A Life Outloud

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

Happy Pride Month!

Faust is back for the 5th time! If you want to use the flag of your choice as an avatar, they're under the cut. They're free to use as long as it's for personal use only.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

He's lived long enough that three of his grandkids have been born with the same condition, and he's been there to assist with the recovery after the laparoscopic version of the same surgery he had.

He has a scar from collarbone to waist that's as thick as my finger--thicker, in some places. My nieces and nephews have scars so tiny you could mistake them for being from a particularly bad cat scratch. And their recovery was measured in weeks, instead of months.

Now I have a machine in my bedroom, and I hook up bags of fluid to a tube in my belly and go to sleep (stay up playing games, scrolling social media, and reading fanfic) and clean out toxins and pull fluid.

Every night I connect and save my life. Every night I look at my machine and see a damn miracle of science and technology that allows me to save my life. Gives me another day to play with my dog, to cuddle my cat. To spend time with my son. To read another book, knit another scarf, have another argument, eat another meal, watch another movie. Smell another flower.

I’m so lucky to have been born in a time and place that offered me this miracle. Because someone 80+ years ago thought, “I can fix this.”

And I’m on the transplant list, which is a whole bunch of miracles that I cry about whenever I think of it.

Someone alive makes a decision to save a life.

Someone who has died lives on in the lives of others.

Either way it’s a miracle of science, yes. But it’s a miracle of kindness. Often on someone’s worst day they still find within themselves compassion for others and make a decision to make the biggest difference in the world.

And it’s still pushing: stem cell transplants along with an organ, so anti-rejection drugs aren’t needed. Pig kidney transplants, 3D printed kidneys, portable dialysis machines. Pancreas/kidney transplants to stop diabetes along with the new kidneys. It keeps getting better, and every generation has a better time of it.

Sometimes dialysis feels exhausting, and people often complain about it: it can hurt, it can make you feel miserable when too much fluid is pulled, it’s intrusive, it makes travel difficult, it puts limits of what you can eat and drink. But whenever I start that thinking I remind myself of how lucky I am to be alive three years later, and I pat Betty (my machine is named Betty) and think of how much work went into it’s creation, and I cry knowing that strangers, years ago, came together and forged a miracle.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."