ChalionKat

When I moved, I’m certain they understood I was leaving because I had all my stuff and gave them lots of food and compliments.

But, they chased down my friend who lived in the next burrough over. They had recognised that friend with me several times and followed them to their house when they couldn’t find me.

They adopted my friend and it was now my friend’s job to bring them snacks and receive the presents.

This was maybe 6-7 years ago.

I visited London last year. Went to see my friend. The crows all not only recognised me, they tracked me down. We got into my friend’s flat and not twenty minutes later there was chaos on the balcony.

We open the curtains, the entire fucking murder is there shouting because they wanted to see me.

Because under the post about giving minors the right to medically consent, people are spreading a ton of misinformation on this - largely because they just do not question the stuff they just assume are "normal". Which here is: "kids are all afraid of needles and therefore if we let them consent or not to medical proceedures, they would just not consent and not get vaccinations, because needles hurt".

And, look. Here is the thing: no, needles do not actually hurt a whole lot. And while, yes, certain procedures that involve being stabbed by a needle hurt more if you are younger for a bunch of reasons... that is actually not the main reason children fear needles. Because, again: the pain is not that bad. And most kids, especially young kids, whose motor skills are still developing, usually will have a bunch more hurting scratches, bruises and the like at any given moment than there will be pain from the needle.

No, from what research can tell, the main reason kids are afraid of needles, is more that for many of them needle procedures are very traumatizing. And that is largely because of the consent issue.

Imagine you are a person who is still pretty darn new to that whole human thing. So for one, yes, your brain is actually not that great in understanding what pain is dangerous and what pain is a safe limit of pain. So yes, someone intentionally hurting you (like with a needle) is really kinda scary. But then there is also the thing where this person hurting you is not telling you why they are doing. The people who you normally trust with keeping you safe (your family) is betraying you, by just holding you down and scolding you for crying over it. Or maybe it is not your family, but some strange nurse who is holding you. And while you are scared, because someone is intentionally hurting you, while someone else is restricting you, the adults around you are telling you, that your emotional reaction to this is actually bad and you are wrong for reacting that way. They might in fact lie to you and tell you that something that is insanely scary to you is "not that bad", instead of just understanding that it is super scary to you. And that is then what you start to expect whenever you see a doctor prepare a needle: people holding you down, hurting you without reason, and telling you that you are wrong for being upset, actively gaslighting you.

We have research on this. And this research is pretty clear: most kids are actually somewhat okay with needles, if you inform them why you are doing it, allow for them to have their emotions, talk to them about their emotions, and allow for them to set at least some conditions.

And frankly, I hate how many people just accept the framing of "kids are naturally afraid of this because it hurts". Like, folks, I know y'all are fucking Americans and that in your culture it is kinda normalized to like put kids into like some sort of fortified hamsterball to stop them from like doing typical kids stuff. But... let me tell you: if you do not do that, kids will actually very regularly engage in dangerous play that they know will often end up in injuries that are going to hurt. And, no, they are not to dumb to understand that. The kids know that this is what might happen because of their play. They actually just take the risk. Yes, they will cry if they get hurt, because - again - their nervous system is still calibrating how it relates to pain. But they will likely do that thing again and again. I can tell you: I fell down a tree so often during my childhood, and I still climbed it. Again and again. So did most kids I knew. Like, fuck, we lived next to a forest. We played "Tarzan", and tried to go along paths without touching the ground. And we fell. A lot. And we still did it.

Public health would be so much better if nurses didn't literally pin kids to a table while they scream to give them vaccinations. I don't think that's necessary ever. And it can give them trauma for life that will impact their ability to access health care as an adult

I hate saying that I have medical trauma because my medical experiences were mostly "normal" routine stuff, I didn't have cancer or any kind of chronic health condition or unusual rare illness. But I still got traumatized, or at least had a response that was very similar to trauma

because my whole entire experience of going to the doctor was "a bunch of adults forcibly do whatever they feel like doing with my body" whether stripping off my clothes, touching me everywhere, sticking needles in me, or hurting me in some way I didn't understand

And I know almost everyone with similar experiences didn't end up nearly as Fucked Up as I did over it, but holy shit was I fucked up over it

I literally didn't even know that medical consent was a thing until I was 19...like I thought that if you went into a doctor's office or hospital they could just do whatever they wanted...unless you ran out of there I guess, or managed to plead/cry/convince them otherwise???...

