Super Verified

White nurses can and do treat nonwhite patients as lesser & don't listen to them sometimes resulting in their very worsening of symptoms or death. Psychiatric nurses are very often abusive to psychiatric patients. My own aunt (retired registered nurse) who is supposed to be taking care of Me is borderline neglecting Me.

sleep apnea is more common in people who are fat.

society decided for some reason that this meant that being fat causes sleep apnea. its often difficult to get referrals for sleep apnea treatment if you are fat, because some PCPs will tell you try losing weight first.

turns out!! having untreated sleep apnea causes weight gain in a not-insignificant number of people. it also makes it fucking impossible for many people to lose weight.

my husband worked out the same amount before he got a cpap as he does now. there have been no major diet changes either. yet he has been losing weight -- and gaining muscle tone -- consistently since he started using a cpap in january.

also, his blood pressure -- which was high, which docs blamed on his weight/diet -- went down significantly within one month of starting cpap treatment, before his weight changed significantly.

ANYWAYS. this is getting long. two final thoughts.

- I Want To Strangle Medical Fatphobia With My Bare Fucking Hands

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.

There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.

You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.

I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.

This was the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea.

This happened due to a series of incidents that all came back to the same thing: the owner was not an engineer and made his own modifications to change the building from apartments into a mall and maximize floor space, a sentence that here means "removed a shitload of necessary visible support structures and weakened the remaining ones while skimping on or even skipping necessary interior structures."

The building collapsed only five years after completion.

There was a meeting going on during the collapse as to whether the mall should be evacuated, with its owner-slash-"designer" saying no because he didn't want to lose the sales revenue. He and the other executives, of course, left before terminal collapse. If you're wondering how they pulled that off: the warning signs started in April. The building collapsed on 29 June. The terminal collapse began circa 5p KST and became complete at 5:52p. In between those two times, the owner still refused to close the mall.

502 people died.

This is the second-deadliest non-deliberate building collapse in recorded history.

This is what happens when a greedy person who doesn't know engineering design is allowed to build and own a mall.

Something something Cybertruck....

Something something data center....

Something something AI.

An engineer DID actually try to stop the owner from doing this. He got fired for his pains, although when the courts got involved he was able to show he had no responsibility for the collapse.

“Uhhhhh. Stick.”

“What.”

“I said, give me your name, child.”

“I still haven’t picked one,” Grass defends, even now still hoping for a way out of a faeries deal.

“No. But your parents did. Give me your name, child, and it shall no longer be yours. The entity of your name shall no longer exist, and you will be free for whichever name you choose— Leaf, or Stick, or Lichen.”

“…oh.” says Petal, and in the next moment a name falls from their lips. It is not their name. It never has been. The fae is sharp and cutting and witty, that moment of softness an imagined slight.

“Very well, child. Be warned of mushroom circles, should you lose your name again.”

“Okay,” Mushroom smiles, and the Fae pulls itself away from their reality in a swirl of feathers and silk.

I need physical help for all self care and showering, I use adaptive cutlery or else I can’t feed myself, I’m also both bladder and bowel incontinent and will be wearing adult pull ups soon.

No I’m not babyish or gross for needing physical help, I have ataxia spastic triplegia and left sided weakness, this makes fine motor skills very difficult and also makes it so my bladder and bowel muscles are weakened.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

From there it's not actually difficult to get the other soldiers onboard with covering up the fact that poor Ping took one for the team and got afflicted by the vagina curse, especially since it would have been all of them if they hadn't gotten the warning ahead of time. So they agree to help him cover it up, because obviously the army's not going to understand.

Mulan: Uh, what boobs? Huh? Where did these come from?

Mushu: *facepalms and thinks quickly* (speaks from the shadows) I AM THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKE! BEWARE MY CURSED WATERS FOR THEY WILL TURN MEN INTO WOMEN!

Mulan: Look-

Ling, Yao, and Chien Po: WE CAN EXPLAIN!!

[One convoluted, chaotic explanation later]

Shang: ...is this why you've all been insisting we don't camp anywhere that doesn't have a lake.

Shang: and then none of you actually swim in it.

Shang: and you all keep jumping at shadows.

Shang: wait a second Ping did this happen before or after you became insanely good at fighting?

Shang: did you get better at fighting after you became a woman.

Shang: are women better at fighting than us.

