Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

@Skiriki

Your story brought me back to August 2016, when I had a hemorrhagic stroke. I hope you have a good recovery. Remember, surviving is the hardest part.

Must be retaliation for Hillary’s house. 🙂

@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy:

No, I hadn’t thought about ortho-k. Maybe I should give it a try.

@Skiriki:

Someone I know, said basically the same thing as you did, about LASIK. They raved about it, and wished they’d gotten it sooner.

It’s really not pain I’m afraid of. It’s just the whole idea of cuts being made to my eyes…I can’t help but be squeamish.

I’m glad to hear you wasted no time in getting to the hospital. That’s truly frightening.

It’s been so cold where I live, that some tubes of lipgloss in my mailbox froze. They’re like glittery popsickles. It is supposed to “warm up” today, which means the temp will hover around freezing.

@kupo: I’d like to direct your attention to the smiley. That was tongue-in-cheek.

Big bunch of replies!

@Valentin
They’re more like “less permanent strokes that pretend to be like real strokes”, I guess. But this was a legit full one, although extremely teensyweensy and very oddly specifically aimed. I mean there’s a tiny numb-prickly crescent moon shaped spot (kinda varies if it wants to be numb or prickly) on my right big toe!

@Shadowplay
No probs, I don’t do that anyway, but my mom keeps pushing me ’em whenever I meet her. 😀

@Moggie
This is not likely to work, because it is not exactly the situation of it — it is the procedure of it, that is, cuffing and resulting pain. I get into worse panic over the electronic variety, which is why the nurses had to go and find one of those handpumped ones after ER nurse had to dogpile me. I mean… literally. I was in a fleeing panic, bordering fighting sort of panic, and the poor nurse had to wrangle me into some sort of pretzel to keep me still “just a bit longer”, which kind of never came, because as soon as the “now the machine holds to see if this is the stable point” comes, my panic just threw it higher and higher and… well.

This is so extreme that merely describing this is setting me on the edge. My pulse goes up from 70 to 95, I can hear my ears popping and tinnitus-sort of whine building up. (I’m fine, no worries, I’ll rest and it’ll settle since it is nowhere nearby.)

On 23rd, the doctors were like “OK, the stroke seems to be under control, but we really need to monitor that blood pressure, so no discharge”. At that point, I had been assigned three different medications to drop my blood pressure, and upgraded the dosage. Four days later, they were kind of forced to agree that yeah, maybe this current setup and situation is actually the biggest effect, because there’s no freakin’ way I can still clock those numbers on those meds and dosages. I honestly got high BP, but…

I’m phobic of hypodermic things, and I got regular blood samples taken, one small canyl fit, one BIG canyl fit, a failed BIG canyl fit that had me screaming, another go at BIG canyl fit, three failed attempts at trying to get a spinal fluid sample, one successful and excruciating spinal fluid sample, phobia of being touched overall… and that big fucking bloodmageddon in my panties, since I had been given anticoagulant and I was on my period. Did you know that there were no tampons (only ridiculously “normal” pads that contain nothing, IDK why no tampons, but I suppose they had good reasons overall), my usual emergency stash had been empty and I had to resort to a long-forgotten skill of “how do I make a big pad out of two pads”? (Otter, however, was a superb darling and brought me a box when I realized how things were going aka “there’s blood all over my bed”.)

And the reason for “remembering” is mostly because electronic devices have completely replaced manual ones in last ten years, and new nurses in training (including one who treated me) aren’t used to it — they’re shown how to take it, they’re taking it couple of times, and then it is “and now we’re using this fancy device instead, which is easy” (except when it comes to people like me). Even oldtime nurses were a bit flummoxed, though quickly gained their old lore.

@Pie
Eeep! I’m just happy that when I stumbled to triage, the nurse did a splendid job!

@Victorious Parasol
Looks like I am already winning!

