every time ive been in the hospital near death i was simply too exhausted to perform pain for these people. it was a ten on the pain scale but they thought i was faking it for whatever reason until they got my lab tests back and realized i would need to be checked in for quite a while

like maybe you, able bodied young doctor/nurse who has never experienced chronic pain and disability cannot fathom me rolling up near death and a flat expression unable to scream and holler about my agonies but I assure you some of us are just too fucking tired to scream about something we generally live with every single day

one video in particular drives me up the wall, as it is some young nurse pretending to do patient intake in the ER and he is both the patient and nurse so he asks himself

what would you rank your head pain?

and he the patient flatly without emotion is like “ten”

so skeptically he as the nurse is like “so ten is the worst pain youve ever felt, like if someone with a chainsaw cut off your arm right now how would you rank your pain knowing that”

and he as the patient flippantly is like “9.5”

and the whole ~joke~ is “yeah youre lying”

but this situation really happened to my brother, he has a brain tumor and brain swelling to where he was dying, but was in too much pain to express it in a way an intake nurse would recognize as legitimate pain, so ofc they blew him off and he did get way too close to death because of that.

Add onto that that my parents actively told me not to perform my pain. I was told that expressing or showing that I was hurting was selfish, annoying and needy. What's the end result of that?

I get to an 8 on the pain scale and the only ways I perform that high of a pain are:

Deep breathing

Closing my eyes against it

Pinching my nose

Maybe rubbing the bones that hurt if I can reach it

I spent the last 5 or 6 years with my daily average being a 6 and I would hit an 8 at least 3 times a week.

Constantly being in that amount of pain means that you earn to mask it very well. And yeah, when I'm in terrible pain, seeing double, about to puke, my voice is flat as fuck. I turn really pale but I keep my mouth shut.

I've had doctors not believe my pain levels were that high regularly and all it did was make me reluctant to reach out for help managing my pain. They also refuse to believe my pain is that bad and yet I'm not taking opioid-based pain medication. I dont because I'm an addict. Same reason I dont keep a giant bottle of vodka in my house, I wont, but I also CANT. I promise if I did I'd become a raging alcoholic, just like one of my grandmothers.

Dead people don't scream.

The more hurt someone is, the quieter they are. People who are screaming are breathing. People running around and shouting for help have brain and motor function. It's the person quietly sitting still on the corner who is going into shock from internal bleeding.

Also some people are just built different. I've had a person with a broken leg offer to limp themself to the ambulance. I had a woman complain of foot pain, apologized for calling 911 over something trivial, and when we put her on the 4 lead heart monitor she was clearly having a minor heart attack. The heart attack was presenting weird symptoms, which is not unusual for woman as they have higher pain tolerances than men. If we had assumed she was just being dramatic and skipped the ECG part of the assessment protocol she could have fucking died.

I think this is a conversation that fandom needs to have in general.

When you encounter something that makes you uncomfortable while you’re playing a video game, reading something on AO3, browsing Twitter, or scrolling through Tumblr, you have the power to remove yourself. You can stop reading, you can hit the back button, you can block/mute, you can turn the device off entirely.

“Consent” has a very specific meaning. When you’re consuming a piece of media that a creator has posted on their own personal account, you are in their space. That is a one-sided interaction. They’re not at all involved, they can’t reach through the screen to hit the back button for you. They’re not “violating your consent” or “pushing your boundaries”, because you are the one in control.

And that if you refused to do so, the game would kick you out entirely.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

the use of gendered language, whether in law or in company guidelines, has been used as an excuse to exclude trans people from various kinds of reproductive healthcare. there have been stories of abortion providers pointing to the use of “pregnant women” in all clinic literature to justify not giving trans men assistance. there are issues where “women’s health clinics” will refuse to accept referrals for anyone who doesn’t have “F” on their records, which of course includes many trans women. there are in turn stories of trans women being unable to access “male” prostrate cancer screening.

language in this sort of capacity needs to be as factual and neutral and carefully constructed to avoid loopholes as possible. at this stage in my life, as a non-woman capable of pregnancy, i don’t really CARE anymore if you talk casually about pregnancy as something that happens to women. but i DO care if the medical system writes out some guidelines that, in only acknowledging pregnant women as a possibility, open me up to the possibility of being denied care by transphobes who can claim they’re just following the rules.

it’s for reasons like this that some people don’t get their gender markers changed, but that in itself creates dangerous situations when their marker doesn’t match their presented gender - I’ve heard horror stories of people getting arrested after being pulled over by a cop who thought they were lying about their identity.