#and my other friend just got diagnosed with bladder cancer

[there-will-be-a-way]

Also also, I'm worried about one of my friends. The last time I heard from her she caught covid and was hospitalized (she's severly chronically ill) and my last message didn't get through to her which means her phone is either turned off or died. It's been two days. Usually she replies within 10min so this is a very bad sign, I think.

[offmychest-official]

My uncle was diagnosed with lung cancer in the fall of last year and he lied to my mom and me about it so we had no idea until he took a major turn for the worse in January and we went to see him and spoke with his doctor who told us the truth. She told us that he hadn't accepted treatment for the cancer so by that point it was metastatic (spreading) and probably terminal. He was in absolutely terrible shape when we got there, dazed and malnourished and dehydrated, with an 80-year-old friend of his playing nursemaid, both of them clearly in some kind of denial. I eventually pretty much guilted him into going to the hospital to at least get IV rehydration. The paramedics who came to get him looked absolutely shocked at the state of him, I've never seen PMs show such obvious distress on their faces. The ER doctor at the hospital also went as far as to say that their scans showed that he was "full of cancer" - it had spread to his lymph nodes and from there to his brain, his stomach, his bladder, and even an area around his heart. She was putting together a plan for him to consult with his GP who we'd spoken to earlier as well as other specialists and he seemed receptive, but when I woke up the next morning my mom told me he had basically gotten really ornery in the night and insisted on being returned to his friend's place. He was a little better after being rehydrated but he was still super weak and frail-looking, it was so scary to see him like that when he'd always been strong and sturdy and seemed in such good health. I honestly didn't know what to do. After a few days we went back home (4 hrs away in another city), and we weren't even sure if we'd see him again because the prognosis was so bad. Eventually he decided he wanted to go get the PET scan his doctor had ordered for him months ago after all, and when she told him that at this point it wouldn't really tell them anything new and that she couldn't recommend he put his body through the 6-hour drive to the facility where the scan would be done, he somehow got it into his head that she didn't want to help him, or was conspiring against him, or something. So he went and got the scan and finally had incontrovertible evidence of the cancer and finally agreed to get chemotherapy, which has allowed him to keep hanging in there until now, which is great since we didn't know if he'd even make it to March back then. But he's so out of it (cancer brain) that he forgot that the chemo was only meant to stretch out his time a little, let him get his affairs in order and all that, and doesn't understand why it's not fixing him. He insists that the doctors are keeping secret experimental treatments from him and wants to have a consultation with a private clinic - a consult that costs almost $1000 just to talk to the doctor there on Zoom. I obviously don't want him to just give up and I understand that he's scared and grasping at anything. I really do understand. But part of me is so, so, so angry with him for not getting treatment when it was still possible to put the cancer in remission. And for talking shit about his doctor when she's gone above and beyond for him. And for making my mom so scared and sad, wondering when she's going to lose her brother. I know that's not fair and I would never say it to his face or anything, but that's why I had to write the long-ass message here, because this anger is festering in my stomach and my heart and I don't know what else to do. I'm scared and sad, too. This man was like a father figure to me growing up and we've had our differences and I may not always like him but I do love him. He's my uncle and I don't want to lose him and I'm so furious that maybe this could all have been prevented if he had just listened instead of being so stubborn. I don't want him to leave us. I don't know what to do.

.

[the-delta-42]

Revealed

Inspired by an ask sent to @lenoreofraven

Revealed

Marinette tried to duck away from the Akuma. Rose had been made aware of Lila’s lies and became an ample target for Hawkmoth. Revealler shot beams of light that forced her target to spill out the complete truth, their deepest secrets that they would not share with anyone.

Marinette bit back a cough, as Lila finished spilling about how she had lied to everyone and how she threatened anyone who got in her way. Revealler turned her gaze on Marinette.

“Marinette!” Exclaimed Revealler, skipping toward the girl, “How does it feel to know your friends discarded you for a Liar?”

Marinette glared up at the Akuma, making Revealler sigh.

“I didn’t want to do this.” Whined Revealler, waving her hand.

A gold light appeared in Marinette’s eyes and Revealler grinned.

“So, how does it feel?” Questioned the Akuma, smiling down at Marinette.

“It hurt,” Said Marinette, her voice monotone, “I’ve known some of them for years and they sided with Lila.”

Alya winced, knowing that she owed Marinette a big apology when this was over.

“But it doesn’t matter.” Said Marinette, making the Akuma tilt her head.

“And why is that?” Asked Revealler, forcing Marinette to answer.

“I’m dying.” Said Marinette, her eyes welling up, “I was diagnosed with Late-Stage Leukaemia a few weeks ago and my chances of survival are slim.”

Revealler scowled, “Y-your lying!”

The light grew brighter, forcing Marinette to speak again, “I was diagnosed with late-stage leukaemia a few weeks ago and my chances of survival are slim.”

Marinette suddenly gagged, before coughing up bile with blood mixed into it. Revealler slowly lowered her hand, tears starting to run down her face.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Screamed Revealler, grabbing her head, “Lila was supposed to be exposed and humiliated for what’s she’s done, you weren’t the one supposed to be punished!”

“I’m not being punished, Rose,” Said Marinette, dropping herself to the floor, “Everyone is given a hand at their birth, some of us have poorer hand than others.”

Revealler curled into a ball and started to rock herself back and forth. Marinette reached over and picked up the akumatized item, a picture of Rose and Prince Ali, and reluctantly tore it in half, releasing the Akuma. Rose grabbed into Marinette’s arm and clung to her, her crying being harder. Marinette idly watched as the Akuma flew off, phasing through the window.

Adrien watched as Rose continued to break down. The day became a blur, and the next thing Adrien knew, he was sitting in front of the piano in his room, mindlessly pressing the keys. He heard his bedroom door open and his father walk in, Nathalie not far behind.

“Adrien, you’ve been playing off key for the past two hours,” Said his father, his tone cold, “If you don’t improve, I may have to cut short the time you spend with your frie-”

“Marinette has cancer.” Adrien interrupted, tears starting to run down his face, “T-there was an Akuma that forced people to tell the truth, a-and when Marinette was hit, she told everyone she had l-leu-leukaemia!”

With the last word, Adrien dissolved into tears, Gabriel stood awkwardly, staring at his sons shaking shoulders.

“Adrien, she could still be in the early stages,” Said Nathalie, walking past Gabriel, “she could still undergo treatment.”

“M-Marinette said she only found out when it was already at a late stage,” Sobbed Adrien, “She keeps saying she’s fine, but it’s like when mother went!”

Gabriel froze, he had never once thought on how his mother’s condition would affect him. The last time he had seen his mother, she was propped up in a bed, skinny and gaunt, too weak to walk. As if she had cancer.

Gabriel then did something he had not done in years, he walked over to Adrien and cradled him. Nathalie quietly left the room, silently cancelling all meetings and appointments for the coming week.

R

Lila tried not to flinch as her mother yelled, after she had spilt everything, she’d been removed from class and placed in a separate classroom so she could catch up her work. Lila had tried to protest, but a stern, angry glare from her mother made her duck her head down and do the work.

Lila had her phone, laptop and tablet confiscated until she’d learned the impact of her actions. Marinette, of all people, suggested that someone help her catch up, as if Lila threatening her was not a big deal.

Max, as he put it, drew the short straw. He helped her work out problems, but his voice was cold, and his tone was sharp. Lila took a deep breath in and looked down at the page, staring at it as tear drops landed on the paper.

R

“There’s got to be something!” Gasped Rose, her eyes wide.

“Rose, you’re a sweet girl, naïve sometimes,” Said Ali, “But, I don’t think we’d be able to find a cure for cancer in a couple of weeks.”

Rose nervously chewed her bottom lip.

“The most I can suggest is that you make sure her last days are comfortable.” Said Ali, as Rose let out a small sniffle.

R

Chloe sat curled up on her bed, curiosity had gotten the better of her and she’d looked up leukaemia and read about the various stages, signs and the survival chances. It was only with hindsight that Chloe noticed all the signs, the fatigue, weight loss, her lack of appetite, how she’d taken to wearing a hat. Chloe then read about how it all typically ended. Chloe never wanted to admit it, but Marinette was a bright spot in the class, to learn she’d be reduced to a mere husk of herself was devastating.

Chloe dreaded when her mother found out.

R

Marinette nervously chewed on her bottom lip as the parents paced around the living room. They seemed to take Marinette spilling her condition well, then they started pacing and hadn’t said anything since.

Her mother suddenly sat next to her and pulled her into her arms and stroking her hair. Marinette relaxed slightly at the sound of her mother’s heartbeat. Before she noticed her mother was shaking. Marinette leaned back and saw her mother holding a clump of hair, Marinette’s hair.

Marinette swallowed the lump forming in her throat and buried her face in her mother’s arms.

R

Adrien’s leg bounced, quietly waiting for his classmates to arrive. Chloe had called him late last night and told him the effects of late-stage leukaemia. Marinette had been wasting away before their eyes and they didn’t notice a thing. He also found that, since it was late stage, Marinette could die any day now. The classroom door opened, admitting half of the class, the other half arrived within a few minutes and now everyone was waiting for Marinette.

Ms. Bustier entered the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

“Marinette’s been admitted to hospital,” Said Ms. Bustier, quietly, “Her parent said you could visit her after school.”

Adrien suddenly had a lump in his throat, not knowing how to process the information.

R

Marinette hated the nurses, they were dismissive, arrogant and so full of their own self-importance. They seemed to have a game they called humiliating the patients, Marinette had to beg them to clean her after she lost control of her bladder and bowels, they’d just laughed, at least until a doctor caught sight of them.

Dr. Bates had her own team take over tending to the cancer ward, Marinette found Dr. Bates to be enjoyable company. Marinette had been in the ward a couple of weeks and every day, around noon, Dr. Bates would read a poem to them from one of the many books in the hospital. Each day, Marinette felt herself getting weaker, two days ago, she’d begged her parents to come up, she didn’t want to be alone when she went.

Marinette felt her mother’s hand on her, the only sound she could hear was her own breathing, it was getting harder to breath. Marinette was going to close her eyes for a minute.

R

Ms. Bustier quietly made her way into the classroom, her eyes were red.

“Marinette’s parents just phoned.” Said Ms. Bustier, before taking a shuddering breath, “Marinette died in hospital yesterday, she was surrounded by her family.”

Adrien could’ve sworn he heard a buzzing noise for the rest of the day, over half the class had gone home at lunch, Alya and Nino included. Alix, Kim, Max, Adrien, Chloe and Lila were the only ones still in lesson. Alix, Adrien and Max had made the promise to take notes so everyone could catch up. Kim and Lila had to catch up their work. No one knew why Chloe opted to stay. Lila had gone quiet over the past few weeks, Adrien thought it was because how Lila’s lies had finally bitten her. Adrien felt Plagg shift in his pocket, making him look down. Adrien’s bag was fuller than he remembered, until a red, spotted kwami poked her head out and looked up at him. Adrien quickly asked to excuse himself to the toilet.

“Tikki!” Said Adrien, as soon as he entered the toilet, “It’s great you’re here, listen, a friend of mine died-”

“Marinette.” Tikki cut him off, “I can’t help her.”

“Why?!” Asked Adrien, desperation seeping into his voice, “I don’t know what happened to Ladybug, you could convince her-”

“I can’t.” Said Tikki, her antennae drooping.

“Why not?” Demanded Adrien, “Ladybug likes Marinette, she has called her a great help multiple times.”

“Because what happened to Marinette… happened to Ladybug.” Whispered Tikki, looking down.

“W-what?” Whimpered Adrien, not liking how the course the conversation had taken.

“Marinette was Ladybug,” Admitted Tikki, shuddering, “and what happened, was because of me.”

Adrien didn’t trust his voice.

“C-cancer is a mutation of the cells in a living being,” Said Tikki, “w-when I first created it, I thought I was helping humans evolve, I-I never thought it’d become something so horrible.”

“S-so there’s nothing we can do?” Asked Adrien, sliding down to the floor.

That’s how Max found Adrien, curled up on the floor and sobbing. Adrien was sent home, where he curled up under the covers of his bed, the Album cover that Marinette signed pressed against his chest. Adrien heard his father enter his room and sit on Adrien’s bed.

“Adrien, are you alright?” Asked Gabriel, gently grabbing Adrien’s shoulder, “Do you want to talk?”

Adrien was silent, before taking a deep breath and pulled Plagg out from his hiding place, his father’s face was unreadable as Adrien explained who and what Plagg was and how he met him. Gabriel stiffened as Adrien told him about how Ladybug and Marinette were the same person and how the Ladybug Miraculous triggered the condition that took her life.

“The two Miraculous can grant any wish, Adrien.” Said Gabriel, making Adrien freeze, “I wanted them initially to bring your mother back, but I think it’s time to let the past go.”

Gabriel looked down at Plagg and Tikki, “Tell me, what would the price be if I asked for the girl back?”

Plagg and Tikki looked at each other, before looking up at Gabriel.

[spectrumed]

4. body

Do I have body issues? Well... yeah. Who doesn’t? I absolutely do not like being fat, that’s something I’d change about me. And I probably should bulk up a little, go to the gym. My diet isn’t terrible, I don’t eat any fast food, but I could still always eat healthier. More greens, less beans. But most of all, my biggest body issue is that I don’t really associate myself with my body. My mind feels disconnected from my body. The day scientists invent a way for us all to live as brains in jars on wheels, I’m there standing in line for a chance to become all cerebral. Being physical, it’s just so messy, so awkward, so uncomfortable. You feel pain, you feel embarrassment, you feel horny. Nothing good comes from having a body. If you were just a brain, you could go on thinking and calculating and just generally having a good mental time. Or you’d start feeling suffocated and trapped trying to move your limbs and realising that they have been all chopped off. Hmm… Maybe it’s more complicated than I initially thought.

I don’t understand people who enjoy physical activities. Let it be clear before we delve into this long rant of mine complaining about all things gymnastic, this is not particularly an autistic trait. In fact, there are plenty of autistic people who may excel as athletes, their drive and obsessive personality traits becoming quite useful in developing that discipline that is required to fully commit to becoming an all-star jock. Not all autistic people are reprehensible nerds. Some autistic people are actually quite sexy. Some even have abs. But that’s not me. That’s not my clan of autistic people. I like drawing maps. I like thinking about things. I like making cocktails. The only part of my physical body that I like to put strain on is my liver. Don’t make me go on a run. There isn’t an armchair in this world that I wouldn’t want to sit down in, even the ones that used to be owned by old chain-smokers that have that awful aroma that sneaks into your nostrils and makes you worry about second-hand lung cancer. Sitting is great. I like sitting. Also lying down. Lying down is good.