@Dormousing_it
I’m familiar with the feeling of squickiness of it, so my sympathies. I was pretty terrified of that… and again, no matter how squicky it still feels as an idea, I’d still go to one rather than have my blood pressure taken 😀

Completely apropos of nothing – if you haven’t seen The Shape of Water – make plans to do so. 🙂 It’s well worth the effort.

(I know its not on general release til the 14th Feb – but planning ahead don’t hurt. 😛 )

Welp, back in the ol’ interwebz saddle after being laid up with one of the worst colds I’ve had in years for the past week. Let’s see what WHTM has been up to…

*reads pages 7-13 of thread*

…oh my….

@Lea, that’s just harrowing stuff. Just getting through such turmoil in the way you have is a testament to your strength of character. I offer all the kitty hugs I can.

It’s kinda odd to consider, but I’m rapidly approaching the age that my father was when I was conceived. My parents had actually been married six years before I was born, mostly due to them needing to get their careers off the ground. As for me… I’m not really interested in relationships, let alone parenthood. As my stepbrothers have gotten married and had kids of their own, I can see the level of responsibility and it’s not the kind of responsibility I’m interested in. So it’s hardly the place for a 30-something single guy not interested in kids to comment on anybody’s particular parenting.

But opinions being like anuses, I will venture a comment or two regarding parents keeping tabs on kids based on both my experiences witnessing friends’ home lives firsthand and also some tales relayed by my mother who has worked as a child psychologist for local school boards for more than three decades now. She’s had to assess some seriously messed up kids: behavioural problems, severe cognitive impairment, severe learning disabilities, you name it, she’s seen it. She’s probably assessed her share of reactive attachment disorder too (if they actually feel compelled to show up). If there’s a throughline to all the stories she’s told me of her interactions with parents, it’s that the worst ones are the ones that can’t engage with the results, either because they’re so indifferent to the well-being of their child that it just rolls off them, but more often it’s that they refuse to accept the clinical findings because little Jimmy is going to be the best at whatever it was that they couldn’t be, despite the fact that he compulsively attacks other students or can’t multiply numbers by the age of ten. These are the kind of parents that blame everything on her when she’s just using the assessment tools that the province has adopted as their standard. The most obnoxious ones complain to the College of Psychologists, but they’re quick to recognize an unfounded complaint and it’s only happened a couple of times.

Bottom line: if you’re engaging as a parent and trying your best (and not overwhelming your kid with expectations), you shouldn’t be on the receiving end of any grief.

I grew up middle class, but I did grow up with two working parents, so I had nannies until I hit junior high, at which point I could be at home on my own. I never considered myself a latchkey kid per se, but I did have a couple hours unsupervised hours after school before my parents got home from work. And being the tech-savvy pubescent Katamount I was, I did check out all the naughty websites a 13-year-old wasn’t supposed to on the ol’ Netscape Navigator of 1998. But beyond NSFW content and the shock sites of the early internet, that was essentially all the trouble I could get up to. We had just made the transition from dial-up to the first cable modems. Google was a brand new search engine competing with Yahoo, Altavista and AskJeeves. Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman in high school. Social media was still five years from being viable, although I’m sure the ideas were there. 20 years later, kids of that age already have a handheld computer leagues faster than the Pentium II that I was looking at dirty pictures with… and plenty more social media reach. Now, I was one of those kids that was always cognizant of my parents’ feelings. I got into my share of typical schoolyard mischief, but my greatest fear was to disappoint my parents (and teachers I respected, who was most of them). Finding dirty websites in their home search history wouldn’t disappoint them, but bullying another student most certainly would. Now that certainly wouldn’t work for every kid in the world, but it can be powerful.

The other tack I would take if I discovered my kid was going down a dark path online (like posting on 4chan or sending gas chamber memes on Twitter) would be to have a casual conversation about it in as non-judgmental a way as possible. Just asking them to articulate why it’s “funny” forces them to explore concepts they maybe haven’t considered in great depth and plants a seed of compassion where it might have otherwise been ignored or marginalized away.

