the things we cherish are small indeed

this has happened to me too (as an adult) and I’m always like??? do you have no survival instincts??? what kind of idiot just goes around announcing their enmity towards a class of person that 1.) cannot be identified on sight 2.) comprises roughly 10% of the population and 3.) they believe to be uniquely conniving, vindictive, secretive, manipulative, and prone to petty vengeance and intense grudges???

if you genuinely believe in astrology and think that Scorpios are Evil™️, I don’t think you want to get on their bad sides if you can help it. right? right??? I don’t get it! why make unnecessary enemies with people who haven’t even wronged you yet? why make unnecessary enemies with people who haven’t even wronged you yet and also have pits of boner scorpions? and why do they before you know who they are, thus allowing them to begin secretly plotting against you?!?!

I love you Safety Wizard.

The fact that we can put fluids into people via IV saves more lives than I can actually communicate. There are so, so many more ways to die when we can't do that. You can go from literally at death's door from an illness you have no other cure for, to Basically Fine, You'll Feel Icky A Bit Longer But You're Otherwise Fine and Your Own Immune System Will Work Now, from sterile saline into a vein.

Or even fucking subcutaneous, under your skin. It still gets into your system faster and bypasses any fuckery going on in your gi-tract.

But you want the other end?

I recently got the answer to a crapload of symptoms of mine and it turned out to be Crohn's. Ileal crohn's.

For most of human history there was literally nothing to do about this but hope and pray that your immune system didn't decide to rip ulcers and lesions in your digestive tract to the point where you bled out, or the point where parts of it died and killed you with sepsis, or enough to build up stricture bands of scar tissue sufficiently to cause impactions or any other really gnarly and unpleasant ways you can die because for some reason your body decides the walls of your digestive tract are the enemy and need to be dismantled cell by cell. (Including a fuckload of cancers caused by the constant damage to the cell wall.)

Even as recently as when most of the younger people reading this were small children, mostly all you could do about it was take corticosteroids when you were in a flare. And that was better than Nothing. But at the same time, corticosteroids have a potential laundry list of side effects and you want to take them as little as possible and for as brief a period as possible. And there wasn't a lot else.

I am on a medication with the proprietary name "Skyrizi" and the generic name risankizumab. It's made from taking antibodies from a non-human source and then modifying their protein sequences to be more similar to human antibodies, after which they modify them further in order to make it so that the literal only thing they do is go into my body and bind to something called "tumour necrosis factor" so that this will stop flagging my own goddamn digestive system walls for destruction by the rest of the immune system.

Please feel free to read that paragraph over again.

There used to be a common, horrific illness that sailors would get, which was mysteriously cured by limes. People know about this one, it's scurvy. But there are other horrible ways to be sick from vitamin deficiency that weren't considered curable at all, and people had no idea what caused them.

Rickets is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency where your bones get bendy and grow in the wrong shape (it is most apparent in children). It causes permanent deformity and very easy fractures, along with debilitating pain and persistent dental issues. Historically, it was known that milk, and later, cod liver oil, would improve or prevent it, but the reason was not understood until the vitamin was discovered.

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a complication of alcoholism that leads to psychosis, dementia, and death if left untreated. Severe alcoholics used to just go completely mad before dying, basically. It ultimately results in permanent memory loss (retrograde amnesia), as well as the inability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia). It is caused by the fact that alcohol prevents the absorption of vitamin B1 (thiamine). It is treatable and preventable by giving the patient thiamine shots - if caught early, before permanent brain damage has occurred, it is fully reversible, although the underlying substance abuse issue still needs to be addressed to prevent recurrence.

Pernicious anemia is caused by vitamin B12 deficiency (in turn ultimately caused by an autoimmune issue causing poor absorption). It causes blood cells to be the wrong size and too few in number, resulting in dizziness and fatigue. It also causes neurological symptoms like tingling in the extremities, poor coordination, confusion, and, in late stages, dementia. There was no cure for pernicious anemia in the past. People would simply become anemic and die from it. That's why it's called "pernicious" - that's an old-fashioned way to say "insidious and deadly," named for its slow onset and then-incurable course. Now it is curable with vitamin tablets or periodic injections.

