Fun fact one time my cat pissed somewhere totally inappropriate and my dumb ass thought it would be a great idea to pour bleach on it to make sure he never peed there again. I gassed myself out of my own home

Well fuck.

Remember kids! Don't clean up urine or urine byproducts with bleach or bleach derivatives.

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”

I searched and searched for the post this graphic was from, and the OP deactivated, but I kept the graphic, because my BFF does the same thing, uses her imagination to come up with the worst pain she can imagine and pegs her “10″ there, and so is like, well, I’m conscious, so this must be a 5, and then the doctors don’t take her seriously. (And she then does things like driving herself to the hospital while in the process of giving birth. Probably should have called an ambulance for that one!)

So I found this and sent it to her. Because this is what they want to know: how badly is this pain affecting you? Not on a scale of “nothing” to “how I’d imagine it’d feel if bears were eating my still-living guts while I was on fire”. 

I hate reposting stuff, but I’ll never find that post again and OP is deactivated, so, here’s a repost. I can delete this later, i just wanted to get it to you and I can’t embed images in a chat or an ask. 

This is possibly why it took several weeks to diagnose my fractured spine.

Pain Scale transcription:

10 - I am in bed and I can’t move due to my pain. I need someone to take me to the emergency room because of my pain.

9 - My pain is all that I can think about. I can barely move or talk because of my pain.

8 - My pain is so severe that it is difficult to think of anything else. Talking and listening are difficult.

7 - I am in pain all the time. It keeps me from doing most activities.

6 - I think about my pain all of the time. I give up many activities because of my pain.

5 - I think about my pain most of the time. I cannot do some of the activities I need to do each day because of the pain.

4 - I am constantly aware of my pain but can continue most activities.

3 - My pain bothers me but I can ignore it most of the time.

2 - I have a low level of pain. I am aware of my pain only when I pay attention to it.

1 - My pain is hardly noticeable.

0 - I have no pain.

It’s also really important to get this kind of scale to people who have chronic pain, because chronic pain drastically lowers your perception of how “bad” any kind of pain actually is, and yet something like this pain scale is extremely user friendly. 

For example, if someone asked me how much pain I’m in at any given time, I’d say hardly any, and yet I’m apparently at a chronic 2.5, and it only goes up from there depending on the day. 

There’s also a similarly useful “Fatigue Scale”

I haven’t been below a 5 on this scale for 4 years 

Here’s the fatigue scale

That exact pain scale is what got me to finally talk to my doctor about what we now suspect is endometriosis (the diagnostic process requires surgery, so as long as birth control keeps working we’re not going to pursue a formal diagnosis.)

I was rating my menstrual cramps around a 3-5 for exactly the reason op describes. “It could be worse.” After finding this scale, I realized my pain was hitting a 7 nearly every month. It’s been as high as a 9 on several occasions.

(For reference, now that I’m on birth control, my cramps are sitting comfortably in the 2-3 range. So it’s not, as I told myself for several years while not seeking help, that I can’t handle a normal amount of pain. I just chronically understate it because I always tried to compare my pain to hypothetical worst case scenarios.)

how to react to 2 different types of celtic cross that you might see tattooed on someones arm

Small tip to help some of your blind friends: do not put 10,000 emojis in the middle of a text or a post if you continue to put text after the emojis because I will tell you that I will Straight give up if I have to listen to “face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy,” 23 times just to hear the rest of your text or post.

Oh my god, that’s what screen readers say when they read out emojis?? I didn’t realize.. I will change how I write my posts now… My bad…

This is good to know. Pretend there are twenty three light bulb emojis indicating sudden understanding following this text.

So the clap hands emoji post would be extra annoying since you can’t just speed read it, damn!

YES. That is one of my least favorite emojis because it’s LONG. It also says skin tone on some, and while that’s AWESOME, if you put 30 prayer hands, I have to hear “hands clasped in celebration with medium dark skin tone” 30 times in full. And even if I use a braille display, it still writes it out in full because there’s no real way to represent them any other way yet, so until someone invents a Braille display with like 10 lines that isn’t astronomically expensive, there’s no easy way to skip over them.

Now, at least with some screen readers, punctuation is a little different and if there are multiple of the same thing it’ll say like “17 exclamation points” instead of saying them all individually, and I wish that update would be made to screen readers to speak emojis in multiples that way… That would be a good solution.

Is it okay to use emojis sparingly? I don’t ever use a million like that, the most I’d put in a row is probably two different emojis, lol. But I do feel the need to use either emojis or ASCII faces in order to get emotion across in my writing. Which is better for you, a traditional ASCII face like :-) or a newfangled emoji like ☺️? Can your screen reader “translate” things like :-) into “smiling face” or do you just hear “colon dash right parentheses”?

Oh yeah, of course! If you only use one or two in a row that’s totally fine! Don’t feel like you have to just stop using them. They are fun and lots of people like them.

As for emoji versus traditional typed out faces, it doesn’t really matter. It can’t translate most of those faces except for a general smiley face, but I know what the symbols put together mean, though this may be difficult for somebody who is not very well versed in print reading. Most blind kids get taught to recognize both though.

There’s so much good info on this post! I didn’t know any of this. Thanks for making it!!

SMALL TALK TIP FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SMALL TALK: Ask people if they have any pets. This is light and impersonal enough to offend no one. People who have pets are usually pretty excited to talk about them and show off pictures, so there’s a good chance that you will be looking at kitties and doggos. People who don’t have pets will usually talk about the pets they wish they had, or have had in the past. People who neither have nor want pets are pretty rare.

It’s a neutral topic to talk about but be prepared for the weirdest shit. I once spent an hour listening to a financial manager who kept tropical velvet earthworms

Ice gets bloodstains out. Intended as a period PSA but I don't know your life.

Queen Rania: Let’s Drop The First ‘I’ In ISIS. There’s Nothing Islamic About Them

I think the West is the only place calling them ISIS; the Middle East and elsewhere calls them Daesh. Here’s the thing: Daesh hate being called Daesh. Daesh wants to be called the Islamic State because Daesh thinks it gives them legitimacy and validity. Plus, Daesh is very insulting to them, so I think we should call Daesh Daesh as a fuck you to Daesh.

What does Daesh mean?

Technically, Daesh is an acronym for their full name in Arabic (al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham), but it also sounds very similar to Arabic words meaning “one who crushes things underfoot” and “one who sows discord” (“daes” and “dahes”, respectively) so that’s why Arabs like to call them that.

Daesh it is!

Daesh it shall be.

Thanks. I will start to use this now.

So I took a moment to test the  block user update with a friend and this is what I learned:

With the help of baneoftoasters I got to check out this update and see what exactly it does.

So this is what the blocked users list looks like now.

I’m going to add them on here for testing purposes.

Oh hey now they’re on the list, all pixelized and blocked! Neat. Now here are our testing notes.

When a user is blocked;

This is the only indication you’ll receive about a blocked user’s message.

Even if a user is blocked:

If a user is unblocked:

There’s the message after I unblocked her. We hope this information helps!

P.S. Also people you previously blocked before this update will still be following you (if they’re following you, that is). If you unblock and reblock, it will force them to unfollow.

It is so unhelpful that I have to do this to old blocks to really block them like… I am not going through that many people.

I have over 2k people on my old block list…

WHAT 

WAHT

WAT

OMG THIS IS THE MOST EDUCATIONAL POST I’VE READ IN MY WHOLE LIFE WHAT THE FUCK