Pomegranate Seeds

Extremely fucking stupid bc genuinely who cares. Walking sticks are literally for anyone. They help you when you walk around. Perfectly healthy and abled bodied people use them while hiking because they just work.

And what if it was just a fashion thing? It used to be trendy. It gives your outfit a different vibe. Experimenting with fashion is fun, there's literally zero things wrong with using a cane because you like the way it looks or how it makes you feel.

Every single person choosing to use a mobility aid in public normalises their use, and makes it less likely for me to get harassed out there. It just becomes a regular thing you see while out in public. And that's the exact thing ableist TERFs like Stock are actually against - Not even mentioning the absolutely obvious misogyny here.

@plasticfangtastic The potential physical harm of misusing mobility aids is WILDLY exaggerated to pressure people into not using them.

Hugh Laurie, as you said, never used it properly (or frankly in a way that would feel natural to most cane users imo), and he did so for many hours of filming over many years. There should have been a safety assesment, risk mitigation, a physical therapy consultant, etc. Because that was a professional environment and no one's job should injure them, ideally.

However in actual reality, most people who find mobility aids more damaging than helpful will simply stop using them way before any permanent damage is done.

Potential, hypothetical damage is not more important than the actual real damage many people are doing to their bodies right now, because they don't feel they can use a mobility aid without facing ridiculous scrutiny and judgement.

I actually did get injured because of mobility aid use. I was bedbound for several years, so when I got my rollator, I was desperate to go out to the park across our street and not be trapped at home, and I overdid it. I was out using it for too long, my posture and grip wasn't ideal, and I wasn't used to engaging those specific muscles - I ended up with costochondritis. Very scary because intense chest pain is terrifying when you don't know what's happening. It sucked, but I got through it, adjusted my rollator use slightly, and it is still an amazing mobility aid that greatly improves and enriches my life years later.

Avoiding that potential episode would not be worth it at all, if that meant not using it in the first place. I would be damaging my body in a different way every time I have to drag myself to a doctor's appointment, instead of supported and protected by my mobility aid, once the issues were sorted out.

For many disabled and chronically ill people, our reality is simply that we don't get to fully avoid negative consequences no matter what we do. A cane might put strain on your shoulder and make it hurt, but not using it would make your lower back hurt worse instead. For many of us, it's always choosing the best possibility out of a bad bunch.

Someone who doesn't need a mobility aid will simply stop using it eventually, because unless there's tangible benefits to your life, it is fucking annoying. Sometimes it's because there's another mobility aid which would fit the particular circumstances better, but if you have no issues not using one, you just won't. There are no perfectly physically healthy people fucking up their bodies through mobility aid usage. It's genuinely just a right wing boogieman.

We can reduce injuries due to mobility aid usage by making doctors and physical therapists both more accessible and more accepting of a patient's choice to use one. By destigmatising their use, promoting safety tips, and having information more widespread and freely available. Not by trying to make the stigma worse and making up this whole 'social contagion' bullshit, while doubling down on medical misogyny.

You can genuinely just read up on how to size a mobility aid correctly for your body, and you'll be fine. The people working at mobility aid stores can help you with it. Look up "how to properly use X" and read content written by other mobility aid users.

Hugh Laurie is the Spiders George of being hurt by improper mobility aid use. He is an outlier and should not have been counted.

Extremely fucking stupid bc genuinely who cares. Walking sticks are literally for anyone. They help you when you walk around. Perfectly healthy and abled bodied people use them while hiking because they just work.

And what if it was just a fashion thing? It used to be trendy. It gives your outfit a different vibe. Experimenting with fashion is fun, there's literally zero things wrong with using a cane because you like the way it looks or how it makes you feel.

Every single person choosing to use a mobility aid in public normalises their use, and makes it less likely for me to get harassed out there. It just becomes a regular thing you see while out in public. And that's the exact thing ableist TERFs like Stock are actually against - Not even mentioning the absolutely obvious misogyny here.

He went on a mini-rant a while ago that was basically thanking me for using one because know what happens when someone is 80% fine to walk without a cane?

Falls. Major fall injuries including head injuries and TBI. Minor injuries leading to avoidance of walking and the resulting deconditioning leading to that 80% becoming 60%, then continuing to decline.

Whatever helps people move and reduces their risk of injury is amazing.

As you said, the stigma against mobility aids used to be much stronger, and many older people straight up refuse to use them. They are the main demographic that are the expected users, the 'understandable' use case, that most people agree makes sense. Their doctors are often begging them to use them. And yet the stigma is so great, and has such power, that people with very reduced mobility would rather continue to struggle and push through without them until they have a fall that greatly injures them. It's so unnecessary and so heartbreaking.

