This shit makes me MOTI. It's going to be so many years before any actual hard truth comes out about covid. But if you try to understand any of it it's just a crazy sea of propaganda and distortion. I'd love to learn unbiased information about what will be probably the most noteworthy event of our generation but it doesn't seem possible. The medical and scientific establishment have decided that we must fear it and impress upon us the belief that we are all harbouring a ticking time bomb of pulmonary and vascular malignancies as a result of covid and the other side believe the same but they just believe the vaccination did it.
When my eyeballs see a society that was fat and out of breath anyway trying to blame a respiratory infection for their self inflicted misery. That and swathes of people who suddenly feel like they know enough about viruses and medicine to give their opinions.
COVID sperg incoming. And while I ranted and raved housandrustynails beat me to some of it.
Here goes:
Man, the branch covidians really get me. The preaching, the entitlement, the virtue signaling, the utter disregard of medical evidence (unless it’s something that furthers their case like some laboratory mask study where some dude strapped a VOG or two on a broom and behold, the broom didn’t get COVID), the demand that everyone participate in their friggin’ neurosis. Show me one single LC-sufferer that was well adjusted & mellow prior to the pandemic. Seems to me half of them were already munching when this glorious virus arrived. Hell, you can have LC without even having had COVID, that’s one scary basic reproductive number!
And WHY oh WHY do they all claim something-something-eugenics?
COVID sperg incoming. And while I ranted and raved housandrustynails beat me to some of it.
Here goes:
Man, the branch covidians really get me. The preaching, the entitlement, the virtue signaling, the utter disregard of medical evidence (unless it’s something that furthers their case like some laboratory mask study where some dude strapped a VOG or two on a broom and behold, the broom didn’t get COVID), the demand that everyone participate in their friggin’ neurosis. Show me one single LC-sufferer that was well adjusted & mellow prior to the pandemic. Seems to me half of them were already munching when this glorious virus arrived. Hell, you can have LC without even having had COVID, that’s one scary basic reproductive number!
And WHY oh WHY do they all claim something-something-eugenics?
Yeah, there's a reason why there aren't massive studies going on about long COVID: there's no evidence for it at all. Everything points to it all being in people's head. I know two people that claim to have it and of course they were the usual hypochondriac types that were always complaining about something before COVID and were constantly fear posting during the pandemic or had muh fibro and muh chronic fatigue. And it's always so weird how they always get their good days when they just so happen to want to go to something fun.
One of the best cumtown bits is about this.
"All of the people that have these diseases tend to have lives where not going to work is an option. It's a huge burden on the people around them that love them, but it's still an option"
"They're always tired or in pain... unless they have something they want to go do. In which case it was a good day. I was walking, I didn't need a wheelchair....but then it was time to do the dishes. For some reason my vacation to the Grand Canyon was all I needed to get walking and hiking but the second I got home it was straight back to bed."
And another thing you can do with spoilers is do [*Spoiler=YOUR TEXT HERE] to title the spoilers
Day 8. I got in a fun groove where I’d post one that had suffered major consequences of her actions for every one I posted that was just funny munchie antics for my entertainment. Everything was really enjoyable again. More of my old Florida posts went up and I dug into Cheyanne’s doctor and the corticosteroid-dependent disasters he left in his wake.
Eight Tilites a-rollin’
Seven bouts of sepsis
Six go-fund-mes
Five golden retrievers
Four superfluous prayers
Three mini-strokes
Two central lines
And a pancreatic enzyme cartridge in a pear tree
Rachel Denton / magically.mozart 1, 2, 3, update.
Service dog program puppy raiser who decided she wanted a service dog of her own but couldn’t figure out what disease she had. Went from rheumatoid arthritis to chronic lyme to the usual suspects to justify it. Trevino patient but didn’t want people to know. Works for Disney. Bought herself a pediatric wheelchair on eBay. Had a series of strokes after she got endocarditis and now is really disabled. Turns out it’s not as fun as she expected. Amongst her lingering issues are balance problems, muscle weakness, near-total deafness in one ear, and visual deficits. She has both hazy/dark patches in one eye and a visual processing issue that makes "busy" environments difficult to process.
She still medposts sometimes and tags EDS and dysautonomia. If a central line was really what caused the endocarditis, she likely doesn't have one anymore since she only shows peripheral IVs. I've been on the fence. At least one person told me the grapevine rumor was she had a port and just kept it off social media/only let the inner circle know about it, but I wouldn't necessarily consider drive-by DMs to be reliable sources. I thought her freaked-out reaction to having a PICC for a few weeks was proof enough that she never had a central line before that, but that was after the strokes and if the infection started in her port then it would make sense why "you need a new line into your heart for a while" would make her freak out.
She now has a power chair, but surprisingly not the one Trevino now gives out to all his patients, suggesting she might not still be with him after her strokes. Despite all her work she still hasn’t regained her strength and mobility three years after the fact. So Rachel is the mythical ambulatory wheelchair user. From the videos she posts it takes a lot of effort, concentration, and support but she can take a few steps without her chair if she’s on an even, non-slip surface. She still has significant weakness and balance issues from the stroke and does truly need her wheelchair for any other purposes. When in a manual she relies on Mozart pulling her and a SmartDrive because her arm strength has never recovered. She’s also been raising a new dog named Wolfgang through Topaz Assistance Dogs. He’ll be Mozart’s replacement when Mo retires.
Both Rachel and her aunt made posts about New Horizons Service Dogs recently. I had been on the fence about whether I thought the complaints about them were legitimate or a bunch of screeching munchies who got told no until now. Rachel and her aunt were two of their biggest cheerleaders for a decade and both of them have come out to say they can’t support the organization and its decisions anymore, so I’m convinced. Aunt Susan was the reason I couldn’t find the callout posts before because she flooded EVERY hashtag related to NHSD with puppy pics. She goes into way more detail than Rachel, citing their breeding program issues, the health of their animals, and ignoring the concerns of the trainers who work with these dogs all day as reasons she left.
In October Rachel went on a dream trip to Europe with her family and got bitchslapped by the reality of her situation: she can’t get anywhere because she actually needs the wheelchair and nowhere is accessible. Even though they did research beforehand trying to make sure she could participate in everything they found out that just because something says it’s accessible online doesn’t mean the path to get there is accessible or the wheelchair lift will work when you arrive. She went with her manual chair and Mozart to assist her but found her dad has to spend most of the trip pushing her in her chair or carrying her places. She might be able to walk a few steps but this is not a smooth surface with a yoga mat for traction like at home. This is uneven and worn stone paths in an ancient city.
First, a cruise around Greece. Her parents booked them on a bunch of walking tours but on learning Rachel is a wheelchair user she’s told they can’t accommodate her and cancel all her future bookings.
Everywhere she goes there’s stairs, curbs, tight corridors, and uneven paths she can’t navigate with just willpower and a golden retriever.
Then Italy. Venice is impossible to navigate because the canal network means stairs and bridges everywhere and there’s not even a place she can let her dog take a peepee.
The dog is also a pain to travel with because these places don’t have the same lax SD laws the States have so she actually has to prove he’s a real service dog that really does perform tasks and that she actually has a medical condition he mitigates. Funny for this thread, she’s able to do that because at this point she’s really disabled and he’s really a program-trained dog, even if she was just a chronic lyme munchie when she got him..
Amsterdam appears to be the only city she didn’t come up against a bunch of barriers in. Overall she says the experience was good and she’d continue to travel and adapt her plans as necessary but she hopes accessibility will improve.
It’s a harsh reality, but even 50 years ago they weren’t building with wheelchairs in mind. The truth is retrofitting accessibility is not as simple as “build a ramp, put in elevator.” Old buildings have narrow halls and doorways, tight turns, stairs, thresholds, built-in furniture... Even if the solution is “add ramp/elevator” there might not be room for one, as in a city building taking up most of the lot it’s built on, where a switchback ramp would take up the entire sidewalk and block pedestrian traffic but a straight ramp would be so steep as to be unusable. Also consider that a lot of places Rachel wanted to visit were notable because of their historic value and the integrity of the site. How much of that integrity is deemed an acceptable loss to ensure she can get in there, and will that loss of integrity mean that the vast majority of visitors who don’t use a wheelchair are no longer interested because it feels artificial and altered? And this is not even mentioning the extraordinary costs of retrofitting accessibility.
Rachel is at least aware of this and that “add ramp” is not the be-all-end-all. Theres a bunch of other weekend wheelchair warriors who have no real concept of what retrofitting accessibility actually entails (cough Nina) and just screech about shit like it’s a quick and easy fix. Rachel is also a lot more willing than others to admit that if she wants to get around in an inaccessible world, she has to sometimes accept compromises like her dad pushing her up a steep grade rather than deciding she doesn’t need the chair today. Weird, almost like she’s actually disabled and doesn’t have a choice about things.
I do have to laugh at some of the stories I catch. Rachel you don’t have to post this anymore. We all know you need the chair.
Anyway, she’s still keeping up with her PT and hoping she’ll get better. Godspeed.
Shelby Lynn Logsdon/Julian Gavino / thedisabledhippie:
timeline 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, update in Mel's post
FTM Jaquie acolyte who tried to throw the Queen under the bus on LCF for skinwalking her and ended up getting exposed as a creepy skinwalking munchie herself. Trevino patient. Former lesbian with extra steps. The poster child for Trans Regret. Wife divorced her when she started leaning back into femininity after her unnecessary double mastectomy. “Disabled” model. Overshares about her sex life to an audience of teenagers.
DETRANSITIONED! I wasn’t even gonna mock her over this. On reddit she straight up said that getting out of affirmation-only care and into therapy that taught her how to stop pathologizing everything in her life was what made her give up the farce. That’s literally all I want these young women to do. Learn how to deal with your emotions like an adult and get out of the crab bucket of social media “everything is a symptom!” shit. Excellent.
But she also talked about how not passing was a huge stressor in her life, especially around Covid which... Shelby, baby. You wore makeup, long-ass nails, feminine attire and jewelry, and had your hair long and expected people to guess he/him from this when your only "masculine" trait - the beard - was covered by a coof mask.
And then she broke the news to instagram on her birthday. Unfortunately, she’s still selling Gender Koolaid, claiming ~gender is a journey~ and this one’s hers. Gender is also a spectrum (of sex-coded stereotypes that are meaningless past a superficial level because humans are either male or female and all the surgery, pills and cross dressing in the world won’t change that.) Still pretneding that this is an industry that has any regulation, as if she wasn’t shilling an informed consent-based telehealth app that sold hormones to anyone who said they wanted them. Also no mention of the issues she brought up on reddit like her internalized homophobia and her wife not wanting to be seen as a lesbian. But I gotta say, the pendulum must be a’swingin’ because two years ago detransitioners were getting destroyed as traitors on this platform no matter how softly they tread and she’s getting YASS QUEENed.
She’s also still pretending she has all her made-up health problems and needs a powerchair and can’t walk, so there’s that. NO REDEMPTION SAGA FOR SHELBY. At least Atlas seems to be mostly retired.
One of the reasons she detransed was that no matter what dose she was on her testosterone levels weren't stabilizing and the hormones fucked her heart up. Gee, almost like you're female and shouldn't be injecting yourself with that. She claims she overdosed twice which I did not know was a thing you could really do.
She doesn't work and now the fiance doesn't work either. They're doing gig work while trying to find something.
She has a terrible tattoo she got in impulse and wants to fix now.
I'm sure you wanted to know about the state of her testosterone-mangled clitoris.
she needs hair removal but she still has to shave every day and cover it with concealer. She's saying she had a thick beard but on her insta she used to talk about how she used eyeshadow to fill it in and make it look better because it was so sparse.
She wishes she didn't cut her titties off.
I happened to catch one of her stories while finishing this and she's posting American Girl doll content. Why are these dolls haunting me?
Denae Manchester dba denae_thriving143 fka poisonhivey
timeline 1, 2, 3
Funny MCAS faker who thought sticking her tongue out and squinting her eyes was a convincing facsimile of angioedema. Afrin patient, moved from Boston to South Carolina when the Boston doctors kept telling her she wasn't sick. Steroid bloated. Spends all her time in bed with adult coloring books. Held her husband hostage with fake anaphylaxis such that he wasn’t allowed to get a job, have friends, or visit his own family because she needed him with her at all times. Claimed she couldn’t eat anything except vanilla ice cream from one specific shop despite massive weight gain.
She finally unlocked her instagram after a year and a half! She apparently stopped posting after I timelined her and only came back on Halloween of that year. You can see she still has her tube hanging out of her shirt.
Shortly before I posted her she talked about how she missed camping with her husband and wanted to be that person again. I thought it was typical munchie ‘but I never can be and it’s okay to grieve’ schlock and wrote it off as such.
She has her birthday with a massively steroided Brynn and that kid that makes me sad because I’m convinced she’s being by-proxied. The kid makes her a box of affirmations that mention Taylor Nearon, the one who got steroided to death by Dr. Afrin.
She cooks and eats Thanksgiving dinner.
Service human Brad needs surgery for his tennis elbow. She admits that the last two years hes been waiting on her, he’s been in debilitating pain.
In April she visited Cheyanne.
Surgery done.
They celebrate their anniversary at the lake and have a nice time.
And his birthday.
Cheyanne is dead. Amongst the people who come into the comments are potsie Nicole and Katie Stanina.
She has a good birthday. Cheyanne’s mom gives her a special necklace. Brynn looks like her face got caught in a pool drain. Overall seems to be improving. No more healthposting and starting to enjoy life again. Good for you Denae.
Recently Cheyanne's mom came to visit and gave her a blown-up photo of her and Cheyanne.
But never forget why Denae got posted here:
(these are just some of the many pictures of her "mast cell reactions". She couldn't figure out why the doctors didn't take her seriously.)
Madeleine-Camille “MC” Preuninger / wheelsaremyoyster:
timeline 1, 2
Autistic food allergy faker and cartoon frog enthusiast. Wanted to be an ASL interpreter but decided she liked the attention she got from being assumed deaf more than she liked helping people. Eventually got diagnosed MCAS by a quack and prescribed high-dose steroids which she refused to wean off of when told and doctor shopped to find new people who wouldn’t take them away even after her bones started to fracture and she developed avascular necrosis. Obsessed with getting a wheelchair even when her doctors tell her to stop using it before her injuries become permanent. Briefly a port-and-tube munchie until her mommy told her no. Tried to commit suicide-by-peanut but isn’t actually allergic to peanuts so they just put her in the psych ward. Spine collapsed from corticosteroids while laying in a psych hospital bed for weeks during a spell of inpatient homelessness. Now she has a real SCI and also developed a major allergy that almost killed her.
Her building finally fixed the door on the wheelchair lift so she can safely get around again.
She’d gotten back into her sewing/clothesmaking hobby after her on-purpose accident and continues to make more complex garments. Her homemade duds are being mistaken for store bought goods now and she feels good about herself.
She gives people tips on what to do if they accidentally roll into soft asphalt this summer.
She’s still doing parasports.
And selling her handcrafted wheelchair accessories on etsy. She has really good reviews and over 900 sales.
Honestly she doesn’t even seem to regret it. She wanted life-threatening allergies and a reason to use a wheelchair, she got them both, now the wheelchair life is central in both her hobby and her income stream and she’s enjoying her life. Good for her, I guess?
Brynn Duncan dba byrnnkaitlin
timeline 1, 2, update
OG MCAS munchie who inspired many more. News story about her fake MCAS went viral in 2015 right around when every attention-seeker on the internet started claiming they were diagnosed with this “rare” disease. The one who convinced a whole group of girls to move to South Carolina so that Dr. Afrin could manage their care long-distance. IRL besties with Cheyanne Perry and Denae Manchester.
Still steroid bloated and pretending her puppy with a few weeks of obedience boot camp is a real service dog.
She got to see Tay Swift in concert.
She went to a munchie convention
Cheyanne is dead.
She was in a wedding.
She saw Pink in concert.
And she went to Nashville.
When Taylor Nearon was alive her family started a fundraiser 5k called Super T’s Mast cell Showdown that still happens annually. Taylor gave Brynn, Denae, and Cheyanne capes to wear with their names on it. When the event rolled around this year, Denae and Brynn held Cheyanne’s up for a photo op.
She’s recently let us know her port is infected again and she’s trying to avoid sepsis. I checked her facebook to see if she updated publicly there and she did not. I did find an ancient picture of her with Betsy, her friend who actually had a real rare disease (intestinal lymphangiectasia) and died from it. Note that Brynn is in her wheelchair with her "service dog" while Betsy has stood up out of the chair she actually needed because she genuinely could not walk the 5k they just finished. That’s about it. She’s just bloated and boring. But as a side note, I never understand the steroid munchies. I mean, better pred than dead if you need it but holy shit man, it’s just not fuckin worth it for social media clicks. You end up fat as fuck, diabetic, with rotten bones, horrible skin, and no hair.
These fucking covid people are rediculous. YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS AFTER? FUCKING HARDLY ANYTHING.
I have a pre existing heart condition, my heart just has been beating slightly more fast from before. The most draumatic change I've seen from ANYONE is my husband, because it fucked up the bacteria in his stomach so he can't be a god damned dumpster like he used to be.
Anyone who has a serious side effect already had a pre existing condition that just needed ANY illness at the right time, or they probably had a secondary disease while you were fighting covid. (Pretty sure husband had both flu and covid but so hard to tell, it's basically a severe cold imo)
Our sense of smell came back, most people will have only temporary dulled senses (although it can last up to 6 months for some people)
You know what's a hell of a lot worse? A combo of pneumonia and strep (I've had this several times)
Also thank you to the person that explained spoiler titles, couldn't for the life of me figure it out.
TB has had a resurgence in Libya due to unchecked third world migration and a crumbling healthcare system, where as it was all but eradicated a decade or so ago. Thanks Obama. Anyway, most people, including myself, have had to deal with it. It sucks. It’s not fun, or pretty, or romantic. Due to its latency period you can go for years without knowing you have it, and then BOOM, you’re drenched in sweat every night, loosing weight, and feel like someone is taking an ice pick to your lungs. If you catch it right at symptom onset (as was my case), then you’re lucky, as your lungs, kidneys, and brain aren’t full if holes like a piece of Swiss cheese and you’re not a walking disease vector.
The antibiotic chemo is intense and taken VERY seriously by health officials. If you are actually sick you may not be able to go home and post romanticized selfies at all, that is if you even felt like it after spraying the walls with bloody gunk every time you cough, or are lucid enough after your brain is eaten away.
Also nobody that isn’t homeless and hopelessly mentally ill is going to die of TB in the first world, there is a cure and it’s not a disease that you can just say ‘lol ok I’ll just die then’, there are serious consequences to non compliance with the antibiotic regimens. To be noncompliant is to willfully choose to spread a deadly, highly contagious disease, it doesn’t look good on paper and probably wouldn’t earn a munch any sick girl brownie points.
Just to be clear the studies I wanted were on covid in general and not long covid because long covid is exactly as stated here: a Munchie's golden opportunity.
So after I got what I assume was the coof for the first time I did take a long time to recover (months). The reason for this was not that it's wildly different to any other corona virus, just that it made me REALLY ILL because my body didn't know the virus and didn't know how to control it. All the coughing and malaise just took longer to clear out and then the recovery time was longer. The lungs took longer to heal etc etc. And as I've mentioned hardly any of us are as fit as we could be living in our majority sedentary states, eating the poor nutritional diets.
The thing is I am interested in what may have been different with this novel coronavirus but the science is riddled with fear mongering and the discourse is a trash fire.
The other thing that gets me gnashing my teeth is every time there's a new strain. We know it mutates. As does every virus. The new strains are more contagious. As is the will of a virus. Not news. However those who profiteer either financially or socially from peddling fear write NEW STRAIN OF COVID 50X MORE CONTAGEOUS missing the key fact that it's also LESS DEADLY less HARMFUL i.e everything is right and as it should be and doing exactly what we knew viruses did anyway. It's like we just took all our prior information and burned it in favour of LARPing that we were in a disaster movie.
And again I really want to emphasise my position in all of this, I don't just think the branch covidians are all retards but the majority of this site too with the WE JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT VACCINE DOES erm no, youdon't understand the vaccine. It doesn't mean no one does. And I don't live and die by the vaccine either, I got the first two and I'm not bothering to get any more because I don't need it. I also support people who don't want to get it: fair enough. It's not the kind of vaccine like smallpox where the disease will be eradicated. But to act like somehow we've all been injected with cucking death serum is fucking retarded as well. Yes very good you didn't get vaccinated, you have shown that you won't be controlled. Move the fuck on with your shit little life.
The unscientific aspects of how that situation was handled was not about using an "untested" vaccine (trust me, it would not have needed THAT much testing) it was the disregard of a millenia of built up understanding in favour of political point scoring on both sides. They should have just come out and said "this is probably going to be a pulmanory virus. It's going to hit us hard. If you already are fat, have asthma, copd (insert any other number of weak-making illnesses) you might die or end up seriously ill so take xyz precautions. We are going to fast track a vaccine that we already have half done but no one thus far has given enough of a fuck to finish. This is going to be a shit show for a while, try not to clog up the hospitals with your bullshit ouchies. the virus will become less serious as it naturally moves through the population as all viruses do and have done. If you are a weak human being soz you need to stay in and wait for the vaccine."
Instead we got friends and families hissing and spitting at one and other that you were basically a murderer or a cuck in some way or another while big businesses a d governments cackled and those with a nervous dispotion trembled and handwrung themselves into psychiatric disorder. Not to mention all of those who died at the hands of abusers when it was deemed "not an essential service" to safeguard those people. And yet if you dare to question the going narratives on corona virus you are deemed NOT VIRTUOUS enough. And that's the opportunity for the munchies, to monopolise the drama and people's guilt to engineer their own fiction that suits their vampiric lifestyle.
Anyway this is the last I'm going to sperg about this, pinky promise.
Depending on where you live, of course, if you have 'normal' TB you can usually stay home but you'll be hassled every day by a Public Health Nurse to make sure you're taking your meds.
If you're unlucky enough to have multi-drug resistant TB (or you have the normal kind but you are the type of client that can't be trusted to stay home and take your pills) you've bought yourself a multiple month stay in a negative pressure isolation room in the hospital. nobody wants to risk you somehow getting Super TB that is resistant to everything and spreading it around town.
TB is a super interesting disease, if anyone is interested in microbiology stuff. It's tricky to grow and takes a long time, different to normal bacteria you would receive in the lab. And as mentioned it can just hang out hiding somewhere for years, and then affect weird parts of your body.
Also back in the day (like 50ish years ago) they used to treat TB by chopping out chunks of affected lung, but Surgeons thought you couldn't just leave the empty space there so they would put all manner of items in the empty space like ping pong or tennis balls. Every now and again you'll have an elderly patient come in with a wild looking chest x-ray cos they had this done in their youth
To be noncompliant is to willfully choose to spread a deadly, highly contagious disease, it doesn’t look good on paper and probably wouldn’t earn a munch any sick girl brownie points.
Her main complaint was lupus, which she didn't have either and would chimp that her doctors were not diagnosing her and she was going to die from it. She just further romanticized a fictional 19th century English/American version of tuberculosis-as-fashion, which was actually a thing albeit not much like what she was imagining. She combined her love for this schlock and her conviction that she had lupus the doctors were too foolish to see on their "tests" into some fantasy where she'd lay in her pretty pink canopy bed having her husband wipe the sweat from her brow as she wrote poetry and waited for death.
If anyone's interested in this phenomenon, enjoy this spoiler.
PL I studied 19th/early 20th century medical history and my very niche happy place was women's and children's medicine in the urban US which is to say "I am marginally less stupid about this topic than I am about most others."
Carrie didn't want tuberculosis but this very romantic fictionalized version of it that was briefly popular amongst certain populations in the United states and western Europe in the late 19th century. She's an idiot and misses just a few things like that those romantic portrayals were deliberately romanticized by the people who had it to push a false narrative; that we didn't know what germs were yet; and that this disease was disproportionately killing young people in their prime for reasons not understood. And as Gaddafi pointed out, the latency period made it unpredictable and almost innocent in comparison to say, cholera which we knew from the start was brought in on ships where immigrants were shitting themselves inside-out even if we didn't know the shitting was caused by Vibriocholerae. You could trace an outbreak back to the people who brought it in and you can watch it spread from the immigration port through immigrant neighborhoods to the rest of the city and getting away from those people drastically decreased your chances of catching it. Whereas with TB you've got wealthy people who leave the urban crowds and squalor for leafy suburbs and still wake up drenched in sweat one day and people who were in close contact with consumptives who never caught the disease.
So, tuberculosis spreads faster in cities which is also where the artists and poets are choosing to live, therefore many of them either had/survived tuberculosis or knew people who did just because statistics do work that way. We understand why this is now (close quarters, poor sanitation) but at the time there were some pretty wild theories that tuberculosis either happened disproportionately in the artist and the poet, or that it enhanced one's creative abilities. Thus these artists and poets created a romantic and glorified version of the disease where it happens to the good, the innocent, the beautiful, and the desirable and we get characters like Fantine from Les miserables, Mimi from La Boheme, and Violetta from La Traviata. This trend coincided with a newly-born middle class of women who had two things they'd never had before: money and free time. If you were lucky enough to be of the income bracket where you could afford to not work and hire domestics, you suddenly had a lot more time to read novels about beautiful young women suffering beautifully from a beautiful disease that made them beautifully romantically poetic. And thus we find a trend of women starving themselves and using arsenic to lighten their skin, belladonna to dilate their pupils, and makeup to flush their faces trying to emulate the look of the romantic consumptive woman and spending their days playing this role publicly. Towards the end of the era, recovering (or dying, for that matter) at a sanatorium became a popular amongst the wealthy which further divorced the reality of the disease (like that it spread like wildfire in the poorest, dirtiest neighborhoods) from the ideal. This is where we truly get the "reclining on a bed on clean white cotton sheets in an airy room full of natural light and fresh cut flowers" shit she was going for.
