welcome to my crud dump

six months later i re-read the essay prior to the final exam, went 'ohhhh yeah i remember this', got a question on that topic, and aced it.

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

I can't speak for all 211's but most should also have a website detailing all the agencies in their database. if you don't like phone calls, this can be something to reference instead.

If you don't have health insurance but you need to see a doctor, reference 211! We list clinics that provide free or discounted general care, vision, and dental services to low income households and people without insurance! Many hospitals also have financial aid policies that can severely reduce your bill if you had an expensive procedure!

If you're stuck in a dead end job or need educational resources reference 211! There are a lot of programs focused on providing basic adult education as well as trade skills or other high demand fields! State governments are generally more interested in funneling people into work than providing benefits, but you can still use this to your advantage especially if you have some form of disability but are still able to work. That includes if you're neurodiverse or have mental health issues! Most of these programs are extremely underutilized.

If you believe you qualify for public benefits but the bureaucracy of the process is in your way, reference 211! There are agencies specifically geared towards helping people obtain the benefits they qualify for- for free!

If you need help with your taxes-

If you need help finding a pro bono lawyer-

If you need help finding affordable housing/section 8 housing-

If you need help finding food pantries-

If you need help paying for your prescriptions-

If you need help obtaining disability aids or assistive technology-

If you need help finding transportation options-

If you need help following a natural or personal disaster (like a home fire)-

If you need help repairing a home you or your family owns or it needs modifications to be accessible-

If you need Queer resources-

Reference your 211!!!!!

I had no idea what 211 was before working for it but I wish I had. I've learned so much about what resources are actually available to the community even in a ho hum area of the country like my state. I've saved my partner literally thousands of dollars just from the medical resources I've gathered.

Not enough young people know about or utilize these services but they are there for you!

P. S.

i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT

ALSO, I don’t want people feeling confident about petting stray/wild animals because there’s a vaccine available, either. I’ll explain why from my own experience (I’m not a doctor).

I got bitten by a wild tamarin once, on the pulp of my index finger. It drew blood, there are many wild animals in the area (tamarins, possums, bats, foxes) and it isn’t that uncommon to hear about 1 or 2 rabies cases every now and again (a puppy we gave to a friend got it, for instance), so I went to an ambulatory immediately.

Because I was bitten in an ultrasensitive area, I needed fast treatment. But it was also a small area, so the usual thing they do - inject the vaccine in the place - wasn’t a choice. They told me they’d divide the shot in 5 small ones, and inject me all over my body, so the antidote would get to my entire system fast.

Please stop for a moment and think that the disease is so worrysome that they’d rather needle me all over than to give me one shot and wait until it spread through my system.

Then they said that, okay, but there was a catch first. I needed to take an antiallergic shot. “Why?” “Because the virus is devastating, and as the vaccine is made from it, but weakened (like almost every vaccine) it will still create a reaction, and it’s a strong one, and it’s veru common for people to have strong allergic reactions to it.” YOU HAVE TO TAKE AN ANTIALLERGIC SHOT IN ORDER TO TAKE THE VACCINE COZ THE VACCINE COULD POTENTIALLY MAKE YOU REALLY SICK

ALSO IT WASN’T JUST “A LITTLE ANTIALLERGIC SHOT”

IT WAS ONE OF THESE FUCKERS HERE.

It was OBVIOUSLY dripped in my body and not injected because HAHAHAHA. Truth be told I was an adult already and I’m tall so I have a lot of mass but STILL.

So after I had taken the antiallegic and was starting to feel drowsy (as a side effect of it) the doctor came with the 5 shots.

- One in each buttock

- One in each thigh

- One in my left arm

They all stung like a bitch and I usually don’t care about shots.

“Okay so can I go home now?”

“No, we have to keep you under observation for 2h so we’re SURE the vaccine won’t give you any reaction.”

BINCH I WAS GIVEN A BUTTLOAD OF MEDICINE BUT THERE WAS STILL A RISK.

I slept through the two hours and then was liberated to go home. My legs, butt, and left arm hurt all over, like I had been punched there, for a few days. I also had a fever (not feverish, a fever)

BUT DID YOU THINK IT WAS OVER?

WRONG!!!