But I don't know how the hell I was supposed to automatically know better, since even when I was 15 I got blood drawn while I was crying and saying "no no no no no."

It's just the changing density of the air refracting light weirdly, so it looks like there's a reflection of the sky on the ground, which our brains often interpret as a pool of water. It can also happen upwards instead of downwards, especially at sea, when the air is much colder near the surface and a warm front appears above it:

Marguerite Perey is one of the greatest radiochemists to ever live, and Francium is such a bullshit element that only an absolute master could identify and analyze it.

The short-lived intermediate actinide chain isotopes are mostly bullshit elements for a lot of the same reasons Francium is. Five of them (Radium, Radon, Astatine, Actinium, and Protactinium) are so scarce in nature and so ferociously radioactive that all of their names literally mean “unstable or radioactive element” because at the time of their discovery that was the only thing known about them. Isolating and identifying these bullshit elements demanded a total technical mastery of the cutting edge chemical and radiological analysis techniques in their time, as well as performing a tremendous amount of brutal physical labor. Preparing these extreme trace elements for study required processing thousands of pounds of raw uranium and thorium ores, often exposing the researchers and their assistants to high doses of radiation, just to obtain the extremely radioactive milligram-scale quantities of the intermediate isotopes they wished to study.

To even have the skills to identify Francium, Perey had to first spend years mastering the separation of transactinide decay products from raw mixed ore at the Radium Institute with her mentor and another true master in the field, Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Her work in Curie’s lab focused on the isolation and analysis of another previously discovered bullshit decay product, the obviously-named Actinium. Actinium occurs in high-grade natural uranium ores at a rate of 0.2 mg Ac/1000 kg ore, a concentration of 0.0000002%wt, so isolating enough of it to study required the painstaking and precise process of dissolving and refining thousands of tons of increasingly radioactive metals in powerful and dangerous solvents.

Upon isolation of a sample of Actinium (specifically Actinium mixed into a Lanthanum carrier) , Perey and the Curies would frantically study the element as its already intense radioactivity multiplied while even shorter-lived isotopes of Thorium, Radium, Radon, Polonium, and others grew in to the sample, obscuring its characteristics and endangering the researchers.

The decay of Actinium should have only initially produced beta radiation from its decay into Thorium-227, which in turn undergoes alpha decay into Radium-223. The days-long lifetime of Thorium-227 means that after a fairly short period of time, the Actinium sample will develop a significant amount of alpha radiation on its own. But Perey was skilled enough and fast enough to isolate and measure her samples before this process could happen, and what she found was an unexplained early spike in alpha radiation from some other very scarce very active alpha source, something that must have been decaying directly from the Actinium in minuscule quantities.

After analyzing several samples to make sure these results were reliable, Perey was confident she had discovered the elusive element 87, and asked Jean Perrin (her supervisor at the lab) to submit her findings for publication. At the time, she was a lab assistant and unable to publish papers, and did not get a degree until 1946, seven years later. She named the new element Francium, after her home country and the nation that sponsored her research.

While Perey was investigating the properties of Actinium, her mentor Marie Curie developed serious anemia and had to withdraw from lab work. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934, after years of continuous exposure to extreme radiation that destroyed her bone marrow and left her body unable to produce new blood cells. Perey discovered Francium five years later.

The dangers of working with highly radioactive elements were not well understood in the early era of radiochemistry, but the experiences of the early radiochemists left a huge impact on those that followed, and Perey championed studies of the effects of radiation and devised new protection methods for researchers throughout her long career. Though she was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize, she never won it, and her contributions and talent have been largely forgotten outside of the nuclear chemistry community.

The level of skill and care required to discover an element that is so immensely bullshit as Francium is staggering, and the numbers involved are unimaginable. The labs Perey and the Curies worked in were left unused for decades until their destruction in 1981, due to the intense radioactivity from sub-microgram quantities of these highly active elements contaminating the room. It’s likely that Perey never observed more than a nanogram of Francium during her lifetime studying it, and no quantity large enough to observe its bulk quantities has ever been assembled.