(((I Will Outlive)))

btw body horror is stuff that doesnt naturally occur and is used to scare ppl, like extra eyes, animal parts on a human, a mouth opening in the stomach, not. disabled people’s bodies lmao.

This post was a plea to stop treating visibly disabled people as monstrous because of the differences their disabilities have caused. It was not an invitation for people to argue what is and is not body horror. It was a call out for dehumanization, not the horror genre.

bringing this back around for IFEW (international face equality week)!! take this time to educate yourself on disfigurement and similar things, and take the steps necessary to become a more accepting and understanding person!! disfigurement and disability is not something to be afraid of!!

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

no actually me and everyone else who’s ever watched crimson peak were brainwashed by guillermo del toro into believing that incest and violence are cool and awesome. sorry

Horrifying that this pearl-clutching over horror actually being dark is unironically becoming A Thing…

(tags via @waterandsilver, id in alt)

Natalie Haynes, from 'Stone Blind'

every time people make a character go through severe life-altering physical injuries and then decide that they’re still able-bodied and look and act completely unaffected after the fact i want to throw tomatoes at my screen

i keep thinking about how it feels as if we have developed ourselves an obsession with "healing" these days – and a friend said something that really stuck in my head – "if you're part of a community where you're always trying to heal, then that means that you always need to be sick". like i think that we're all taking this ideal of healing too far saying that everybody needs therapy all the time and resetting your gut biome or surrounding yourself with positive energy or whatever it is that you can come up with. you're always focusing on something that is "wrong" and that needs to be eliminated, after which everything will be okay again. it all sounds like just another way of maintaining an illusion of control over your life and i don't think it's doing us any good

I also heavily resent the ever-present implication in mainstream media that at all touches on trauma that we cannot have any sympathy for Bad Victims. That it's evil to write a sympathetic Bad Victim. Hell, that it's bad to portray one at all at times. Writing a victim of trauma who's an addict or self-destructive is already an edge case-- writing trauma survivors who end up actually hurting someone else, being chronically "treatment"-resistant or having inconvenient ptsd, perpetuate the cycle, or are just kind of a total dick is considered an evil move. Instead of like. An actually complex and interesting artistic choice.

Idk. It pisses me off a lot how often Bad Victims[TM] are brushed under the rug and if you dare to speak of them/make art of them, let alone SYMPATHIZE with them you're an irredeemable monster. And that's just fictional characters. Don't even get me started on the way people treat actual people who have ptsd in a way that's at all inconvenient and problematic in their opinion.

I think a lot about how, if the glorious violent revolution happens, every kid with significant medical needs in a hospital where power gets cut will die.

You can decide you're willing to sacrifice your own life, but you don't get to tell everybody else on the planet that they're acceptable collateral damage.

This gets notes every time it drifts into leftist circles. But here’s the thing: I am a doctor. I have cared for children in hospitals. Vast, intricate supply chains that rely on functioning world governments with trade agreements are necessary to the provision of modern medical care. There is no way to work it so those kids can win if electricity, water, food, or medical supplies like sterile intravenous fluid bags or EKG stickers get interrupted. Forget even permanent disruption, a temporary disruption of the sterile tubing necessary for surgery would mean a lot of kids die of appendicitis. The generators we have as back-up are meant to last minutes, not weeks. And you can say “under my new system, the total violence done would ultimately be less than the violence done by the state,” but it’s easier to say that about a hypothetical kid than one lying on a gurney in front of you. When you’ve been responsible for a life—when you’ve lost a patient, when you’ve been through a Code Blue for a one-year-old—there is nothing you would not do in order to protect that life. I think all the time about what Devil’s bargains I would make for various situations; it’s one of the fucked up things I do. I can tell you that I would kill anyone who tried to cut power to my hospital, or I would die trying. There is no alternative.

The world is too interconnected to allow one part of it to go down. When Puerto Rico got slammed by hurricanes and the US did fuck all about it, we had a nationwide shortage of bagged IV fluids. I was working in hospitals through that. Things we normally do as part of routine medical care, like giving the puking kid with the migraine IV Zofran and Reglan, got a whole lot harder. I was working inpatient during COVID, when there were sudden shortages of pain and anxiety medications we relied on, like opioids and benzodiazepines. There was a nationwide shortage of lidocaine last year and we had to save it for biopsies of suspect cancers. Surgery requires not only a surgeon but an entire team of people and complex equipment to safely sterilize tools, most of which are now based around laparoscopic surgery that requires camera tools instead of the old-school open surgeries. You could not even say “but the surgeons can still operate” because no. They can’t. Not safely. Not with ether instead of succinate and fentanyl. I could deliver your baby after the apocalypse, but who’s staffing the blood banks when you have a post-partum hemorrhage and I don’t have three trained nurses with a kit of specialty meds to slow the bleeding? I still remember the time during the worst of COVID when I couldn’t fly a patient from our rural hospital to an urban hospital that could have done the operation he needed, because the hospitals were completely full. I had to buy time with heavy-duty IV antibiotics (the one and only time I’ve been allowed to use a -penem) while he lay there in agony for 12 hours until a bed came open and we could transfer him. If we couldn’t treat the pain and keep the infection from killing him long enough to operate, he would have died then and there, in front of us, while we stood there helplessly.

