i’m trying so hard to stop checking my pulse. i’m doing a little better today, but i’m still having slip-ups too. i know it’s not gonna be a linear form of progress, but fuck, it’s so hard. the urge to do it is making me want to go actually feral in fear.
i’m just so tired of this. my biggest theme lately has been health. just… every single day for two months now, worrying about something with my health. it’s never been this incessant. it was heart problems first, then lymphoma, then leukemia, then sepsis, then diabetes, and now heart problems again.
my neck is bruised from the constant pulse-checking. i get stuck in the “high bpm, panic, higher bpm, panic harder” loop constantly.
i’m only 17. no family history of heart issues and virtually no risk factors. and yet, i’m afraid to fall asleep at night because what if my heart stops and i never wake up.
it’s exhausting. arguing with my own fucking brain for hours, and for what.
i was diagnosed with hurley stage two a couple weeks ago and am now starting treatment. the first thing my doctor wanted to try was daily panoxyl when i shower. i have one current chronic wound and one recurrent one that’s currently closed, as well as a possible developing abscess in my thigh.
how long might this take to help heal it? the doctor said to use it for the rest of my life, so i will, but i would like a general idea of how long it’ll take to create improvement.
i hate when people excuse harm towards animals because “they’re just animals“. especially domestic animal abuse, the usage of animals in entertainment, and unethical farming. animals have thoughts and feelings, and while yes, it is okay to eat them, it’s not okay to inflict unnecessary harm. many of the animals most affected by this (cats, dogs, cows, sea life…) have strikingly similar cognitive capacity to humans. you wouldn’t kick a three year old, would you? then it’s not okay to do the same to a dog. they operate on the same level.
conversely, i hate when people apply unnecessary humanity to animals, to the point it comes back around to, once again, hurt the animal. my two biggest examples are people applying human morality to animals, and viewing distressed animal behavior through a personifying lens. an animal is not evil if it attacks a person or another animal. yes, the behavior must be addressed and managed, but the animal does not understand what it did. it might’ve caused harm, but it’s not morally evil. on my second point, there are too many people who see an animal behaving a certain way and react as though they’re a human. a “smiling” monkey is fucking pissed, leave it alone. a “guilty-looking” puppy is scared, not remorseful. animals have different body cues than people, and we need to respect that, so we both protect ourselves and give them dignity.
my dad just yelled at me about the smell of my armpit drainage (which i try my best to manage). saying i just have a hygiene issue and i need to be institutionalized because there’s something wrong in my head, because it’s just body odor.
wouldn’t listen when i said that’s what hs drainage just smells like. wouldn’t listen when i said it isn’t bacterial and has nothing to do with hygiene.
i’m so fucking pissed that i’m crying. just weeks after i’ve been diagnosed with a chronic fucking illness. one that isn’t preventable. two, almost three months of constant pain, just to be called disgusting because of something i literally cannot control.
not even to mention the sheer ableism in using mental illness like an insult. of course if i come to him about any of my actual mental health issues, he says i’m soft and don’t know struggle.
just... fuck this shit.
welp, it happened. i just noticed my first ever thigh abscess and it’s pissing me off already. what can i do to manage the pain until it ruptures? and afterwards?
when i was eleven (and very much childfree then), my dad took me into the delivery room with his girlfriend to watch her give birth, so i could “witness the miracle of life“ or something. i do believe this was traumatic for me, in hindsight, seeing a mother figure to me laying cut open like that.
i think my dad thought it would make me want kids… it did not, needless to say. and while i already knew i didn’t then, this instance contributed to my crippling fear of childbirth.
i think it’s weird and gross to make a little girl witness gore, in the hopes she’ll be influenced to breed.
look at this dumb fat chud smh !!! full of Soup. is he Stupids.. /j
in all seriousness, volume two goes hard and vol three is gonna go hard too (and will have kel on it yaaaeeyy)
does anyone else notice that weird thing parents do, where they like… basically sic their kids on clearly uncomfortable adults? it sounds oddly specific until you think about it. i‘ve encountered it a lot. for example, they’ll tell their kid “go play with [x adult family member who actively does not want to engage]”, and then laugh because they find it sooo cute and funny how they’ve forced someone to interact with their precious little breighleigh.
i’m not sure if this is just my family being weird or what, but it’s so irritating. yes, “we’re not entitled to a childfree world” or whatever, but that doesn’t make it okay to knowingly impose a childful world/situation on someone who just doesn’t want it.
i know it’s just 0.1 of a point, but it’s great news, because i can now apply for a 100% scholarship instead of a 75% one if i retake the SAT! i don’t know how it got so much higher in such short time, exactly, because that usually takes a while. but i assume it had something to do with my college english class and my high scores on my finals last year.
i was recently diagnosed with hidradenitis suppurativa, basically meaning that i get painful abscesses and chronic wounds, which leads to quality of life restrictions, and could result in more serious inflammation-related issues down the road.
pregnancy worsens flares for some people, and causes hs flares postpartum a significant amount of the time, so that’s already a massive nope. but in addition, it’s highly genetic, so having a kid would also inflict this lifelong bullshit upon them.
i guess the only positive of having chronic pain is being more affirmed in my decision not to breed.
someone with recently diagnosed HS here. the smell from my current, non-healing wound is really bothering me lately. it just seems to be getting worse and worse. every time i turn my head, i feel nauseous because the smell of my armpit wafts to my nose and it’s just… ugh. i’ve never smelled a corpse, but i imagine it smells something like this. i’m starting treatment soon, so hopefully that’ll clear it up for now, but the thought of smelling this for the rest of my life is irritating.
edit: thank you guys for the suggestions, i will try them! i’ll also try to get to the doctor soon. when the wound was cultured last, it was non-bacterial (part of what led to my diagnosis), but it easily could’ve become infected a secondary way since then.
i know this sort of post has been done to death, but i feel like it’s still relevant.
i‘m a minor, and my parent has multiple young children. i just overheard said parent on the phone, giving advice to their partner(? it’s wishy-washy right now) about how to handle their own overstimulating, misbehaving kid. my parent said: “sometimes i just need to take twenty minutes in my room by myself to unwind, and then i’m ready to go back out into the chaos.”
i can’t even imagine that being my life for the foreseeable future, holy shit. having to be grateful for twenty minutes of alone time per day sounds genuinely undoable. every moment of that would be spoiled by knowing that in nineteen, eighteen, seventeen minutes, i have to go face a screaming child again.
couldn’t be me. like. ever.
just remembered this absolutely wild rhetoric relayed to me by my parents as a young child.
they’re both a part of the maga cult, and as such, are misogynistic. that rubbed off on me when i was a little girl, but mostly in how i saw myself, not others. i started to hate my body from a young age due to perceived limitations, derived from the completely incorrect view of puberty they (mostly my dad) taught me.
whenever i cried to them about it, about how i didn’t want to be “weak” or “fat” or the other things they said would happen, their response was always something like “it’s true, but your body is just as good as a man’s, just in a different way. you can use yours to create life and that’s beautiful.”
i already knew i wasn’t having kids. now imagine how worthless that comment made me, then ten years old, feel. i didn’t even want to fulfill what was taught to me as my “purpose”.
of course, i completely dropped that mentality as soon as i was properly educated about puberty and anatomy. the female body is not shameful, no matter what it looks like, and i’m disgusted with myself for ever believing differently. at the same time, i recognize that i was a child just going by what my parents said. but god, what a disgusting thing, to groom little girls into internalized misogyny, and then eventual motherhood they don’t want.