become the wildfire once more!

🌡️⚠️ OVERHEATED WARNING!⚠️🌡️

Unit Due for Maintenance Check!🔧

Or: A very sick little murder gremlin with her cheerful puppy boyfriend, her solver possessed tail, and her eldritch horror mother looking after her.

My first Murder Drones art, please be nice ;w;

More long-ass yapping (detailed desc) below read

my new theory: covid had to become 'just a cold' culturally because more research is coming out all the time about how you don't wanna get sick in general, it can absolutely fuck up your life, and people realizing that will inevitably result in people demanding changes to the way things work.

the thing that they don't want you to know is that these acute sicknesses, common viruses and colds, can either cause direct damage or create the circumstances that lead to long term, often complex health problems down the road. by 'they', i mean the people who have a vested interest in putting all our bodies through the meat grinder of late stage capitalism 'business as usual', no matter the circumstances.

i don't have a lot of spoons to write about this today and i'm brain foggy so i'm not gonna be the most eloquent but

think about the implications if your boss making you come in sick can lead to your coworker developing parkinsons or ms or heart damage or cancer. if people knew these things, they would absolutely not take the business as usual shit we're doing right now. people would demand paid time off. people would demand universal healthcare. people would demand so much more.

for example, just saw this recently.

but it's also not just this. conditions like MS and parkinsons, even cancers, among others have been linked to viruses, like for one, epstein barr. (epstein barr is mono, by the way).

cancer, y'all. certain viruses, including covid, increase your likelihood of getting cancer.

if we all really understood this, i believe more of us would be masking up. i don't want this for any of us and it's important to know these things.

i don't think that there is necessarily a global conspiracy to keep this from us, obviously donald trump and joe biden have gotten covid a billion times and are suffering because of it, obviously some of it is just plain ignorance but it is true that the powers that be have a vested interest in us not understanding this.

and if you aren't familiar with the long term damage covid causes:

i love angry disabled people

i love disabled people who are not afraid to take up space

i love disabled people who loudly talk about their symptoms

i love disabled people who call out inaccessibility

i love mean disabled people

i love disabled people who dont answer questions

i love disabled people who are not ashamed of their medical devices

I am someone’s biggest fear. My life is so bad to them, that people are afraid to look at me and people like me. To engage with anything associated with M.E. Because it is too scary to imagine yourself as severe. To imagine yourself as bedbound and this sick. Too terrifying to see yourself in my position. So you just don’t look.

Do you not realize this is why we speak out? Why we warn people who are mild/moderate to stop overexerting yourself before you become like us?

And I am not here to bash on anyone who does look away. Because I know why they do. I know I’ve looked away too at times. It’s human nature to want to try to protect yourself. There is no anger on my end from that.

However, avoidance, though natural and morally neutral, won’t save you, or anyone else from becoming severe. Actual knowledge about your disease might.

What is ME/CFS?

Treatment suggestions- Bateman Horne Center

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.

When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.

Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)

Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.

College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.

Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:

When on the flight Amy was fed bread that contained multiple things she was allergic to. The packaging was completely unlabled and she was never offered an allergy warning before or during the 13 hour flight. She had an allergic reaction and had a very hard time breathing and had to take the ONE epipen she had access to for this whole trip that day. She would not be able to get a new one. The flight attendants did not give a singular fuck about what happened to her and the position she was put in because of their carelessness.

Fast forward to the end of the trip. Luckily Amy had no further incidents during the trip. We get on the plane for the flight home and Amy asks about the food for the flight and if she can have the ingredients list. She also makes it clear to the flight attendants that this is really important because she has already had an incident and no longer has her epipen.

Do you want to know what the flight attendants did?

They kicked her off the plane. They kicked a seventeen year old off a plane and left her behind in an unfamiliar city because they would rather not deal with her disability. She delayed the flight for several minutes begging and crying for them to not leave her there. She told them she had no way of accessing a new epipen here, but they said she couldn’t fly without it. Me and my friend who were sitting next to her held her and argued with the flight attendant to keep her on the plane. She sobbed as she said she could just not eat anything, or that she could eat what she brought aboard. They still kicked her off. Bless the chaperone that chose to stay behind with her so she wouldn’t be alone.

You want to know the most fucked up part after that? The flight attendant who kicked her off was amused about the whole thing like it was some funny joke. Another one complained that “In all his years of working this job he had never been so disrespected.”

Amy and the chaperone ended up sleeping at that airport over night before they could get on another flight. I don’t remember if she was able to get another epipen for the flight home but I think she was.

“But Professor, the technical flaws!” “But Professor, the grammatical errors!” “But Professor, you’re not even in my fandom!” “But Professor, you’ve never even read my fanfic!”

Preparing the kid for the future