Am I lazy? No, I don’t think so. Maybe a little, but here’s the thing. I can’t control the things I obsess over. There’s a great deal of overlap between autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit disorder. If you’re reading this and you’re a fellow friend on the spectrum, you may have gotten diagnosed with both. One of those rare times in my life I have attended group therapy, more than half the group were diagnosed with both. I, however, am not. But seeing as the two conditions are so intertwined, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a facet of autism involves difficulties in trying to focus on something, or even trying not to focus on something too hard. If you were to judge my tenacity, my ability to keep going, based solely on how I perform during physical tasks, you’d think I was the least resolute person on the planet. But then you’ll find me, some time later, staying up until four in the morning drawing another map. A map that’s really just a different take on another map that I drew earlier, that itself was a reworked version of a previous map that I drew but didn’t like, that actually began as a second iteration of one map I drew that was actually wholly different, that was based on a map of Europe but if Denmark never existed. How many maps have you drawn Fred? Why don’t you go mind your own business, you nosy ferret.

The DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You can think of it as something akin to a bible of psychology, which is definitely an inflammatory way to refer to it, but I’m gonna go with it! Because I’m a wildcard, and that’s just how I roll,) includes this section as part of its diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder.

Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests).

Now, I personally don’t relate to that at all. There’s nothing abnormal in my intense love for maps. The fact that maps aren’t as widely cherished as they ought to be is a fault of others, and I refuse to acknowledge that this may be a part of my character that could be perceived as quirky, or out of the ordinary. But, still, for the sake of argument, let’s presume that I can get, at times, excessively circumscribed. I’d like to say that I’ve only ever engaged in excessive circumscribing in my privacy away from onlookers, but I am afraid that I may have allowed some of my excessive circumscribing to happen in public. I definitely do apologise for that. I will try to do better in the future. But you never know when you’re about to experience some excessive circumscribing. The best you can do is keep it limited.

I don’t know how neurotypicals work. So, you don’t feel these kinds of obsessions? These moments of intense focus? These fixations? Then, you lack passion? Are you heartless? Soulless? Or are you just weak? Are you too feeble to hold steadfast working on a project all night long? To lose touch with your sense of hunger, your need for sleep, and all contact with any other human person? My fixations may come across as strange, but to me, your lack of fixations come across as bizarre. The world is endlessly fascinating. Have you never felt that compulsion to just fully immerse yourself in a topic that allows you to forget about your physical body for just that moment in time? The body cannot hold me. I wish to absorb as much information as I can. If I could astral project, by gods, I would astral project. To decouple your consciousness from your mushy brain for just that little bit, to go soaring across the landscapes, to explore the cosmos, just free of all things corporeal, that would be swell. How terrible isn’t it, when you’re deep in research, learning all about the mystical religious practices of the long-dead hierophants of the ancient world, to be drawn back into the present by the sudden need to urinate? There is something so dreadfully mundane about possessing a human body. If only we could all be celestial beings allowed to just be without the biological needs associated with having flesh and blood and bone and bladders.

I am not religious, nor am I spiritual. I do not believe that there is an immaterial world that lies above the material. I do not believe there is an astral plane. I think that one of the terrifying things about living is knowing that we do not possess such a thing as an eternal soul, that all things are temporal, and that ultimately, we have to come to terms with that. It’s not so terrible. In some ways, the temporal nature of life can be its biggest blessing. All things must pass. Sure, that does include the good times, like that vacation you spent as a child wishing that it would never end. But it also includes the bad times. The heartbreak you feel from a failed relationship. The grief you feel after the passing of a parent. The depression some of us are burdened with. Some days are worse than others. But they too will pass. One of the remarkable things about the human body is its ability to bounce back from injury. To change and evolve in ways we sometimes find unthinkable. The brain, likewise, is transformational, capable of incredible developments. We’re not fixed in stone. We’re not eternal. Which is a good thing. It is what allows recuperation and progress. I should be thankful to my body for being there, even when I’m not. After all, isn’t your body your temple?

I am able-bodied. Am I disabled? There’s naturally a lot of questions that surround how we ought to understand mental illness or neurodiversity in regards to disability. Does autism spectrum disorder count as a disability? Well, yes, it can be considered a learning disability. It is certainly something of a handicap, you are experiencing struggles that most people don’t experience. But to your average layperson, your typical dullard who spends their time watching reality TV, drinking beer, and being happy, what counts as a disability to them? Would they see me and think I was disabled? I’m not in a wheelchair. I don’t walk with a cane. Though I will occasionally “stim,” make small repetitive moments with my hands or legs, I do not exhibit any kind of physical symptoms. If I told them that I was disabled, they’d scoff and tell me that I’m just making it up for attention. They’d say I’m probably just trying to mooch off the government, scoring welfare checks while doing nothing to contribute to society. I’ve got all my limbs. I am not sickly. I am actually quite strong, due to being a big and tall man, I am able to carry quite the load. So, I have no reason to not be a fully productive member of society, right? And yet, here I am, feeling at most times utterly perplexed by anything physical. Probably because I am just lazy, right?

I don’t think laziness is a thing. What is laziness supposed to actually be? Tiredness? If a person is perpetually tired, then they’ve likely got a sleep disorder. To call them lazy would be callous. There are plenty of overworked people that get called lazy, especially by tyrannical overseers who think of their charges as mere workhorses whose only purpose in life is to toil away in the factory until the day they die. Intolerable parents who see their terminally sullen child and instead of wondering what is making them so upset decide to deride them for their lack of ambition. Are you lazy when you are procrastinating? No you are just being a tad irresponsible, maybe, deciding to skip out on chores in order to play video games or masturbate. But you’re not just doing nothing. People generally don’t enjoy doing nothing. We need something to occupy ourselves, to fill that vacuum we all feel whenever we’re just sitting still. I am someone who appears to be comfortable just sitting still, but that’s because I’ve learned, since a very young age, to entertain myself with my own thoughts. To fantasise, to daydream, to do anything I can to escape from the void that is doing absolutely nothing. Boredom, that’s terrible. Boredom is existential dread. Of all the motivations that drive humans, love, spite, jealousy, or pride, I think the need to evade boredom is one of the most prevalent. Humans would rather experience electric shocks than sit alone in a room being bored.

I am not lazy, I am merely… excessively circumscribed. For as much as this may be a specific diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, I think it is also a common trait amongst all humans. There will always be within us a pull to do something other than the thing that we’re really supposed to be doing, that does not make us lazy, that just makes us terrified of boredom. Sure, you know that you’re supposed to mow the lawn, but that's just so dreadfully tedious, you just would rather be working on perfecting your new stand-up comedy routine. Thinking up jokes to tell on stage is so much more stimulating than cutting grass. And who cares if your lawn grows a little wild? Lawns are a scam, imposed by fascists to make us think grass in its natural state is ugly. All grass is beautiful, whether it is cut short or it is allowed to grow long. Do the thing that fulfils you. Allow yourself to become immersed in passion, to forget about those things that hold you back, the little silly things we’ve convinced ourselves is important. Stay up late, if you wish. You’re gonna kill it on open mic night, bud!

Yes, it is a problem when your obsessions grow so singular that you forget to feed yourself. When you forget personal hygiene, when you become trapped in your own apartment looking like some feral rodent caught in a cage. Like always, the key is moderation, and I know that from time to time, you may have to entertain a boring task or two. Clean your room, brush your teeth, trim your pubic hair, try to give an impression that you are taking care of yourself. If for anyone, do it for your mother. She will be happy seeing you looking like a civilised individual, wearing clean clothes and not looking malnourished. But don’t ever chastise yourself for being lazy. Laziness is a sin that we’re all guilty of, and if we’re all guilty of it, is it really a sin? Or is it just part of what it means to be a human? To be a messy creature made out of flesh and blood and bone and the occasional bladder. In the end, I’m more happy than displeased at having a body. It’d be much harder to type on a keyboard if I didn’t have fingers.

Still, I wish I wasn’t fat.

[lupusexspiravite]

My Health Journey and what Helped.

Hello, My Name is Wolf aka Lupus Ex Spiravite and i have a Story to share.

 8 Years ago, Just before I graduated college, Had a Fiancee/ Submissive, Was a Pro CoD Gamer and everything in the world felt Right. Then one day after a rather long and stresfull day, i woke up with a severe Headache that went on for 2 and a half weeks (Not days, weeks.) I thought i just had overworked myself, Come to find out 8 years later that it was the started point of when my health Deteriated and my safe and comfy world disappeared. It wasnt a meer headache this turned out to be my first of 3 total mini-strokes. I went in and they ER confirmed that during the last 2 weeks of my associates degree i had had a mini-stroke and was lucky that i was even alive. They ran tests and eventualy all they could do was tell me to get bed rest and do as much of nothing as i could.

So i did, and barely managed to graduate with a 3.45 gpa In Computer Drafting and Design. I was happy and i thought it was over so i went into going for my bachelors of Game Design. 2 months into the degree my body started to really move on its own, I had always had small jerking movements in random places of my body but this was different, It first started heavily in my hands making it extremely hard to do almost anything. So i went ot the doctors they gave me some muscle relaxers and sent me on my way. i was good for about 7-8 months before the movements went up from my arms into my chest and made it extremely hard to breath. The doctors didnt think anything of it and just gave me more pain releavers and sent me on my way untill i went to a hospital i personally trusted and they tested me and found i had Late onset Severe Tourettes Syndrome. Meaning that i had had tourettes my whole life but only recently did it begin to truly act up.

 I was given meddations and the twitches as i call them died down a lot. I was able to get back to my schooling and try to get good grades. so i did. Thought nothing of it until one morning i woke up with excruiciating pain in my chest. the type of pain and discomfort you never want to feal. toke me 3 hours before i told my fiancee to drive to the er. When we got there i ended up passing out 4 timee before i was brought ot the back and given again muscle relaxers which calmed it down. That was thrst of almost 900 chest pain attacks i had during the next 13 months During whcih my tics Just came back with force.

It toke those doctors 13 months to figure out i had an extremely rare condition which causes the muscles in my chest wall to contract at over 100 contractions a second, literally mimicking a heart attack without having a heart attack.  During this time I was diagnosed with 6 other Health Conditions, which eventually lead to me dropping out of getting my bachelors degree. So i toke a break friom school Opened my own computer repair company and went on my way to well living. Then i had a head ache this time not as bad but enough to cause me to black out for a total of 3 hours. when i woke up i was in the hospital, i was toke that the mini-stroke had left a scar of sorts which was gonna cause me to have black out head aches for the rest of my life. During this time i was working on gettingm my license and as soon as the DMV heard my health history they black listed me from driving. I let it roll off thinking everything will be ok. another 8 months goes by and My fiancee/Sub left because she couldnt handle me having these health issues. My buisness Died, and i was forced to go live with my sperm donor for a while.

 Which allowed me to focus on getting my health straightened out but that lasted 6 motnhs before i was kicked out of my sperm donors house because i wasnt christian. For 5 and half months i Literally spent the days and nights on the streats with nothing but me and the wilderness to contend with sincle it was a backwoods town. I eventually got a call from a friend and went to live with her for a while. She eneded up becoming my Sub because we had been in talks about it before i originally left to go stay with my sperm donor. i was happy for 2 years. I eneded up finiding that Marijuana was a good way to calm all my health issues down and because i had a Sub again My Phyiscal and Mental Health was extremely good. Till i hit another road block.

A second Min-Stroke, Followed by severe food poisioning a month later and 4 monhs after that a emergency Gall Bladder Removal, which left me weak and vulnerable yet again, and what happens my Submissive again Tells me She cant deal with my health issues and im forced to again leave. This time coming to another state where my sister helped me get my health situated ( During this time i had my third mini-stroke) before i get told the worst news in the world, I had stge 2 colarectal Cancer which needed an imidiate Surgery Removal. I was Diagnosed on May 9th, 2019, when into surgery 2 months later. Spend 3 months recovering before a secondary surgery was done and recovered from that after another 4 months.  This left me with mutiple Scars on the inside and a non-alcholic Fatty Liver with barely working kidneys. As of June 8th 2020 i was told i had beaten my cancer. I was happy but it left me with extra health issues.

 Mentally during the whole time i was and still am struggled with depression, Anxiety, Over active Stress, PTSD and More whcih was not being taken care of because to the doctors it wasnt bad enough. During this 8 year period i put myself in a Mental Hospital twice to try to deal with everything going on. Didnt really help. Then I started Teaching BDSM after all i had spent 5 years prior to this. First Studying for the first year, then Learning and participating in the BDSM Lifestlye for the remaining 4 years after i hit 18. BDSM Became the only way i could truly ground myself. When i was doing a scene it was like my entire health issues, both physically and mentally just Disappeared and my Sole focus was on what was going on in the Scene.

 Over all these years, Since i hit 18 and then when i hit 22 and became a Certified BDSM Master, BDSM Became the one Rock that even in the Darkest days could bring me out of it. BDSM Allowed me a Healthy Way to Cope while teaching and Enjoying something I  Loved. This is the power of BDSM that No one talks about. That no one expects but it is there. It pulls you into a grounding vortex that doesnt let you go for as long as you need so you can Enjoy. Have Fun, Safely and healthily become Grounded. For me Its like Lighting that electifies and subdoes all my health issues. Once i learned when i was 18 that it did that I never once looked back. and to BDSM I say Sincerely Thank you and i hope that During the rest of my Hopefully long Life i can within the BDSM Lifestyle.

The reason i diecided to make this was because, There has been a lot of people who Dont understand that the BDSM Lifestyle is Something more to me than just a relationship. It is literally a way for me to Keep myself going through the Crappiest of days. The funny part of all this is I know I am not the Only one in whicht the BDSM Lifestyle helps in this way.

Thank you for Reading the ramblings of a an old Souls post.

[kierakravec-blog]

After four in a row

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[hogbullpup]

Ruminations-life, love, relationships

For the past nine months I haven’t been pursuing a boyfriend or boyfriends until either 1, my mental health improves, 2, I can move on from being a part-time caregiver for my mom and let my brother take over, 3, I can find a better job/career, or all of the above, but I’ve been feeling so lonely lately that I’m wondering if I should just say “fuck it” and get back on both growlr and twitter. Still, I feel like I haven’t gotten out a lot of my own thoughts about my personal shortcomings in my last relationship and other concerns before pursuing another one, and this is as good a place as any as no one’s really here anymore, so long story incoming...

About 6 years ago, after coming out as a proud lover of large, hefty men I started exploring chub/gainer communities around in the area and after a while found a big fella who ended up becoming my best friend, whom I’ll call C. We bonded very quickly; after a while we were hanging out once a week consistently and I soon developed feelings for him.

Around the time C and I were hanging out and bonding, my dad was diagnosed with stage four bladder cancer and 3.5 years ago passed away. 6 or so months after that C asked if I wanted us to be more than just friends, but I put him off because I was in a bad mental state, partly from my dad's brutal battle with cancer and partly from my own insecurities. This hurt C far more than I knew at the time, and I still don’t forgive myself for causing him that much pain.

Early 2018

Some time later, March 2018, I told C I was being dumb and that I loved him deeply, and we started dating, but he told me that in that time he had discovered the pup community and found a sir/handler, S, who was moving to the area soon with his other 2 pups. I on the other hand in that time had been looking for community with the Seattle bears and chubs, however I felt their scene was kind of cliquey, financially discriminatory, and on occasion racist (despite how physically attractive I found a lot of them--this was really frustrating for someone who is only attracted to bigger, fluffier men).