So how many kids are you OK with watching die from a ruptured appendix? That’s what comes in to the ED at two in the morning and within half an hour if you’re lucky has an ultrasound proving the diagnosis and a surgeon getting scrubbed in. If there isn’t ultrasound, ultrasound techs, pain medication, anesthesiologists, ventilation machine for when you’re under, light-up scopes with blades to allow for intubation bc then there’s direct visualization of the vocal cords, paralytic medications to keep you still, medications to keep you asleep, monitoring machines that read your blood pressure ans CO2 levels and pulse oximetry while you’re under, computer scheduling for OR time, post-op recovery nurses, gurneys, autoclaves, specialized small metal tools for the surgery—if there are interruptions in training or production of any of these and a whole lot more, anyone could die of a surgical problem, but it hurts worse when it’s a kid. Watch breast cancer come back into vogue, as we lose mammograms. You ever treated a woman who’s ignored breast cancer so long it’s now a fungating mass? Go Google what that looks like. Two cases have walked into my office and they are both dead now. One was schizophrenic. Without modern global supply chains, we don’t have lorazepam or morphine for humane death, let alone psych meds. How many people would deteriorate? Get specific. Which friends would you be willing to watch die? Which of their kids are expendable?

What kind of violent revolution are you planning where you are able to look a patient in the eye and tell them, “Your death is necessary to my vision,” and not understand that you are the villain?

You get to decide whether you want to end your own life for this glorious future. You do not get to decide to end my life or my patients’ lives or anyone else’s. You are not God and you do not get to make plans as if you are, as if you have the One Correct Vision and the rest of us just need to fall in line and follow the prophet. Fuck you. You think the Black kid whose treatment team I was on while he writhed in pain on a hospital bed because he had a kidney transplant and it was rejecting wouldn’t tell you to go fuck yourself about your violent revolution? Our society is no longer able to tolerate large-scale disruptions. We have built too much and we would lose too much. We are too big to fail, and although it’s easy to see that as a bad thing, what I keep seeing, over and over, is that transplant team. How the nephrologist and the resident and the nurses and techs and pharmacists and therapists were working together to keep that kid alive. The scientists who did the research, relying on impossibly complex systems that have taken hundreds of years to build. Collaboration is how we survive.

We cannot allow the vulnerable to die and call that progress. We cannot turn the lights out on any hospitals, because the people in the ICU on ventilators will stop breathing and die within minutes. Would you want that to happen if it’s your mother in that ICU? Would you tell your mother the answer to that? What if it was your child? What about your favorite sibling? How many of other people’s families are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of something that stands a virtually 100% chance of going up in flames immediately, when we look at prior attempts at creating a new government out of war and chaos? The massive impacts of even “small” shortages on patients is not theoretical and has killed patients since I’ve been an attending, starting three years ago.

You do not own the right to anyone else’s life.

And if you think you want a violent revolution, see how you do with your next toothache without pain meds, lidocaine, dental expertise, and composite that lets you keep the tooth and keep chewing. How long would you have to suffer to crack?

(via @hollowedskin)

(link to original (and TTS-friendly) post)

Boy, I sure do love when random people with no apparent humanities training condescendingly tell me I’m misunderstanding the very basics of a legal-philosophical concept I teach and publish on.

I’m getting real tired of the ableds in my immediate circle proclaiming that the lockdown measures are a form of debilitating inhuman torture and makes life not worth living.

And yeah, this sucks. All of this sucks and is vastly damaging to people’s physical and mental health. We’re enduring a global trauma, the ramifications of which will likely be felt for decades.

But when it was just my daily life being housebound due to my disabilities, it was a-okay for you to abandon me to this life while using phrases like, “must be nice” and “sounds rough,” all said smilingly under the sneering veneer of implied laziness and choice.

So which is it? A fate worse than death you’d never willing choose, or a cake walk? Which is it? *flips table*

And btw, this is not to invalidate anyone who is struggling with the isolation of lockdown. Because this shit is hard. This is so, so hard and I wish none of us were going through this.

But I also need those people to realize that this is the reality of many of us living with disabilities and chronic conditions. We endure this level of isolation constantly. Sometimes for years and years, if not our whole lives. And it is often not our choice. But it can be the choice of those around us.

And I get it, it sucks when your friend is too ill to go anywhere and you just want to do fun shit. But it sucks worse for them. And you can choose. You can choose to be inclusive and do things they are capable of being a part of. Or you can choose to leave them behind and make assumptions that they’re just being lazy or a bad friend because on some level you can’t help but feel if they really wanted to do something, they’d do it.

All I’m asking for, begging really, is for a little mindfulness. Please stop comparing this life to a fate worse to death. Or if you really must make that comparison, ask yourself why you were okay with some of the most vulnerable people in society being left to endure it on their own. And why it took you a global pandemic to realize the inhumanity of it.

