a silly little guy

but this is CLEARLY not the case for everyone with a high bmi. if i were to go around saying that my experience was the norm and anyone else discussing medical fatphobia was lying or wrong then that would be pretty fucking stupid of me, right? especially when there are aspects of my experience that make it radically different from a lot of other people’s (such as the fact that im very muscular, and therefore weigh more than someone of the same size who has less muscle). it would be bullshit for me to dismiss other experiences from people who, while they share my bmi number, have other aspects that change how they are perceived and treated. if i started doing this then people would be in the right to call me a short sighted idiot.

As someone who has epilepsy and used to have several grand mal seizures a day, I’d also like to add that “offer help” can range anywhere from keeping the person calm to explaining to them where they are and what they were doing to even just telling them they should sit and rest for a while longer (lack or coordination is common, and it can be hard to walk straight or see clearly).

It’s okay for them to take up to a half hour to fully regain their bearings and sort out what they were doing prior to the seizure. Just answer any questions calmly and be there for support.

If they come around and you start to panic or shake them or ask them what the heck is wrong with them they are going to freak out and panic too.

I cannot stress it enough that this is bad.

DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. I’m dead fucking serious. I had a grand mal in public once and the POLICE were called and imagine coming out of the seizure, feeling like you got smacked in the head with a sack full of bricks, confused, dazed, in desperate need of some sugar to boost low blood pressure and some DIPSHIT has called the police and I was being threatened with being ‘drunk and disorderly’. It took a phone call to my doctors office to get them to back off. The police cannot properly deal with sick people. 

Offer help can be:

assuring person where they are/what time it is

getting them something to drink if they can; seizure burns so much energy and does cause a blood pressure drop

getting them safely to transport or a carer

getting them some dignity like a blanket/towel [loosing control of your bladder and bowels is fucking horrifying]

ensuring they have a way to get home. Someone who has just had a seizure should NEVER DRIVE straight after

calling emergency services if you notice any of these symptoms because they may have stroked out.

Why you shouldn’t put anything in someone’s mouth: they will choke. Yes, they may bite their tongue but I can assure you it’s less traumatic than cracking your jaw on someone’s greasy wallet or choking on a spoon.

Because PNES seizures aren’t caused by the same thing as epileptic seizures, they can look similar but people can be semi-conscious during them, generally do not lose full control of their bodies (bladder/bowels and other reflexes remain), and importantly, they can last longer than 5 minutes (even hours) without causing long-term damage.

The “do not call the police” point was especially vital for them, because people with PNES are more vulnerable to medical abuse by professionals who think they are “faking” because the seizure isn’t epileptic, and a person with PNES may have medical trauma from being treated cruelly by doctors, family members, etc. while seizing in the past. This study looked at stigma around PNES (also called functional seizures; I’m using PNES because its what my coworker called it):

Literature suggests that it can take years for patients to finally get a diagnosis of FS, but once they receive the diagnosis, it is often met with negative stereotypes and perceptions that lead to stigmatisation and treatment resistance. […] Moreover, with 34 of the 70 included data sources reflecting HCP [healthcare professional] stigma, one of the main themes that arose from this review illustrated the importance of HCPs’ acknowledgement and acceptance of their role in both perpetuating and reducing FS stigma. From our review it became apparent that HCPs’ negative attitudes towards patients with FS persist in the health community, often because of a lack of knowledge, general awareness, understanding and medical training with regards to this disorder

For my coworker, they expressed that one of the most important things for them was to just not be alone, to have someone verbally saying they were with them and it would be alright, and then to be supported according to their needs once the seizure ended. Their seizures were often triggered by stress, or from trauma triggers, so being treated with compassion, having their body respected, and having a calm environment during and after the seizure were very important.

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

Lied and said he was non-verbal

Lied and said he was incapable of communication

Lied and said he had not gotten the surgery of his own accord

Lied and said his "guardians decided [he] was trans"

Got MGT to call a procedure done on a consenting adult "criminal" just because he had cerebral palsy

Mass reported his video and his account, which he ran, until facebook terminated his account for "child exploitation" despite it being his account, him being an adult, and him not being exploited

Ableism and transphobia are inseperable. Just like ableism was used to prop up bigotry throughout history, now it is being used to deny transgender people bodily autonomy the same way it is used to deny disabled people bodily autonomy. It's not a coincidence that so much of the rights transphobic rhetoric is focused on labelling us as "mentally ill". They don't think any disabled people, let alone mentally ill people should have independence or liberation.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

Isopod

x x x x x x x x x Stimboard for the color blue For 💬 anon~ Hope you like the choices :)