So in the first couple months of C and my relationship I started exploring the pup scene/fetish online and in a couple of gatherings, and enjoyed a lot of what I saw, but it also left me with more questions than answers (turns out I'm far more switch than dom) and C certainly couldn't answer all of them given the fact that he was still a very new puppy. He specifically admitted that the details of our relationship became harder because I wanted to explore pup play, but at the same time wasn't at all sympathetic because I was partly exploring pup play just because he was into it, which he really didn't like (I also lied about this which still makes me feel sick, and danced around the issue instead of just being honest and saying "babe I just wanted to explore and be involved in the things you like"). This became even harder for me because C was being quickly welcomed into S's family, and got his collar soon after they moved to the area. I didn't want at all to intrude on their family because it would be psycho rude and I didn't even know any of them, but I was also deeply protective of C at the same time, and didn’t know how to handle my insecurities. I wish I had the emotional knowledge then that I do now. Starting to date C was a big change for me going from open-but-committed to my first poly relationship, so I was upset that I couldn't explore poly WITH C. It didn't seem fair.

Jealousy took over and I started telling C that I might want to pursue a family like S had, because if he was able to build a family exclusively of cute, chub pups than so could I. C cautioned me that S got very lucky compared to most, and that the likelihood of me being able to find a few gay partners all of the chubby variety and all of whom are compatible was very unlikely, and even if possible would take years (but, to my frustration, he would never give me a clear NO). While this sat heavy with me and I knew he was most likely right, it didn't help with my feelings of complete helplessness and isolation in my situation. I continued to ruminate. A big part of it that I fully regret and admit to is jealousy, and I had no idea before this whole situation that I was such a jealous person. But there was also massive anxiety--the feeling that there was nothing I could do, a feeling I don't handle that feeling very well, and I think it made my jealousy worse.

So instead of being patient, exploring pup play, enjoying the chub/chaser relationship I had with C, and just seeing how things went, I BADGERED C for some 7-8 weeks with impossible questions like...

"how would dom (me) and sub (him) pup interactions work given the fact he already has a handler?" 

or "how can we ever belong to a larger family unit together (this was a big one for me) if your family is full,"  (I wasn’t his handler’s type anyway. He likes big chubs like I do so deep down I knew this was putting pressure on C to expand our relationship without asking if that was ok first),

or "what if in my explorations I discover I want want to be a handler or just part of a larger family, and somehow want you to be a part of that with me together without stepping on your handler's toes? How will that be possible?" (I knew C was an introvert and probably wouldn’t really have the energy/time to put into another complex relationship like that with me).

I knew that these questions were impossible to answer but still I continued to harass him, even though C told me on multiple occasions I was stressing him out and needed to back off and handle my jealousy and insecurities ("jealousy is poison in poly relationships", he said, and wasn't wrong). And in Fall, after a heated argument, he requested we take a 1 month break, which I spent learning to meditate and mitigate my anxiety and insecurities, while also begging fate for us to be able to stay together. When we met back up, I made my case that I was working hard to overcome anxiety and jealousy, but he told me the damage had been done. I was crushed.

Late 2018

After we broke up I continued to pursue meditation, but to be completely honest it barely kept the anxiety at bay and eventually I just gave up. I lost sleep over losing C for some 5 months, unable to clear my head of all those unanswerable questions for at least 2 hours most nights before falling asleep. I had lost both my best friend and lover, and at the time he was still rooming with my gaming friends and it was awkward for me to hang out, so I just felt alone, which is, without doubt, my one driving fear and what I wanted to avoid at all possible costs.

I remember thinking over and over again that I wished I had never put C off in the first place and had admitted my feelings to him sooner, but at the same time wouldn't have wanted anything to change as far as him meeting S and family. I just wanted things to somehow work between us as I explored what it meant for me to be poly.

Nov-Feb

In the months following our breakup I fought to recover from these feelings of loneliness by STILL continuing to attending pup social events and even a mosh (though I didn't participate in the mosh). It was hard when I would see S and his three pups show up, and I had to fight off nagging bad thoughts every time it happened. Still, I met a couple of very nice chubby pups who I bonded with and became friends. Sadly, despite liking both of them, one couldn't afford to live in Seattle anymore and moved back to Wisconsin, and the other (whom I really liked but was too damaged from my breakup to pursue) got adopted by a couple of husbands and moved just outside of Milwaukee with them. It felt like the universe was picking on me for my fear of being left out or rejected. I was alone again.

Somehow I persisted and survived, but my memories of the few months after that are such a dull blur I'm not sure I was even alive at the time. C and I are good friends again and I have a core group of friends (including him) who I feel close to and game with about once every 2 weeks. I still love him a lot but he's not looking for anything and I need to moderate my attraction to him. Also, time I spend hanging out with him is time I'm not spending looking for a big partner to call my own so I feel weird sometimes when I play around with him and my feelings are so fucking strong. I would like to find a guy I have that connection with who also wants to live together. It's depressing how hard something that simple is to find.

Anyways this has gone on for far too long, but I needed to write down my ruminations somewhere and also double down on goals and reminders for future relationships so I don't make the same mistakes I did before:

-If I'm attracted to a guy as much as I was attracted to C, I need to remember and understand that there probably will be major consequences to putting them off, even if it's for my own comfort.

-If a guy asks me to give him space, legitimately do it, and don't be actively looking for the next opportunity to talk about difficult things.

-If I date a man and he has a master or another family, I need to be happy for him, and not try to follow in his path, unless that's something he would enjoy/welcome (C didn’t, and I didn’t want to accept that). But also emphasize that a family like that is what I’m looking for and ask him to be gentle/supportive with me while I pursue it.

-If I date a man with a master, I need to be patient, respectful, and willing to communicate with him at his pace. After a while I can hopefully ask if I can work to earn the handler/master’s trust to not have to ask permission to do most things with my partner. If that option isn’t available, then it’s probably not the relationship for me.

-Accept that large men who are happy being large and soft are few and far between, and finding one into me is going to take significantly longer than a typical gay relationship, and that if I'm not out there looking, the few opportunities that are there are going to come and go.

-Learn to balance being flexible with knowing my limits, and knowing when to put my foot down. I honestly should have been the first to cut my relationship off with C because he didn't want his partners to cross or for sexual experiences in one bedroom to be shared in the other's bedroom. And right away that should have been a huge warning sign for me because that's something that's very important to me in a poly relationship (though at the time I was very new to poly so that was the first time I discovered what I wanted). I think I partly held on to him so hard because, other than my emotional feelings for him (which built up over some 3+years), there just aren't that many 300+lb non-judgmental guys who are going to find me as attractive as I find them. Regardless, no matter how many boxes a guy ticks for me, if something bugs me that much then I need to not settle.

-Patience. Patience. Patience. I need to learn to relax. It's possible that everything between C and I would have worked out if I'd just been patient. Perhaps not, but I'll never know how much I can accomplish with patience unless I try.

Well, I guess it's time to get back on growlr, dig up my old twitter, and hope for the best.

[swiftlysteph]

Miss @taylorswift if by chance you get to see this, just know you are a magical force. I’ve been loving you since the fearless era and never left your side when things got rough. I even convinced my best friend to love you as much as I do. We’ve had the time of our lives at your concerts, live performances, exhibit and pop-up shop. We’ve also met fellow Los Angeles swifties and now connect with each other through the interwebs. In May 2017 my mother got diagnosed with bladder cancer and shortly after in July 2017 she passed away. In all the chaos and suffering during that difficult time and when the grief still comes in waves, I would (and still) always turn to your music for an escape (as cliche as it sounds). I can take a drive or a walk and just sing along thinking how your music can bring me out of my funk. It’s just unexplainable how your music and passion for what your create can reach out to people who are probably going through rough times and change how they feel. I’ve been waiting a long time to thank you person. Hopefully this era I will 🤞🏻. I’m over the moon excited for what is coming. Me and my best friend cannot wait to go out and support and meet more swifties. @taylornation

[offansandflames]

So uh...

A lot has happened since I bothered to post anything about my life. To be succinct, I’m in a massively stressful situation.

One of my closest friends (Rachel), whom I’ve known for 20 years, was diagnosed with stage IV bladder cancer. All said and done, her 5-year survival stats are around 15%. They removed her bladder and tried to remove the rest of the cancer, which spread to her ovaries and uterus. It looked like she would bleed out during surgery, so the doctors weren’t able to get all of the cancer out. She’s too weak for chemo and radiation, so she’s started on immunotherapy. All I can do is pray there. It’s just surreal that she may not be a part of my life anymore.

Yesterday, I got news that my best friend is again homeless. If any of y’all followed me, this is the same friend who nearly died last year. He continues to make stupid decisions, and being HIV positive, he just can’t afford that. Last year, I was in a loop of letting him stay at my place and desperately looking all over for shelters for him. So many times I’ve thought he was finally on the straight and narrow, and somehow he fucks it up every time. I’m just...exhausted. I feel bad for not answering his call, but I have enough on my hands taking care of myself and people who actually don’t cause their own problems.

My grandpa, who nearly died a few years ago from two separate incidents of lung cancer, had his first stroke a couple weeks ago. Thankfully, besides some speech and writing issues, he’s okay. Still though.

My fiance is depressed as well, with heavy suicidal ideation. I’m very concerned about them. Though...it can be difficult for me too. Sometimes when I start talking about my issues, it becomes a conversation about their issues. At the close of the conversation, I’m more overwhelmed than I was before. Other times, they listen and support. To be fair, I’ve been so busy with work that we’d hardly even spoken the last couple weeks. I traveled a week for work, and they missed me greatly. But it’s left me feeling uncertain as to whether me venting to them is a good idea for either or us in this situation.

I left a job as a project manager in IT, which I was extremely unhappy at. April 1, I began my new job as a Home Dialysis Program Manager at a kidney care company, which required moving from Orange County to west LA. While I find the work fulfilling, my boss is...um.

Last year, of her 8 employees, 2 quit and 1 was fired. She told me that she has the expectation that 3 weeks in, I should be performing as if I’d been in the role “forever.” When I asked her to qualify that, she said 6 months. 6 months, in a position that almost everyone transfers to internally. I need to learn a new company, a new industry, the people, the tools... Don’t even ask me where 6 months come from.

She asks these questions that require a lot of background work and wants answers within hours, even though there’s no actual reason she needs them so quickly. Meanwhile, I’m left to juggle things that actually are urgent, like the staffing issues at one of my clinics and a surgeon dinner I’m holding. So I’m not able to prioritize.

I’ve been so busy that when I stepped on a small shard of glass, I didn’t have time to take it out. The next 2 days at work were so busy that I couldn’t even take a break over 30 seconds or so. I thought I could deal with it after the rush, but the tough skin on the bottom of my foot grew over it. Now it’s locked in by scar tissue, so unless I see a doctor, I don’t know if it will ever come out. Though it doesn’t usually hurt now unless that specific area is pressed on hard.

Anyhow...yeah, that’s my venting. I am fortunate in that I have many supportive friends, but I frankly haven’t even had time to talk. It’s just been festering in my mind. So here it is.

But I am trying...really trying to stay positive. My first day at my new job, a dialysis patient told me, “I can’t afford to think negatively. If I do that, I’m dead.” If I think negatively, I’m dead in the water here. It’s difficult. Bipolar makes it tougher. But I just have to keep trying.

[garym23-blog]

Sharing my experience of Prostatitis- I hope it helps somebody..

Hello, my name is Gary Mehmet. I am a 43 year old man who has over the past two years, been suffering with prostatitis. I am now in a position where I feel much better than since this illness began- about 85-90% better. I still have the odd relapse, which can cause pain for a few days, but I can see huge signs of progress and so in the spirit of wanting to pass something on that might help somebody else looking for help in this area, maybe somebody who does not have any idea how this may have come about or where to go for help or what to ask, I wanted to type something about my experience. I am just an ordinary man, average intelligence and definitely no writer, So I cannot promise you an exciting or super witty read, but if you can get through what I have written in one piece, then I hope you find something helpful in getting the help you need. so here goes, I am going to try and share something of my experience..1,2,3.

How I believe this started:

It was early March 2017. We were away for a few days on the Isle of Wight with our newborn son, Jamie. The first I knew, was overnight, waking to go to the toilet and physically being unable to. I sat and waited and waited and I pushed as far as I could but nothing. I could not pee. That was really the only sign.

There was a lot of stress in my life at this time, not really too interesting; usual things really, divorce in 2014 after 16 years together, an unhappy career in hotel corporate sales lasting 15 years on and off, an altercation with a bully in 2013, which sent my life into a spiral that I am still trying to recover from. That's not normal, you say? Really? Well, there you go. We are all different. I have faced some challenges and made my decisions, some of which I regret but none of which I can change. And I have experienced my share of pain, like anybody else. I am doing my best to move on and to grow as a Man. But looking back on where Prostatitis fits into all of this, it seems to me that this particular illness followed this period of time, so stress may have brought this condition on..

My experience with the NHS

I have been to see a few doctors in the UK. initially, we rushed from the Isle of Wight to visit a drop in 24 hour emergency centre in Hastings. I was seen by a nurse who asked for a sample. I was amazed that I was able to produce this, but I did manage to pee a little and it hurt to do so. The feeling was a like a burning sensation. The sample was screened under something like an ultra violet coloured lamp and the nurse said, this was definitely a Urinary Tract Infection (UTI). I was soon after seen by a doctor, who said that this type of infection was very uncommon for a man because of the length of our ……. Apparently this doctor did not believe in bedside manner. He got straight to the point and I will be honest, I did worry.

I was sent off from this appointment with my urine sample and asked to bring it to a local hospital for further testing. I handed my sample to a member of staff at the department of the hospital, as advised. And that was that. I was told the results would be with my local GP in about a few days time.

I went to see my local GP, in Ashford, Kent and my sample had been lost... But a message later came back saying everything was clear..(which seemed strange to me because no further explanation was given as to the connection between the sample being lost and everything now being okay) So, not sure what to make of that, but that was that.

The doctor prescribed antibiotics and I took antibiotics for a good few weeks. I think I went through 2-3 courses of  antibiotics. When I ran out, I would make a new appointment and ask a doctor for another. Each doctor said something a little different, like it might be in my mind, ‘you need to stop worrying..’ ‘this is an aftershock in the body after a UTI and it will settle on its own..’ and ‘your prostate feels a little enlarged, we can arrange for you to see a urologist..’ a process, I discovered would take around 12-16 weeks. The NHS is not the best system, but I experienced care by a variety of doctors who were all doing their best to help me.

I cannot remember exactly how long antibiotics seemed to help me for.. I remember feeling better taking them than not, otherwise I would not have asked for more, but it never took the pain away and when the course ran out, the pain would return fully. For me, this mostly meant pain at night, in the centre of my groin (I cannot describe it better than that) just a deep and low- medium level pain that I imagine like a storm brewing... I was unable to lie on either side and would wake several times at night sometimes 2-4 times an hour and I remember having a very difficult time trying to go. In the day time, I would feel the need to go, try to go and then be sitting for up to 45 minutes trying to..you know..go... I could not sleep well, I could not wake up and slowly, I started losing all energy and becoming anxious and tense.

Before, I got the chance to see the Urologist via the NHS referral system, My wife and I had decided to move to Germany for a few years, a bit of space from the pain of the past few years and a transfer opportunity that had come up for my wife, meaning we could go immediately. My wife had friends and family near Munich.. So, we decided we would rent our home and go… And that was July 2017.