I truly do hope thing get better soon, I really, really do. But please don’t forget about us the moment you can safely go outside. Please don’t take away the newfound accessibilities that have been put into place that we were always told was impossible. Please fight for and with us. We’re so god damn tired.

— Elizabeth Barnes, “Confessions of a Bitter Cripple,” Philosop-her (x)

[ID: Tweet by Charlie @NoPowerChords “being disabled right now is a lot like being locked in a room while all your friends are playing right outside your window, except they’re all playing with knives & the next part of the game is them coming inside & seeing how close they can throw them at you without hitting you” “i mean this tweet with full fucking offense because i’m exhausted and tired and angry at the world” Nov 27, 2021.]

Y'know, I started to type out a massive post about how sad and frustrating it is that every USAmerican southern character in anything is presented as ignorant and uneducated and "dumb" and even hateful, how there are people here with degrees and careers and incredibly complex skills that took years to develop and learn, and then I realized, fuck that-- yeah, there are a lot of people with no or little education down here. We're fucking poor. A lot of us just can't afford college. A lot of us have to get jobs instead to support our families. Some people dropped out of high school to do that. And you know what? They're still human beings who deserve to be represented as whole, real, functional people and not flat archetypes.

Like yeah, I could talk about all the talented and smart people who came from down here, but the "simple," the disabled, the uneducated down here don't deserve the way the media depicts them, either! Because the bulk of them are good people who just got dealt a bad hand because we are so pathetically poor down here. And yeah, that includes the addicts. We have a lot of addicts down here. And that isn't our fault, either. when you're dealt the worst possible hand and no one wants to help you, everyone regards you as being trash, you're gonna cope however you can.

Everyone wants to write us off and present us in media as pretty much just. nothing people, but there are many, many people here of all walks of life who deserve respect and who need help that they aren't getting BECAUSE nobody shows us any fucking respect, and the way the media depicts us consistently does constant, DEEP damage to the way the rest of the country views us. It isn't fucking fair and it isn't fucking okay.

I'm tired of my family's accent being used as shorthand for "this character is a dumb, useless hick, and nothing more." Yeah, we got a lot of dumb, useless hicks, and I love them to death and they have hobbies and families and histories and don't deserve the way writers fucking treat them as throwaway gags or convenient villains.

"- I have a lot of problems with Biden. He is clearly the better of the two options, which I recognize is a very low bar. Being better than Trump cannot be the standard, because Donald Trump is the absence of a standard.

"But the truth is, even if Trump looses, that won't be the end of this. The people who cooked up Project 2025 will just move onto Project 2029 instead, because for them, this is so much more than just one election, or indeed, one candidate. Project 2025 is born from impulse as old as America. It's an impulse that says one class of Americans is entitled to lead, and the rest of us are lucky to be allowed to serve- that thinks there should be a limited government when it comes to rules they have to live by, but also a unitary executive to keep the rest of us in line. These are old, old ideas that have been shouted from podiums-... but have now been placed into a new handbook for an only too willing president to use on day one.

"And in a perfect world, I would love if we had an opposing party better able to articulate a strong defense of our country's ideals and that also consistently lived up to them. People are entitled to hope for more from the next four years than someone just not being Trump (and for at least two supreme court justices to die)-...

"And for anyone tempted to think, 'Well, we survived Trump's first term,' first, not everyone did, and it should hopefully be very clear by now a second Trump term really does promise to be far, far worse, because if Trump's first term was defined by chaos, his second could be defined by ruthless efficiency. That should be troubling to absolutely everyone because Project 2025 is a movement who's members joke about wanting a white homeland and insist women have to have more babies to uphold western society.-

"We need to be better than this."

-John Oliver, June 19th of 2024

if you are disturbed or disgusted by disabled peoples' bodies, or uncomfortable with disabilities, that's something that you personally need to work on and unlearn.

i understand sometimes someone's initial reaction can be alarm, especially if empathizing and imagining how it might feel. but the reality is people with disabilities exist and if their existence in proximity to you is uncomfortable? the problem lies with you.

i'm not going to condemn you to being an irredeemable or "awful" person. both because i believe everyone can grow and change, but also because it's just not my business or interest to do so. but that reaction, that attitude, is an issue. it is ableist and it is harmful to disabled people.

people with disabilities deserve to exist. and they deserve to exist in proximity to anyone without being treated as inconvenient, disturbing, or alarming. that goes for people with visible disabilities, mental illness, mental disabilities, and so on. it applies to all people, honestly.

if you're alarmed that someone with schizophrenia is possibly experiencing an episode near you, that's something to examine. if you're disturbed seeing someone with an amputated limb or significant scarring, that's something to examine. if you're uncomfortable that people with disabilities are existing in proximity to you or within your line of sight, and want them to be out of sight, away from you, or tagged so you can avoid them, you need to reflect on that.

ableism is socialized and embedded in social structures and institutions, but that isn't an excuse to not put in effort to unlearn those ideologies, and to challenge and redirect those narratives. treat people with disabilities with dignity, respect, and compassion. disabled people are people. people with disabilities should not be censored or pushed into the margins for the comfort of some.