u/Familiar_Percentage7

That's my name for it: Neurocardiogenic/Orthostatic Presyncopal Events. NOPE. I guess the medical terminology is "malaise" but that's so vaguely dramatic and imagine trying to cancel plans because you have "malaise", ugh. No drama, it's just my body saying NOPE to all stimuli.

Like, nothing "happens", I don't faint bc if the feeling comes on suddenly, I quickly do the leg cross or bouncy calves or half squat or excuse myself to go sit or lie down. Sometimes it's gradual and lasts for hours or days though. I just feel Bad and I'm usually not going to be able to fight my ADHD during those times to get much done because the feeling is so uncomfortable and distracting and energy draining, but it doesnt respond well to just resting. I know it's a dysautonomia thing bc the feeling happened during my tilt test before I vagaled out

I hate how it is entirety subjective and unpredictable, though on the bright side that means it's not going to kill me! Sometimes feel feverish or cold during these episodes, but my body temp is fine and really all my vitals seem to stay in a generally healthy range. Doesn't seem like it's ever reflected in any labs either and if anything is off, it's a transient blip and fine by the next time, except the high ANA, which has not manifested as an autoimmune disease as this time. My heart is totally healthy too. It's been going on for over 20 years across several lifestyle and diet changes and different sizes and locations so there's no obvious behavioral or environmental factor to blame.

What causes it? Bad luck! What makes it better? Good luck! Partly vestibular I think bc sometimes triggered by being in a vehicle that's moving wrong or has uneven temperatures or while im hungry or had a busy day. Can also be triggered by being out on a hot/sunny day for too long (dehydration?) or by cloudy/rainy weather (atmospheric pressure changes? Allergy?). Also certain foods, but with no useful pattern, like a plate of pasta will wreck me most often but other high carb or high gluten foods are fine. It's separate from the other pain i might be experiencing at the time. There's always something aching or itching bc of hypermobility and the only correlation I've found is the tendon pain can be a trigger. Muscle pain is ok, but going to the gym is not apparently. Sometimes a headache or aura appears but not always. It has a migraineish vibe though, but distributed everywhere instead of the head? Or the part of nausea that isn't GI? Dopesick without ever doing drugs?

I got a prescription, but for some reason the Dr prescribed thigh highs initially, maybe bc i didn't have a diagnosis yet. The durable equipment company didn't say anything about this type being harmful for my body type even though they measured everything So i got this nonrefundable product, wore them twice and each time I could not tolerate a full day because they cut into my skin and the pain probably messes with me even more than the untreated blood pooling! So after I finally got a positive tilt test, I got a new prescription for waist high compression which clinical trials have proven to be the appropriate type for NCS anyway. In my mind that's no different than switching meds in the middle of the month bc the first med has side effects, but the supplier claims they still count as my 1 pair per 6 months?! I submitted a grievance but that probably takes weeks. What can I get in the meantime?

Who else is in here not to explain some weird memories, just former gifted kids who love/d a certain type of sci fi? This sub gives me a weird type of FOMO bc of how closely my childhood approaches the asymptote of belonging here. Get this crazy series of adjacencies:

The program name: My gifted program began in 3rd grade, after doing TOPS and some IQ test in 2nd grade. Most of us knew we were gifted since kindergarten and looked forward to joining "GATE"...but they changed the name to GAP right before our cohort! And it was legit gifted education.

Other pullouts: So many! Speech therapy, advanced reading groups, social worker dragging me and a bully in together to try to get us to be friends, music lessons. So many missed opportunities to secretly be in a psychic training program but they only tried brainwashing me to be more normal, except the reading groups which just made us nerdier...

Those headphones: I saw them attached to weird computers in the school library (microfiche?) in kindergarten or 1st grade and asked about them and was told it was something the older kids were using, specifically a special program, either GATE or learning disability related. Distinctly remember the mystery and anticipation, but we got a whole new computer lab 1 year later minus the mystery equipment. We did get special computer activities in GAP, but it was just useful research tools and software above our grade level, on the same Macs everyone used. Hypertext, spreadsheets etc.