I had to take four reinforcement shots in the next month, one a week, so I could be positively be considered immunized. Every time I took a shot, my arm would swell and hurt like it’d been hit, and when night came I’d have a fever. Because that’s how fucking strong the vaccine is, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW VICIOUS THE VIRUS IS.

So yeah. DO NOT PUT YOURSELF IN RISK, GODDAMNIT. Rabies is a rare condition all over, THANK GOD, and 1 confirmed case can be already considered a surge and a reason for mass campaigning, AND FOR A REASON.

If you like messing with stray/wild animals, don’t go picking them up and be extra careful. Or just, like, DON’T - call a vet or an authority that can handle them safely.

I must add that I live in a country with universal healthcare, so I didn’t pay a single penny for my treatment. Is this your reality? If not, ONE MORE REASON TO NOT FUCKING PLAY WITH THIS SHIT.

Rabies is 100% lethal. Period. If you are scratched or bitten by an animal you’re not positive is vaccinated, you need to find treatment NOW. And probably go through all that shit I’ve been through (also if you are immunosupressed? I DON’T KNOW WHAT’D HAPPEN)

Finally, you don’t need to be bitten. All you need is to come into contact with an infected animal’s bodily fluids through a cut that maybe you didn’t notice when you were handling it when it drooled on you.

Prodromal: Stage One. Marked by altered behavioral patterns. “Docility” and “likes to be pet” are very common in the prodromal stage. Usually lasts 1-3 days. An animal in this stage carries virus bodies in its saliva and is infectious.

Excitative: Stage Two. Also called “furious” rabies. This is what everyone thinks rabies is–hyperreacting to stimuli and biting everything. Excessive salivation occurs. Animals in this stage also exhibit hydrophobia or the fear of water; they cannot drink (swallowing causes painful spasms of the throat muscles), and will panic if shown water. Usually lasts 3-4 days before rapidly progressing into the next stage.

Paralytic: Stage Three. Also called “dumb” rabies. As the infection runs its course, the virus starts degrading the nervous system. Limbs begin to fail; animals in this stage will often limp or drag their haunches behind them. If the animal has survived all this way, death will usually come through respiratory arrest: Their diaphragm becomes paralyzed and they stop breathing.

And to add onto the above, saliva isn’t the only infectious fluid. Brain matter is, too. If, somehow, you find yourself in possession of a firearm and faced with a rabid animal, do not go for a head shot. If you do, you will aerosolize the brain matter and effectively create a cloud of infectious material. Breathe it in, and you’ll give yourself an infection.

When I worked in wildlife rehabilitation, I actually did see a rabid animal in person, and it remains one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, because I was literally looking death in the eyes.

A pair of well-intentioned women brought us a raccoon that they thought had been hit by a car. They had found it on the side of the road, dragging its hind legs. They managed–somehow–to get it into a cat carrier and brought it to us. 

As they brought it in, I remember how eerily silent it was. Normal raccoons chatter almost constantly. They fidget. They bump around. They purr and mumble and make little grabby-hands at everything. Even when they’re in pain, and especially when they’re stressed. But this one wasn’t moving around inside the carrier, and it wasn’t making a sound.

The clinic director also noticed this, and he asked in a calm but urgent voice for the women to hand the carrier to him. He took it to the exam room and set it on the table while they filled out some forms in the next room. I took a step towards the carrier, to look at our new patient, and without turning around, he told me, “Go to the other side of the room, and stay there.”

He took a small penlight out of the drawer and shone it briefly into the carrier, then sighed. “Bear, if you want to come look at this, you can put on a mask,” he said. “It’s really pretty neat, but I know you’re not vaccinated and I don’t want to take any chances.” 

And at that point, I knew exactly what we were dealing with, and I knew that this would be the closest I had ever been to certain death. So I grabbed a respirator from the table and put it on, and held my breath for good measure as I approached the table. The clinic director pointed where I should stand, well back from the carrier door. He shone the light inside again, and I saw two brilliant flashes of emerald green–the most vivid, unnatural eyeshine I had ever seen. 

“I don’t know why it does it,” the director murmured, “but it turns their eyes green.”

“What does?” one of the women asked, with uncanny, unintentionally dramatic timing, as she poked her head around the corner.