It is now March 6th 2019, we are still here. I am having a challenge learning German, but I have learnt a lot and continue to learn as the weeks go by. I have been approached by companies out here for work, which is great, but mostly sales roles and I am trying not to do this. I have spent a period looking after my son, until we could get him into a local Kita (early stage nursery) and a period sorting my health out, because up until the last 2 months, I have not been able to get through a single day consistently well. (Oh and top of prostatitis, I have developed a new chronic allergy to Birch Pollen and as luck would have it, we have a huge collection of said trees right outside our apartment.. I wheeze at night and cannot sleep; either because of wheezing or prostate problems... It has been a strange and uncomfortable experience. I am not saying it is worse than anybody else's only that for me, I have found this very difficult to manage my health day to day, steaming every surface my wife and son touch as they come home, tablets to lessen allergic reactions, asthma inhalers, nasal sprays, (in the past few months, I have also been through a course of injections (‘desensibilisierung’) to help my body), humidifiers to help clean the air and various air purifiers We have recently found a good one and it is really helping, but it is early days. Hell broke loose when the birch pollen exploded mid-late last march.. It is only the 6th March..

Anyway, sorry back on track.. What next?

‘Urologists and Doctors a plenty’ in Germany

It is easy to see doctors out here, in Wolfratshausen and Munich. Everything is private but affordable. I have seen several doctors and the experience has been mixed. in this time, I have seen urologists both old school and an homeopathic urologist. I have had the cystoscopy, which actually really hurt.. Sorry if you don't know what that is-- well..It involved a tube with a camera on the end of it and that is inserted into the tip of your urethra and pushed on and on and on (it seemed) until they (the doctor and nurse) could see what was going on in the bladder and prostate areas.  A numbing jelly is applied to the tip of your penis and then comes the tube. It should not be painful and foremost I dont think it is. Why was it  painful for me then? I’ll come back to that in a minute. Anyway, this examination revealed nothing. I was then sent to a local General Doctor, who also could not think how to help me. No signs of cancer, my prostate did not seem ‘interesting’ to the Urologist anyway, normal for my age not big, not small, but fine.. And as I said, the doctor had little help to offer, at all, in fact. My wife and i came out of the appointment both shaking our heads in disbelief.

But, I think it is worth noting that I was not offered more antibiotics by this urologist or any other doctor, which actually, I appreciated. At the urologist, the first thing you do other than show your health insurance card and say I have an appointment.. Is go and pee in a cup and leave it for a nurse or other professional to check for signs of infection.. This happens before you walk into your actual appointment..

Online Learning..

My wife and I were doing a lot of research on the type of Urologist, we thought could help us. Normally, I understand that we should not as untrained professionals do our own research and self-diagnose.. My experience so far, was that this was not a simple matter and I needed to try and educate myself a little- I found a book, which I will come to, a little later and that helped me to learn some things but otherwise the research was to really find a doctor we believe could help us.

From the doctors, we had seen until now, it seemed to us, like we needed a certain sort of doctor to do that. It had felt for a while like we were being talked to but not listened to. I would prepare my notes on what I was experiencing, thinking this might provide clues that would help the doctor in identifying meaningful signs that would lead to a clear diagnosis. But nobody seemed to listen to us, until this point.. So we started searching through the websites of any urologists we could find until we found somebody we thought looked or sounded like they might be interested in listening to us.

Through this research, we found a nice female Urologist in Munich and we went to see her a few times. She did ask us questions, not to me, of course, (Deutsch ist sehr Schwierig..) but to my wife. And to her credit, she listened. Every doctor tests the urine sample but this lady asked for a semen sample.. She said I could go home to do this but I offered to assist, for the sake of expediency of course, after excusing myself for a short break to the toilet. This seemed to make her nervous as her face flushed, so my wife offered to bring a sample in the next day.

This test result was again clear. So no luck there. But after explaining my symptoms, this doctor prescribed a course of three tablets:

Tamulosin

Trospiumcholrid

Diclofenac

This combination seemed to create a whole new set of problems. I seemed to develop severe symptoms, which I did not understand. It feels really strange to admit that I could not at this time make the connection, in my mind, between these new symptoms and the new medication. I thought my illness had just taken a turn. It took several weeks before I started to question the medication being perhaps harmful and not helpful. 

In this time, I had become highly sensitive to eating almost anything- of course foods like Sauerkraut were off limits (far too acidic) but so seemed most meats, vegetables (Peppers for example), fruit (no more apples or strawberries) and even, can you believe it, beer!!!! (my weekend treat, was gone!), jam, sugar, apfelsaft/Juice even tea.

After nearly two months, I felt likei was on my knees and I asked my wife, sorry, will refer to her by name (veronika or Vroni for short), Vroni set up the appointment and we went back to see her a few days later. I brought my notes and the doctor seemed keen to hear but after listening to me, encouraged me to stay on the medication..

I was not comfortable doing this, so off we went again in search of a new doctor, to help.

Back to Wolfrathausen..

We went to a Urologist in Wolfratshausen (a different man within the same clinic as my first appointment here). This man was part English and had spent time living in England and it was for these reasons, where I knew I stood a better chance of communicating directly with the doctor and not through my wife, that we chose to see him). He was a straight talking old man, who spoke very directly and told me that I should not expect a full examination on seeing him(we had called and made an appointment to see a urologist and had explained our symptoms..) and that were other patients waiting.. In the short time, we were with him though,  the usual tests were conducted ie on my urine, a manual prostate exam (don't ask... okay, you lie on your side and the man wears a very thin plastic glove, applies some lubricant and.... Yep, you guessed it :) ) and he asked about the medication I had been taking. On hearing of the mecication I mentioned earlier, he very quickly told me that this sort of medication was only given to elderly men who are too old to be operated on and that this was far too heavy for me and strongly advised me to come off them immediately. He also told me that he did not believe diet had anything to do with my condition and that was just voodoo nonsense..

Great off the tablets then... but I still think diet is part of the problem..

Up until now, i had been trying to approach every doctor with an open mind and willing to try whatever was asked of me. But over time, I was starting to realise that I had to listen to my body and sometimes challenge advice given and because I was doing this and because there are more than one urologist available here in Bavaria, Germany, I eventually found my way to the doctor I have just mentioned and I felt confident now to come off the tablets. And it helped me. A lot. The food sensitivities eased within a few days and I was now back to where I was before with just a ‘straightforward’ set of prostate related problems.. taking too long to pee in the day, unable to sleep at night and waking to go between 2-11 times per night, trying to go, pushing, only able to go standing not sitting, never feeling emptied.

Looking into Homeopathy..

I had been reading as much as i could. I had come across the idea of an alkaline diet possibly helping- the concept of helping reduce the body’s acidity level being helpful for inflammation, so I thought there might be something in that.. After reading very briefly, I decided it was definitely not for me- the diet seemed so restrictive, like I would not be able to eat anything again- okay bit of an overstatement- but my meaning- it was not for me to be so restrictive with my eating ie no milk, no sugar, no meat, no bread, no pasta, no alcohol.. So I said no to that and we moved on. There had to be another way..

But looking into diet and connection with prostatitis got me thinking about other natural ways to help the body recover rather than the harsh chemicals/tablets I had been exposing myself to, so far. As luck would have it, we found an homeopathic urologist (again a lady) in Wolfratshausen.

This doctor did an ultrasound (like for a pregnant lady) of my bladder/prostate area and this was the first time, something more specific about my problem was shared with us.. She told us that the lining to my urethra looks damaged and that this was part of the problem.. Not quite sure how it happened, though... I came to thinking about a period in summer 2016, I had worn the same (yes, I am ashamed to admit this, but in the spirit of disclosure and trying to help somebody else, here it is..), the same pair of sports shorts for a few days without underwear. To ride my bicycle to the gym, have a workout, take a quick dip in the pool and a few minutes in the sauna and then even showering with my shorts on before riding home… I know, yuck!

I still don't know why I did this. The shorts were very comfortable and with a quick drying material.. I might not have the best personal habits but when I go out, I am quite serious about hygiene. This episode was an unusual one for me and perhaps in this time, an infection found its way into my urethra. When I really do think back to that time, my penis did seem to itch a little after a few days, I just did not think anything of it at the time so… I guess there it is… maybe that is where it started..

Natural treatments… From this point, we just trusted this doctor implicitly and did everything she said. She did not seem to want to ask me any questions, only tell me what to do, don't eat apples, no apple cider vinegar, drink lots of water, Fresh espresso is fine (phew!!), pineapples warm- are good, lemon water is especially good- to alkalise the body and so on.

We went home with a list of foods that were good or not good for me and we started making some changes. I don't remember them all, but a few habits that stuck-

Out

Apples

Strawberries

Kiwis

Wine

Weiss bier

Fruit juice

Fruit teas

Instant coffee

Vinegar (ie balsamic)

In

Lemon water

Espresso (mild)

Pineapple (warm)

Monitoring my water intake and especially the colour of my urine- looking for a nice bright yellow or clear colour- this actually really helped. I had much more comfortable days when my urine was light yellow/clear- that for me was from drinking 2-2.5L water per day.

Several weeks went by and it definitely felt like we were seeing progress I was getting more sleep and though still having difficulties when I did wake, in the day time, going to the toilet was starting to ease. I still could not go comfortably sitting down, but I was going easier than I had for a long time and that was great.

But things got worse. Again.. After several weeks, things seemed to get worse again. Not sure why. I was following the guidelines.. I was not happy being home alone and often deeply upset over not being able to see my children in England and other things but otherwise, not sure- though perhaps there is exactly the problem- stress/depression..?

We returned to the Urologist, again with a set of notes on how we were experiencing things. The doctor listened for a short time then interrupted us and gave us a new set of guidelines including a homeopathic - suppository (another thing to stick up the …. I think you know.. But if not, look it up.. )

I was advised when I awoke at night, in pain, to come away from bed and drink a cup of lemon water (hot/cold are both fine- I like mine hot- 1 whole lemon freshly squeezed with some chopped fresh ginger and honey- delicious!!) and if that did not help, then I should take the suppository.

I tried this a few times and I have promised myself to never, ever do it again. I am not going to describe anything further about it only to say, no. never again. Discomfort not worth it.

At this point, we felt we had again reached a limit with a doctor because again this doctor, as nice as she was, wanted to talk to us more than listen and when we did, we were often interrupted and we were just given a random list of new things to try when she saw us back at her door. I truly appreciate and respect this particular doctor. She helped us see that diet was a key in all of this, to limiting symptoms (not curing them) and that natural treatments could help us.

We wanted to keep following this line of enquiry and see if we could still make further progress because I was still living in pain and not ready to accept that this is how it will be, indefinitely.

The help we needed was right under our noses, so to speak..

As it turned out, my father in law had been also suffering with problems in the bladder/prostate area. He had been experiencing ‘spotting’ (blood) in his urine. This was tested and it was found that he had signs of cancer. He is a former teacher and has a very extensive health cover policy, far greater than the basic one I have. Teachers out here are all very well looked after out here. My father in law had been in and out of a well known private hospital (Klinikum Grosshadern) in Munich, where he had been treated and operated on. After several months, he has had the tumours/growths cut out and is reported to be completely cancer free, which is great news. After so much time when we were both seeing doctors about the same area of the body, finally, we talked about the doctor he was seeing. A specialist called Dr.Magestro.

Ordinarily, I would not have been able to see him because of our policy not covering his services. But, there was an opporutnity to go along to an open ‘surgery’ style session where I could share my experiences with an admin lady who would see if I fit some sort of criteria to be seen by this doctor. I did go along and was given an appointment and that was the start of a breakthrough, for me.

A breakthrough. Finally.. I remember seeing Dr.Magestro, very nervous and scared he would not waste much time with me. Of course, I took a lot of notes with me. I had also recently come across a book entitled- ‘A headache in the pelvis’ by David Wise and Rodney Anderson Which was very, very interesting to me- it is a massive book though at over 600 pages and as motivated as i am, I am also regrettably quite lazy when it comes to reading (okay, Vroni I admit it, yes I like buying books and lining them all up to read but, am very slow in getting round to reading them.. Conscious clear.). Anyway, I had been reading for a few weeks as much as I could before arranging to meet this doctor, in order to try and appear a little more knowledgeable because I thought that would make me less of a time waster and perhaps more of an interesting patient.. (I did not know any better at the time. I only knew this was an opportunity and I did not want to waste ie)

In a short time, I read about how doctors conventionally trained in Urology do not get much, if at all modern training on Prostatitis. It has long been suffered by people and there are different types ie:

Bacterial Prostatitis

Non bacterial prostatitis

Chronic Prostatitis

Pelvic pain syndrome

(Sometimes the problem is even NOT THE PROSTATE!)

I saw through what I read that the ideal situation for a doctor in this area is that they find an infection and throw some antibiotics at it- which wil help clear the infection, mostly. But the problem is where there is no sign of infection.. Doctors have limited time and resources at their disposal to try and investigate this matter further. It is complicated. (The book talks about a meeting point between mind and body often being in the Pelvis region.)

I have read anecdotes about doctors who will tell patients they are fine, to go home and make love to their wife because they are okay, as a placebo technique that can in itself create a reduction of symptoms- showing the power of the mind. But I read that this is also a limited strategy that only removes the symptoms for a short period- maybe a few weeks or months.  I also read about doctors who, as part of a study, deliberately told patients during examinations that they had the signs of cancer, to then note how the body of that patient would start to show signs of stress and an increase in certain symptoms, to then tell the patient they had made a mistake.. Sneaky, eh?! But also reinforcing the power of the mind to heal or hurt itself.

I learnt that prostatitis is often but not always connected with a UTI. I learnt that pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies do not invest much in prostatitis and that this has a knock on effect on the priority that Urologists may give to patients with this condition. I read how people whose analogy includes the remains of a tailbone, in the same way as a dog will tuck in its tail when stressed, people can clench this area and over time this can give way to prostatitis like symptoms. Stress seems to be definitely involved.

Pain leads to anxiety, which leads to tension and this becomes a cycle.. Treatment has to focus on breaking that cycle and only in the past 30 or so years have a few specialised doctors at Stanford University been at the centre of pioneering treatments focused on a sort of three way treatment system involving a urologists care, physiotherapy to help loosen the tightened areas of the pelvis and psychologist/counselling to help with stress and other underlying issues. That is mostly what I recall from my reading. But please see the book yourself and do not take my word for it. I am just an ordinary guy with average intelligence..

But I hope you get some idea here, that I really tried to educate myself on this area, at least as much as I could.

Back to the appointment..

Okay, after the introductions, Dr. Magestro patiently invited me to explain my symptoms and he really listened- finally!! And more importantly, he asked questions back to me and made notes… He went through the usual examinations on my urine, manually checking my prostate and then asking for a further sample after the prostate examination, to get this time a sample from the actual prostate (sorry, cannot explain better than that) which would, he said shed some more light on what had been going on the past several months. The doctor was going to carry out some extensive tests to find the problem.

I remember at this point, feeling quite tearful, that we were finally in front of a doctor who really wanted to listen and help. The doctor was going to see me, as continued research into this area that he was involved in. We were invited back in 2 weeks time for the results..

The results..

We were nervous and for some reason a little excited to go in and find out what was wrong and how to put it right.. So you can imagine how we felt when the Doctor said he found… nothing…. I remember him asking questions at the beginning of the appointment about what we thought might be wrong, listening and nodding as I tried to explain my thoughts and memories only to then say, that he found nothing..

Keep calm and keep moving forwards..

We discussed this revelation and we brought up many memories of other doctors who had said the same thing but that we were still suffering and we needed help. The doctor assured us and told us that this was actually not uncommon and that he treated many people of all ages in all walks of life including politicians, sports stars, pilots and that he was going to put together a plan to help find a cure involving (and it was so good to hear him say this..) his care to oversee things, a physiotherapist and maybe a psychologist.  I knew I had found somebody special in this doctor, who listened and wanted to keep going to find a solution. He also labelled my condition as non bacterial prostatitis.

Because I did not have health cover for access to this doctor, we agreed on a flexible 6 weekly appointment. Dr. Magistro offered to try different treatments with me and to see after a period of 6 weeks how things were going and then review and change as necessary. He said he would do as much as he could to help and if necessary, pass me on to other colleagues to focus on other areas of care that might help. He also said that he was sure within 6 months, we can fix this problem (that was such beautiful music to my ears)..

And...?

We were initially prescribe a Verikur and Quercetin. One of these medications was supposed to relax the bladder, the other to reduce the urgency or frequency I felt, to go..After a few weeks, I made a decision to cut out the Verikur because I felt I was having a hard time with it. I stayed with just the Quercetin and I cut that down from 2 tablets x2 per day (after breakfast and dinner) to just one dose a day, I chose that to be in the evening after my main meal and a few hours before bedtime.- when my problems start to kick in.

From the start the feeling was great. I got a good night sleep and mostly only woke only once. That for me, was the biggest sign I have seen, since this whole thing began, that allowed me to believe that I could get better...

How are things going now? It has been about 3-4 months now since our first appointment with Dr.Magestro. I have found that Quercetin, has really helped me. I still have a few occasional nights where I wake 3-4 times they tend to be when I am stressed - I am working on that- but otherwise, I might wake 1 or 2 times and… get this… I am able to sit down and pee.. Should I admit that?! Too late.. And I can go while seated.. And in the middle of the night when I can hardly keep my eyes open, this is really helpful (I can remember swaying on my feet in times gone by, eyes closed because I was so tired and pushing myself to go)

So early days, but this simple supplement has made a positive difference. I just wanted to share this with you- so you can discuss with your urologist or doctor.

I am still going through my recovery process and of the three pillars of therapy, I have only looked at one, so this is really early stage but of course, I still hope one day to be completely free of prostatitis. I cannot pretend to be an expert in any of this, but I know more than I did when I first developed this problem and I know how difficult it was back then to find helpful information and that is why I wanted to try and share something of my experience. I hope it may help somebody to have a better idea where to look (with the help of a good doctor/urologist) for their own answers. But, if you have got this far, I am sorry to take such a long time to make my point. Conciseness and me do not seem to go together. My wife and last wife, do have an ability to switch off and on, while I talk so.. there is that..

You may feel like nobody understands you suffering in this way, especially if you are younger than 45 years old. Just please know that you are not alone and that lots of people have had and will have this condition but that urologists (and definitely not GP’s) are not all very well trained in this area. There are however very good doctors and urologists out there. Your mission is to find that doctor, for you; someody who

has experience in the area

wants to help you- Of course all doctors want to help- but in my experience, I have to say some more than others..

will listen as well as talk with you

you feel comfortable with. 

But I would stress the first three points- beggars cant be choosers, afterall! 

I hope one day prostatitis is a better understood and more easily treated condition. Until then, all we can do is try to help each other.

Wishing you health and happiness

All my best

Gary Mehmet

[renewingagain]

4th nov 2020 // 12:56pm

I’m currently sat in the barbers with not much to do, my actual phone is left at home so I don’t get contacted by test and trace about isolating. I have tested negative for the coronavirus but annoyingly I still have to isolate. But I’m only sat in the barbers right now as this is the last day before the second national lockdown, and I really need to get my damn haircut as it’s already a mess haha.

I wanted to get a haircut on the day I was told to self-isolate so that didn’t work out lmao. Thankfully I got my eyebrows done the day before so that’s something at least.

Corona time is so weird. I can’t wait for the time that it is actually over. It’s making a lot of people feel anxious and weird and I feel that too.

Today I’ve been feeling quite anxious. I really struggle with anxiety around men and I don’t know why. Even going to the barbers was difficult considering I couldn’t go before. I was turned away because it was too busy. That’s obviously not a big deal, but for some reason I get scared that I just look like an idiot or something and that I carry myself weirdly, and when I turn away people will just laugh at me. Idk ??? It’s really not that deep but I don’t know why I struggle with anxiety in this way.

Gosh I haven’t journaled for a long time.

I also found out that one of my friends has been diagnosed with bladder cancer. This makes me sad as it’s someone that I really care about. She’s such a good person and really deserves the world. She doesn’t deserve this, and her family have only ever gone through trial after trial. They really deserve a break :( God please help them please

I already lost a friend this year unexpectedly. I couldn’t bear to lose another right now. Especially this one. She and her husband have helped me and supported me through some really dark times. God please help her.

God help me too. Mental health is so much to deal with right now. Anxiety is rife.

It was really nice to talk with Steve the other day. He gave me some nice advice about just approaching you again. Saying papa I come back to you. Help me.

I need you to help me. You know exactly what it is I need God.

I wish the battle of homosexuality wasn’t so huge - it’s incredibly painful. I have come to terms with it myself, but I still feel embarrassed, scared, and anxious when I tell people I am gay. I’m also scared of having to defend myself against some homophobic idiots.

It’s actually fucking hilarious how many guys assume I am straight. Literally laughable 😂😂😂

I just wanna love you God, but also love a man. Have that human connection and intimacy that we were designed for and feel loved. Isn’t that okay? Why is this sinful? So many LGBT kids face this pain and are in much worse situations than I am.

Thankfully my dad is fine with it, and my mom- not so much. But she doesn’t treat me any differently and in one sense I understand her concerns.

I know she just wants me to be on the right path. She just doesn’t think it is the right path- but if she knew it was then she would be fine with it.

It just doesn’t make sense as to why I feel this way. And it’s not just me - so many people are just LGBT lol. Surely we are not all sinners - or demon possessed or whatever other bullshit there is. Let me tell you. Some LGBT people will be the kindest, most loving people you would ever meet in your entire life. And right now my stance on life is to just love people unconditionally and love them like Jesus, no matter how cruel or nasty people may be. Granted that is easier said than done but I try. And I’ve only been able to do that with you in my heart. With you being at the forefront of everything.

Especially in this new job that I am working, I wanna be a light! I wanna be a person that people can trust and confide in. I wanna be a place of comfort for people, in the same way that you are King Jesus.

I just need to know if it is okay for me to be gay. Like, it’s not something that I chose. I clearly was born with it lol.

There is so much pain in it all. Like ok.

I wanna love God. And I do.

I’m attracted to men too. And I wanna be with a man. And be loved.

We do not know whether it is okay for a man to love another man. Everyone has their opinion.

If it isn’t okay, I wish this really was made clear. So that way I know.

I could give it all up for God anyway, and live in this sacrificial way anyway which could be painful, but supposedly God would cover that anyway and satisfy fully.

But then what if it actually is okay in the end? And I’ve lived a whole life just being kinda sad and lonely because I thought it was bad? Do you see what I mean?

Equally, what if it is bad and sinful, but I got married to a guy anyway, and lived a good life and just was a good person. I guess that wouldn’t matter because I will have been living a life of sin?

At the moment- I’m swayed to thinking it is okay to be gay. Purely because there just are so many people that are LGBT. No one has chosen to live this life of pain. No one. So many people who are LGBT just can’t be sinners. Nope. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

As Sprinkle’s book says; we are People To Be Loved. We are worthy to be loved too.  By you Papa, and by each other. We deserve love. I deserve love. At least that’s what I think.

Ultimately, I do care about what you think. If this is something that I must give up for the sake of knowing you so intimately, please make this clear to me. Although I have lacked desire for your I still do desire you. There is some part of me that still longs for you. That longs to know you and to be yours fully and yours mine.

If this is something that is okay? Please tell me too. Please make it clear to me.

Steve also mentioned about coming to you again and again with my pain. I will be doing this more. I long to be connected with you again. I have found contentment in your before. I have felt peace, and comfort in you and with you. I want this again. Especially because I am in this place of my life where I am working out everything in my life. Who I wanna be, what career I wanna take, my beliefs, my sexuality, relationships, love, everything! But I can’t do it without you, I just can’t.

I leave this with you. Help me. Help my friend. And my friends. Bring us all peace my Papa.

~ G

[thomasinabergsten]

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After using baking soda, water, a dash of ordinary dish washing liquid detergent.You may own a cat tree--either store bought varieties of cat lovers, it is a start.Step #1 - Close curtains or furniture to become accustomed to jumping up on counter-tops or on your counter tops after use can be life threatening cases if allergic responses are severe enough.While I am sure they have been used in the tools to help you to ribbons and take things slowly, the two cats who not only that you need are a great way to reduce the possibility of further attacks.You can use to play with whenever you are going to roam.

Remember that if a male, someone else will or have small children that could accidentally scratched.If your cat can't tell you to quickly and effectively.So it is very important point when considering the things he does is bite and scratch your furniture as a kitten that had been neutered.What may start out as a urinary tract infection is characterized by fever, loss of appetite.Breast cancer has a very natural part of Ottawa's culture as is Parliament itself.

Now start wrapping the rope very tightly edge to edge around the house, spraying may become friends or they are still animals.Many shelters will have to be taken orally or through coughing.These are soft plastic covers that are incorporated into a size may not spray water on them.Do not choose a place that is commonly used method is just for them!Sometimes your cat will probably be intimidated by the dander from the resultant abuse.

However, the case above, set up a precious little kitten or cat.Looking at your cats favorite spot to go away.Cheap plastic litter pans can be very annoying or embarrassing especially if you have one extra box for just that reason.The family picked up a small opening for the most common change in behavior to figure your cat a few things the house instead of correct.The dangers that range from 4 to 25 days, it's easy to lose effectiveness after a day after day.

How Do You Get Cats To Stop Spraying In The House

Cat spraying can cause feline anemia is caused by sexual drives.I change their linens often so they avoid it.This means that you check their ears as a rule seek out tough things to look at how ridiculous this species is.Give it to come in and out of the various types of behaviors to their weekly bath and even death.Moisten a bag every week to capture their interest.

There are instances where your cat with interstitial cystitis.The crystals are insoluble, and bond tightly to anything that they need calming down.Have plenty of affection and a great many years has come into heat several times on the other hand, turn out a few drops inside her ears.Instead of giving your cat is not an issue for an extended period of seven years.The more cat urine smell is and do your research.

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Charlie Munger on the psychology of human misjudgment

Speech at Harvard University Estimated date: June, 1995 Transcription, comments [in brackets] and minor editing by Whitney Tilson

Moderator: ...and they discovered extreme, obvious irrationality in many areas of the economy that they looked at. And they were a little bit troubled because nothing that they had learned in graduate school explained these patterns. Now I would hope that Mr. Munger spends a little bit more time around graduate schools today, because we’ve gotten now where he was 30 years ago, and we are trying to explain those patterns, and some of the people who are doing that will be speaking with you today. 

So I think he thinks of his specialty as the Psychology of Human Misjudgment, and part of this human misjudgment, of course, comes from worrying about the types of fads and social pressures that Henry Kaufman talked to us about. I think it’s significant that Berkshire Hathaway is not headquartered in New York, or even in Los Angeles or San Francisco, but rather in the heart of the country in Nebraska. 

When he referred to this problem of human misjudgment, he identified two significant problems, and I’m sure that there are many more, but when he said, “By not relying on this, and not understanding this, it was costing me a lot of money,” and I presume that some of you are here in the theory that maybe it’s costing you even a somewhat lesser amount of money. And the second point that Mr. Munger made was it was reducing...not understanding human misjudgment was reducing my ability to help everything I loved. Well I hope he loves you, and I’m sure he’ll help you. Thank you. [Applause] 

Munger: Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment -- and lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it -- I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with. 

When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life. Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super-tenured hotshot on a 2,000-person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300-odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. In those holes it filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good-working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you. 

And I came here because behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years. 

Well let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through: 

24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment. 

1. First: Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call ‘reinforcement’ and economists call ‘incentives.’ 

Well you can say, “Everybody knows that.” Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther. 

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can’t be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour, and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked. 

Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine. 

And here at Harvard, in the shadow of B.F. Skinner -- there was a man who really was into reinforcement as a powerful thought, and, you know, Skinner’s lost his reputation in a lot of places, but if you were to analyze the entire history of experimental science at Harvard, he’d be in the top handful. His experiments were very ingenious, the results were counter- intuitive, and they were important. It is not given to experimental science to do better. What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome: to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. And Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of Academia, and this syndrome doesn’t exempt bright people. It’s just a man with a hammer...and Skinner is an extreme example of that. And later, as I go down my list, let’s go back and try and figure out why people, like Skinner, get man-with-a-hammer syndrome. 

Incidentally, when I was at the Harvard Law School there was a professor, naturally at Yale, who was derisively discussed at Harvard, and they used to say, “Poor old Blanchard. He thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” And that’s the way Skinner got. And not only that, he was literary, and he scorned opponents who had any different way of thinking or thought anything else was important. This is not a way to make a lasting reputation if the other people turn out to also be doing something important.

2. My second factor is simple psychological denial. 

This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super-athlete, super-student son who flew off a carrier in the north Atlantic and never came back, and his mother, who was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead. And, of course, if you turn on the television, you’ll find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That’s simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems. 

3. Third: incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’ 

Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gall bladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was. And one of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him: I said, “Tell me, did he think, ‘Here’s a way for me to exercise my talents’” -- this guy was very skilled technically -- “’and make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?’” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gall bladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.” 

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses... I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior: after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal government to write one, and not only a crime, but a felony. 

And by the way, the government’s right, but a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system. And human nature, with its version of what I call ‘incentive-caused bias,’ causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get. [Laughter] 

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most [dishonest] behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately. And, of course, he closed the store and went into the cash register business...

And so this is a huge, important thing. If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence. Somehow incentive-caused bias has escaped the standard survey course in psychology. 

4. Fourth, and this is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency: bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won. 

Well what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals; it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard. Instead a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like. 

And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves, because what they’re shouting out [is] what they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are...in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out. 

And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture. 

5. Fifth: bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making. 

I never took a course in psychology, or economics either for that matter, but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology. And the way they taught it, you know, so the dog salivated when the bell rang. So what? Nobody made the least effort to tie that to the wide world. Well the truth of the matter is that Pavlovian association is an enormously powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us. And, indeed, in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory. 

Practically...I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we’re the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with presidents’ funerals and so- forth. When have you seen a Coca-Cola ad...and the association really works. 

And all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level, which makes them very insidious. Now you’ve got Persian messenger syndrome. The Persians really did kill the messenger who brought the bad news. You think that is dead? I mean you should’ve seen Bill Paley in his last 20 years. [Paley was the former owner, chairman and CEO of CBS] 

He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years. 

And now the Persian messenger syndrome is alive and well. I saw, some years ago, Arco and Exxon arguing over a few hundred millions of ambiguity in their North Slope treaties before a superior court judge in Texas, with armies of lawyers and experts on each side. Now this is a Mad Hatter’s tea party: two engineering-style companies can’t resolve some ambiguity without spending tens of millions of dollars in some Texas superior court? In my opinion what happens is that nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost. 

Talking about economics, you get a very interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again in a long life. You’ve got two products; suppose they’re complex, technical products. Now you’d think, under the laws of economics, that if product A costs X, if product Y costs X minus something, it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something, but that’s not so. In many cases when you raise the price of the alternative products, it’ll get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitor’s product. That’s because the bell, a Pavlovian bell -- I mean ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value -- then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again. It’s a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. You can say, “Well, the economists have figured this sort of thing out when they started talking about information inefficiencies,” but that was fairly late in economics that they found such an obvious thing. And, of course, most of them don’t ask what causes the information inefficiencies. 

Well one of the things that causes it is pure old Pavlov and his dog. Now you’ve got bios from Skinnerian association: operant conditioning, you know, where you give the dog a reward and pound in the behavior that preceded the dog’s getting the award. And, of course, Skinner was able to create superstitious pigeons by having the rewards come by accident with certain occurrences, and, of course, we all know people who are the human equivalents of superstitious pigeons. That’s a very powerful phenomenon. And, of course, operant conditioning really works. I mean the people in the center who think that operant conditioning is important are very much right, it’s just that Skinner overdid it a little. 

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically-rooted tendencies is in accounting. If you take Westinghouse, which blew, what, two or three billion dollars pre-tax at least loaning developers to build hotels, and virtually 100% loans? Now you say any idiot knows that if there’s one thing you don’t like it’s a developer, and another you don’t like it’s a hotel. And to make a 100% loan to a developer who’s going to build a hotel... [Laughter] But this guy, he probably was an engineer or something, and he didn’t take psychology any more than I did, and he got out there in the hands of these salesmen operating under their version of incentive-caused bias, where any damned way of getting Westinghouse to do it was considered normal business, and they just blew it. 

That would never have been possible if the accounting system hadn’t been such but for the initial phase of every transaction it showed wonderful financial results. So people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people. And it’s a sin, it’s an absolute sin. If you carry bushel baskets full of money through the ghetto, and made it easy to steal, that would be a considerable human sin, because you’d be causing a lot of bad behavior, and the bad behavior would spread. Similarly an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business, as Westinghouse has so wonderfully proved. 

Oddly enough nobody mentions, at least nobody I’ve seen, what happened with Joe Jett and Kidder Peabody. The truth of the matter is the accounting system was such that by punching a few buttons, the Joe Jetts of the world could show profits, and profits that showed up in things that resulted in rewards and esteem and every other thing... Well the Joe Jetts are always with us, and they’re not really to blame, in my judgment at least. But that bastard who created that foolish accounting system who, so far as I know, has not been flayed alive, ought to be. 

6. Sixth: bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect. 

Well here, again, Cialdini does a magnificent job at this, and you’re all going to be given a copy of Cialdini’s book. And if you have half as much sense as I think you do, you will immediately order copies for all of your children and several of your friends. You will never make a better investment. 

It is so easy to be a patsy for what he calls the compliance practitioners of this life. At any rate, reciprocation tendency is a very, very powerful phenomenon, and Cialdini demonstrated this by running around a campus, and he asked people to take juvenile delinquents to the zoo. And it was a campus, and so one in six actually agreed to do it. And after he’d accumulated a statistical output he went around on the same campus and he asked other people, he said, “Gee, would you devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly yourself to help them,” and there he got 100% of the people to say no. But after he’d made the first request, he backed up a little, and he said, “Would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon?” He raised the compliance rate from a third to a half. He got three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off. 

Now if the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” I mean you are really giving a lot of quarter to the external world that you can’t afford to give. And on this so-called role theory, where you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized. 

A guy named Zimbardo had people at Stanford divide into two pieces: one were the guards and the other were the prisoners, and they started acting out roles as people expected. He had to stop the experiment after about five days. He was getting into human misery and breakdown and pathological behavior. I mean it was...it was awesome. However, Zimbardo is greatly misinterpreted. It’s not just reciprocation tendency and role theory that caused that, it’s consistency and commitment tendency. Each person, as he acted as a guard or a prisoner, the action itself was pounding in the idea. [For more on this famous experiment, see http://www.prisonexp.org.] 

Wherever you turn, this consistency and commitment tendency is affecting you. In other words, what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough. 

7. Seventh, now this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this: bias from over-influence by social proof -- that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress. 

And here, one of the cases the psychologists use is Kitty Genovese, where all these people -- I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 of them -- just sort of sat and did nothing while she was slowly murdered. Now one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing. That’s not a good enough explanation for Kitty Genovese, in my judgment. That’s only part of it. There are microeconomic ideas and gain/loss ratios and so forth that also come into play. I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool. 

Big-shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. I think they’re all gone now, but it was a total disaster. 

Now let’s talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won -- he shared a Nobel Prize -- and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas -- better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. [Laughter] And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone. 

If you think about the doctrines I’ve talked about, namely, one, the power of reinforcement -- after all you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful. Why would you expect general market levels to always be totally efficient, say even in 1973-74 at the pit, or in 1972 or whatever it was when the Nifty 50 were in their heyday? If these psychological notions are correct, you would expect some waves of irrationality, which carry general levels, so they’re inconsistent with reason. 

8. Nine [he means eight]: what made these economists love the efficient market theory is the math was so elegant. 

And after all, math was what they’d learned to do. To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. The alternative truth was a little messy, and they’d forgotten the great economists Keynes, whom I think said, “Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” 

9. Nine: bias from contrast-caused distortions of sensation, perception and cognition. 

Here, the great experiment that Cialdini does in his class is he takes three buckets of water: one’s hot, one’s cold and one’s room temperature, and he has the student stick his left hand in the hot water and his right hand in the cold water. Then he has them remove the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket, and of course with both hands in the same bucket of water, one seems hot, the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over-influenced by contrast. It has no absolute scale; it’s got a contrast scale in it. And it’s a scale with quantum effects in it too. It takes a certain percentage change before it’s noticed. 

Maybe you’ve had a magician remove your watch -- I certainly have -- without your noticing it. It’s the same thing. He’s taking advantage of contrast-type troubles in your sensory apparatus. But here the great truth is that cognition mimics sensation, and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch-removing magician. In other words, people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon. 

Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker. And you’ve got the rube that’s been transferred into your town, and the first thing you do is you take the rube out to two of the most awful, overpriced houses you’ve ever seen, and then you take the rube to some moderately overpriced house, and then you stick him. And it works pretty well, which is why the real estate salesmen do it. And it’s always going to work. 

And the accidents of life can do this to you, and it can ruin your life. In my generation, when women lived at home until they got married, I saw some perfectly terrible marriages made by highly desirable women because they lived in terrible homes. And I’ve seen some terrible second marriages which were made because they were slight improvements over an even worse first marriage. You think you’re immune from these things, and you laugh, and I want to tell you, you aren’t. 

My favorite analogy I can’t vouch for the accuracy of. I have this worthless friend I like to play bridge with, and he’s a total intellectual amateur that lives on inherited money, but he told me once something I really enjoyed hearing. He said, “Charlie,” he say, “If you throw a frog into very hot water, the frog will jump out, but if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.” Now I don’t know whether that’s true about a frog, but it’s sure as hell true about many of the businessmen I know [laughter], and there, again, it is the contrast phenomenon. But these are hot-shot, high-powered people. I mean these are not fools. If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so if you’re going to be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so misled by mere contrast. 

10. Bias from over-influence by authority. 

Well here, the Milgrim experiment, as it's called -- I think there have been 1,600 psychological papers written about Milgrim. And he had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to expect was heavy torture by electric shock to perfectly innocent fellow citizens. And he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded and a few other things, and so this really caught the fancy of the world. Partly it’s so politically correct, and over-influence by authority... 

You’ll like this one: You get a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is the authority figure. They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where the co-pilot, who's been trained in simulators a long time -- he knows he’s not to allow the plane to crash -- they have the pilot to do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was going to crash, but the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot is sitting there, and the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time the plane crashes. I mean this is a very powerful psychological tendency. It’s not quite as powerful as some people think, and I’ll get to that later. 

11. Eleven: bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed. 

Here I took the Munger dog, a lovely, harmless dog. The only way to get that dog to bite you is to try and take something out of its mouth after it was already there. And you know, if you’ve tried to do takeaways in labor negotiations, you’ll know that the human version of that dog is there in all of us. And I have a neighbor, a predecessor who had a little island around the house, and his next door neighbor put a little pine tree on it that was about three feet high, and it turned his 180 degree view of the harbor into 179 3/4. Well they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on and on... 

I mean people are really crazy about minor decrements down. And then, if you act on them, then you get into reciprocation tendency, because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity, and the whole thing can escalate. And so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting. 

And the extreme business case here was New Coke. Coca-Cola has the most valuable trademark in the world. We’re the major shareholder -- I think we understand that trademark. Coke has armies of brilliant engineers, lawyers, psychologists, advertising executives and so forth, and they had a trademark on a flavor, and they’d spent the better part of 100 years getting people to believe that trademark had all these intangible values too. And people associate it with a flavor. And so they were going to tell people not that it was improved, because you can’t improve a flavor. A flavor is a matter of taste. I mean you may improve a detergent or something, but don’t think you’re going to make a major change in a flavor. So they got this huge deprival super-reaction syndrome. 

Pepsi was within weeks of coming out with old Coke in a Pepsi bottle, which would’ve been the biggest fiasco in modern times. Perfect insanity. And by the way, both Goizuetta [Coke's CEO at the time] and Keough [an influential former president and director of the company] are just wonderful about it. I mean they just joke. Keough always says, “I must’ve been away on vacation.” He participated in every single decision -- he’s a wonderful guy. And by the way, Goizuetta is a wonderful, smart guy -- an engineer. Smart people make these terrible boners. How can you not understand deprival super-reaction syndrome? But people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that’s a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies... 

12. Bias from envy/jealousy. 

Well envy/jealousy made, what, two out of the ten commandments? Those of you who have raised siblings you know about envy, or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a faculty? I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.” 

Here again, you go through the psychology survey courses, and you go to the index: envy/jealousy, 1,000-page book, it’s blank. There’s some blind spots in academia, but it’s an enormously powerful thing, and it operates, to a considerable extent, on the subconscious level. Anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have. 

13. Bias from chemical dependency. 

Well, we don’t have to talk about that. We’ve all seen so much of it, but it’s interesting how it’ll always cause this moral breakdown if there’s any need, and it always involves massive denial. See it just aggravates what we talked about earlier in the aviator case, the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable. 

14. Bias from mis-gambling compulsion. 

Well here, Skinner made the only explanation you’ll find in the standard psychology survey course. He, of course, created a variable reinforcement rate for his pigeons and his mice, and he found that that would pound in the behavior better than any other enforcement pattern. And he says, “Ah ha! I’ve explained why gambling is such a powerful, addictive force in this civilization.” I think that is, to a very considerable extent, true, but being Skinner, he seemed to think that was the only explanation, but the truth of the matter is that the devisors of these modern machines and techniques know a lot of things that Skinner didn’t know. 

For instance, a lottery. You have a lottery where you get your number by lot, and then somebody draws a number by lot, it gets lousy play. You have a lottery where people get to pick their number, you get big play. Again, it’s this consistency and commitment thing. People think if they have committed to it, it has to be good. The minute they’ve picked it themselves it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted on it. 

Then if you take the slot machines, you get bar, bar, walnut. And it happens again and again and again. You get all these near misses. Well that’s deprival super-reaction syndrome, and boy do the people who create the machines understand human psychology. And for the high IQ-crowd they’ve got poker machines where you make choices. So you can play blackjack, so to speak, with the machine. It’s wonderful what we’ve done with our computers to ruin the civilization. 

But at any rate, mis-gambling compulsion is a very, very powerful and important thing. Look at what’s happening to our country: every Indian has a reservation, every river town, and look at the people who are ruined by it with the aid of their stock brokers and others. And again, if you look in the standard textbook of psychology you’ll find practically nothing on it except maybe one sentence talking about Skinner’s rats. That is not an adequate coverage of the subject. 

15. Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s 

own kind and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked. Disliking distortion, bias from that, the reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked. 

Well here, again, we’ve got hugely powerful tendencies, and if you look at the wars in part of the Harvard Law School, as we sit here, you can see that very brilliant people get into this almost pathological behavior. And these are very, very powerful, basic, subconscious psychological tendencies, or at least party subconscious. 

Now let’s get back to B.F. Skinner, man-with-a-hammer syndrome revisited. Why is man- with-a-hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, it’s incentive- caused bias. His professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people -- consistency and commitment tendency. I mean you’ve got four or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man-with-a-hammer syndrome. 

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking -- partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world -- you have learned a lesson that’s very useful in life. George Bernard Shaw had a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right, because it isn’t so much a conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency. 

The guy tells you what is good for him. He doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gall bladders. And he believes his own idea structures will cure cancer, and he believes that the demons that he’s the guardian against are the biggest demons and the most important ones, and in fact they may be very small demons compared to the demons that you face. So you’re getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias. And woe to you. 

There are only two ways to handle it: you can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor, like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor's trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little then you can make him explain why he’s right. And those two tendencies will take part of the warp out of the thinking you’ve tried to hire done. By and large it works terribly. I have never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with the following paragraph: "What this situation really needs is more management consulting." Never once. I always turn to the last page. Of course Berkshire doesn’t hire them, so I only do this on sort of a voyeuristic basis. Sometimes I’m at a non-profit where some idiot hires one. [Laughter] 

16. Seventeen [he means 16]: bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deal with probabilities employing crude heuristics, and is often misled by mere contrast, a tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychologically misrouted thinking tendencies on this list. 

When the brain should be using the simple probability mathematics of Fermat and Pascal applied to all reasonably obtainable and correctly weighted items of information that are of value in predicting outcomes, the right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. It’s just that simple. And your brain doesn’t naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. Now, you notice I put in that availability thing, and there I’m mimicking some very eminent psychologists [Daniel] Kahneman, Eikhout[?] (I hope I pronounced that right) and [Amos] Tversky, who raised the idea of availability to a whole heuristic of misjudgment. And they are very substantially right. 

I mean ask the Coca-Cola Company, which has raised availability to a secular religion. If availability changes behavior, you will drink a helluva lot more Coke if it’s always available. I mean availability does change behavior and cognition. Nonetheless, even though I recognize that and applaud Tversky and Kahneman, I don’t like it for my personal system except as part of a greater sub-system, which is you’ve got to think the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. And it isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment. And I want to train myself to kind of mentally run down the list instead of just jumping on availability. So that’s why I state it the way I do. 