Scars/marks: I know the origins of each one.

Military connection: Parent who was in military intelligence...but only as a Reservist doing basically data entry.

Pink drink: We got an interactive presentation about dental hygiene... but they skipped the pink drink fluoride swish and the chewable dye tablet to see how well you brush so I didn't even get the mundane pink drink experience! (Plenty of bubblegum amoxicillan, but not at school.)

Tests and experiments: Our school had a partnership with a college or university so we were subjects of several psych/education grad student experiments that were too mundane to remember or have feelings about. And our hearing tests were exactly the same as my dr did at 5th grade physical. Beeep

Xener cards: My aunt got ahold of a set and showed it to me as a kid but it was too close to dinnertime to actually run the test and there was never any deja vu about seeing those cards in another context.

Supernatural stuff: So many family members have ghost or UFO stories and I got nothing! And I read all those books at an impressionable age that could have at least created a false memory!

"Mallworld": yes, but i think that's just a normal experience that feels spooky bc of the repeated location within the usual dream randomnesss. My mall sometimes connects to other liminal places like an airport or mansion.

I was obsessed with books about special powers and secret organizations, so I would have been a perfect target.

TLDR: Not POTS but my vagus nerve hates me!

Having ADHD made me play myself when they put the IV in bc I asked them to use my AC instead of my hand and then kept doing T-rex arms. Ouch! (Thankfully the straps during the test end that problem!)

Getting tilted up made me feel like a rainstick!

This was supposed to be more evidence of orthostatic hypotension but my dumb nervous system thinks we're on a carnival ride and BP spikes impressively (but not enough to stop blood pooling).

I keep running my mouth about how normal I feel, then clarifying that my normal is constant muscle aches and retiring to a "fainting couch" to doomscroll for hours unless I'm obligated to do stuff. The feeling that's growing in me is actually bad, not normal, just my baseline. Also sighing a lot which is apparently not just a mental health thing.

Horrified realization that the now palpable lactic ache in my calves and numb feet like I've been on an elliptical this whole time is the result of a compensatory mechanism with a time limit. A limit I've shrunk by avoiding the gym lately... and the reason I haven't fainted in years is I never push myself to the limit anymore.

I start feeling extra bad and my vision grays out like it does on a regular basis, but i can't do my usual presyncopal half squat and keep walking, or bail out on the nearest furniture. I narrate my feelings and close my eyes, then I'm listening to some nice music with colorful lights, then it's oddly quiet and i feel like the vibe in the room has changed. So I open my eyes and announce that I fell asleep and I must be sleep deprived bc I was dreaming a little but I'm awake now and they're like actually your heart rate fell into the 30s and you fainted. Oh.

I'm sweaty and actually have a vague sense of well being like the mythical runners high. I realize it's bc I'm horizontal again and they hooked up some fluids when I went down. Now I understand those IV clinics!

So that's the test. We'll see what cardiologist says but in the meantime I'm all flared up and getting a constant guilt trip about how lazy I am bc a couple short events I was looking forward to happened to fall this week and I saved my energy for those. And I was still sitting at every opportunity and shortening conversations and giving off tired vibes, so it's not like I'm spending my energy budget frivolously, but whatever...

I'm a new grad RN and what I thought was just burnout and bad studying ergonomics from nursing school is still here a few months later so it's looking like a bonafide case of the neurodivergence-inspired fibromyalgia here (does it come with free cookie monster pajamas?) and idk if that means 1st year nursing is going to make it even worse or I'll get so used to feeling this way at baseline that workdays can't even be that bad by comparison. I like pushing myself mentally and i don't mind the high step count and getting strong but i need to be able to sleep and avoid injury. I'm getting scared of all these new grad opportunities that are mandatory night shift with like 8 patients on med/tele and I didn't hear back from any psych nursing jobs, but now I'm already in training for a dream job (except the lower starting pay compared to local hospitals), which is home care at sane times of day, with minimal driving, for an agency that so far is waving nothing but green flags.

