What, you’ve never had pancakes with mascarpone before? Cheese is cheese, sheeple!

I feel that.

Back when I was a caregiver, pain assessment was a bit of a pain lol. I’d have patients with cancer, and they’d just not notice something like a sore forming because it just got drowned out by chemo, or whatever. I’d do the daily thing of asking about their pain levels, and how the hell can they answer? They’re at a constant 8 to 10 range, so it’s kinda pointless to try and rely on pain signals to find new pains that need help.

Mind you, I was doing other checks, so nothing got missed, but it could have.

And, like you said, the usual “script” for checking on pain breaks down with chronic pains. You have to really get detailed, focus on tiny changes in pain with them.

And, even knowing all that, I still have trouble communicating my own pain and issues because it’s just so overwhelming sometimes. I sometimes joke with a new doctor or nurse and tell them it would be faster to list what doesn’t hurt. Except it isn’t really a joke.

So I just keep compartmentalizing everything and try to be a good patient lol.

Too bad the dress wasn’t macrame, then you’d also have macrame and cheese

Thank you :)

The system is still broken

Man, I truly appreciate the effort and passion you put out there. That’s some beautiful humanity inside you.

The only thing I can say that doesn’t insult what you put out is that, as wonderful as it would be for your hopes to come true, I simply don’t believe it is possible without tearing down the country built on slavery, oligarchy, and sheer hubris, and starting fresh. The system isn’t just broken, it was never whole.

Again, I am so glad to see someone put that much thought into a response to my sheer disgust at the world, and bring hope into the subject. I can’t debate the fine points of it without dishonoring the intent there. So I’ll just say thank you.

As better as it gets, thank you :)

I really thought my life was over. Now I’m married, have a kid, good friends, and find ways to enjoy even the bad days.

I mean, that’s part of pain tolerance. It isn’t just how much pain you feel, it’s how much you can take.

Chronic pain has taught me a lot about what is and isn’t bearable. Things that when they were new would leave me sobbing, I now don’t even show more than a frown and gritted teeth for on a good day.

Part of that is taking the pain, putting it in a little box cake “I will not fucking quit” and throwing that box into the depths of the mind where it can’t bother you for a while. Your body still hurts, you still know it hurts, but you keep going until you can’t, and the pain can just fuck right off.

Now, let me stub my fucking toe while doing all that and it cuts right through all of that and says “nah, dawg, you gonna feel this”. Different pain, and acute.

So, little shit like shocks and needles in muscles, and the like, you know they’re coming, and they go right in the box with the chronic, and into the oubliette of agony.

That kind of pain testing? That’s totally within mental techniques’ ability to ignore. Your pulse will still change, blood pressure too, but it’s still a distant thing that won’t reach you for a while.

But everyone is different. You can take two people with the same injury, and they’ll tolerate it differently, even if they’re siblings of the same gender.

Part of that is indeed built in, but there is always a psychological component to pain perception.

Now, please note that I’m not saying that walling pain off and ignoring it until you’ve injured yourself is a good thing, much less better than letting pain guide your actions so that it isn’t worse later. I’m just saying that the green text is realistic, and the person responding like that may not be bullshitting, they may just have worked on managing pain.

And people went the fuck home

I would say that any time a group is targeted, deprived of freedom and moved into brutal conditions, comparisons about exactly how bad a given version of a concentration camp is kinda ignores the point that they’re fucking wrong by nature. They are a stain on humanity, period.

And I actually include prisons in the United States as morally equivalent since there’s a disproportionate amount of minorities targeted the be put in there. But at least they had the pretence of due process, so it isn’t the same thing.

And make no mistake, the “holding” facilities were indeed intended to treat humans like filth. And they’re designed in a way that has led to rampant death.

The only reason that deaths haven’t reached genocide levels is no active killing, it’s all passive so that people can ignore or and pretend they aren’t responsible for each and every death that does occur. Any citizen of the United States bears the onus of what w.e did to the Japanese citizens in ww2, and we bear the onus of what has happened, and is still happening to our fellow human beings in this hellholes currently.

What I’m doing here is expressing my disgust with so-called activists and militants that claim to want serious change, but will not risk anything to do it. And yes, it is impossible to do alone, it takes feet on the ground, willing to take any action necessary, and that’s risky. Every attempt to organize a serious effort that I could find failed because nobody was willing to take action. They wanted to fuck around, have a little circle jerk about how bad it was, and go home.

We, as a population, have stood by while our fellow man have been treated worse than we treat animals. Which is pretty bad, if you’ve ever seen industrial farming.

One million, one thousand, one hundred, even one is too many.

You know, I was tempted to just give you a bit of a troll and tell you to blow me, but damn dude.

Pull down everyone in power and rebuild a nation. That’s what revolution is

Man, you can’t even get people to do anything about actual concentration camps. Like, some people tried to organize raids on the places where humans were being held because they dared to cross a border, in horrible conditions, including children. Nobody did a gods damned thing. A lot of fucking noise about how “somebody” should do something, but they couldn’t.

Yet another black man was murdered by police a few years ago, and people did rise up a little, but didn’t have the will or stamina to do the job all the way to the finish.

Truth? The people that think they’re all progressive and good are fucking complacent. They really think that they can fix the system from the inside without any sacrifice.

Fuck, you can’t even get far left radicals to actually do something concrete.

Meanwhile, the far right has ridden on the coat tails of racism and hate until they’ve been taken over completely by the racists and fascists, but they’re united enough via identity politics that they’ll never, ever let go of what they’ve gained without an actual, real fight.

Okay, I think I may have to try this eventually.

Hell, that could work fine. At least there’s one big button issue they would agree on for sure.

Yeah, even the big names tend to not care much as long as nobody else is profiting off of their work. Agents and publishers, they tend to get right snippy about piracy lol.

Mind you, there is a segment of working authors that do suffer in their ability to go from a part time, almost hobbyist situation into a proper career of it. They tend to see the lack of sales as more of a problem, but they tend to be younger and didn’t ever see how impossible breaking in to traditional publishing was. It’s easy to look at your self published income and think “oh, if people had to buy these, I’d be making a living at this instead of it being barely enough to cover expenses for writing”. But, most of the time, back before self publishing was actually a valid and useful route, they wouldn’t have been selling anything, they’d be hoping for an agent to get their first sale for them.

And I’ll never tell anyone that they can’t profit from their own ideas and labor, and expect anyone consuming it to pay up. Authors that object, that’s fine by me (and I actually don’t pirate their stuff). But like you said, most writers would rather someone read and enjoy for free rather than not read at all.

As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn’t.

Gods, I hate those. I won’t watch anything that does it

Ngl, I still have the fire truck I got when I was five.

Only reason I didn’t become a fireman was getting convinced I could do stuff in nursing that I was better at and help more people than I would as a mediocre fireman.

I dunno if it was true or not, but it ended up relatively good overall, so I ain’t mad.

But shit, I got to ride in the trucks a few times anyway. My uncle was a volunteer fireman in the next town over, so as a kid I got rides when things were slow. Even went a few times as an adult on actual calls, though that wasn’t supposed to happen lol.

Hail satan