Life Is Inevitable

it's a deal

When You Look at Dr. Grace

When You Look at Dr. Grace

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.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

look up recipes (especially snack recipes) that are child/toddler/baby-friendly

Repost if your account is a safe anti spoiler place of Tadc, We shall NOT spread spoilers of EP 9 till it comes out on YouTube. Lets make This last experience enjoyable for everyone!

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”

I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.

i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’

he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’

i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’

he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’