#I got back from a loooong walk with friends and I'm exhausted

[doctor-amazing]

Mycology

I'm getting a bit twitchy. It's night, or morning, or whatever you'd like to call it. I'd figure out what to call it, myself, except for the fact that my phone's long dead and I can't seem to keep my sense of direction about me.

It's no help that the moon's not out, or the clouds are thick, or maybe I'm just seeing things again.

I think I breathed some of it in back there. That'd explain it. That'd explain a lot, actually.

It was fun, at first— the spelunking, that is. It's one of those things that always sounds intimidating, and awful, but with the right company, anything's a great time. I had my best friend with me, and we'd parked a loooong way down the road from a famous cave that'd been cordoned off.

Supposedly, there were some sort of bioluminescent fungi that lived in the caverns, and they were being studied for some fancy glow-in-the-dark dye.

I need to sit down for a moment. Catch my breath. Telling this story is exhausting, yet I haven't said a word.

The fungi did glow well enough, in any case. We'd passed through the scientific base camp at the mouth— mostly abandoned, since apparently the company was waiting for a grant to finish their work, and that was our opportunity to get into the cave before security came back when there was more to guard.

The only signs of the occupation were two empty tents left standing, and a rack just inside the cave with a few full-body hazmat suits.

It's getting a little hard to move through the forest, now. Half of it's the wood getting thicker, but the other seems to be some sort of fatigue I can feel deep in my lungs. I'm having to huff a few raspy, staccato breaths for every one I'd have to take normally. I'd be more worried about it, but it's been a few hours of walking, so maybe it's just the dust kicking up.

The cave itself wasn't terribly hard to navigate by the light from our phones, and there weren't any crazy drops of tight turns, as luck would have it. We saw rope left haphazardly strewn around some junctions, where perhaps they had seen fit to map elsewhere, but had given up nonetheless.

Eventually, there was a sort of blue glow ahead— at my own insistence, my friend and I both snapped off our flashlights, and we let our eyes adjust to the light of the plant life ahead. Actually, can you even call a mushroom alive?

Turns out, it's not just the dust. I was right about breathing it in, after all. Do you want to know how I know I'm right?

I can feel it.

It's pulsating in my veins. Throbbing. Reaching. Waiting.

It's not patient, and it knows that it's already won the game that was afoot. The one I had no idea I was playing.

The reward for it is a sickening crack that reverberates throughout my body, and after a moment of excruciating pain, one of my arms goes entirely limp. My scream breaks the silence of the woods, but after the moment has passed, I realize my arm is completely numb except for some sort of lingering pinpricks and soreness.

A phantom pain, of sorts.

For a second, it looked like my friend had kicked up a helluva dust cloud from the stone floor, but then the coughing began.

My eyes watered, and I couldn't stop from blinking over and over and over again in a futile effort to get whatever the hell was in the air out of them. I stumbled, ran, and got a few nicks and scratches from whichever walls I got snagged on.

Eventually, enough distance had passed, and with one foot in front of another, I made it near the entrance, in one of the side passages. I looked around, called my friend's name, and then noticed something was off— a flashlight beam pointed at the ceiling, from the bottom of a drop.

I wanted to fucking vomit on the spot.

My eardrums feel like they're splitting apart, but the woods are as silent as ever. I can hear it— them, thrumming inside of me.

It's running through my bones, tearing through my flesh, making a home in my marrow and crevices.

I've scratched my arm to bloody ribbons. I can't tell if the itch is in my fingernails, or the mess it's made.

I figure I must be losing it on several fronts. The thrum of the thing inside of me is unbearable, and it makes me want to rip my ears off and grind the stumps of cartilage on my cranium into paste.

The... rot.

It's screaming at me.

The message, I still can't discern.

There's a pressure somewhere on my back, near my shoulder. It's hard to pinpoint where, but it's getting worse. Almost painful.

I'm still heading through the woods, but my prospects aren't good— I haven't seen the trail in hours, and it's not getting any lighter.

