occurred, we have been told that multiple dam failures in the area caused flooding of coal and natural gas power plants releasing massive toxic coal ash contamination into the Cape Fear River which will severely and permanently contaminate coastal communities and waterways and will soon make its way to the ocean.

That’s what we know about other power plants in the area and that is certainly bad enough.  But what else was likely released into the flood waters ahead of, during and following Hurricane Florence and how would we ever know?  Well, one piece of evidence would be symptoms of disease in the human and animal residents of the area and we do in fact have evidence of an outbreak of gastrointestinal symptoms in evacuees:

Officials say that norovirus outbreaks are caused by a group of related viruses that account for more than 90 percent of gastrointestinal illness outbreaks in the country. Noroviruses can be found in stool and vomit and are very contagious.

Symptoms of norovirus illness usually begin about 24 to 48 hours after close exposure and can appear as early as 12 hours after exposure and include:

Nausea
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Abdominal cramps
Low-grade fever or none at all

Norovirus, you say?  Of course, those storm victims immediately suspected of having contracted norovirus are the ones being formally surveilled by the state and are living in storm shelters, but how many others are suffering, what are they doing about it (or more likely, what are they not doing about it considering everything else they have to deal with in the midst of an ongoing disaster) and how would we ever know?  The reported outbreak at this shelter is interesting, to say the least, considering that the symptoms of norovirus are virtually the same as symptoms of acute radiation sickness which are as follows: