It's raining outside

I am an ER nurse and this is the best description of this event that I have ever heard. 

 FEMALE HEART ATTACKS 

 I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is description is so incredibly visceral that I feel like I have an entire new understanding of what it feels like to be living the symptoms on the inside. Women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have… you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor the we see in movies. Here is the story of one woman’s experience with a heart attack: 

 "I had a heart attack at about 10:30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might have brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up. A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation–the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m. 

After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasms), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR). This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening – we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I’m having a heart attack! I lowered the foot rest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else… but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment. 

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics… I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to un-bolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in. I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the radiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stints to hold open my right coronary artery. 

I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents. Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand. 

1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body, not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up… which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’ visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be! 2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an aspirin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER - you are a hazard to others on the road. Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road. Do NOT call your doctor – he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later. 3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive to tell the tale.“

1) my subconscious is better at tumblring than i am

The Shark Nebula

Finally, after several months, I have finished my flower journal (v 1.0)! It ended up being 69 pages! So here’s a couple of my favorite illustrations. To see all of the pages, you can visit my website.

A protein bar isn't the best possible source of protein in your diet, but it's better than not getting that protein. Fresh fruits would be better than orange juice, but if your choices are between having the orange juice and not getting the vitamins at all, you drink the fucking orange juice.

Cooking is Terrible: sadly, you still have to feed yourself

It's geared toward people who struggle a lot with preparing even simple meals, particularly neurodivergent or otherwise disabled people. To that end it includes a lot of suggestions along the lines of 'pick at least one food each from three of these five lists, put them on a plate, you have a meal.' (e.g. cheese slices, apple slices, lunch meat, crackers.)

(It is not geared toward people who need to follow a specific diet, to which they say, essentially, 'I assume you know what you need to replace.')

(Also the author is nonbinary, which is great, but still a side-note to how damn useful the book is)

There is no legal code for stories. There's no cop who will arrest you for making a horror story for children or a police procedural with musical numbers or a retelling of Frankenstein set on a Moon colony. Almost any concept can be redeemed by good execution and you can do anything you want with your story.

2. Reading and writing stories is a form of play, like sports. And, like sports, storytelling is often done by rules depending on the story being told. In the story of Star Trek, Vulcans can do mind-melds and Klingons cannot. If you want to write a story about Klingons doing mind-melds, you CAN argue that it's a fictional story and you can do anything you want... but it's like a football player saying hey, we're all playing this game for fun, right? Well, it's fun for me to get on an ATV and drive the football into the endzone.

Which isn't to say a game where people drive ATVs around while carrying footballs couldn't be fun--maybe a bit risky--but people who want to watch football probably wouldn't appreciate this "rule change" the same way people who watch Star Trek wouldn't appreciate Klingons doing mind-melds, or the Enterprise being able to change into a giant robot, or anything else that breaks the lore. Because "this story is set in the same universe as these other stories and the same lore is in effect for all of them" is one of the rules of Star Trek and if you don't play by that rule, you're ruining everyone's fun.

Short story: under 7,500

Novelette: between 7,500 and 17,500

Novella: between 17,500 and 40,000

Novel: over 40,000

Novels around 40k words, or less:

CS Lewis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 38k

F Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. 47k

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 46k

George Orwell. Animal Farm. 29k

John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. 28k

It just shows that a story can be told well with 30-40 thousand words….

Hey! Just a reminder! AO3 does NOT have an app. This garbage was made by theives who steal fan artist’s work and sell it back to you.

“Oh, but it’s free!” There are ads. They are making money off of this. They are stealing from the creators you love and you are hurting those same creators if you use this app or any similar app.

App acts like a browser but paywalls offline reading while reviews state it’s full of intrusive ads and lacks basic functionality such as commenting. Do not use this app. Use the ao3 website. The app uses Gen-AI content for imagery on categories and is essentially forcing people to pay if they want to read your fics offline.

By the way you don’t have to pay anything to read fics offline. You can do it for free using easily accessible resources that don’t cost anything.

You do not need to pay $1 every week, $2 every month, or even $18 a year. It can be done free! By anyone!

If you don't have a PDF reader on your phone, there are any free ones (I personally like ReadEra). Or you download it as HTML.

Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.

Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).

Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.

I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.

Cold enough to make some frozen bubbles!