Looking over the cliff, my friend's body was splayed out like a ragdoll at the very bottom. I'd never seen that much blood in my entire life, and the stone piercing his skull glittered crimson in the light of his phone.

I stepped back.

Then took another step.

Then another.

I couldn't stop running, rushing past piles of rope, rushing past the hazmat racks, rushing past the tents, and into the brush beyond.

There wasn't an ounce of sense to my flight, and I lost track of the path immediately in the state I was in. At some point, I tripped, yelling in surprise, and slammed my outstretched hand into a stone on the forest's floor. My phone came up spiderwebbed with cracks.

Somehow, the humming has lightened up. Or maybe I'm adjusting, or maybe I'm beginning to understand it a little. There's a rhythm to it, as horrific as the wailing is, but it permeates my body, and I'm absorbing it with every second.

Exposure therapy.

I have something extra, now, to make up for this swollen, useless mess of an arm. Just above the shoulder blade, there's... something. It's new. Alien. I can't express what it's like to have something like that where it shouldn't be.

I can't tell if I'm horrified or pleased.

My other arm seems to have a mind of its own, too. A few times, it's swung at nothing, and the feeling is beginning to fade in a way that's entirely unlike the first. It's... slow, and patchy. Sometimes I can feel it, and sometimes I can't.

If I don't focus on keeping it still, it gets numb and starts to work on it's own accord. Like having your eyes pulled somewhere else every second.

I stop, breathless, and vomit something dark and red onto the forest floor. Something chunky. My breaths come ragged, and I come to the slow realization I don't know where I am.

My mind is everywhere, but I manage to keep my head up and keep moving. Any direction is better than here, so I'll start walking.

I'm twitching a lot, now. It's hard to see, but maybe it's just dark. It hurts, but it says it'll stop soon. It says we're close, that it can see the lights. Lights. Home. Food. I can hardly move by myself. The new growth is unfamiliar, so it helps me move sometimes. It says that it'd be better if I just let it lead for a little while, so I can sleep. Rest. It says that when I wake up again, it'll have found some food. That sounds nice.

I'm very hungry, after all.

I think I'll let it handle the rest.

[illmoraineakoi]

Fun Fact: A few years ago, I went to the ER with the worst stomach pain I ever had. I legitimately thought my appendix had burst, because it was in that general area and I still had mine.

It was a fucking nightmare.

[Under a Read More bc this got loooong. Also, Trigger Warning: Graphic Image]

They refused to do anything for me until I proved I wasn't pregnant via a urine sample.

I was so nauseous that I literally couldn't keep water down, and I hadn't drank anything for the entire day because of that (because I am American and had resisted even going to the hospital until the pain had reached that 'I think I might literally be dying' point.) So there's like four nurses that kept badgering me to drink the water, stop vomiting, tell us when you last bled from your vagina, who's your sexual partner, etc.

Some important facts about me: I have never once had sex with a living man; the only sexytime friends I have are the ones made from rubber. I have a VERY irregular menstrual cycle, to the point where I once only had four periods in an entire year (I heavily suspect I have PCOS.) And I am a very fat woman with crippling social anxiety.

Those immutable facts didn't matter apparently.

Because despite being a 25 year old adult, the nurses apparently decided that I needed to be chided to about how "A lot of young girls don't want to tell us this information because they don't want to get in trouble."

...So that was fun, being assumed to be a total liar about my sexual history :)

And also very patronizing, to be lumped in with 'young girls'. Maybe those same 'young girls' also don't want to tell you shit because you're also being super patronizing and righteously to them too, did you ever think about that?

The entire visit was like that. It felt like getting teeth pulled, and trying to pull teeth in return.

"We can't give you any pain meds until we're sure you're not pregnant." "Unless I'm the next Vi grin Mary, I can guarantee you I Am Not. I feel like my stomach is going through a chipper shredder. May I at least have a low does of something?" ":) No. Wait here for another half hour without seeing one of us. There's a tiny child complaining of a tummy ache three doors down."

[That child walked out of there in five minutes. He'd just had really bad gas. I get the need to prioritize people based on the severity of what was/might be wrong with them, but that still kinda pissed me off. Especially because it still hadn't be explicitly ruled out that one of my internal organs hadn't exploded.]

Shocker, how the nurses got a little grumbly when my test came back completely negative, because OF COURSE IT DID, I LITERALLY TOLD YOU THAT MY VAGINA HAS NEVER SEEN A REAL DICK IN HER ENTIRE EXISTENCE.

Reminder that I was 25-26 when this was happening. NOT a teenager, and not even an age where I could be mistaken for being younger than I actually was. I was an adult woman, and I looked like an adult woman. Who also gave her date of birth on the paperwork they made her fill out.

Who they had refused to not perform a pregnancy test on despite my repeated refusal and instance that such a test was unnecessary.

[I double-checked this with the surgeon who actually took care of the problem, afterwards. I asked specifically if the pregnancy test was used to look for other problems or help determine a suspected diagnosis. They sometimes could, she said, but not for me. Not for any of the things that could have been wrong with me outside of pregnancy-related things. The test was 100% just to determine if i was knocked up, and thus completely useless. A waste of everyone's time.]

Those nurses straight up told me if I refused to give them a urine sample to test, there was nothing they could do for me and they would have to ask me to leave. I HAD to comply.

At that point, i was in so much pain (literally crying) and so mentally exhausted that I just gave up and did what they wanted. And, also, by that point, the fluids they'd been pumping into me had actually gathered enough for me to be able to give them my piss.

That was the first instance of this HOSPITAL refusing to listen to me.

The second was when they found out what was wrong, and sent me home with three days worth of pain meds to last until my primary OBGYN handled the problem.

Important note: I did not have an OBGYN. I had to figure out who in my area accepted my insurance and then call around asking if they were open to new patients.

Or, I would have had to call around, if there wasn't exactly one (1) Lady Part Doctor within 100 miles of my location that took my insurance. Who had not been open to accepting new patients.

I begged. I literally fucking begged this office.

Just this once, can one of your doctors figure out what's wrong with me and help me. I'll fucking pay out of pocket if you want me to, I'll pay double, I'll do anything, just please give me access to someone who can tell me what the fuck is going on and make the pain stop.

Because oh yeah, the hospital hadn't done that.

They didn't tell me what was wrong with me. They just said "You have gynecological issues that we can't treat. Contact your OBGYN and go to them. Bye."

There was zero mention of the 13 inch wide Ovarian cyst that these motherfuckers found on the ultrasound they did. A hugeass cyst that could pop at any point and was literally strangling my ovary to death. The pain? Yeah, that's why; my ovary was twisted so tight that blood couldn't get to it and it was DYING. That pain was my right ovary's death screams.

It took a week to get into the OBGYN office. [My ovary was unsalvageable by that point. Any longer, and it would have started to rot and give me sepsis.]

Luckily, the universe decided that I had suffered enough misfortune during this horrible situation, and threw me a miracle that I am still grateful for to this day: the main OBGYN doctor of the office I begged had agreed to see me.

Because apparently she had figured out what was likely wrong just from those ten minutes of talking to me on the phone, and had become concerned enough to want more information.

Also apparently, she was APPALLED that the hospital had ever let me walk out it's doors, because she very much considered this to be a huge emergency requiring surgery ASAP.

The problem being this fucking thing:

[Warning: Graphic]

Yeah, that was inside of me.

That is the Dermoid Cyst they pulled out of me. That red tubey thing on the right of the second pic? That WAS my ovary.

What had happened was that, that day, I had moved just wrong enough for it to then shift inside me and twist my ovary at the falopian tube. This thing was likely growing inside of me for most of my life, which is normal for dermoid cysts. They're just normally found before they're so big and also normally don't cause problems.

I forget the exact measurements they took of it, but I think it was even larger than they thought it was. I just default to 13 inches because that's how big she originally told it might be from the ultrasound imagining, and that number kinda fried my brain.

[It was noncancerous. Just full of normal Dermoid Cyst stuff, like hair, fat, puss, etc.]

I had that inside of me. For a full week. While it had twisted my ovary and strangled it to death.

AND THE HOSPITAL HAD DETERMINED THAT IT WAS THERE AND SENT. ME. HOME.

The OBGYN doctor who agreed to see me had been my savior. She was a godsend. Because she wasn't just an OBGYN, she was also a surgeon. She MADE room in her schedule to do surgery on me the very next day.

That was how concerned she was about this thing rupturing inside of me and KILLING ME.

BECAUSE YEAH, THAT WAS THE FIRE THAT I WAS APPARENTLY PLAYING WITH! THE DANGER THAT I HAD NO IDEA ABOUT. FUN!

[And she was such a kind person. She apologized no less than ten times for not being able to keep the incision smaller, because she knew it would scar. She had to go around my belly button just to fit this stupid thing out of me. I didn't care about that. A scar is a scar, they happen. The fact that she helped me to the degree she did when she literally didn't have to was all that mattered to me. She was the one who helped me through everything about this situation, and I will never forget her kindness. I am still thankful to her, even now.]

But you wanna know the kicker? The part that I still rage about, and thing that made me refuse to ever go back to that hospital even if i was literally dying?

She was a surgeon who partially worked at that same exact hospital.

And she had been there, that very night I had come in.

And she told me, "if someone had told me about this then, I would have come help you. I would have taken you on as a patient right then and there and squeezed you in sooner. Maybe not that night, specifically, but definitely the next day. There is no excuse for them to have sent you home like they did. They should have brought this case to my attention. Handling these types of surgeries and c-sections are all I do at this hospital. I don't know why ER hadn't let me know."

The double kicker? I had asked if there was anyone there who could help me at the time. And the hospital said no.

Had the ER staff contacted her and had I had the surgery a full week earlier, I would still have my right ovary. She could have saved it, it wouldn't have been too late.

The ability to have kids isn't important to me. I don't want to have babies, I don't like babies. The loss of one of my ovaries isn't a big deal to me.

But I am horrified to think how emotionally devastating that this situation could have been for someone who DID consider the ability to have children important.

And I just find it so very ironic, that the hospital that was so concerned about determining if I was up the duff to the point of causing me agony for hours is the same exact hospital that permanently affected my fertility.

Funny, that.

I did not feel like I was treated, medically, at that ER. I still don't, to this day. I didn't feel like a human person that was worth their time or sympathy, because no one there afforded me even the barest scraps of either.

They didn't listen to me. They didn't try to work with me to determine a plan of action. They didn't even tell me what was wrong with me. There was ZERO communication.

I don't know how the ER medical field works, I don't know if this is normal, if I'm just complaining out my ass and all the ER nurses and docs are currently rolling their eyes at me, I have no idea if I seem entitled or not. I thought I had behaved pretty reasonably and politely. I thought that my expectations of how I would be handled wasn't outrageous or illogical. Maybe I'm missing some context and the nuances of how the Emergency Room functions. This is the only time I've ever been there.

But if the above is normal...Fam, this ain't it. This isn't how you treat people. This shouldn't be how you treat people.

It never felt like I was being helped. Just like I was a problem and shouldn't be there. Like the only parts of me they saw were my vagina and uterus.

It's only coincidence that what was wrong with me was actually a problem with my female parts. Had it been a popped appendix like I thought it had been, how much longer would it have taken them to get there? Until I needed to be hospitalized for sepsis?

Or would they have contributed that to a problem with my vagina too?

Medically speaking, informed consent does not just apply to things you want done to you or for you, it also applies to things that you don't want done to you or things you don't want withheld from you.

I don't think a lot of people realize that, and I don't think a lot of medical professionals want to acknowledge that, because it means they would have to reevaluate the ethics of denying treatment to patients. Also they would have to reckon with their patients' agency and right to self-determination. Both of those things really freak some medpros out.

[pocket-void]

Why don’t any of you pay attention when you always have the privilege to see?

Orange without his big toothy grin looks really off to me, though that’s just because he doesn’t drop it often in front of people.