In the late 1880s/early 1890s we learned what caused tuberculosis and it was people coughing and spitting Mycobacterium tuberculosis-infected lung goo all over the place. And we very soon learned that the same bacteria that caused the beautiful waif disease they were emulating also causes some really disfiguring shit like lupus vulgaris, scrufola, and Pott's Disease. Almost overnight it went from beautiful romantic artist ailment to icky flesh-mangling disease spread by dirty poor people and their gross bodily fluids.
While we're on the subject of TB, I'll give a shoutout to a book I love: The Plague and I, by Betty MacDonald (The Egg and I, Ma and Pa Kettle, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle). It was published in 1948 and is a memoir of her own time in a TB sanatorium in Washington State from 1938-39.
She was hospitalized at Firland Sanatorium (thinly veiled as "The Pines" in the book), and you can find lots of digitized photos from that sanatorium online if you like to look at that kind of thing (I do). There's a lot about the treatment methods and the extreme boredom of having tuberculosis.
MacDonald is enjoyably snarky and honestly probably would've had an account here.
Oh the subject of Shelby BTW, kinda wild how she has come to all these big girl conclusions in therapy about how she was just transing to create a stronger, protective persona and to help her displace her actual issues - yet still death gripping onto her sickest girl LARP. Will she ever have clarity about this or is it proof that a Munchie is for life and not just for Christmas?
Carrie didn't want tuberculosis but this very romantic fictionalized version of it that was briefly popular amongst certain populations in the United states and western Europe in the late 19th century.
She was hospitalized at Firland Sanatorium (thinly veiled as "The Pines" in the book), and you can find lots of digitized photos from that sanatorium online if you like to look at that kind of thing (I do). There's a lot about the treatment methods and the extreme boredom of having tuberculosis.
Has there been any discussion on THIS one? Pretty sure she’s a Florida patient who has the nose hose yet can find time to eat a whole ass Wendy’s ice cream in their largest cup size lol
No. This one doesn't ring any bells. They look new. For a few minutes at first initial glance I thought Kat Loosemore (BarfieQween) but not. Similar looking, round head, fauhawk at times, glasses, but those seem to preppy for the other tubieqween... probably around same size, but hard to tell, sweatshirt and boobs up photo..
Lol wonder what Kat's up to?
hello, I return with more reddit nonsense from r/psychiatry
I'm a relatively new attending - though if you check my post history I'm prooobably stretching the definition of new at this point. I'm getting going with my own outpatient practice now so I'm lacking the support of supervisors and peers and such and the acuity is a little different to what I'm used to in the hospital.
I've been having some people present seeking ADHD diagnoses who meet very few of the criteria for it and have no longitudinal history of symptoms. It's mostly women, but there's a good few men too. Upon questioning there's normally a vague idea of lacking motivation and wanting to be further along in life than they are. Think 25 year old who never quit their retail job because they never could settle on a better career path or failed a few intro courses and gave up, no offense to retail workers.
Intelligence seems broadly normal, mood disorders if present are mild (and when treated don't tend to improve the life issues, if anything the life issues are lowering their mood), a few had BPD and / or ASD and I can see how this would be related, but most don't. I've kicked back a few to their PCP for general fatigue workup and that's been negative except in one incident where she was really anemic. There's no real common developmental theme here, trauma or otherwise - I could call some of them a little sheltered but I'm reaching. A good few have some choice words about capitalism and society in general, valid points I suppose but that's not much of a reason to not live a life.
Somewhat perjoratively I see people call this presentation "acopia", DSM-II might've slapped them with "inadequate personality disorder".
I'm just sort of lost on what to do for them. "Bad at life" isn't a diagnosis and certainly not one I'm going to give a patient. Most are actually pretty disappointed to hear they don't have ADHD. What am I meant to do in this scenario? I'm neither much of an inspiration nor a life coach - I'm almost tempted to say they don't have a meaningful psychiatric pathology to treat and thus I should discharge but they also clearly have (subjective) distress relating to where they are and I wish I could do something about it.