I keep seeing advice to grind away at bedside for at least a year so you have access to better jobs, but this sounds like the kind of better job I'd be grinding for already. Am i missing something?

I'm aware that as soon as i got hired, a clock started where if I change my mind about hospital jobs, that better happen in 6 months or in 3 years to infinity. And like, I do think it would be cool to be a critical care wizard and discover that my own health problems are all from fighting my night goblin side to fit in with society, but I've gotta be realistic about the odds here.

Before I crossed the trench, I had a nice base in a pretty location (purple plants overlooking old habitat), close to lots of Pents to process into food rations and my wandering would naturally put enough fish in my path too, so that 5-10 minutes of work would let me pack a nice lunch for long journeys all over the starting area. I miss the self-sustaining bases of Subnautica but maybe future updates will add that. In the meantime, west half of the map is fine as a hunter-gatherer.

Not so much in the east, unless I'm missing something. I haven't found a spot with the same density of edibles. There is a plateau early on with a decent population of pneumas but I prefer them alive and they're hard to catch with the poor framerate of a 5-year-old gaming laptop anyway. I've only found one grow bed to scan, so if there is sustainable horticulture in this game, it is unknown hours away. Skin algae is not doing it! I'm thinking about just investing an hour or more into going back to fill my inventory with high calorie snacks at the old home base and fighting over it with old ms grabby as many times as I need to.

Is there a spot I'm missing that will let me explore in a more leisurely pace instead of just dying on purpose to get back to half full? At least I finally found copper on this side so I can keep charged. It got really grim for awhile until I realized I could use Creative mode to scout for resources. I get that hunger mechanics are a big part of survival games, but right now it's just interrupting the work of a QI !

I got a job in peds home health and I'm really excited about it. I like kids and there's going to be even more peds opportunities in the next few years if i wanna change settings. Plus picking out fun scrubs instead of hospital colors! And the scheduling would allow me to accommodate my circadian rhythm and my hobbies. I also prefer even messy home environments to the noises and lights in a hospital bc i can get used to those stimuli, whereas industrial lighting gets more uncomfortable by the hour.

But right now I'm also in the recruiting pipeline for some competitive hospital new grad residencies and there's more I can apply to later. It seems like most new grads fight for those spots and "settle" for agencies like mine instead of making it first choice like me. I hear things online about needing bedside to move ahead in career later, so I'm wondering if I'm supposed to do that while I'm fresh and competitive. Like if I try to switch later will they think I've got too many bad habits from being 1:1 all day and they'd rather train a new grad?

The problem is, new grads here almost always start on night shift. I had DSPD when I was a young adult, so maybe if I'd started this 20 years ago i could have done it but instead I've worked so hard to get on consistent sleep cycle that matches society a little better and I'm still struggling with fatigue, so I can't even imagine what it would do to me to regress and then keep going all the way to night shift schedule.

Even snagging a day shift 7AM start would be a bit of sacrifice because it cuts into the part of the night where I finally get restorative sleep. If I miss that window it's basically an all nighter with possibility of nap around dinnertime so i don't see how id manage 3 days a week of 7p-7a. I've got some scary biomarkers of potential autoimmune disease already and may be perimenopausal already so I'm afraid to embrace a year or 2 of sleep deprivation like my younger peers because even when I was young I'd get ill from even 4-6 hours of sleep. Like i don't even want kids partly for this reason and it's the main reason I chose nursing school over med school!

I want to see if i can build a good career around using alarms to keep myself on task instead of a cortisol boost to interrupt a sleep cycle.

Played for an hour, got interrupted with tasks to perform asap so I saved and closed the lid to go into sleep mode with the game paused. This laptop doesn't stay in sleep mode that long apparently so it shut down at some point but booted up normally. Now clicking through all the bs and then Continue crashes game immediately. Same whether from epic launcher or .exe shortcut. This is before even trying to open my save file so it shouldn't matter. On current attempt (via Epic) it isn't even going that far... just 3 blinking dots in the corner

I decided to go for it and do a beginner class + 1 month membership at a climbing gym now instead of putting it off any longer, but I'm 40+, baseline 2-3/10 pain from hypermobility and dealing with a cute but impractical body type of very heavy but not particularly muscular thighs and upper arms hanging off a gangly body that means every move on the wall is an extra devious physics problem.

Also accidentally started the day before the no birth control week of the month, so day 1 was some magical 3 hours of defying gravity where the only pain afterwards was DOMS, but the next few times the hormonal muscle fatigue kicked in fast so I wasn't using my legs right and now it's all tendon pain and crunchy back and that kind of nauseous feeling I associate with martial arts where they go for pressure points. I fear I may already have pushed my fingers to the danger zone and have to give them several days to recover 😅. I'm also stuck in recovery mode all the time and even skipped some chill social gatherings to just vegetate. When does this get better? Its like having a horrible disease.

It's not like I'm starting from zero, boring gym got me to where I can do squats and make a visible bicep and stand from the floor without using my hands and I'm not recovering from any sprain or back injury or vertigo episode. I guess I still need to do my training at the boring gym, get a high protein calorie deficit going and get my body composition a little better before I can make climbing and cardio my workout plan? Also adapting for explosive movements without hurting myself?

Waiting for the day I feel better instead of worse from any self improvement plan...

I really want to do this but: It's been 30 years since I learned how to get up a YMCA walk (no overhangs) and fell in love but my mom couldn't bear the anxiety. Now I'm over 40 with some kind of hypermobility-induced fibromyalgia and sometimes arthralgia, and I'm built like a lipodema influencer. I'm also making RA autoantibodies but my joints have no damage and no one really know what triggers that ticking time bomb and sometimes it never goes off but if it does, I'm using my hands to the fullest first! I have a climbing gym in my neighborhood and lots of sandstone in driving distance.

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On the bright side of hypermobility, I have huge hands and feet and hips as flexible as a toddler so when I've tried scrambling I could get up some climby bits by getting a leg really high and the only significant injury that's ever resulted was my ankle rolled from fatigue on the way down while my other foot was wedged between rocks so i couldn't use my many years practice "tripping over nothing" to quickstep out of it and I needed to use a wrap or compression bootie for a few weeks. Since then I've put a lot of work into diagnosing and fixing my congenitally weak ankles + balance so I don't fall anymore on those kinds of hikes, but my arms are still too weak to do a pushup or pull up and every gym or home based method of strengthening upper body is just too boring to stick with for long, so my hope is indoor climbing will provide the necessary dopamine to make progress of gaining and losing the same pound of muscle a few times a year and then maybe I'll be able to be sportier.

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I know that the ankle instability + middle age means I'm going to be slowly climbing or belaying down instead of jumping down several feet like I see a lot. (Though that's probably great for keeping bone density.) I'm sure I'll need a special harness to accommodate dat Pixar mom azz. But what else should I be aware of that I need to do differently to enjoy this hobby/sport safely with a body type not commonly associated with climbing?

In S1, since everything is so spread apart anyway, I learned that I'm happy making my big base near the origin point (specifically between the geyser, a big piece of wreckage, and Stonehenge), and since I hate bringing my mobile base to the mid/late game area, I have small utilitarian outposts in some scenic spots. Even after you get to the depths, you still have reason to return to the safe shallows. This means as soon as I have my Habitat Builder, I know I'm safe to invest as much as I want into my starter base. Is that the case in BZ or do you reach a part of the game where your home is too far away from where you spend most of your time and now you wish you didn't lock so many resources into it?

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I built a cozy multipurpose room near the Alterra crane/hook, where the sunlight slants down good. It's maybe 500m northish of the lifepod so it feels a little redundant as far as creating a safe space, but the kelp and coral is less dense there so it has lots of room to expand, while blending in better with the environment (holefish and Alterra tech have similar aesthetic) and it's got the cool hanging glaciers with anemone fruits 100m away. Only aggro is brinewings near this food source, and of course if this is my main base, I'll no longer need to harvest outdoors. But now that I have decent transportation, I'm constantly journeying 1k+ away. As the story progresses will this become a problem?

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I thought about building right off the delta dock which is more central but I didn't like getting attacked right away. I love the whales but they seem to coexist with more aggressive beasts. I don't want to build anywhere too maze-like which cuts out like half the map! I build anticipating I'll be too hungry and injured or goal-focused for pathfinding and evading attacks!

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Is my spot good enough to expand or should I anticipate changing my mind after 10 hours of story progression?

I got my authorization to test and looked online and found either I take it now or I wait a month bc I guess there's a pattern to how much time other new grads in the area think they need so most of June is booked up. I want to start working ASAP so I signed up for Monday, which feels really sudden because I know people talk about studying for several weeks after graduation. But my program had mandatory test prep built in and on every HESI I thought I was failing the whole time (adaptive difficulty) and got scores saying I'm 99.9% likely to pass. So I feel like I should be able to relax and just refresh some forgettable high yield info over the weekend and depend on my program preparing me well for the test already. I'm also "Gifted" so written tests are "easy" anyway except for the overthinking. Should I trust the HESI prediction or is it based on average candidate behavior of doing a bunch of test prep between their exit HESIs and NCLEX?

I'm also fresh off a vacation where I was active daily, healed the burnout, and lost dependence on my still-available ADHD meds, so I'll be at my mental peak as far as that goes. I figure if I wait too long the lack of mental stimulation and summer heat will start bringing me back down.

We're traveling by train, seems like too much hassle to rent a car, so our travel through the Alps is based on where rail stations are, which is city centers, but we want lots of outdoors time. We've decided to splurge on 2 nights at Castel Hörtenburg (Sunday and Monday last week of May). On Sunday we're traveling from Vipiteno... not sure if we have to preplan the train d.t. holiday crowds or choose based on vibes. After we check out and have breakfast on Tuesday we're going to visit Ötzi at the museum and catch an afternoon high speed to Florence. So approximately 1.5 days.

We sadly have only a short stay bc this trip is a train buffet and if we fall in love with a particular region we'll do a long trip with a car and everything. So any day trip requiring even more travel from our base has to be on Monday, which is coincidentally a holiday (Pentecost/whit Monday) with lots of German tourists and closures so I'm not sure how this affects things. Plus Mondays is the day lots of museums close. So if we can only do the highlights, how should we prioritize?

We can hike a few hours of hilly terrain but one of us has a connective tissue disease and the other a recovering wrist injury so probably no climbing courses. The hotel offers ebikes but idk the details.

We're planning to take full advantage of a rail pass this month and we're going to spend a solid week migrating southward, avoiding long rides because one of us has RLS, but 2 hours bracketed by a little hassle with luggage is a fine interruption for us and we don't mind if our neurology means doing this every few days. So we're going to be arriving in Vipiteno early one morning, staying a night, and when we leave the next day (since we can store luggage after checkout) depends on how much there is to do there that wasn't already done vs what we can enjoy in other locations on our route. We've already got I think a total of 4 nights booked between Florence and Rome hotels, which is going to max out the amount of time I want to be in big city crowds. But Vipiteno to Firenze looks like it will be too long to sit through straight through (and too short/too many transfers for a night train), plus we're going to pass by Dolomites, Lake Garda, and the Tuscan countryside so it seems better to break up the journey by picking one or more of those destinations to stay a night or two.

I could use some help figuring out how the trains work though because I think my searches are picking up bad AI-fueled info now. Like there's high speed rail but only from certain spots? And how often? Like two cities that are geographically further could actually be temporally nearer, but there is no simple tool to find that info.

And I don't want any guff about blah blah blah too many places on one itinerary. We know what we're about!

There's an art contest, they want everyone to watch the prelaunch stream on Saturday, you can "apply" to Alterra and if enough people do they'll add another blueprint to the game etc. Apologies if this is a repost, I'm not scrolling that far!