@natalunasans / natalunasans.tumblr.com
hot take but i think pain should be discrete and purposeful (‘stop touching a hot stove’ and ‘stop bumping into furniture’) and then it should stop when it is no longer communicating useful and actionable information. you may disagree but i think chronic pain is bad.
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dialogue under the cut >>>>
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dialogue under the cut >>>>
Will I Know Passion Untainted By Anger Ever Again?
A short comic about being an artist creating dangerously in times of dread.
Transcript: https://blog.reimenayee.com/transcript
some angst scenes from my current good omens fic (link in replies)
later i will post some happier scenes
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dialogue and image description under the readmore:
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dialogue and image description under the readmore:
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dialogue and image description under the readmore:
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dialogue and image description under the readmore:
So just to clarify some things for the new people (hello if you’re still finding me from that facebook page or the harry potter post), I am a chronically ill person with numerous health issues. One such issue being the complete genetic fuck up that are my teeth, meaning that no matter how well I take care of my teeth, they have up until fairly recently, been rotting out of my skull.
This was in part due to being (unknowingly) allergic to the metal fillings that were put in place as a teenager causing chronic inflammation, which in turn caused my gums to try and push my teeth out of my face, quite literally. But also the fillings were also put in place by a dentist who has a) since vanished from his private practice in the UK presumably for b) using dangerous levels of mercury to create amalgam fillings and c) we now suspect wasn’t sanitizing his tools between patients because of the terrifying levels of bacteria that were found inside the root pulps of the teeth I was forced to have extracted or potentially die.
Teeth which have, by the way, been causing me severe pain for over a decade, but due to medical negligence and gaslighting, I was told repeatedly was purely psychosomatic by several dentists and nothing to worry about.
So I went about my business thinking I was just a wuss and needed to suck it up better and not complain so much about a non-issue.
This was proved to be factually wrong two years ago when I turned up to an emergency appointment delirious with pain and fever, and what I thought was a “mild” abscess, turned out to be a bone infection that was encroaching on my upper left cheekbone, reaching toward my eye, and was promptly informed this was a medical emergency.
I’ve since had two more incidents like this, with the true extent of the damage only being realized last year when it was discovered my lower left jaw was also rotting out, and I had two more emergency procedures, which only kind of worked, and I am still working to fix them. I’ve been on and off antibiotics for the last two years like a demented jack in the box falling down the stairs, which in turn has wreaked havoc on the rest of my already fragile health.
I’ve endured root canals without the luxury of anesthesia, digging my fingernails into the vinyl arm rests of the chair, managing not to scream and hold my head still, despite being able to feel the nerves being burned and scraped out of my skull. I’ve breathed through extractions because anesthesia just plain doesn’t work on me, and neither does standard pain medication, forcing me to destroy my stomach and kidneys to try and get some small relief from the feeling of wanting to crawl out of my own bones to escape the never ending pain for just a little while. Just to sleep, just to eat, just to catch my breath before my next surgery where there is not guarantee of success or of even being pain free.
And to add the final insult to injury on top of all of this…I have always looked after my teeth. I have always brushed, I have always flossed, for as long as I can remember I have taken care of my teeth. The rot doesn’t start on the outside, it’s on the inside, it’s in my bones. Literally.
So while I am sure a smattering of the messages I received telling me to rinse with salt water and the importance of flossing meant well, the next person that implies I somehow deserve any of this will be summarily garroted and pickled in Listerine.
:claps and yells ‘til it hurts:
The particularly _classist_ ableism of the “people with dental problems _obviously_ deserve them” assumption is infuriating.
One of the ideas put forth in this video is that the entire concept of “Rights,” for any being – from human to bot to botfly – only has meaning in the context of pain (i.e. the right to be protected from pain).
Therefore, as long as we keep A.I. from acquiring the ability to feel pain, we have nothing to worry about. And then, the video asks: “But what if A.I. advances far enough to be able to give itself that ability?
(Assuming that advanced intelligence would come first, and pain comes later)
I think it’s the other way around:
Congratulations! Self-awareness!
Furthermore, I think we will soon want to give our A.I. the ability to feel pain… Most of us won’t recognize that’s what we’re doing, though.
We’ll just be teaching our bots to recognize when there’s a fault in their hardware, or when they are under attack from a malicious hacker.
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.
wow i’ve been saying 1 when i should have been saying 4
you ever realize how able bodied people just are not expected to do things that cause them excruciating physical pain? like they’re just. not
if i shouldn’t use my cane because i can sometimes technically walk without it, it would just hurt like a motherfucker then abled people should no longer be allowed to use potholders to take things out of the oven because i mean
well they could technically pick up a hot pan with their bare hands. it would just hurt like a motherfucker
*sees an abled person using potholders*
i just think it’s really sad that you’re giving up on yourself like that
Often, when I see non-autistic people trying to understand autistic anxiety, there’s this assumption that our anxiety must automatically be irrational. It must be because we have “black-and-white thinking” or because we tend to fixate on things. And it’s not that those things never cause anxiety in autistic people – they sometimes do. It’s just… I think many non-autistic people don’t realize what it’s like to deal with constant sensory overload, with confusing social interactions and ill-treatment by others because we’re different and all the other difficult things we have to deal with our day-to-day lives. So they can’t understand that a lot of our anxiety is actually very rational. And when I say that this anxiety is “rational”, I’m not implying that we can’t learn to cope with it. But sometimes it might be better to avoid certain things that make us anxious, like going to places that are very noisy, because there’s actually a good reason for doing so (i.e., to prevent sensory overload that could lead to a meltdown or shutdown, which might take days to recuperate from, which might lead to missing work, school, or make us unable to get other important things done). And in cases where we might be able to and want to cope with rational anxiety, we can’t learn to cope with it by pretending it’s irrational and baseless. Well… we might. For a while. I certainly was able to fool myself into thinking that my rational anxious thoughts were irrational, and that worked for a while – until that false belief became harder and harder to sustain in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary.
This exactly! I’ve often struggled with non-autistics assuming any problems I say I have as a result of my autism are basically just me imagining things or thinking about them the wrong way.
And obviously that’s true of some of my problems, as with most people, but like most autistic people, I have very real differences in my sensory needs and tolerances that most non-autistic people automatically assume I am not accurately reporting.
This has caused a lot of problems, especially when I believed the people constantly telling me I was wrong about what I was experiencing. As an autistic kid I learned to ignore how much literal pain I was in – because obviously I was just thinking about it wrong, not really experiencing it – and just suffer through easily avoidably awful situations without any attempt to accommodate my needs, which was actually traumatic and caused even more long-term problems, as well as making it more difficult for me to focus and engage in the short term.
It’s only as an adult that I’ve slowly begun to learn to listen to my body again, to notice when something specific is causing me distress, etc., and to recognise that I now have the option of changing some of these easily avoidable triggers or finding strategies to deal with the unavoidable ones. It’s been a long process, because I was taught my entire young life that my perceptions, reactions, and pain were imaginary, so it wasn’t worth trying to find solutions.