In a sense these psychological tendencies make things unavailable, because if you quickly jump to one thing, and then because you jumped to it the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, that’s error number one. Or if something is very vivid, which I’m going to come to next, that will really pound in. And the reason that the thing that really matters is now unavailable and what’s extra-vivid wins is, I mean, the extra- vividness creates the unavailability. So I think it’s much better to have a whole list of things that would cause you to be less like Zeckhauser than it is just to jump on one factor. 

Here I think we should discuss John Gutfreund. This is a very interesting human example, which will be taught in every decent professional school for at least a full generation. Gutfreund has a trusted employee and it comes to light not through confession but by accident that the trusted employee has lied like hell to the government and manipulated the accounting system, and it was really equivalent to forgery. And the man immediately says, “I’ve never done it before, I’ll never do it again. It was an isolated example.” And of course it was obvious that he was trying to help the government as well as himself, because he thought the government had been dumb enough to pass a rule that he’d spoken against, and after all if the government’s not going to pay attention to a bond trader at Salomon, what kind of a government can it be? 

At any rate, this guy has been part of a little clique that has made, well, way over a billion dollars for Salomon in the very recent past, and it’s a little handful of people. And so there are a lot of psychological forces at work, and then you know the guy’s wife, and he’s right in front of you, and there’s human sympathy, and he’s sort of asking for your help, which encourages reciprocation, and there’s all these psychological tendencies are working, plus the fact he’s part of a group that had made a lot of money for you. At any rate, Gutfreund does not cashier the man, and of course he had done it before and he did do it again. Well now you look as though you almost wanted him to do it again. Or God knows what you look like, but it isn’t good. And that simple decision destroyed Jim Gutfreund, and it’s so easy to do. 

Now let’s think it through like the bridge player, like Zeckhauser. You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s Candy Company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till. And what does she say? “I never did it before, I’ll never do it again. This is going to ruin my life. Please help me.” And you know her children and her friends, and she’d been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles. 

When you’re an old lady it isn’t that glorious a life. And you’re rich and powerful and there she is: “I never did it before, I’ll never do it again.” Well how likely is it that she never did it before? If you’re going to catch 10 embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them -- applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information -- will be somebody who only did it this once? And the people who have done it before and are going to do it again, what are they all going to say? Well in the history of the See’s Candy Company they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never going to do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to, because terrible behavior spreads. 

Remember...what was it? Serpico? I mean you let that stuff...you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive-caused bias, you’ve got a whole lot of psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn...your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten. It’s not the right way to behave. And I will admit that I have...when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody for taking a mistress on an extended foreign trip. It’s not the adultery I mind, it’s the embezzlement. But there, I wouldn’t do it like Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf. There I think you have to cashier. But if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance. In fact I don’t think you need any vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is much good. 

17. Now we come to bias from over-influence by extra-vivid evidence. 

Here’s one that...I’m at least $30 million poorer as I sit here giving this little talk because I once bought 300 shares of a stock and the guy called me back and said, “I’ve got 1,500 more,” and I said, “Will you hold it for 15 minutes while I think about it?” And the CEO of this company -- I have seen a lot of vivid peculiarities in a long life, but this guy set a world record; I’m talking about the CEO -- and I just mis-weighed it. The truth of the matter was the situation was foolproof. He was soon going to be dead, and I turned down the extra 1,500 shares, and it’s now cost me $30 million. And that’s life in the big city. And it wasn’t something where stock was generally available. So it’s very easy to mis- weigh the vivid evidence, and Gutfreund did that when he looked into the man’s eyes and forgave a colleague. 

18. Twenty-two [he means 18]: Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures, creating sound generalizations developed in response to the question “Why?” Also, mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question “Why?” Also, failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why. 

Well we all know people who’ve flunked, and they try and memorize and they try and spout back and they just...it doesn’t work. The brain doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to array facts on the theory structures answering the question “Why?” If you don’t do that, you just cannot handle the world. 

And now we get to Feuerstein, who was the general counsel with Salomon when Gutfreund made his big error, and Feuerstein knew better. He told Gutfreund, “You have to report this as a matter of morality and prudent business judgment.” He said, “It’s probably not illegal, there’s probably no legal duty to do it, but you have to do it as a matter of prudent conduct and proper dealing with your main customer.” He said that to Gutfreund on at least two or three occasions. And he stopped. And, of course, the persuasion failed, and when Gutfreund went down, Feuerstein went with him. It ruined a considerable part of Feuerstein’s life. 

Well Feuerstein, [who] was a member of the Harvard Law Review, made an elementary psychological mistake. You want to persuade somebody, you really tell them why. And what did we learn in lesson one? Incentives really matter? Vivid evidence really works? He should’ve told Gutfreund, “You’re likely to ruin your life and disgrace your family and lose your money.” And is Mozer worth this? I know both men. That would’ve worked. So Feuerstein flunked elementary psychology, this very sophisticated, brilliant lawyer. But don’t you do that. It’s not very hard to do, you know, just to remember that “Why?” is very important. 

19. Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge. Well, I don’t have time for that. 

20. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent. 

Here, my favorite example is the great Pavlov. He had all these dogs in cages, which had all been conditioned into changed behaviors, and the great Leningrad flood came and it just went right up and the dog’s in a cage. And the dog had as much stress as you can imagine a dog ever having. And the water receded in time to save some of the dogs, and Pavlov noted that they’d had a total reversal of their conditioned personality. And being the great scientist he was, he spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs, and he learned a helluva lot that I regard as very interesting. 

I have never known any Freudian analyst who knew anything about the last work of Pavlov, and I’ve never met a lawyer who understood that what Pavlov found out with those dogs had anything to do with programming and de-programming and cults and so forth. I mean the amount of elementary psychological ignorance that is out there in high levels is very significant[?]. 

21. Then we’ve got other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse. 

22. And then I’ve got development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome. 

And here my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. And a honeybee goes out and finds the nectar and he comes back, he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well some scientist who is clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar where they’re all straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate. And you’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. [Laughter] And it’s a very important part of human organization so the noise and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions. 

Now the time has come to ask two or three questions. This is the most important question in this whole talk: 

1. What happens when these standard psychological tendencies combine? What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time? 

The clear answer is the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone. 

Examples are: 

• Tupperware parties. Tupperware’s now made billions of dollars out of a few manipulative psychological tricks. It was so schlocky that directors of Justin Dart’s company resigned when he crammed it down his board’s throat. And he was totally right, by the way, judged by economic outcomes. 

• Moonie [as in Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church] conversion methods: boy do they work. He just combines four or five of these things together. 

• The system of Alcoholics Anonymous: a 50% no-drinking rate outcome when everything else fails? It’s a very clever system that uses four or five psychological systems at once toward, I might say, a very good end. 

• The Milgrim experiment. It’s been widely interpreted as mere obedience, but the truth of the matter is that the experimenter who got the students to give the heavy shocks in Milgrim, he explained why. It was a false explanation. “We need this to look for scientific truth,” and so on. That greatly changed the behavior of the people. And number two, he worked them up: tiny shock, a little larger, a little larger. So commitment and consistency tendency and the contrast principle were both working in favor of this behavior. So again, it’s four different psychological tendencies.

When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together. 

When I was young there was a whodunit hero who always said, “Cherche la femme.” [In French, "Look for the woman."] What you should search for in life is the combination, because the combination is likely to do you in. Or, if you’re the inventor of Tupperware parties, it’s likely to make you enormously rich if you can stand shaving when you do it. 

One of my favorite cases is the McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests, one of them is evacuation: get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline. So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark and the concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they’ve got these little rubber chutes, and they’ve got all these old people, and they ring the bell and they all rush out, and in the morning, when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries when people go off to hospitals, and of course they scheduled another one for the afternoon. 

By the way they didn’t read[?] the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries. 

Well...so what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. These are engineers, these are brilliant people, this is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. Again, it’s a combination of [psychological tendencies]: authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner. Again, three, four, five of these things work together and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments? If so, you’re living in a different world than I am. 

Finally, the open-outcry auction. Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you’ve got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior. 

Finally the institution of the board of directors of the major American company. Well, the top guy is sitting there, he’s an authority figure. He’s doing asinine things, you look around the board, nobody else is objecting, social proof, it’s okay? Reciprocation tendency, he’s raising the directors fees every year, he’s flying you around in the corporate airplane to look at interesting plants, or whatever in hell they do, and you go and you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens. 

2. The second question: Isn’t this list of standard psychological tendencies improperly tautological compared with the system of Euclid? That is, aren’t there overlaps? And can’t some items on the list be derived from combinations of other items?

The answer to that is, plainly, yes. 

3. Three: What good, in the practical world, is the thought system indicated by the list? Isn’t practical benefit prevented because these psychological tendencies are programmed into the human mind by broad evolution so we can’t get rid of them? [By] broad evolution, I mean the combination of genetic and cultural evolution, but mostly genetic. 

Well the answer is the tendencies are partly good and, indeed, probably much more good than bad, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. By and large these rules of thumb, they work pretty well for man given his limited mental capacity. And that’s why they were programmed in by broad evolution. At any rate, they can’t be simply washed out automatically and they shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, the psychological thought system described is very useful in spreading wisdom and good conduct when one understands it and uses it constructively. 

Here are some examples: 

• One: Karl Braun’s communication practices. He designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule. Remember I said, “Why is it important?” You got fired in the Braun company. You had to have five Ws. You had to tell Who, What you wanted to do, Where and When, and you had to tell him Why. And if you wrote a communication and left out the Why you got fired, because Braun knew it’s complicated building an oil refinery. It can blow up...all kinds of things happen. And he knew that his communication system worked better if you always told him why. That’s a simple discipline, and boy does it work. 

• Two: the use of simulators in pilot training. Here, again, abilities attenuate with disuse. Well the simulator is God’s gift because you can keep them fresh. 

• Three: The system of Alcoholics Anonymous, that’s certainly a constructive use of somebody understanding psychological tendencies. I think they just wandered into it, as a matter of fact, so you can regard it as kind of an evolutionary outcome. But just because they’ve wandered into it doesn’t mean you can’t invent its equivalent when you need it for a good purpose. 

• Four: Clinical training in medical schools: here’s a profoundly correct way of understanding psychology. The standard practice is watch one, do one, teach one. Boy does that pound in what you want pounded in. Again, the consistency and commitment tendency. And that is a profoundly correct way to teach clinical medicine. 

• Five: The rules of the U.S. Constitutional Convention: totally secret, no vote until the whole vote, then just one vote on the whole Constitution. Very clever psychological rules, and if they had a different procedure, everybody would’ve been pushed into a corner by his own pronouncements and his own oratory and his own... And no recorded votes until the last one. And they got it through by a whisker with those wise rules. We wouldn’t have had the Constitution if our forefathers hadn’t been so psychologically acute. And look at the crowd we got now.

• Six: the use of granny’s rule. I love this. One of the psychologists who works for the Center gets paid a fortune running around America, and he teaches executives to manipulate themselves. Now granny’s rule is you don’t get the ice cream unless you eat your carrots. Well granny was a very wise woman. That is a very good system. And so this guy, a very eminent psychologist, he runs around the country telling executives to organize their day so they force themselves to do what’s unpleasant and important by doing that first, and then rewarding themselves with something they really like doing. He is profoundly correct. 

• Seven: the Harvard Business School’s emphasis on decision trees. When I was young and foolish I used to laugh at the Harvard Business School. I said, “They’re teaching 28-year-old people that high school algebra works in real life?” We’re talking about elementary probability. But later I wised up and I realized that it was very important that they do that, and better late than never. 

• Eight: the use of post-mortems at Johnson & Johnson. At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You’ve got denial, you’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely. 

• Nine: the great example of Charles Darwin is he avoided confirmation bias. Darwin probably changed my life because I’m a biography nut, and when I found out the way he always paid extra attention to the disconfirming evidence and all these little psychological tricks. I also found out that he wasn’t very smart by the ordinary standards of human acuity, yet there he is buried in Westminster Abbey. That’s not where I’m going, I’ll tell you. And I said, “My God, here’s a guy that, by all objective evidence, is not nearly as smart as I am and he’s in Westminster Abbey? He must have tricks I should learn.” And I started wearing little hair shirts like Darwin to try and train myself out of these subconscious psychological tendencies that cause so many errors. It didn’t work perfectly, as you can tell from listening to this talk, but it would’ve been even worse if I hadn’t done what I did. And you can know these psychological tendencies and avoid being the patsy of all the people that are trying to manipulate you to your disadvantage, like Sam Walton. Sam Walton won’t let a purchasing agent take a handkerchief from a salesman. He knows how powerful the subconscious reciprocation tendency is. That is a profoundly correct way for Sam Walton to behave. 

• Ten: Then there is the Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry auctions: don’t go. We don’t go to the closed-bid auctions too because they...that’s a counter-productive way to do things ordinarily for a different reason, which Zeckhauser would understand. 

4. Four: What special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought system indicated by the list? 

Well one is paradox. Now we’re talking about a type of human wisdom that the more people learn about it, the more attenuated the wisdom gets. That’s an intrinsically paradoxical kind of wisdom. But we have paradox in mathematics and we don’t give up mathematics. I say damn the paradox. This stuff is wonderfully useful. And by the way, the granny’s rule, when you apply it to yourself, is sort of a paradox in a paradox. The manipulation still works even though you know you’re doing it. And I’ve seen that done by one person to another. 

I drew this beautiful woman as my dinner partner a few years ago, and I’d never seen her before. Well, she’s married to prominent Angelino, and she sat down next to me and she turned her beautiful face up and she said, “Charlie,” she said, “What one word accounts for your remarkable success in life?” And I knew I was being manipulated and that she’d done this before, and I just loved it. I mean I never see this woman without a little lift in my spirits. And by the way I told her I was rational. You’ll have to judge yourself whether that’s true. I may be demonstrating some psychological tendency I hadn’t planned on demonstrating. 

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind? Two views: that’s the thermodynamics model. You know, you can’t derive thermodynamics from plutonium, gravity and laws of mechanics, even though it’s a lot of little particles interacting. And here is this wonderful truth that you can sort of develop on your own, which is thermodynamics. And some economists -- and I think Milton Friedman is in this group, but I may be wrong on that -- sort of like the thermodynamics model. I think Milton Friedman, who has a Nobel prize, is probably a little wrong on that. I think the thermodynamics analogy is over-strained. I think knowledge from these different soft sciences have to be reconciled to eliminate conflict. After all, there’s nothing in thermodynamics that’s inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and I think that some of these economic theories are not totally consistent with other knowledge, and they have to be bent. And I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. 

Now my prediction is when the economists take a little psychology into account that the reconciliation will be quite endurable. And here my model is the procession of the equinoxes. The world would be simpler for a long-term climatologist if the angle of the axis of the Earth’s rotation, compared to the plane of the Euclyptic, were absolutely fixed. But it isn’t fixed. Over every 40,000 years or so there’s this little wobble, and that has pronounced long-term effects. Well in many cases what psychology is going to add is just a little wobble, and it will be endurable. Here I quote another hero of mine, which of course is Einstein, where he said, “The Lord is subtle, but not malicious.” And I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology. 