“Rabies,” the director said. “The raccoon is rabid. Did it bite either of you, or even lick you?” They told us no, said they had even used leather garden gloves when they herded it into the carrier. He told them to throw away the gloves as soon as possible, and steam-clean the upholstery in their car. They asked how they should clean the cat carrier; they wanted it back and couldn’t be convinced otherwise, so he told them to soak it in just barely diluted bleach.

But before we could give them the carrier back, we had to remove the raccoon. The rabid raccoon.

The clinic director readied a syringe with tranquilizers and attached it to the end of a short pole. I don’t remember how it was rigged exactly–whether he had a way to push down the plunger or if the needle would inject with pressure–but all he would have to do was stick the animal to inject it. And so, after sending me and the women back to the other side of the room, he made his fist jab.

He missed the raccoon.

The sound that that animal made on being brushed by the pole can only be described as a roar. It was throaty and ragged and ungodly loud. It was not a sound that a raccoon should ever make. I’m convinced it was a sound that a raccoon physically could not make. 

It thrashed inside the carrier, sending it tipping from side to side. Its claws clattered against the walls. It bellowed that throaty, rasping sound again. It was absolutely frenzied, and I was genuinely scared that it would break loose from inside those plastic walls. 

Somehow, the clinic director kept his calm, and as the raccoon jolted around inside the cat carrier, he moved in with the syringe again, and this time, he hit it. He emptied the syringe into its body and withdrew the pole.

And then we waited.

We waited for those awful screams, that horrible thrashing, to die down. As we did, the director loaded up another syringe with even more tranquilizer, and as the raccoon dropped off into unconsciousness, he stuck it a second time with the heavier dose. Even then, it growled at him and flailed a paw against the wall.

More waiting, this time to make sure the animal was truly down for the count.

Then, while wearing welder’s gloves, the director opened the door of the carrier and removed the raccoon. She was limp, bedraggled, and utterly emaciated, but she was still alive. We bagged up the cat carrier and gave it to the women again, advising them that now was a good time to leave. They heeded our warning.

I asked if I could come closer to see, and the clinic director pointed where I could stand. I pushed the mask up against my face and tried to breathe as little as possible.

He and his co-director–who I think he was grooming to be his successor, but the clinic actually went under later that year–examined the raccoon together. Donning a pair of nitrile gloves, he reached down and pulled up a handful, a literal fistful, of the raccoon’s skin and released it. It stayed pulled up.

Severe dehydration causes a phenomenon called “skin tenting”. The skin loses its elasticity somewhat, and will be slow to return to its “normal” shape when manipulated. The clinic director estimated that it had been at least four or five days since the raccoon had had anything to eat or drink. 

She was already on death’s doorstep, but her rabies infection had driven her exhausted body to scream and lunge and bite. 

Because, the scariest thing about rabies (if you ask me) is the way that it alters the behavior of those it infects to increase chances of spreading. 

The prodromal stage? Nocturnal animals become diurnal–allowing them to potentially infect most hosts than if they remained nocturnal. 

The excitative stage? The infected animal bites at the slightest provocation. Swallowing causes painful spasms, so they drool, coating their bodies in infectious matter. A drink could wash away the virus-charged saliva from their mouth and bodies, so the virus drives them to panic at the sight of water.

(The paralytic stage? By that point, the animal has probably spread its infection to new hosts, so the virus has no need for it any longer.)

Rabies is deadly. Rabies is dangerous. In all of recorded history, one person survived an infection after she became symptomatic, and so far we haven’t been able to replicate that success. The Milwaukee Protocol hasn’t saved anyone else. Just one person. And even then, she still had to struggle to gain back control of her body after all that nerve damage.

Please, please, take rabies seriously.

I am not exaggerating when I say that is literally terrifying.

Y'all please read this. That is absolutely hideous. That’s literally like something from a horror movie.

Dogs are dumb, friendly fucks who will investigate anything; everything else in the animal kingdom knows better than to mess with a porcupine, unless their brain is being ravaged by something beyond their control.

Also I heard that in the USA, human rabies pre-exposure vaccines are not widely available and cost something like $900

Get your pets rabies vaccine every year, folks. Aside from everything else - and that’s a lot of everything - the test for rabies involves the brain, so the animal will be killed first.

Do you know why “dog catcher” was such a serious occupation? Because in the late 1800s rabies ran rampant in urban street dogs. Because people who got bitten by street dogs… had probably just gotten a death sentence.