I literally…can’t stop thinking about this guy… So I’m gonna talk about him in some more depth for fun! (And also so I can get it outta my system o///o) I drew him a couple times before this, but just to be clear, he’s a personal version of the Orange side I made. Though it’s not really a theory, since I am 100% sure I am incorrect, this is just purely for my own enjoyment because I ended up?? Really liking him as a character??? W h o o p s. >///<

So yeah, don’t mind me as I just talk about him a bit... It’s just some random scattered notes about him I really want to put down somewhere...

He does have a name, but I’m not gonna talk about it for now. 

He represents a bunch of things, but his main embodiment is that of anger, mostly in the form of blind rage. He is 100% blind most of the time and possesses dull brown-orange eyes. The only circumstance in which he can see is when he wears Logan’s glasses, and his eyes turn blue within that duration of time. Due to his disability, he tends to jokingly ask people to do him favors, but he actually kind of despises the fact that he’s blind. Not because he can’t see though, it’s because he thinks everyone else is taking their own sight for granted. His eyesight is actually scarily clear when he can actually see, and it makes him think other people are wasting it. (He’s actually more perceptive because he can’t see normally)

It’s incredibly important to remember that Orange is in fact, another aspect of Logic. He is based on the real life phenomena in which anger can sharpen one’s critical thinking and concentration in small doses. Wearing Logan’s glasses gives him the clarity he needs to rip people’s arguments apart, and he is particularly efficient at bringing up things people often overlook as evidence for his case. He’s sharp, but also incredibly blunt and straight to the point, as funny as that sounds. He’s who takes the reigns when regular logical reasoning fails, and he’s no where near as nice or understanding. If he goes too far however, Logan’s glasses will break and he’ll turn blind again and lash out. If it goes farther than that he’ll actually also start to lose hearing. Which makes him really destructive in the long term, and while Orange is fully aware of that, he can’t help but get carried away sometimes. Which is why he only ever gets to do anything if Logan is out of commission.

Now that’s him when he’s serious, but most of the time he’s actually kind of a big goof. He’s got this really blasé and laid back attitude to him, which mostly stems from the fact that he doesn’t have much to do. I describe him as a rat bastard because I love depicting him as a gremlin, and he most certainly can be. He is also 100% the type of guy to take threats seriously for fun, and will throw down with you if you suggest it. He’s awfully perceptive and knows when chaos is happening but will still be that guy who says he “can’t see” the problem and laugh. Honestly not one above causing trouble just for the fun of it. He’s sly, often coy, and acts like he doesn’t take anything seriously, which is why when he does, he really does. He tends to think that things would be much easier if he was allowed to look at the issue, but his impatience when dealing with things is probably why he’s not the one usually in the driver’s seat.

Another important thing to note that alongside anger, he actually partially represents self respect. Similar to how Janus is self preservation alongside deceit. Orange is completely focused on the self, and will argue things accordingly to benefit that. He’s that voice that tells you that you don’t deserve to be treated that way or that wanting to be treated better isn’t an unreasonable request and pushes you to actively fight for and demand it. That attitude is where his relationship with Logan kind of fits into the puzzle, and while I find their dynamic interesting I think it’d take too long to actually get into and this is already plenty self indulgent as it is fajkfbeg. Note that he’s not ego, he is very different from self esteem. He’s more like the embodiment of “Being garbage still doesn’t mean that I get to take shit from you”. 

He habitually chews things, which is why the collar of his shirt is absolutely destroyed. When he’s really antsy, he also bites his nails. He likes to call people by color because it’s the most identifiable thing about them from what he remembers during his short periods of sight. Except Patton, who he probably calls “Pops”, in a more sarcastic way if anything. Since they probably disagree a ton.

There’s a funky mafia? AU I imagined with him in it, but thaaaat’s not gonna be elaborated on any time soon. I also semi-made a playlist for him for fun.

Thanks for reading my rambles? If you’re here?? Honestly I just like him a lot for some reason, hhhh- >///< I have fun imagining stuff for him, but I can’t really say how much I’ll actually use him. I just like talking about things way too much akjfbakegt. See ya around! u///u