Mulan: ....uh. well. maybe? no one's ever tried to find out.

Yao: [thinking very fast] y'know Captain it's just so hard to find recruits these days.

Chien Po: Real shortage of men.

Ling: Lots of women, though.

Mulan: [catching on] Without marriage prospects.

Shang: You're right, men. The spirits must have done this in order to show us that we should be recruiting women as fighters.

Mushu [from the shadows, seeing an opportunity to do the funniest thing]: EXACTLY, LI SHANG. I HAVE TRANSFORMED PING INTO A WOMAN BECAUSE YOU HAVE TOO LONG OVERLOOKED THE TRUE WAY TO WIN THE WAR.

Mulan [seeing an opportunity to get all the stories straight]: O Great Spirit, is it reversible?

Mushu: WHY WOULD YOU WISH TO REJECT MY GIFT? I HAVE SEEN YOUR HEART, CHILD, AND HAVE ALREADY ALTERED THE MEMORIES OF EVERYONE WHO KNEW YOU BEFORE YOU LEFT FOR THE ARMY. YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THEIR DAUGHTER.

Li Shang: Welp, the spirits have spoken. Ping - wait is your name still Ping if you're a woman now?

Mulan: Uh. Actually, I was thinking of renaming myself. How do you feel about Mulan?

BONUS:

Mulan [climbing out of the eleventh lake the men have arranged for her to swim in]: Yeah no, it didn't work. Still got boobs. [tries to appear dejected].

Chien Po: If it makes you feel better, they're very nice boobs.

despite literally being a community comprised entirely of some of the most historically (and in a lot of instances, presently) discriminated-against groups on the planet, a lot of queer people seem to just shit on disabled people at every chance they get— and that’s if they even remember that we exist.

it’s just baffling to me that a group of people who preach inclusivity and acceptance are some of the least accepting people out there when it comes to accessibility at events. there is no consideration for us when planning events. if they even remember that they’re supposed to be making the space accessible and inclusive, they do the bare minimum while going around saying they’re saints for doing so.

wanna go to a parade? okay, why don’t you go stand in 90+ degree heat for 7 hours with no access to water in that entire time. wanna go to this cool pop-up event? oops, there’s no wheelchair paths, and everyone is going to be blocking your way anyway. sure, we’ll hold an indoor event, but there’s no air conditioning, you’re not allowed to use the bathrooms, and absolutely no one is masking despite there being hundreds of people crammed into a singular venue. and yes, we will be deploying strobe lights at random intervals.

A person can go from no symptoms at all to being profoundly debilitated all in one day.

Some have baseline symptoms so low and flares so high, that things can go from 1 to 10 very quickly.

Like this applies to all “invisible” disabilities in the sense that just bc you can’t see what’s wrong doesn’t mean nothing is wrong or they aren’t disabled but it’s especially the case for chronic migraines

Migraines are NOT just headaches. It’s not just “oof ow my head hurt :(”, Migraines are WHOLE body affair. It’s getting weepy and irritable hours before the pain hits, it’s starting to get clumsy and feeling body aches just before the pain starts, it’s getting stiff because of the aches and sensitive to light and sound because of how heightened senses get.

And when the pain gets, sometimes it is the general image of someone locked in a dark room in bed, which is genuinely awful bc you can’t do anything. You just have to lay there and stew in your pain and no medicine touches it and everything hurts, worst of all your head and there is nothing to focus on other than the pain because any light hurts and any sound hurts.

But sometimes the pain isn’t bad enough for that, or sometimes you have to work or go to school with nails in your head and it’s impossible to focus. Your depth perception gets wonky, you’re clumsy, you slur or stumble over your words because so much of your brain is occupied only by pain. You can’t miss another day of work, you can’t miss the money, but you’re messing up orders or you’re misunderstanding instructions.

And then there’s the after. Postdrome, the migraine hangover. Where the emotional and irritability returns, and you have issues with your stomach, very often leaving you unable to eat or drink without puking. Your neck is stiff, your head feels heavy, your brain is so fogged up that you can barely string together a coherent sentence. Your body aches much worse than before, and you’re exhausted, fatigued to hell and back, and that lasts for 1-3 days after the actual migraine.

Migraines are a multi-day condition that affects EVERY aspect of your fucking life. And medicines that treat the pain very often only lessen the symptoms that occur before and after.