These scenarios may include:

Moving around folks who are already spooked or easily-startled

Approaching people who you absolutely do not want to alarm, such as people with poor spatial awareness, people experiencing paranoia or a panic attack, folks who are very focused on a different thing, people handling dangerous chemicals or machinery

When you very urgently need to get somewhere and there are people in your way

Any other time when you require others to be aware of your presence and location

Sincerely,

Oh cool so the CDC is just doing a media blitz to lie the groundwork for weed becoming illegal again in many places huh okay

I have never had these problems, as a chronic cannabis user, I literally ingested mould that was growing in my guts…..

But the doctors ALL blamed it on my cannabis use.

I got pamphlets and guides on how to curb my 'addiction', and they stressed real hard it doesn't matter if I used it for medical reasons, if I wanted it at all when I wasn't on it, it must mean I am addicted and need to stop.

I am 100% certain that my INGESTING MOULD issue was written down as "Cannabis Emesis Syndrome" and would get wrapped up in the data to suggest that emergency room visits among cannabis users for cannabis use is becoming higher.

Like... it's fucking biased reporting that is going to fuck a lot of us over.

Despite having an active infection, not having even used cannabis in a month or two because I was actively recovering from a surgery, I was told that it was likely CES (even though all the pamphlets they gave me said CES would ease if you didn't use again "for a few days to a week"). And my only advice when I was discharged (after staying the night, being flooded with antibiotics and hydrated via salin drip), was to cut out the cannabis. I ingested a fuck ton of mould spores that made me sick, but because I also am a chronic cannabis user because of my debilitating nerve pain and PTSD, it will have been listed in the records as CES because that is what the doctors decided to focus on. Because it's the big new scary thing.

Fuck, the surgery I was talking about before that I was recovering from was gallbladder removal - and before that my own doctor tried to blame CES for what was in fact a very inflamed gallbladder. Once I got over the rough recovery from that, the symptoms my doctor wanted to associate with CES *went away* because it wasn't CES it was an actively inflamed gallbladder that was causing the problems.

Like, people talk about fad health trends in pop culture readily enough but I think we should also turn this focus towards doctors themselves because holy shit this was a fringe theory that everyone latched on to and started reporting cases of - regardless of whether or not they fit the description.

There also aren't traditional addiction pathways for cannabis in our brains, just habitual feedback-loop ones. Cannabis can be misused, same as any substance, but it's very safe and not at all causing a plague of illnesses. Using cannabis regularly, in a normal manner, is not unsafe and only needs to be charted by a doctor for the safety of specific medications or procedures. It's supposed to be treated the same way as disclosing you drink or smoke tobacco.

They very much are trying to claim a rise in cannabis related emergency room visits here as well.

I don't remember the % they quoted on the pamphlets I was given but it was similar to the CDC's number here.

And I'm not saying CES doesn't exist - though I was flippant about it as I didn't realize that post would get as much traction as it did - and frankly I would like more studies on the long term effects of cannabis for chronic users because that data would be really helpful to be able to use this in a safe manner! Hell, I would join such a study if I could.

And I will even concede that, perhaps, an inflamed gallbladder could be partially caused by cannabis consumption, and perhaps these things are related. Maybe cannabis affects the gallbladder and what we are calling CES, is actually the results of an inflamed gallbladder partly because of cannabis use. I don't think we know enough about how these things affect each other to rule it out entirely. So I will concede that it could be related! But when I ingested mould after a surgery touching my gastro system and had bad complications because of it... and they call it CES... I don't have a lot of faith the uptick in "cannabis related" incidents isn't just because it is an easy correlation to point to.

What I see happening on the ground level as a patient, is that doctors are extremely quick to cry it must be CES even despite other relevant factors and that isn't very reassuring.

Spin the wheel to find out your weakness!

coco has trouble drawing spells until tartah makes her a wand that's molded to her specific way of holding pens, because she grew up in her mother's fabric shop and was more used to holding a stone, so the grip of her wand is wide and flat

tartah has silverwash and can't tell any colours apart, so no one expects him to be able to become a witch and no one wants to take him on as an apprentice - never mind the fact that he doesn't need to be able to differentiate colours to, at the very least, do basic spells. even knowing those basic spells would significantly improve his quality of life

euini can't draw properly when people are watching him, and it takes another child to tell him that he doesn't have to do everything the way his master taught him, and that if he can't cast when he's around other people, he just needs to find a way to be alone