flamingsword | Entries tagged with health

I am back in bed until 4 pm because I am trying to fight off a throat infection because when I do too much for too long, my immune system tanks and things stop healing correctly. Everything about my body gets a little off. I had my period for an hour yesterday and then it stopped. Today my throat is sore and my glands are swollen. I've been snacking on raw cabbage for a few days so the ulcer is going away. I got a massage yesterday to help deal with the body stress. I'm drinking a crapton of throat soothing herb tea and lying in bed with all of the blankets on to sweat this out. It will get fixed, all of it, but it makes me irritable/discouraged when I can't do the things I want because my body can't live up to the number of things to accomplish that my brain has ideas for.

It occurs to me that even if I had a sponsor or trust fund or something that would let me camp out at an Occupy and still pay my bills, I would not be able to do so. As I get older the photophobia (painful sensitivity to light) is getting worse. With the goggles on I can deal with maybe two hours of sun on a good day, half an hour on a bad one before my thoughts get nonlinear and I lose words. If I don't get out of the sun shortly after that i could give myself a migraine. Every migraine incrementally increases your risk of stroke. I don't want to end up like my cousin Julie. It feels selfish to put my desire for physical safety over my desire for actions toward the freedom of our country. I am stressed out.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

I was thinking recently of trying to add gluten back into my diet because of how much I miss croissants. But then I started making a list of the benefits and possible costs. In the plus column: chocolate croissants. Eating out with friends sans excessive planning. Not having a thing that I have to always be paranoid about.

Unchanged: get cysts either way.

Negatives: the return of migraines. The immune system of fail. Higher cancer risk. Become anemic again and have low blood pressure issues.
Ive been sick twice this year instead of the usual once a month. My immune system works better this way. And I miss croissants, but its not worth my health to have them even if there is not a passable substitute.

It bothers me to know that there will always be things I want and cant have, but then I forget to be annoyed until the next time it becomes an issue. How sad is that?

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Two weeks ago I got back on birth control because I thought I might have an ovarian cyst. It was an occasional pain, and I wasnt waiting for it to get worse before I did something about it. The symptoms are the same as two years ago, and Im as sure as I can be short of an ultrasound. Last time this happened I missed 13 days of work across two and a half months, which was pretty inconvenient. Yesterday I missed work because I was over-medicated to the point of being a little woozy and low-blood-pressurey and I still couldnt stand up straight.

Yeah, I have another thing wrong with me. And it hurts and everything, but what really gets to me is this sense that my body is wrong somehow, that it isnt supposed to be this way. Theres a lot of conflation of feelings there, and its hard to chase down. Betrayal, worry, tenderness for my body, aggravation, defeat. I feel like my body is a failure, like no matter how much care I take of it, it is never going to perform on par with similar models. I feel defective.

I want a robot body. As soon as it becomes available, if they need early adopters to test it out, I am willing to jump off the edge of the world, out of these perceptions and into something possibly dangerous or hellish, so that I can have some kind of standard model of something. Ray Kurzweil promised that we would have robot proxies already, and I am still waiting, yo.

Now Im going to go listen to Rainbow Connection by Weezer again.

My body is defective. It's nowhere near that time of the month and I am turning into a ball of pain.

( so I may have to say everything and edit later. )
I know nothing about medical powers of attorney, but I've got a tab open with google results to remind me after I finish this. Any experience here, flist?

Since going gluten-free and being on the liver cleansing diet, I have noticed that my hair is falling out less (still not getting less creepy), but the reparative effects of the diet may take six months to a year to become apparent. That's okay, though, I'll still be on this diet until they get better evidence concerning the link between gluten, casein, and autism spectrum disorders. Synchronicity needs to stop following me around. I don't like it that way. Let's just be friends?

I may have to take the advice discussed here on seeing if the gluten-free diet takes away my migraines (because apparently everything that's ever been wrong with me can be caused by a food sensitivity), and then re-institute a wheat-containing diet for a few weeks to get a diagnosis.

I have been reading too much. And possibly reading into too much? We'll see in a few months.

In other news:
* one of my closest friends is going batshit insane and I'm trying not to go with him.
* I am about to post a massive number of things on Etsy tomorrow evening.
* Scratched a necklace photographing it, now it needs a home. Care to test international shipping,

maeritrae ?
* Saturday night will be spent at Ghost's house.
* I am having trouble sleeping alone. Y'all should sleep over. Slumber party at my house!

If you do not wish to hear the tale of stress and ZOMG CAPSLOCK WOE, you do not have to ( click here )

That is what I have been doing instead of commenting y'all's posts. Things will calm down by the fifteenth, and I promise not to kill anybody or shake people 'til they make sense. But right now I'm a bit on edge.

In the aftermath of a migraine, I am not eloquent. But I will try.

Years ago, I changed the way I think to remove metaphors from the context of my thoughts, because even if postmodernism lacks poetry, it is simple to use and understand. My metaphors were incomprehensible to most sane people; I wanted to be easier to understand. I traded the possibility of being romantic for the probability of communication. But at times like this, all my brain can come up with are thoughts like 'if you're this disappointed in yourself, imagine what you must be like to your friends', and that's sort of crippling.

( Musing on how I got this way. )

I'm not looking for an offer of help, I just want to tell you what's going on in my head. I hope to see my local peeps out at Panopikon/eXcuses Cafe tonight despite the hit-in-the-head feeling of aftermath.

Now I'm going to drink a gallon of water and get some potassium. Wish us luck, loves.

Sonogram results: I have a hemorrhagic cyst. That is, apparently, when you form a cyst that has a blood vessel going through it. If the blood vessel leaks blood into the fluid-filled cyst, it swells and presses painfully on surrounding nerves. According to my doctor, they usually fix themselves in less than a month, and unless the cyst bursts and I have internal bleeding, no surgery will be required.

Other than some aches and a few sharper twinges, it has been pretty painless the last two days. Things are looking up.

This pain thing is a bit rubbish isn't it?

All the gloriously satisfying violence that Inglourious Basterds promised but didn't quite deliver on, has now been consumed and cheered for by me and Blue. Saw Boondock Saints II today with

gonner221, and when I stood up the right side of my belly ached. I made it about eight steps before it felt like someone was kicking me in the nuts, and FYI: I don't have any nuts for the kicking. Seriously, body, what the fuck? And then he drove me home, because I am no fun when I am in pain. Either I can be distantly polite at you or I can pay attention but bite your head off at random. Sometime I would like for there to be a third option in there.

Anyway, tomorrow or the next day I get to see about doctor-type things, because this shit is just not on. Also, I realize that brit-slang is falling into my vocab, but it's not my fault. Blame

elucreh and all her links to Merlin fanfiction. It's as deep and historically accurate as Xena, but with magical gay boys and a giant slash dragon. I'm not even kidding. So much crack; my brains are in terrible danger.

Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America's most trusted newscaster? Oh, yeah!
Shatner does Palin on Late Night with Conan O'Brian.
Song that ear-wormed me earlier this week, Almost Human by Voltaire. I blame Blue.
AT-AT bed for your little ones. But where's MINE?
Our bodies glow. I feel like I should get a 'told ya so'.
Solillaquists of Sound bring the funk to your ears.
The snark is for those who wonder how to convey textual sarcasm. ~Really.~
Monkeys learn less from our mistakes than from our successes so please remember to thank people for anything you want them to keep doing. :)
Monsters & Rockets: a blog of many wins, and a place for geeks to prove that sharing really IS caring.
And finally: Former president Jimmy Carter being a good example of what belief in a deity should look like. He's putting the Christi back in Christianity, folks.

I feel so much better than I did this summer and spring. I guess I should talk about that. ( But it's gross, so it's behind a cut-tag. )

( This entry is a technical follow-up to the last post for those interested. )

My friends, my fandoms: please vote for what should go up on my other journal,

literalgame, in the Fandom Health Posts. I'm trying to decide what the most helpful therapies are for my fellow internet addicts. As we are mostly the sort to ignore the existence of our physical bodies, these problems are many and varied. Tell me your woes.

Since this may contain medical information that some may not want shared about, comment screening is turned on.

[Poll #977552]

Have you got something I missed? I'm not a doctor, but references to health studies abound on the internets. I'll hook you up.

ETA: Yeah, I don't know how to fix joints being on there twice. I'll account for it in post-production. ;)

If you have talked to me recently, you know of my doing something strange to my hip and having sciatic pain last week. It's baby's first sciatic nerve pain, and does that shit ever suck. It had been getting better and worse since last Thursday, but today I did some funny stretching and working on it and then twisted my back until the sacroiliac joint popped back into place, which I believe was the original problem. Yes,

cuts_inside, I will show you what I did, and we'll see if that helps you any. Do you want to go see March of the Penguins? I am back into a people-mood now that pain and weird grouchiness are gone.
Also, does anyone want to see the Body Worlds exhibit in Fair Park with me? It runs through May of next year, and I would so much rather go see that than ever have to do a dissection course for anatomy. It will be cool and creepy, and I know you guys are fans of the creepy. ;)

Also, thank you to dyingfire! The coins came in the mail and are neat!

Now that I actually have an immune system, getting sick is a strange thing. It happens a lot less, for one thing, and for the next thing I get fewer symptoms of being sick. Which is cool and all, but makes it really hard to identify what kind of sick I am. These last few days it has been joint and muscle aches with limited spinal mobility, and this hazy out-of-it feeling like someone turned the volume down on the world or my ability to pay attention to it. No fever, mild antipathy to food, mild irritability- but nothing unusual in those areas.

My point: I think medical science assumes that symptoms are the same from person to person for the same disease. It's like math to them, or computer science: if A -> then B. But what happens when you have a basically healthy person with a recently acquired illness who's mostly asymptomatic? Now that sanitation is common and health care is becoming so, you have a higher baseline from which to start measuring. So the same illnesses will appear differently. Is medical science working on ways to measure the relative health of different bodily systems, and ways to tell if there's been a recent change to those systems? Let's hope.

Doesn't sound like a big deal, and in many ways it's not. But here's my worry: there are viruses whose impact on the body directly correlates to how long they've been present in the system. So damage is being done before the patients even knows they're sick. Now that there are fewer people who will become immediately symptomatic, the period between someone becoming sick and knowing they're sick will be longer and much more likely to spread infection. All this leads up to my other point: what if one day all viral infections become like AIDS?

It's kind of a sci-fi concept, but also kind of inevitable.

Sorry I haven't been online and keeping up with the flist. I've been catching up with a few long-lost friends and doing upkeep things in the real world. But fear not: my LiveJournal obsession is alive and healthy.
To save having to have this conversation with several people, I'm just putting it here. It's kind of embarrassing, but it needs doing. Questions are welcomed, but for once I am going to give the touchy-subject warning. For serious: no teasing me about this, or I will be interesting to you. In the Chinese fashion.
( I have brain damage, but I don't talk about it much. )

Starting from the simple stuff and proceeding into the land of the padded walls:

Be Lazy

Don't get to know yourself. Hinder yourself with ignorance.
Invest no effort into complying with your principles. Avoid self-respect.
Don't think about how you can improve your habits. Fail to improve yourself. Don't grow or take pride in your own growth.
Make no contingency plans. Feel that if one thing goes wrong it was meant to, to screw up the rest of your day. Feel judged by higher powers. Don't recover smoothly.
Listen to your insecurities, instead of fighting them. Discover more fears. Feel like a coward.
Brood. Dwell on things and make them important instead of getting on with what you're doing.
Don't pay attention.

Maintain Your Illusions

Listen to gossip. Believe what you're told without checking facts at the source.
Feel betrayed by the truth when your illusions break down and you are forced to deal with things as they are.
Ignore the differences between things. Treat things all the same so that you get different results each time you come into contact with them and confuse yourself. It will make your bad mood easier to maintain to have something negative to fixate on.
Compare yourself to people you're not like. Comparing unlike things is designed to separate you from what's real, and using an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to will keep you too busy to question the inconsistencies of your context.
Ignore your weaknesses so that you get unexpectedly beaten at things you thought you were good at. Then berate yourself for your failure.
Don't listen to yourself to see if you're making sense. Find ways to justify your reasoning that don't apply to logic.
Submarine your self-image by not trusting in your abilities. Get used to the paralysis of uncertainty instead of ability to reach for what you want.

Focus On The Negative

Expect it to be about you whenever something goes wrong.
Use high-contrast "weighted" adjectives when thinking about your life to increase drama.
"Qualify" your joys. Don't take the good with the bad. Think that if something were really good, it wouldn't have a downside.
Think of the good things that happen to you as deviations from the norm. Then take them off the bell curve of your expectations entirely. Skew your statistical universe.
Focus on what's missing rather than on the things you have.
Hold your friends to an unrealistic standard so that you can dwell on their shortcomings.
Accept that any backsliding you do negates all efforts you put into crawling out of the depression you've now made.

Betray Yourself

Teach yourself not to want things. Have no goals. Give up hope.
Make time to do things that are bad for you physically, and can lead to health problems. Pain and illness will help your rough patch stand firm in the face of overwhelming joys.
Use self-fulfilling negative prophecies to prove to yourself that your self-hatred is reasonable.
Push away people who care about you.
Ask people for good advice. Don't take the advice, then beat yourself up for not taking it.

Advanced Rectal Haberdashery

Re-prioritize meeting the needs that you can get met now 'til after the needs that you can't get met until later.
Invest effort and frustration into impossible schemes trying to make those needs get met now.
Distract yourself from your need to fix your problems with drugs. Use people-related drama, religion, or illegal narcotics to keep your mind occupied and off-balance.
Deny responsibility or ability to fix your problems. Cripple yourself with despair.
Hurt other people so you can feel ashamed and horrible.
Be angry with your friends for interfering in your unhappiness. They're on your side, but you're not on your side, and that means they're against you.

Some people have medical reasons for being depressed. I am SO aware of that, hello. Even so, I dare you to say you've never done any of this to yourself. Or comment me with ways I've missed, and we'll add them to the master list. Because this is just the ways that my friends, family and I have messed ourselves up, and I'm sure there are creative ways to self-destruct that we've missed.

Before you guys try to die(t), I recommend making sure that you are as healthy as possible. A body that is mistreated or unhealthy is less responsive to change, so for some people it won't matter how much you diet. You will not change your shape until your body feels healthy and safe.

WATER is a useful tool. You body is mostly salt water, and when you dry out you get gummy and your salts crystallize and it's tres gross. How do you expect to wash away all the gross additives you ingest and the city air pollutants you inhale if you don't drink water?
CITRUS FRUIT Is a good thing for always, but especially after stressful days and heavy exercise. When you metabolise citric acid it forms, among other useful things, a base that neutralizes the lactic acid produced by your muscles. Lactic acid is what makes your muscles ache and it is THE BAD. So orange juice your pains to death. Or limeade. Or whatever.
APPLES are so cool. They contain cancer-fighting substances. They contain substances that help promote tissue longevity. They are sweet and tasty and crisp. They contain pectins and insulin-affective substances so that, while sweet, they don't throw your sugars out of balance. They are full of fiber, and we'll get to that in a minute. They are damn near the perfect food.
FIBER All of the trash your body needs to get rid of has to have something to be stuck in. Fiber is like the trash bags of the intestine. It gives your body somewhere to put all that nasty so it can be sent on it's merry way to fertilize the porcelain god. It makes your intestinal muscles' job easier so you don't have to strain as much to get the job done, and so it's good for your heart. Does that follow? Let me explain: When you have to strain to do something, your blood pressure momentarily skyrockets up into an unhealthy range. Any weaknesses in your arteries are made cumulatively worse every time. Further stresses on your heart and blood vessels like cholesterol plaques and high trigliceride levels are what form the base conditions that become heart failure. Don't let the base condition form, and your heart will win at life for a long, long time.
CINNAMON There's so many reason's I'm not going to type them,just read this.
CAYENNE is an anti-inflammatory. It promotes weight regulation, it increases circulation, it stimulates the lining of the intestines so that you absorb your foods better and eliminate them more easily, and prevents intestinal gas caused by slow digestion.
MASSAGE causes the increased production of both red and white blood cells. It breaks up cross-linked fibers in muscles that impede motion. It raises your awareness of your body. It causes the production of oxytosin, a narcotic-like substance normal to the brain, that helps alleviate pain, depression, and feelings of lonliness. It breaks up concretions of lactic acid in muscles and relieves muscle tension. It's nice.

Most of the people I know are upset that they're "fat" again, as 'tis the season to overindulge. Or was. And now comes the self-flagellation, etc., that they have to diet and whip themselves quickly into some different shape or another.

WILL Y'ALL QUIT IT?!

I'm tired just hearing about the regimens of strenuous exercises and pointless food restrictions and, for fuck's sake, PILLS. So in this mass-communication format I'm giving out my own secrets to having a body-shaped body. Everyone can agree that I'm pretty much shaped like an average healthy human (except for the fat head) so there's something to aim for before you all try to look like anime characters and martial arts champions. Okay?
#1. BREAKFAST. Eat breakfast every day. Unless you have a blood sugar condition breakfast should contain more carbohydrates than proteins. The portion size should run about 1 to 1&1/2 cups. There should be at least a little fiber. The carbs start your metabolism burning for the day. Small meals, about the size of a saucer instead of a plate - every four hours or whenever you're hungry, will prevent your body from overreacting to being hungry by slowing your metabolism and storing fat. Once your body is used to getting what it wants and not being hungry, it chills out and stops keeping the fat it thought it needed.
#2 TIME & REALISM. You didn't put on all this fat in a week, or even a month. So why do you think you'll lose it in a week or a month? If you want to get into a different shape, for real and forever, you ought to allot yourself as much time to get to that state as it took to get into this one. And don't go thinking that Kate Moss is a healthy shape to aim for. That's just sick. Be real.
#3 FIDGET. People who move around in their seats, who get up and walk around when they're waiting for something, who sit up straight and therefore use more muscles than it takes to slouch, all burn more calories and have a slightly higher metabolism. How's that for a run-on sentence? Move more, use more of your body, use it in ways it's not used to being used, and it will get used to being the kind of body that moves and will look like one. It takes a few months for the change to become visible, but it's that simple.
#4 VARIETY. Most of us have strange dietary needs. The normal human body is a myth, and feeding a body type that you don't have is what comes of that myth. If you want to intake more salt than is considered healthy, do it. If your body wants to eat zucchini, go get some. It's not just pregnant ladies that have the cravings, they just get them harder. Don't worry about the fat intake. Once you start having the higher rate of metabolism your body just processes fat like anything else. So if you want your zucchini drowned in ranch dressing, that's okay. Give your body what it wants and it's more prone to give you what you want.
#5 SLEEP. Sleep is part of being healthy and all good diets should include it. Changing the fundamental structure of how your body decides it's shape and energy protocols is hard work, best done while while you sleep. It's a time for your body to digest all the interesting things you feed it and use them to fix the structure of your body. Most of you run short on sleep anyway, and your body doesn't like it, and if your body is unhappy it will resist change.
#6 SEX AND EXERCISE. Exercise is a good thing. Play, which is a form of exercise that is fun, is even better. Sex is the best form of exercise ever. It has so many health benefits I'm not going to bother listing them. So go play, get exercise, masturbate, and have sex. Do the Monty Python silly walk. Get used to moving around and practice being in touch with your body. Once your shape starts changing you'll need this anyway, because your reflexes will still be on a default setting for your old shape and not for this new thing you're becoming.
#7 MAKE IT A HABIT. Once you get into the habit of eating smaller, more frequent meals you'll start planning your meals differently. You'll probably buy more tupperware. You might learn to make your own snack food, but let's not get crazy, shall we? Leave that to me. Get into the habit of giving your body different foods, different kinds of movement, different textures to feel, and different dreams every night because you actually get enough sleep.

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hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

written on the subway walls and tenement halls

Entries tagged with health

ill health and protest

the internet is in my bra!

biological sabotage

Seriously? I have cramps NOW?

I'm not sure what to say

(no subject)

I HAVE BEEN BUSY.

(no subject)

health update

Sean Patrick Flannery? Is still fantastic.

links.

health post

Slowing depression.

(no subject)

sciatica and sciences

Also, thank you to dyingfire! The coins came in the mail and are neat!

have been ill

brain damaged - no, literally

How To Depress Yourself And Get In Your Own Way

Remedial Potions

shape shifting made simple

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