Cretinism, or, less stigmatizingly, congenital hypothyroidism due to iodine deficiency, is a developmental disorder caused by the inability of the thyroid gland to function properly without sufficient iodine. it causes short stature, intellectual disability, infertility, hair loss, and a large lump in the neck known as a goiter (i.e. a hypertrophic thyroid gland). It was historically associated with poor inland populations living far from the ocean (due to the protective effect of consuming seafood, which is naturally high in iodine). We now simply put iodine in table salt, and this disorder is virtually unheard of in regions where this is the case.

Neural tube defects are a leading cause of birth defects, infant mortality, and stillbirth. The most common nonlethal forms of neural tube defects include spina bifida, hydranencephaly, and encephalocele. These defects are caused by a failure of the embryonic structure that becomes the spinal canal to close properly during development, leading the central nervous system to have a distorted shape that may impair cerebrospinal fluid drainage and put pressure on the brain. In severe cases, e.g. anencephaly, the brain/spine essentially develop outside of the body, which is not compatible with life (anencephalic and iniencephalic babies typically die within hours or days; fetuses with more severe forms are usually stillborn if they are not terminated). The risk of these defects is drastically reduced by taking supplemental folic acid (vitamin B9).

Vitamin K is perhaps the most amazing one on this list. Newborns often have very low vitamin K levels due to the fact that it does not cross the placental barrier easily and is not found in high levels in breast milk. It is only produced by gut bacteria, which babies do not have when they are born, and it takes time for them to acquire the right flora from their environment. Deficiency impairs blood clotting, and in infants, can lead to brain bleeds and sudden, unexplained death. Tiny babies would simply die of brain hemorrhaging for no good reason at all. But if they're given a quick shot of vitamin K at birth, that doesn't happen.

Chapters: 1/6 Fandom: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen, Persuasion - Jane Austen Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Anne Elliot/Frederick Wentworth Characters: Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Lady Russell (Persuasion), Mrs. Reynolds (Pride and Prejudice), Sir Walter Elliot, Mr. Darcy Sr. (Pride and Prejudice), Elizabeth Elliot, Mary Musgrove (Persuasion) Additional Tags: Figure Skating, Olympics, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Olympics, Winter Olympics, AU of an AU Series: Part 6 of Skating AU Summary:

Alternate title: Five Times Everyone Thought Anne and Darcy Were Dating (And One Time Everyone Knew They Weren’t)

After taking her coach’s advice and breaking things off with her pairs partner, Frederick Wentworth, so that he can pursue a career in the NHL and she can compete in women’s singles figure skating at the Senior level, Anne Elliot faces a unique maelstroms of stressors. There’s school, there’s her mother’s failing health, there’s a family she must to do her best to hold together, and of course, there’s all the life-absorbing struggles of trying to compete at the next Olympics.

Olympic gold-medalist men’s figure skater Fitzwilliam Darcy faces the exact same stressors.

The friendship born of their specific circumstances is a real help to both of them– and a source of constant misunderstandings to everyone around them.

Or, otherwise: What happened if you put Mr. Darcy in the middle of “Persuasion?”

I would say that recreating the characterisation, mood and general vibes of an existing work of fiction is in fact a skill in and of itself that's acquired via practice. A common compliment delivered to fanfiction writers is how well they have captured the spirit of the original work. Inexperienced fanfiction writers fail to do this.

When creating an original character you can, ultimately, say anything about them and now it's canon bcos you created them and you said so. conversely, well, if you are covering a well known song and start playing the wrong notes people will notice immediately.

In addition: a lot of fanfiction, IMO, is in actuality a form of metafictional literary analysis. a story where two characters sit down and talk about their feelings about a canonical event? literary analysis, which is of course a skill. Sometimes fanfiction is bad bcos the writer is not good at interpreting texts.

When you hear a story about a Guy, wanting to tell a story about them is the most natural thing in the world. That's how mythology and folk tales happen.

IMO the idea of fanfiction being "bad" or "cringe" as an artform is related to how activities have to be profitable to be considered valuable, but further than that it is related to how "owning" is considered to be preferred over "caretaking" or "stewardship" where you do not own, you just participate