#Strang Clinic

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Eleanor Roosevelt at the first anniversary celebration of the opening of the Strang Clinic (now the Strang Cancer Prevention Institute), an infirmary for women and children, April 26, 1934. May Strang, niece of Chauncey Depew, who with her sister, Dr. Elise L'Esperance, founded the Strang Clinic in memory of their mother, is shown pouring tea for Mrs. Roosevelt.

The Clinic was devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Dr. L’Esperance collaborated with Drs. May Edward Chinn and George Papanicolaou, whose research led to the early detection of cancer of the cervix. This resulted in the Pap test. In 1940, Strang was the first medical facility to introduce it into clinical practice.

Photo: Associated Press

[taylortruther]

must be very strange to have to perform your heartbreak. as authentic as the emotions are, to market them at all (do a photoshoot, decide on "promo")... it must be strange to reconcile that with your private life, the intimate details, at times

[naamahdarling]

Kitty update:

Raleigh: We have done what diagnostics we can, and the results have been mostly inconclusive, somewhat positive, with only one negative confounding factor. That is a very mixed bag. We know that chemotherapy is likely to be ineffective. The only way to tell if the tumor is truly operable is exploratory surgery and removing anything that looks removable. If the vet answers a couple of follow-up questions positively and it is something we can afford, I would like to give him that chance. I don't love the debt that this will put us in, this is very stressful, but he is also a relatively young cat and otherwise good health. Incidentally, his eyes are doing much better. He is stepping over obstacles he cannot "see" with his whiskers and is jumping around with more confidence.

Dried Pickle Man: Smooch has historically been uncooperative but we changed the type of needle we used and did it in a different way and tonight he responded much more positively to the fluids. He was purring the whole time and didn't appear uncomfortable. If he continues to be cooperative like this, we should be able to get a little more meaningful time out of him provided we can get him to eat enough. It is possible fluids will help with his appetite. I monitor his quality of life extremely closely.

We don't have as much information as we would like about either of them, and that makes it harder to feel like we are choosing the option with the best chances of success. I do think we are doing as well as anyone could. Our veterinary team have been very direct and realistic about all of this, the conversations have not been awkward or uncomfortable. The vets at our home clinic care very, very much for our cats, and we love the vets very much as well. Even in a sad situation, it is a pleasure to work with them.

I cannot overstate my gratitude for everyone's support. I truly cannot. I wish that I had the energy and the ability to fully express to each one of you individually how much your words and material assistance have meant to us. It breaks my heart that I can't. Nothing is overlooked, nothing is unappreciated or taken for granted, everything is received with love, and that love is returned. I could not ask for better people to support us.

Thank you to those who have reached out with sympathy, advice, and pictures of your kitties to amuse and delight. It has made a confusing, frustrating, and very sad situation no less terrible, but much less lonely.

Knowing that my cats' presence on the internet has been meaningful to even a single one of you is something that I am grateful for, too. The idea that my trash tier shitposting about my crew of insufferable bastards has improved anybody's life is incredible to me, and wonderful, and frankly it is also deeply amusing. That I find love and meaning in Dried Pickle Man sneezing into my open mouth (today!) is funny enough on its own, knowing that you find it funny and meaningful when I tell you about it is actively hilarious.

Thank you for going on this absolutely terrible journey with us.

[captainpangolin]

BBC Ghosts brainrot so bad, I said Alison Cooper instead of Alice Cooper 😭

[verdantvain]

My therapist just told me, "If gender If was a flavour, you'd be a kitkat sold in Japan." What does that mean for me?

[loveimp]

many people can just go about their lives not needing the things I need and not bother people and be normal and love people normally and have involved lives outside the screen . And I must suppress everything knowing I can’t have what I want I cannot have my easy fix of making myself feel better because it requires People . My inner world cannot be nourished on it’s own, i shamefully wished to be fully schizoid so I can believe that I don’t need others . I could just play by myself and not yearn . I yearn and I yearn and I need distractions and to hold up my fragile fantasy world all by myself because real life is so empty and difficult .

[vestaclinicpod]

Oh, I have another question! Hopefully not a silly one. From what I've observed, Sec usually cannot "see" anything that isn't on his own screen. We've heard him interact with various microphones, and even the venacraft's imaging systems, but I don't think we've heard him interact with cameras?

Fae's willingness to explain what things look like for him is of course convenient for the audience, which I assume is the foundation for this decision. But on an in-universe level, I'm curious (if I'm not just wildly misremembering/misobserving), whether or not he *can* interact with cameras (missing drivers etc.) or if there just aren't any around for him?