Just my two cents on the parenting topic. I hope everyone else is staying healthy… being sick during a cold snap really sucks when you live in a basement apartment. It’s like the chills hit twice as hard.

skiriki

wow so strange which parts of your brain connected to your body. I am glad for you that it is only some small areas which effected.

Just to quickly remark on the overall tenor of the comment threads around here, I do think they benefit from David’s steady guidance, particularly in his frequency of posting. Leaving open threads to pile up can result in several topics being discussed at once, which in turn ups the potential for miscommunication. Granted, I’m not familiar with the “Thread of Doom 2” that has been alluded to, and being a relatively recent poster, I can’t speak to the culture this community used to have, but based on what I see, there’s still plenty of smart, thoughtful people hereabouts to keep me coming back.

Sometimes I worry that I derail things though… I’m the kind of guy who only says something if I feel it’s worthwhile for others to hear. Maybe a one-liner if I have a funny reference in mind, but mostly stick to long-form comments as I try to line up some thoughts I’ve had on a given topic. Thanks to everyone here for indulging them and offering some excellent responses which have certainly got me thinking on all sorts of things I hadn’t considered before.

I hope David’s health improves as 2018 begins. I think a fresh open thread would help clear the digital air and give us a clean slate to talk about stuff.

For those who were hoping – Trump’s physical on Friday will not include a pych eval.

That’s always been known, I think.

Is there any safe way to evaluate politicians’ psychological fitness, without ending up with this being abused in much the same way psychiatry was abused in the Soviet Union, to remove opponents? There are objective tests you can administer, such as memory and logic, but when you have doctors making subjective diagnoses, it gets dicey.

So it is now 3 am, I haven’t had proper sleep and my right hand has decided it is so going to be fine with some sort of “Frozen” mimicry attempt and my kitties are juuuuuust stirring and moving about and… uh, yeah. It is 3 am and I must rant.

@PeeVee and lots of other people up the thread:
Thanks. 🙂 It really does mean quite a lot to hear from y’all and while I’m not a hugsy person that much…

Aha!

*scoops up a kitty that is willing to do the hugsies* Pass ‘er on.

I spent my evening trying to put together some sort of birthing box and nest box for Carisma, and the latter one got immediately occupied by Didi. At least the nest box has been in bedroom so it is not strange and alien complex for momkitty. Then, after crouching and kneeling, I got wobbly because of blood pressure fluctuating and I went to have a bit of liedown.

I forgot to ask Otter to bring milk or cream from the shop so I could make hot chocolate. Bother.

Um… I guess that’s the rant for now?

@kupo
Well… Carisma wants to sleep on a pillow next to me, that’s for sure! Didi, on the other hand, is kind of like me, so touching is something you negotiate and inform beforehand, and snuggles are rare.

Right now I’m mostly trying to get my spoons back from the hospital trip, since the idea of me + 3 other people in the same room is not exactly ideal. At one point, 2 of them were older grannies who had lost way, way, way more to various things that can happen in brain, and who were basically unable to use an alarm bell to summon nurses.

Which meant that I and the other roomie (who was there for shingles complications, and was way younger than me!) had to do it for them, day and night, because they weren’t exactly on timer when it came to regular nurse checks, y’know? If it was night, I just got up and went to the nurse office to notify, because that usually also meant diaper swap about to happen right next to me and there were times when my tummy just couldn’t handle, so I could just go to communal room to vegetate.

The first night, while I was in observation section of the ward, that was a bit scary. A nurse station was in the middle of two smaller rooms, and on the other side were another two (different) grannies. One of them was wailing on automatic, with short bouts of silence when she got injected with meds and fell asleep.

Another was… well. Lung infection on top of serious epilepsy, I guess, because she could barely breathe, and then, at 2 am she suddenly seized, didn’t stop despite meds given, and suddenly nurses slammed the joining door on our side closed, and you could still hear things. Like “DNR has been signed” and discussion where giving medicine becomes resuscitation and suddenly way more people than the ward should have had at that time of the night.

And it was really terrifying and sad but the gran pulled through the night, and was still there when I left, slightly more awake by that time and responsive.