#seid

@kamuch-kommando and I talked about seid and highdes interaction.

Seid would give highdes headpats if he sees him with his hair down. Highdes won't mind as long as seid is fire resistant.

Hades : can I return the headpats ?

Seid : no but you can hug me if you want.

Hades puts out his cigarette to hug Seid.

...

1min later hades is snoring

Seid smiles and pats him some more before taking him to bed so he can rest well

( Seid looks like my kronos lowkey highkey )

So when seid has golden eyes, highdes just remembers his father when he was actually a dad. (His hair glows golden when he thinks fondly of his dad)

Cooking modern au poseidonverse with @kamuch-kommando.

A little work sketches

Mustachioed teenager Poseidon and Zuzu.

Exercise. This includes yoga, pilates, aquatherapy, and other "gentle" exercises. If it works against gravity or another resistance, it's not good for treating PEM w/ CF. The deconditioning theory was debunked years ago, so don't bring that shit here.

B-12. It's important to get tested for a B-12 deficiency as the symptoms can be similar to PEM w/ CF, but once it's ruled out added B-12 can have side effects. The main and most studied one is insomnia, but anecdotal reports (including my own) also often mention racing heart rate and jitters. Since these side effects use up energy, it's better for people with PEM w/ CF to err on the side of caution and avoid excess B-12 intake. Also it's pretty much the first thing anyone suggests so unless someone is newly ill they've likely already tried it and are sick of hearing about it.

Caffeine and other stimulants. While these can make you feel energized temporarily, it doesn't actually increase the amount of energy in your body. Assuming we're running on the theory of PEM w/ CF being a deficiency of ATP caused by mitochondrial issues, fatigue isn't a state of mind. It's our bodies telling us we're running out of fuel to keep them going. Also many of us have a co-morbid tachycardia condition and a flair up of that condition can cause a flair up of fatigue.

Medication and other treatments designed for mental illnesses. While having a chronic illness can cause mental illness, especially if you live in an ableist country with failed disability aid services, mental illness does not cause PEM w/ CF. Treatment for mental illness won't actually treat the symptoms of PEM w/ CF.

Alternative medicine. Many alternative medicine treatments are actively dangerous and the idea that there's "no harm in trying" because "it's natural anyway" is false. Stop recommending ozone therapy (potentially deadly and not useful in concentrations not strong enough to kill you), stop recommended chiropractors (can result in a stroke), stop recommending essential oils (no approved medical use beyond basic relaxation and concentrated nature can make them dangerous), you get the picture. Alternative medicine preys on desperate suffering people to sell them ineffective, potentially dangerous "treatments", don't do their advertising for them.

Or post the first chapter of a long crossover

Actually give my main character a personality so I know what drives their story

As a disabled person who is not a fitness instructor, it’s hard for me to actually blog about tips on exercising - a lot of it just isn’t designed for me. Another thing is that unless the person describing the routine to me has also dealt with CFS, I need to take their advice with a grain of salt and also wildly dial down the intensity - intense workouts are not safe for people with CFS/ME/SEID, and this means for people with Long COVID or Long Lyme or anything like that too. Exertion of that kind can cause crashes that last several days, weeks, or months at worst. If you have any form of chronic illness, I heavily recommend that you take whatever workout you’re doing and dial down the intensity a lot - only doing a couple of reps at a time, etc. Your workout should feel like it’s too easy. I’m serious.

There is, as far as I can tell, only really one person in the topmost Youtube search results potentially worth listening to in regards to CFS/ME and fitness - a lot of the rest of it seemed like it was overly spiritualistic or based on unclear science. (There were even claims that psychology or retraining your brain could somehow fix CFS... Youtube, do better! It’s a physical post-viral condition!!!)

Raelan Agle is self-described as someone who has recovered from CFS and is the primary person I could find making any videos in regards to exercise with CFS/ME/SEID. She also just talks about CFS and her personal journey with recovering from/minimizing symptoms from it in general. I’m personally going to be looking into her videos more in the future and seeing what I can take from them for my own life. However, a word of caution - she seems to have bought into things like juice cleansing/clean eating, and while if that helps her, that’s wonderful, I worry about the safety of recommending practices like that to others. That type of “wellness” industry thing contributes to a lot of bad, like eating disorders and even cults. So be careful.

I’m a wheelchair user, so wheelchair exercise or seated exercise (I do have control of my legs, I can technically ambulate on my tip toes) is critical to me. Luckily that’s not too hard to find. Much easier than good tangible advice for people with postviral illness, anyway. A little bit of searching on Youtube before I started this blog, and I found Paul Eugene’s channel.

He does a number of videos designed for seated exercise, low impact exercise, and other forms of exercise for older or disabled people in a variety of settings for a variety of purposes. He’s not a wheelchair user himself, and he does advertise some of the exercise as ‘fat burning’, but the commitment to accessible workout information is appreciated and very helpful. Some of the videos are set to gospel music but most aren’t.