Had a patient yesterday who came to me with ADHD on concerta and Wellbutrin which are maxed. All the dopamine in the world doesn’t change someone who is not motivated to do something they don’t enjoy
I suppose it's far too easy to latch onto the stimulants and deny personal responsibility because of how shockingly effective they are when you first try them. Suddenly, you have the energy and discipline to do [boring thing the human brain didn't evolve to do for hours at a time, with intermittent breaks consisting of social media scrolling], and it's easy for people to then conclude "Ah, guess there was something chemically wrong with my brain, since this med fixed it."
so which term do you prefer: acopia, dyscopia or inadequate personality disorder? my favorite is dyscopia
now, from a completely different subreddit: r/askwomenover30
Him and I have gone thru issues before with us being overly focused on his health concerns to the detriment of mine. Some of it stems from him having a crap mother who only gave him affection when he was ill. So early on in her relationship, I realized that he’d be stressed out and would act like any ailment (real or imagined) was the worse thing and he needed me to dote on him 24/7. Meanwhile, my crap childhood taught me that being ill or injured made you a major inconvenience and it was somehow your fault because you probably didn’t listen to your mom and you didn’t wear your coat while outside playing (even though you did but somehow you deserved it). So taking care of sick people is not natural to me and I don’t like it so when I’m put into that role, it gets really tiring. Especially when the person is being too whiny. Or probably not even sick.
So of course after mostly getting thru that issue, he has a 2 year period where he really does have a bunch of health issues. Non-related. Totally random. And I’m getting burnt out. Finally after he’s been doing fine for months, he gets the flu. I take care of him. He feels better right until I come down with it. He offers me no help. At one point, I had to walk to a nearby deli because we have no food (pre Instacart days). I know he is feeling better than me because he’s up watching tv. He’s no longer in the stage I am where all you want to do is lie down and sleep. It hits me how unfair he is being.
When I recover, I went off on him. I made it clear that he dropped the fucking ball. He asks me what I need. I tell him that I need a break. Unless he needs an ER, I’m not interested in helping him or covering for him or hearing about it for 6 months. He actually managed to tone down his whining for a few years and learned that he gets more affection from being healthy.
But he’s back at it. I had food poisoning earlier this year. I made it clear that the culprit was from food at a party that he did not go too. I made it clear if he started mimicking my symptoms, I’m done (he had that habit too. If something is wrong with me, it’s wrong with him too). He did a good job. A few months later we both caught Covid. It was rough. He did a good job again of helping me until he got sick. Then it was like he played sick longer so he’d be down the same amount of time as me. Annoying but whatever.
And we come to now. I had an accident and ended up with an infected wound. It was really bad. It’s like one of the worst things to ever happen to me medically. Recovery was slow. I’ve never had a medical issue like this in the years we’ve been together. I had a really bad fever and lethargy for several days. I also couldn’t physically do a lot for some time. So he had to step up. Which mostly meant taking care of the pets more (he’s the main reason we have them) and cleaning. He took care of the pets but barely cleaned. I also had to beg him constantly to clean the litter boxes often enough.
I’m already pissed. But now he just came to me and said he was feeling sick. All of his symptoms are what I have. That is right. He somehow caught an infected wound from me! I’m still fucked up and he’s pulling this shit! He literally repeated the symptoms I had from the active infection and then the antibiotic side effects. I made the mistake of needing to stop while we were walking the dogs due to being nauseous. I said I couldn’t wait to get home and lay down in bed. And several hours later that fucker is nauseated and in bed. I’m actually really thinking about divorce over this. It is like a light switch goes off that if I don’t feel well, he doesn’t either. And if he has to keep himself from flipping that switch too long, aka has to actually help me, he falls apart.
*edit: I realized from some of the comments that I may not have emphasized how fucked up I still am. I might not fully recover and may spend the rest of my life partially disabled. I'm still on a shit ton of antibiotics which are wrecking me health wise. If our positions were reversed, I'd be sucking up any of my own ailments to support him. Which I've done for him for less severe issues. I was literally able to walk the dog with him for the first time since this happened and he immediately decides its his turn to be cared for.
I'm too tired to pick out comments to highlight but I recommend reading thru the thread, it's a fascinating insight into what male munchies are up to (hint: abusing their wives)
