World of Pure Imagination

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

He's lived long enough that three of his grandkids have been born with the same condition, and he's been there to assist with the recovery after the laparoscopic version of the same surgery he had.

He has a scar from collarbone to waist that's as thick as my finger--thicker, in some places. My nieces and nephews have scars so tiny you could mistake them for being from a particularly bad cat scratch. And their recovery was measured in weeks, instead of months.

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.

pretty sure this is exactly how lessons at qifrey's atelier go

Magic air fryer

This is why magic is a trade secret

Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.

(cw: rape, sexual assault, CSA, incest, domestic abuse, religious abuse, etc.)

The article, as you might have gathered from that list of content warnings, is about the widespread sexual and physical abuse in Amish communities and the way that their patriarchal and insular practices make that abuse almost impossible to prosecute.

I read that article when it came out, and that's why I went to a screening of McClure's new documentary, Keep Quiet and Forgive, at the Philadelphia Film Festival last month. We were also lucky enough to have a Q&A with Sarah McClure and it was really eye-opening.

(For those who want to watch it, I believe she said the doc will air on PBS next year.)

One thing I was really struck by when watching the documentary was the way that almost all of these women (and yes, a few men who'd been sexually abused by other men) had left the community. It makes sense; would someone still in the community ever talk to an investigative journalist? It's not likely.

Almost all of them had lost their entire support system when they'd spoken out about their abuse. Their families and friends shunned them. They got hate mail regularly from their former neighbors. Whenever they went to court dates, they had to face not only their abusers but their entire former community, who would turn up to support the accused in court.

The few who were still in the community were either going to meetings secretly or were largely being shunned. One of them, a woman who still identified as Amish but whose entirely community had turned on her when she'd testified against her wildly abusive husband, ended up leaving the community entirely by the end of the documentary. She looked so much happier.

Where I'm going with this, though, is that these people often lose their friends, family, and community when they leave. So they've started creating community of their own. The documentary showed a lot of meetings between former Amish women who would band together to support other Amish women through the process of leaving and testifying against their abusers. There were group therapy sessions where women would finally get to talk about what had been done to them. Conferences where they discussed future steps. Meetings with activists to create change. Podcasts by victims of abuse who wanted to reach out to others like them.

Groups like The Amish Rescue Mission are working to provide support to victims of abuse in Amish Country, including providing Pennsylvania Dutch interpretation services when necessary. There are lots of small survivor support groups on Facebook, too.

I don't generally add to posts, but I did want to spread this information, reporting, and list of resources to anyone who might benefit from them. I am no expert, but I wanted to link to some people who are.