Trashpool's Dumpster Fire

Imagine what the economy would look like if we had to pay for housework.

Moms work for free. It's required.

Start with diapers. How many diaper changes are in 2.5+ years of constant diaper wearing? Almost exclusively cloth diapers, mind, so that adds to the laundry we aren't counting. There was another year or so of sporadic diaper wearing while potty training was happening. Oh, and who was responsible for those teachings, do we think?

There's years of breast feeding. How would that even calculate? What's the going rate for producing entire, calorie-rich meals within your body nowadays?

Over a decade of wake-up calls and breakfasts during the school years. Plus the 3.5 years of being a full-time educator in there during the homeschool period.

Twenty plus years of being an on-call, in-house therapist for both partner and child.

Twenty plus years of being the household manager, keeping track of birthdays and appointments and events and deadlines.

There's also thousands of injections of subQ fluids in there for the multiple cats we've lost to kidney disease. And nursing two 50lb dogs through three separate knee surgeries. And just 99.9% of all pet care in general over the years, to be honest.

And so on and so forth.

In some ways, my shit was easy even. I only had one kid and have been with the same partner the entire time. Though I'm nonbinary and have multiple late-diagnosed neurodivergencies, as well as a pretty nasty anxiety disorder. But I'm also white, which again does reduce the friction I face everywhere.

Seriously. I can't even imagine how much more difficult everything would have been and would continue to be if I were not a white person. It's exhausting and not a little terrifying to contemplate, to be honest.

Point being, all of that work is completely invisible in our society. It's mostly all necessary - how long would things function if moms stopped? - but there's a violent refusal to even look at it.

And it's wild because men and women both, cis and trans alike, are so convinced that they are the only ones not believed about pain, not allowed to express certain emotions.

When disability is a connected factor, then there is even greater disbelief, backlash, lack of patience. When mental health is a factor, there is an even greater assumption of low tolerance or delusion. When race is a connected factor, then suddenly Black people are meant to have a higher pain tolerance, so they are allowed to suffer more. Self-medication is expected in some areas, and forbidden in others. Access through financial means is a barrier to care.

There's so many layers to the concept of "I'm not allowed to react to my suffering" that are all true, but every time there is someone making gendered arguments of "UNLIKE MY OPPOSITE" I have to call bullshit. Cis men and women do it to each other, they do it to trans people, trans people do it to each other, and to cis people.

Bill Nighy

Hugh Laurie

James McAvoy

John Lithgow

Katherine Parkinson

Keira Knightley

Kit Harrington

Leo Woodall

Mackenzie Crook

Mathew MacFadyen

Matt Berry

Nick Frost

Paul Whitehouse

Peter Serafinowicz

Riz Ahmed

Shirley Bassey

Simon Armitage

Simon Pegg

Stephen Fry

Stephen Mangan

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.

I do know that weight cycling (gaining and losing weight repeatedly) is definitely associated with forming gallstones, and yet doctors still feel just fine recommending diets to anyone who isn't underweight (and maybe even then!), so yeah.