Waiting For Winter

Like i have a long history of injuries from my youth of Dicking Around in the Woods. I have pulled muscles, torn tendons, broken bones, had major surgeries. I have ovarian cysts, arthritis, and chronic pain. But nothing i have ever experienced can match the pain of a dental abscess. Dental issues are painful and dangerous. Dental issues impact quality of life, because every person needs to eat and if you have dental issues you may not be able to do that well, easily or without pain.

And yet dental care is treated, first and foremost, as cosmetic. Most dental care is prohibitive expensive, even if you have good insurance. Most insurance only covers half of each procedure and even then they only pay out 1000 a year, which is less than the cost of most dental surgeries.

If a dentist fucks up your teeth, you don't have the same kind of recourse you would if that dentist were a doctor. I am facing tens of thousands of dollars in dental work I can't afford specifically because a dentist fucked up my teeth with orthodontic work. He didn't take my top wisdom teeth claiming they would never drop. Now here I am in my thirties, with multiple broken and missing molars because his choices messed up my jaw. And I have recourse.

If I am having dental pain or an abscess, I can't walk into an er or an urgent care and get help, outside antibiotics. Emergency dental centers are few and far between and getting emergency care is next to impossible. Dental offices as a rule do not bill like doctors offices and hospitals do, you have to have the money upfront and their is almost no dental assistance if you can't afford care.

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

And also a Coritiba player jumping over the barricade to celebrate his goal without realizing there’s a hole right behind it

A Coritiba player was celebrating a goal yesterday, 12 years after the original meme, and once again fell in a hole behind the barricade

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

Make horrifically cringey fanart - it doesn’t matter. Dont get involved with discourse- it doesn’t matter. Dont search for the approval of internet strangers - their opinions of you don’t matter. Don’t tear down or fight for people you don’t know - you don’t know them so it ultimately doesn’t matter. Do you see where I’m going with this.