Naculan Royal Court

If you are a doctor or nurse or work in the medical field at all, I do recommend that you read it, because I desperately wish there was awareness among care providers that experiences like mine even exist.

I used to have a lot of angst over "whether everyone secretly feels this way and I'm just worse at handling it," but I think fanfiction helped confirm this as not true. Even in a literary environment where exploring the feelings related to rape and bodily violation were accepted, medical stuff was not a major nexus for this anxiety.

I am working through the idea that my level of distress was not normal and not something I should have felt guilty about or felt forced to tolerate.

The medical fear (which, as I said, was mostly a fear of being sexually touched/violated without my consent) was a major contributor of my feeling of "the world being an evil place/the nature of the universe being fundamentally bad." This weighed on me relentlessly through my entire life

The medical fear also was a big part of the sense of a Bad Something in my head all the time that I was actively holding back/trying to distract myself from. I mentioned in another post that I couldn't just sit still and think to myself "I exist, and I am okay, in this moment" without the feeling of something evil and nasty immediately leaking in.

I still don't know exactly what I wish was different.

I remember when I was 10-12, I had severe panic attacks (like, a few years later I couldn't even reconstruct in my head how awful they were, the feeling of utter utter helplessness and terror) and it was usually triggered by me thinking I had some kind of symptom that would mean I would have to go to the hospital

I had persistent fears of having all sorts of illnesses and conditions to the point where I "Knew" that I had something medically wrong with me and it wasn't several years afterward for me to realize that wasn't necessarily true.

But looking back, the things I was scared of were often things that were completely treatable. It was *going to the hospital* that scared me, not the illness itself.

And I was so scared of going to the hospital that I literally could not think about it. I could not picture what would happen there or what I was afraid would happen, and the notion never visited my mind that there would be something "after" i went to the hospital. I could not imagine life after Having Gone To The Hospital, on a level that was so total it didn't even occur to me that "after" could exist.

It doesn't seem necessary for me to feel that way. I can imagine a universe where the fact that doctors exist could have been a comfort to little me, the knowledge that if I became sick, there were people who could help me to feel better.

But instead, I was trapped in this horribly isolating state where going to the doctor was the worst thing I could imagine, so if something was wrong in my body, I would just have to die.

I literally have "sexual health" blacklisted on tumblr. i can't look at Scarleteen because how they talked about medical exams when i first read their stuff triggers the absolute fuck out of me

There needs to be a sexual health resource that includes some kind of discussion of the following things:

What it means to feel safe with a health care provider. The fact that feeling safe with a health care provider is possible.

Consent exists in medical settings. No one should be touching your body without your consent or against your will. It's okay to be upset about that because it's wrong.

maybe some kind of indication that "nervousness" is fairly normal but if you feel crushing dread and guilt and disgusting horror and violent rage that is not the same emotion as "nervousness," that is in fact a different emotion

and does NOT include

writing off anxiety or apprehension about medical situations as "embarrassment" or "nervousness" that will magically Disappear as soon as you walk in the doctor's office when you realize the doctor is Literally Nice :)

any kind of mocking or belittling people's fears

any phrasing like "it sucks and everyone hates it but you have to suck it up"

any phrasing that comes off as placing "fault" upon the reader for getting cancer/illness if they don't Suck It Up

i wish there were health resources in general that had 1 milligram of sympathy and compassion in them.

From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:

you're right i should draw them more i love obitine and their regency era pining, even if I know I'll never match their no.1 shipper

This is completly false. Rabbit shut down because they had no business model, were making no money whatsoever, and went bankrupt. What Rabbit did (host and stream remote-control virtual machines) is not inherently illegal by any means.

Hyperbeam is the exact same thing and I've been using it for years for perfectly legal activities -- you can display maps for d&d games, have youtube watch parties, play tag-team neopets, whatever you like. It has full access to the internet, so could someone do illegal things? Probably. But you could also do illegal things with your normal web browser. Not my problem.

Unlike Rabbit, Hyperbeam has a side-hustle (main-hustle?) offering more advanced virtual machines to businesses and schools, so they do actually make money and should stick around longer.

Karaoke night gone wrong? (Part 2 here)

First time chucking a brick, kinda nervous haha.

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the progran was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!' I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job! We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

My remarks were received with silence, no movement, no shifting in the seats. The controllers, each and every one, knew what I meant. I was just putting their thoughts into words.

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough and Competent.' 'Tough' means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. 'Competent' means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."