Not a silly question at all! A great question and something I had a big think about when first writing the show!

As you have very correctly noted, Sec can access a range of different systems including the scanner and other imaging. Anything that he can connect to, you best believe he is peeking at! (RIP Dr Underwood’s emails)

And, yes, it is convenient for characters to describe what’s going on because we’re working in audio! However, the main reason Sec doesn’t have a camera feed running at all times is because he’s in a clinic room and patients are in there all the time in various states of undress, having various bits +/- pieces prodded +/- poked! Even if most alien species have wildly different opinions about nudity as a concept, Sec was installed by a human who wanted to protect their patients’ dignity as they understand it.

I also think that Sec has such a vast array of information at his disposal at any one time, he really doesn’t miss 1920x1080 pixels of the same clinic room every day! But, certainly, he has a built-in camera, he’s just been advised to not use it unless requested or the humans will get twitchy!

Thank you so much for asking!! We love a bit of Sec lore!

[monstrousproductions]

Audio Drama Sunday - 12/11/23

Happy Audio Drama Sunday, friends! To get my brain in gear for Travelling Light, I've been venturing into a bit more sci-fi than I usually listen to and did you know? There's some real good spaceship podcasts out there?? 🚀✨

First up, I've been blasting through @vestaclinicpod and having a (space) whale of a time. Every character is now my child, and I would die for them. I love how the medical angle helps keep the stories grounded, and gives a really fun angle of entry for exploring the world!

Someone on the MP Discord server recommended StarTripper!! for people excited about Travelling Light and I'm thrilled they did. It's SO much fun, with really tight eps that go down super easy. Reminds me watching classic scifi with my dog after school. You know, like a cool kid 😎

Less silly but just as immersive has been The Strange Case of Starship Iris. I was hooked from the first episode - literally stopped in the middle of the washing up to listen better. The acting is class and they manage to make the action scenes fun and compelling - no mean feat in audio!

All that said, there have been a few old favourites playing in Monstrous HQ this week too. I'm loving the start of the latest (and last!) season of @the-mistholme-museum. Sweet Audio Tour Guide and their totally-not-a-crush 🥰 Can't wait to see where it goes from here!

Finally, God knows I post enough about @thesiltverses that at this point there is a weird little crab where my heart should be. But its just real good OK. It's real fuckin good. And as their VA, I've decided Sibling Rane's first name is, in fact, Perple. You're welcome.

What have you all been listening to? Apart from Travelling Light, of course 😌 I mean, if you want to tell me all about how much you love TL, do feel free… 😉 But I'd also love to hear any sci-fi, fantasy or science-fantasy recs you've got! ✨🧑‍🚀

[tinydino-4]

This is what goes through my head every second of my life

[tomatoluvr69]

Last night I dreamt about going to a buffet and accidentally eating cucumbers (my one food allergy) and then woke up because I was having an asthma attack. I know it’s probably spring pollen in the air but it’s funny that my brain decided to warn me I guess. But also that’s a really boring dream

[o-uncle-newt]

I read Possession by AS Byatt after people told me "if you liked Gaudy Night you'll like this" and WELL.

Warning- spoilers for both books abound below!

So it sounded great- as a lapsed academic (though not in the field of literature by any means) there's a part of me that loves reading about academia because it's full of such obsessive people, and this book seemed to be exactly that and so I was excited.

Then I read it, and on the one hand, my first thought was "all these people are dull as heck, the only sane modern-day one is Val, and at the end of the day the historical stuff is just two people having an affair, who cares." My second thought was "there's just enough stuff here that makes me think that maybe the author knows that all of this is stupid, like the fact that Val is obviously one of the few sane ones here." But the ending made me doubt even that. Essentially, and I say this even as that lapsed academic, the author could not convince me to care about the important things at stake here, and as a result couldn't get me to care about the people who only seemed to care about those things.

I didn't care about Ash and LaMotte- they came across as two people high on their own supply who had a tawdry affair. (And each of them is the less interesting person, as a person, than their official partner!) As a result of not caring about them, I couldn't POSSIBLY care about Roland, Maud, and the rest of their crew, because their only functions were to be possessed by, and weirdly possessive of, these two entirely unworthy individuals, whose in-universe historical and literary significance Byatt couldn't convince me of, and to use that possession as a mirror for their own very lame romance. Beyond that they're utterly uninteresting, and there isn't even meant to BE much beyond that so it's not that surprising.

Anyway, I didn't like this book much, but it still made me think a lot. And there's a way in which a certain kind of person might say "well if it made you think then that's surely a sign of some positive quality" and... maybe? I don't know. I didn't hate all of it, and some parts were interesting, and I do have a whole separate list of things about the book that bug me including a breakdown of some of the book's (perceived by me) themes that I particularly disliked lol. Perhaps I'll post it another time. So I guess you can say it spurred me to thought, but loads of things that I don't like do that, and the only positive thing that that draws from me is that they're not downright dull.

The thing is, after finishing the book I was immediately struck by that "if you like Gaudy Night..." element, because it has a situation that felt weirdly similar (if for totally different reasons)- a young scholar stealing a letter from a library/archive. The circumstances are different- in Gaudy Night, the scholar does it to hide its existence so as not to contradict his thesis, and in Possession, the scholar does it so as to explore the document further, though still secretly- but there are still some interesting parallels vis a vis class. Possession goes into the class thing more than Gaudy Night does, but neither book goes much into it- the scholar is lower-class and someone who has scraped their way to their position, and is encumbered by a female partner of lower social and academic standing, and in the end they are juxtaposed against scholars who come from an elevated class and who have more money and opportunity. In Gaudy Night, Arthur Robinson is judged by the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey and a college full of women who don't have to do anything but think, teach, write, and grade papers; in Possession, Roland has to convince a bunch of academics of standing and resources to take a chance on him (and while this is more about money than class, he's the main one who's like "maybe it's good if Lady Bailey gets her wheelchair"). Byatt elides over this at the end by having him magically become in demand and on his way to achieving his academic goals, but I think in both books, the class element really could have taken on more significance in the text.

(I'd add as well that Byatt pits the upper-class and moneyed Maud, who of course is doing things for "the right reasons," vs the evil American businessman who clearly... doesn't care about Ash enough? Despite how much he clearly and obviously cares about Ash? The book was way more interesting when he seemed like a valid rival to the British team, who only thought that they deserved the letters more because of their obsession, rather than how it turned out at the end where the American dude is an actual cartoon villain. What made him genuinely less worthy besides having money without class, and of course having the bad taste to be American? What makes one scholar's possession more justified? Sayers was never this unsubtle.)

So that made me think more about Possession vs Gaudy Night, and the thing is, there are actual living people in Gaudy Night! Say what you will about the unworldliness of the academics at Shrewsbury, but you get a very keen view of their personalities by the end, even as they are (by necessity given the rules of their world) subsumed by academia, or subsume themselves in it. And the people who do fall in love are REALLY in love, and you understand why...

And somehow a book from 1935 feels far more interrogative of the possession (or lack thereof) found in love and romance, and just about the place of women in academia and relationships overall, than one from the late 80s. In Gaudy Night, Harriet accepts Peter once she has determined that despite their power differential (brought on by class, money, history, and to a degree gender) he will not threaten her personhood, because he has proven himself to her. In Possession, Maud accepts Roland because she has the power (money, class, position, even height) and so Roland actually cannot threaten her- and yet still that final scene is about her being taken by him, basically to prove some kind of a point. In contrast, in Busman's Honeymoon, the euphemistic sex scenes are about Peter trying to please Harriet.

When I say it's to prove a point, I'm paraphrasing Byatt, incidentally- who said: "And in the case of Maud I had made it very inhibiting. She was a woman inhibited both by beauty (which actually isn't very good for very beautiful women because they feel it isn't really them people love) and she was also inhibited by Feminism, because she had all sorts of theories that perhaps she would be a more noble kind of woman if she was a lesbian. And so she was a bit stuck. And Roland was timid because I am naturally good at timid men. It's the kind of men I happen to like. He's a timid thinking man, so of course it took him the whole book." I mean... yikes, but also that explains a lot. Maud can only bring herself to be with a man who is weak/effeminate (?) enough to justify whatever weird psyche Byatt has imagined up for her, but still she needs to get over her inhibitions and under him because... reasons. I don't know.

(Height is also interesting here as a point of contrast- Byatt makes Maud taller than Roland to make a point about how on the one hand she retains the power but on the other hand there is now even more of her that has to surrender. Peter and Harriet are the same medium height and wear the same size gown.)

I think the thing that most stuns me is how regressive Possession feels when it comes to gender politics on relationships than Gaudy Night does. I'd need a whole other post to talk about this, but the theme of Possession seems to me to be "relationships that produce things (whether art or children) are worth more than ones that don't." Roland is better with Maud than with Val because Val is a second rate scholar who drags him down (while supporting him financially) and Ash is better with LaMotte than with Ellen because LaMotte didn't only inspire his writing (Ellen's contributions are described only in the negative "didn't impede"), she gave him the child that Ellen refused to. Incidentally, in both cases it's the man pursuing a relationship that will give HIM something... But, to paraphrase Peter in Busman's Honeymoon, one wouldn't want to regard relationships in that agricultural light. Gaudy Night is about how two people can produce great things without each other but choose to be with each other for their own, and each other's, happiness. They aren't each less apart, and as I noted in a prior post, they don't need to solve cases together or conjoin their work in order for their relationship to be worth something. It is worth it for them to be together because it encourages some kind of inner balance within them and between them, as people. They enjoy collaborating but that is by no means the basis of their love (and, incidentally, I think that a lot of, if not most, detective series romances fail this basic test of "would they have fallen in love if they were accountants who met on a dating app." Peter and Harriet definitely would have- would, say, Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton have? I do NOT think so).

And here's the thing- another reason why Byatt's quote above is so off-putting is that it makes it clear that not only in the text but on a meta level, the purpose of the relationships is to prove a Point. I found Roland and Maud to have zero chemistry, and honestly I was expecting them to get together 3/4 of the way through and split up at the end when it turned out they had nothing in common- it seemed like that kind of book. I was kind of stunned when they only got together at the end in an "it's meant to be" way because nothing about it seemed meant to be. They were stuck together by that one thing and they each apparently needed the relationship for some kind of self-actualization or historical rhyming or other. (Whatever I say about Ash and LaMotte... at least they seemed to like each other!)

Peter and Harriet... they get together because they love each other. Do they change over the course of Gaudy Night, and over the course of the other books they share together? Of course they do. But if it makes sense, I'll put it this way- Harriet doesn't accept Peter's proposal as proof that she got over her hangups, Harriet gets over her hangups so that she can accept Peter's proposal. Her hangups only matter because they were keeping her from this particular kind of happiness- she was a fully actualized person even with them. She is a person who does things for human reasons so that she can build a mutually happy life with the person she loves, not a little plot mannequin being moved around in order to tell the author's desired Message. People can say what they want about Gaudy Night and its flaws, but despite the intricacies of its construction, nobody can call the characters' actions and motivations anything but brutally human.

Whether within their universes or on a meta level, the books have SUCH different things to say about the value and nature of love, the place of and purpose of sex, the place of art and intellectual accomplishment in relationships, all of the above in the context of femininity… and I can't help but feel that each time, Gaudy Night wins the contest. It's possible I'm missing something major about Possession, and maybe sometime I'll post the rest of my notes about the things I disliked and people can tell me what I'm wrong about- but if nothing else it made me appreciate Gaudy Night even more, so for that I'm grateful.

[bekaterrier]

Just a few days left to get 15% off a bracelet inspired by your favourite audio drama! You can use the link below or enter the code PODCASTLOVE before January 1st. I'd love to share my love of podcasts with you!

[secretsstash]

I know there are a limited number of bones in the body, but what is the strangest x-ray you have taken?

Numbers of bones might be limited, but ppl are many! 😁

Once I had a person for a chest xray after pneumonectomy (that looked cool).. also the bone conduction hearing aid took me by surprise once (it looked as if that person had a screw in their head).

[umemiyan]

thinking about previous conversations on ‘guys who are weird about your teeth’… ok so… what if i kinda wanna be weird about teeth too? what if i wanna inspect my boy’s mouth, grip his chin, press on his tongue, thumb over his canines to feel the points?? run my fingers all up in there like he’s a fuckin animal??? and he has to just sit there and let me but it’s okay because he knows i won’t hurt him

[heartshapedhackjob]

I've lost every single friend I had in the last 2 ish years due to my deteriorating mental illness and i exist in total isolation all day long today i didn't have contact with another human person for 7 hours and I feel like I'm slowly losing my mind and sanity but also if any one asks me to do anything I can't and i certainly can't work so ❓

[lxminen]

🚨Urgent 🚨🙏Humanity appeal

Don't ignore appeal please 🇵🇸🥺Time is running

out 😭 my Father🚨🚨 is Injured in war of Gaza🇵🇸🍉

DONATIONS A LIFE TO US 😭🙏

I'm Dr.Mohammed Alkhaldi from Gaza I need your support My house was destroyed I lost my Job Please Don't ignore my appeal.😭😭😭

My father is so sick and tired, needs your support and your donations.

After we lost our home and live now in a tent my father's health is not good and he needs a medical care and medicines and urgent surgery

Please don't hesitate to donate to us I am now living in a tent with my family😔

Our campaign is verified by Genei Moon and this is their TikTok account @femmeintifada she has a group of verified families from gaza on telegram also it's vatted by @GazaVetters and @paliLiberation you can see in my pined post 🇵🇸🇵🇸

go!