As a child, Louis Pasteur watched a man from his hometown die slowly, painfully, and unstoppably from rabies from a rabid wolf bite and it stuck with him so hard that when he grew up he put his own life on the line studying and working with rabid animals to develop a treatment. (Louis Pasteur’s wife, Marie Pasteur, was also a talented, passionate scientist who worked uncredited by his side. Many of their daughters also took up research.)

When Louis Pasteur did his first human test of his rabies vaccine, it was because a mother came to him desperate. Her 8 year old son had been bitten 14 times by a street dog. Doctors were certain he was going to die. She’d heard what Pasteur was working on and begged him to try to save her son.

He tried.

It worked.

This made national news. This made GLOBAL news.

And in the small Russian town of Beloi, locals read about this miracle cure. Their town had been attacked by a rabid wolf and twenty two people had been bitten. They knew these people were going to die. So the bitten people set off walking, carrying the most injured. They walked for weeks to get to France, where Pasteur was based.

When they arrived, the only French word they knew was “Pasteur.” Their cases were dangerously far along, possibly too far. Pasteur began treatment anyway, pushing with the most aggressive dosages he dared.

This also caught global attention. The world waited on tenterhooks.

Pasteur’s vaccine saved 19 out of 22.

The world was awed.

And when those Russian villagers returned home, to their families, it would have been like seeing the dead return.

Vaccinate your pets.

Don’t touch wildlife.

Also reblogging to remember Louis Pasteur, the nineteen lives he saved then, and the many others since.

In America it’s handled way differently, I guess?

I got bit by a bat on my ankle, waited a week cuz i thought it was a dry snake bite, went to the hospital when i decided on a hunch to look up bat bites and it was a dead ringer.

Waiting room time was like, 45 min. Went back. showed my mostly healed ankle and a picture of what it looked like immediately after the bite. Got wheeled into a private room far removed from other patients because “just in case your pain tolerance is low, we don’t want you to scare them”.

I did not get an anti-allergin drip, but I did get seven-eight shots in that one spot on my ankle until my skin was swollen and my flesh couldn’t take anymore vaccine, then I got a bunch of shots in both arms.

And it did hurt, I will not lie. It hurt like a mother fucker, that liquid is thicc.

It should be noted that my pain tolerance is a little high; I’ve broken a bone and thought it was a sprain. They offered to strap me down if I thought I’d move too much.

I had two followups for shots, one shot in each arm, spaced like three weeks apart.

They did not keep me overnight for observation, but they did send me home with a list of allergic reactions to watch out for and advice to come back if I displayed them.

Life sucked for like, a week? Felt like I had the flu but no fever to prove it.

But I mean, given the alternative, I’ll take the pain.

Also!

In America!

You can schedule a rabies vaccine, a slow one not an emergency dose, if ur gonna be out in the wild and shit.

Ur rabies vaccination is good for about two years, even the emergency ones!

Also tbh u can probably schedule rabies vaccinations for yourself in other countries too but I don’t know the stores you’d use for that so

Also did u know that the probably real reason the Uncanny Valley effect freaks us out? The real source for the legends of various shapeshifters? Rabies. Because it changes how you act.

“That thing is wearing my friend’s face, but something isn’t right. That’s not my friend.”

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

Static was WILDLY popular in Brazil (a country where the population is over 50% black) and we had re-runs for YEARS on open television. Everyone who was a kid in the 2000s knew and loved him. As a result, every single Brazilian Con has a LOT of static cosplayers!

So, a couple of years ago, Comic Con Experience (the biggest con in Brazil, which is actually also the biggest con in the world!) invited one of Static’s creator Denys Cowan as one of the guests of honor.

Now. Thousands of people attend his panel. And cosplayers went NUTS because they could show their Static cosplay to the creator himself! What none of us expected was Debts Cowan’s reaction:

He cried on stage.

He had never seen Static cosplayers - especially not so many of them! And he had no idea the show was popular here! No one ever told him his character was so beloved! Years and years of reruns and he had no idea! He obviously created the character with his experiences and his community (Black North Americans) in mind. Still, he accidentally touched a whole other community of black people who could see themselves on the screen as a superhero!

Anyway he is a lovely person and one of the best, most memorable guests we had. And I think this is a nice reminder that your art might touch people you can’t even imagine would when creating it.

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt