Dreams in Flux

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

If the above stretch ain’t compatible with you for reasons like having bitch ass knees, here are some alternative and amazing stretches for the muscle in order of easiest to hardest (but imo least to most helpful) to perform:

However, just keep in mind that none of these stretches will help you if you have a herniated disc, which compresses the nerve roots that protrude from the spine itself! For that you’ll for sure need some different medical intervention.

Full Transcript at the link; 3-minute listen.

Quote:

By taking biopsies from long COVID patients before and after exercising, scientists in the Netherlands constructed a startling picture of widespread abnormalities in muscle tissue that may explain this severe reaction to physical activity.

Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.

"We saw this immediately and it's very profound," says Braeden Charlton, one of the study's authors at Vrije University in Amsterdam.

The tissue samples from long COVID patients also revealed severe muscle damage, a disturbed immune response, and a buildup of microclots.

This article mentions that ME/CFS is a "similar complex condition" but that's DEEPLY underreporting the similarities. The phrase "post exertional malaise" (now researchers are trying to replace it but this article uses that phrase) was INVENTED for ME/CFS. It's the only known condition, before "long covid", that causes these kinds of symptoms after exertion!

It's good to know for sure that it's the same mechanisms at play when the inciting viral infection is Covid and not, for instance, Epstein-Barr or RSV, but half the time it doesn't seem like researchers are making comparisons at all, just reinventing the wheel and acting like "long covid" is a totally new phenomenon with no previous point of comparison. There are literally drugs in human trials to try to treat the mitochondrial dysfunction in ME, this dysfunction is well-established and fairly well understood and I feel insane when ppl report on long covid without mentioning that there is already a named and studied condition that accounts for this subset of symptoms!!

SOME researchers are drawing comparisons but they're largely ME researchers who everyone else is largely cignoring because of the widespread perception that ME is a fake disease for lazy women.

That same perception btw is why "graded exercise therapy" (GET), or exercise gradually increasing in intensity, cwas for years the go-to treatment despite MOUNTAINS of evidence that it makes ME patients sicker. Some end up permanently bedbound and unable to even eat or drink without a feeding tube/IV because the damage is so bad! The GET recommendation was finally changed only in the past few years in the US and the UK, and many doctors hate that they're not allowed to recommend it anymore, because they insist despite the evidence that ME/CFS is psychological and ME patients are just "deconditioned" and too lazy to do anything about it.

Now the same kind of "treatment" is being recommended for long covid patients despite evidence showing exercise is having the same kinds of cellular effects as it does in ME patients. "Taking PEM into account" sounds gentler but I'm deeply concerned about the reinvention of GET for patients who meet all the criteria for an illness that's been shown definitively to become permanently worse with GET. This mitochondrial damage is progressive in ME, and there's no reason to believe patients who meet all the criteria of ME after Covid won't experience the same progression if they force themselves past their energy envelope in such a systematic way.

The additional finding that T cells — part of the immune system's arsenal — had infiltrated the muscles of long COVID patients also caught Iwasaki's attention, possibly indicating "an autoimmune response within the muscle cells."

and like. do we have to keep gently phrasing things to protect naturally-thin people's feelings. in my life it has never been fashionable to be fat. "fat" is still a bad word. there has never been institutional power pushing people to gain weight; no trillion-dollar industry to "fix" skinny people. a larger body type has never been over-represented in models, influencers, celebrities. sure, people might say "i'm worried for your health," but they do it with respect and gentleness, like they're talking to a scared deer.

every single fucking time i talk about this, i have to be so careful with what i say, in case i offend even one skinny person. it is just true that skinny people have social capital across many cultures. there is a reason you almost never hear someone say "i wish i was fat," but you will constantly see people say "I wish i was thin." and yet inevitably some skinny person will tell me: i thought you wanted body positivity. it is the same fucking attitude as when a cis man says "when you say men have power, well, i've been bullied for being a man. i thought you believe in mental health awareness. don't you know men have a higher suicide rate?"

two things can be true at once: your experience being bullied for being thin was terrible. and people with larger bodies probably have it worse.

i have been big and small. i know many other people who have been big and small. trust what i'm about to tell you: being small is much easier. the world is kinder to you. people treat you better. honestly, this pattern occurs pretty much regardless of gender - my guy friends have confided that they'd rather be bullied for being thin than be bullied for being fat. if you're skinny, the pressure might be to gain weight, sure, but it's often to do so in a way that keeps you skinny - to gain muscle, specifically.

thinness is seen as innate and natural, genetic. whereas carrying any fat - that is a moral failing. it is assumed to be related to your character, your personality. i have seen people equate it to discipline, to hygiene. that bias is why we need to talk about this.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.