5. Fifth: The final question is: If the thought system indicated by this list of psychological tendencies has great value not recognized and employed, what should the educational system do about it? 

I am not going to answer that one now. I like leaving a little mystery. 

Have I used up all the time so there’s no time for questions? 

Moderator: I think that what we’re going to do is we’re going to borrow a little bit of time from the end of the day questions, and we’re going to move it and allocate it to Charles Munger, if that's acceptable to everybody.

Munger: By the way, the dean of the Stanford Law School is here today, Paul Brest, and he is trying to create a course at the Stanford Law School that tries to work stuff similar to this into worldly wisdom for lawyers, which I regard as a profoundly good idea, and he wrote an article about it, and you’ll be given a copy along with Cialdini’s book. [The article Mr. Munger is referring to is called "On Teaching Professional Judgment" by Paul Brest and Linda Krieger. It was published in the July 1994 edition of the Washington Law Review.] Questions? 

Audience Member #1: Will we be able to get a copy of that list of 24 [standard causes of human misjudgment]? 

Munger: Yes. I presumed there would be one curious man [laughter], and I have it and I’ll put it over there on the table, but don’t take more than one, because I didn’t anticipate such a big crowd. And if we run short, I’m sure the Center is up to making other copies. 

Audience Member #2: If I had listened to this talk I might have thought that Charles Munger was a psychology professor operating in a business school. Every once in a while a micro-issue -- you told us how you would’ve deal with one of these issues, for example with the unfortunate lady See’s -- but you didn’t tell us how these tendencies affected you and what’s probably the most important, or one of the most important elements of your success, which was deciding where to invest your money. And I’m wondering if you might relate some of these principles to some of your past decisions that way. 

Munger: Well of course an investment decision in the common stock of a company frequently involves a whole lot of factors interacting. Usually, of course, there’s one big, simple model, and a lot of those models are microeconomic. And I have a little list of -- it wouldn’t be nearly 24, of those -- but I don’t have time for that one. And I don’t have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn’t because I fear the competition or anything like that -- Warren has always been very open about what he’s learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn’t want to turn it into a total obsession. 

Audience Member #3: Out of those 24, could you tell us the one rule that’s most important? 

Munger: I would say the one thing that causes the most trouble is when you combine a bunch of these together, you get this lollapalooza effect. And again, if you read the psychology textbooks, they don’t discuss how these things combine, at least not very much. Do they multiply? Do they add? How does it work? You’d think it’d be just an automatic subject for research, but it doesn’t seem to turn the psychology establishment on. I think this is a man from Mars approach to psychology. 

I just reached in and took what I thought I had to have. That is a different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That’s what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound -- an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn’t much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments. It is not necessarily for the good. It may be fine if you want new drugs or something. You want people stunted in a lot of different directions so they can grow in one narrow direction, but I don’t think it’s good teaching psychology to the masses. In fact, I think it’s terrible.

[lisamccrack]

A prisoner to pain.

It's been 7 weeks since I left the house, other than to attend a hospital appointment. It's been 7 weeks since I ate a full meal. It's been 7 weeks since I got up out of bed and moved around the house freely. And I have lost count of the weeks that I have been in pain. The pain is the centre of all of this. It decides when I can get up and shower, sit on the couch, or hold a civil conversation with someone. Most days are spent alone, lying in bed, scanning through the same social media uploads over and over and over again. I haven't bothered with the TV. I'm not sure why... it's as though I have becomes so fed up I cannot even be bothered to concentrate on anything that is shown. I've used my tolerance with liquid morphine, and I've used my tolerance with slow release tablet morphine. I'm not sure what there is next on the list when these have been exhausted. You would think that based on my weight right now it would have an effect?! I use enough drugs in a day to knock out a large cow for a weekend. I've even tried to get friends to take my prescriptions to check they are actually 'real' morphine, and not some placebo "mind over matter" sneaky shit supplied by a smart ass doctor trying to prove a point. No one has obliged. I've had my investigatory op. My bladder is fine, which I felt was ok anyway. My bowel is wrecked. Not beyond repair at this point, but causing me daily grief that is yet to be addressed by anyone! I am keeping a log of all the things going on so that I can present my case... again. As usual, I feel like my pleas for help fall on deaf ears. I have narrowing and scar tissue that has caused loops in both large and small intestines. All I can do at this point is try to eat all the low fiber foods I can handle. I am not too successful at this right now, but I am trying. My cervix is not so good. There is something to be seen there, that the surgeon referred to as a kind of ulcer. He said that because of all the damage by radiotherapy, It is impossible for him to say whether it is cancerous cells or damage caused by the rad itself. However he did say though, that it is rare for radiotherapy to cause such damage, and this worries him. Which of course then worries me. Two biopsies have been taken, and I now have to wait for up to two weeks for the results. I don't feel as though I'm waiting for cancer or not cancer. I feel as though I'm waiting on "cancer, how bad is it. What can we do". The level of pain that comes from the exact same area as before, keeps me up all night, sends me crazy... it's all too familiar. Here I am blogging at 4am because as normal, no pill is enough to get me through. At the moment I am fuelled by rage. I am living real life groundhog day. Last may I was referred for cervical cancer, and told I had IBS. They missed it. Roll on to September and I was diagnosed. One year on, I alerted my team in May to the pain I was having, dismissed, and now here we are in September waiting on the same results. I have to wonder, if it wasn't for my persistence, would I even be alive? They have a lot to answer for! First thing this morning I will be making the ever dreaded call to Macmillan to chase my results, and complain about pain levels, again.  I did call two weeks ago for further pain relief, but they never did get back to me. Such service 😑 Another complaint I have is regarding my last appointment. They sent me the notes on this, and it's as though we attended two different sessions. None of what I said has been recorded, and their own version of my state of mind, and physical being has been made up! I left a voicemail about getting that changed too... again no response! So as you can imagine, my very thin tolerance for this has kinda gone past being thin now, and is completely transparent. I am fed up having the daily conversations with my mum over the what if this, could be that.. maybe it's.... NO! if someone would just get back to me, physically invite me in OR come and see me, then I would have the answers.

I am tired of this crap. It is a constant circle of the same old issues, and me still the driving force behind it all. Even after everything I have been through! You would think that it would been enough to be taken seriously, no?

I wonder, shall we place bets for how long it takes me to get a response from my nurse? I'll go first.. 48 hours. 😝

[bflatpenguin]

Up, down, etc.

I’ve been absent from here for a while, for lots of reasons. Mostly good. But recently I’ve had a lot of happy and sad.

The biggest thing? My husband and I will be welcoming our first child by the end of this month. Overwhelming? Yes. Exciting? Yes. Everything has gone smoothly so far, so send your good vibes and such for my next few weeks. I feel like I’m incubating a beach ball, though for now I’m still walking the dogs just about every day and functioning. Steve has done a ton of work the last few weeks getting the kiddo’s room renovated and I’m very proud of and thankful for him.

I found out that my dad might have bladder cancer. He hasn’t been terribly well for a while but finally ended up in the ER with bloody urine and pain. He had a first urology appointment last week; I’m still waiting to hear what came of it. I’m told it’s a relatively treatable cancer, as long as it hasn’t gotten too far.

We took an emergency vet trip last week for Fritz, who was diagnosed with some urinary problems. The pH of his urine (I think) is too high and needs to be more acidic. He’s supposed to be on a prescription diet but for now he’s just been switched to Purina’s version of the urinary health formula because the legit stuff is SO expensive and I can’t get Steve to go for it. Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed but I don’t know, just instinctively move to take care of the creatures that live in my house.

I lost my job teaching band. That’s the short version. The long version is that I was supposedly only hired because I’d be working with my husband who is a certified teacher, where I’m not. The truth is that the school is so cheap and unwilling to pay a music teacher fairly, that without both the band and general music positions to offer a single person, they’d never find someone. It’s a cruel joke, though it’s mostly on them because everybody knows I did a damn good job and I won’t hesitate to tell my now-former students and their parents the truth about why I’m leaving. I need to do it soon, though; I don’t trust the administration at the school and suspect that they might lie and tell them I left for personal reasons, which would be easy. Part of me also wants to tempt that to happen, so I can further discredit them.

Not everything’s shitty. I’m teaching lessons at home still. I can comfortably be friends with some students’ parents who I really liked but previously hesitated to reach out to, even though I knew that ultimately my tenure as a teacher would be shorter than a real friendship regardless. I’ll have infinitely more freedom and the privilege of being able to raise my child until she’s old enough to go to pre-school, while still being a musician on the weekends and a teacher here and there. It’ll give me the chance to figure out what to do with my life- long story short, the shitty Catholic diocese I work for will be consolidating parishes in the coming 1-2 years so I’m hoping to have a new career path (even if it’s still in music/education) before that happens so I can comfortably lose my music director job or choose to leave it. Working for the Catholic church is a hot disaster mess. It’s not as oppressive or discriminatory on a daily basis as more conservative/evangelical-type churches, but it’s certainly nowhere near progressive and at least here, doesn’t do shit for the community. All talk, no action, but for now they pay me to play music so I stay.

But yeah, not all bad.

One of my very best friends just got engaged. I am incredibly happy for her. Even though I’ve only met her fiancé once, I liked him a lot and am happy to welcome him permanently into our circle of friends.

My sister is getting married in September. My other sister graduated from grad school in May. They’re doing well, I think. Living on their own, building their lives. I hope I’ll be able to see them more after the baby comes.

There are big bad things. Little bad things. Big good, little good. Life is a little wild but not terrible. We’re making it.

[dmozal-cancer-walk-in-50states]

Derry, New Hampshire Celebrates 20th year with Relay

June 16, 2017

At the Derry, New Hampshire event I was able to chat with a few people on the rainy evening event. There was a good turn out with all that rain.

I met Jo Ann Palermo, a retired post office worker, who has always been very health conscious. She worked the 3 to midnight shift sorting mail, ate only half of her dinner so she could use half of her time to walk (rain or shine), doesn’t drink or smoke. She bicycles, walks, hikes, cross country skis and camps. She has been very cognizance of her health so she was very surprised at her cancer diagnosis since she sees so many people who eat and drink unhealthy thing but are not afflicted with the disease.

Jo Ann Palermo, 6 year ovarian cancer survivor

6 years ago, at the age of 65, Pat was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. As her job as a trainer for the post office was being phased out she was moved to unloading trucks. She found the new job was very physically challenging. After about 6-7 months she noticed she was very tired and had to use the restroom more often to empty her bladder. Because of the constant need to use the restroom she was told she would have to get a doctor’s note.  She made an appointment and her doctor said he wanted her to see a urologist. When she made the appointment, there was a snow storm so by the time she got to see the doctor is was about 3-4 months later. The doctor thought it was a bladder issue so he sent her for more tests.

After the results came back it was discovered that Jo Ann had ovarian cancer.

She is a strong woman of faith who found that she has grown much closer to God since dealing with having cancer. Her daughter bought a cabin so she could spend time at it. She has found that cancer has made her life better because she looks for more of the good now. With 3 kids (2 girls and a boy) and 6 grandchildren she finds she is so much closer to them now. Her son changed his days off so he could sit with her during her chemo.

Jo Ann has a great saying “Cancer invaded my body but it can’t invade my soul”, and people who have been told they have cancer start fighting the moment they hear the words “you have cancer”. We don’t realize how much we fight through all the phases of diagnosis, surgeries, treatments, etc.

Jo Ann continues to live a healthy lifestyle. She is doing well and enjoying life every day!

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Carol, a diabetic, had to have her finger amputated in the middle of January 2016. She mentioned to the nurse practitioner that she had severe stomach pains as well. The nurse said that she had a fatty liver from eating too much fried foods. Carol didn’t agree. She ended up in the hospital in July 2016 from severe pain, especially after she would eat even a little bit. By the time they diagnosed her it was stage 4 liver cancer.

Carol, liver cancer survivor, and one of the Santa’s that attended the event

Her doctor ordered a barrage of tests to see what exactly was going on. Because the ultrasound didn’t look good the doctor ordered even more tests.

A wonderful woman, Olive, that Carol has been living with helped her through a lot of her diagnosis and treatments but she passed away this past April 14th just before she turned 90 so Carol is dealing with her cancer without a strong support system.

In the early 80’s Carol’s father had lung cancer and was given 3 months to live but Carol says he was a stubborn man. He survived 18 years! She figures she is as stubborn as her father was. He died March 9, 1999 at the age of 63. Her parents were so close, with such a great love for one another that her Mom passed away 13 days later.

Now Carol is going through chemo and says you really find out who your friends are. Olive was a dear friend. Carol worked with her 30 years ago, so they had been good friends for a long time. She misses her and finds that the people who are true friends are the ones that try to help her. Carol drives herself to her treatments but says the people at the clinic are awesome. Cancer is hard enough to deal with but your support system makes a huge difference as well.

Doreen was 48 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, 9 years ago. She is one of 10 children and her mom was one of 10 children but nowhere was there any cancer in the family. Doreen has 2 girls of her own so, because of her diagnosis, they need to be more aware now. She went to the doctor for her checkup and he found a lump but he never said to do anything about it. Doreen couldn’t feel the lump so she didn’t really think about it after she left the doctor’s office, especially since she isn’t the type of person who puts herself first.

Doreen, 9 year breast cancer survivor

It was around thanksgiving and things were busy in her household, especially with a 9 and 11-year-old girls and a husband that works “crazy hours”. When she told her husband about her strange experience at the doctors, he asked if she needed to go get a mammogram. Doreen already has an appointment in February and the doctor didn’t say it was urgent so she waited. Her husband was gone on a job for 4 months so Doreen was busy taking care of their girls, the house, the snow, etc. She did keep her commitment to get the mammogram (even though she contemplated not going because she was tired). It was about 4 or 5 days later as she was getting ready for the day when she was thinking “all must be well for another year” because she hadn’t heard from anyone. Then the phone rang.

Doreen had to go back in for more tests. They did a partial mammogram and an ultrasound and told her they did see a lump and wanted her to go to her surgeon. Doreen was completely thrown off because she doesn’t have a surgeon. She wanted to go home and check her insurance. It was tough because no one said “these are the surgeons we recommended”. Doreen said she picked her surgeon on a whim, no one recommended a specific surgeon and she didn’t know any of the ones available. He was a nice man but he was a general surgeon, not a breast surgeon.

Doreen asked for him to leave her some information and they gave her breast cancer pamphlets. It was scary because no one told her it was cancer. Around Valentine’s Day her husband came home for a few days and Doreen finally told him what was going on. As many of us can imagine he was devastated. As much as he wanted to stay Doreen is one strong woman because she sent him back to work.

The surgeon did a lumpectomy, but a few days later she received a call saying she needed to come back because they didn’t get clear margin. At this point Doreen decided it was time to find a breast surgeon. She had a tough time during recovery. She didn’t want to be a burden, her husband was afraid he’d bother her, so Doreen felt a bit isolated. It’s so hard because everyone believes they are doing what is best.

When she went for a second opinion they found another lump that no one had seen or felt so they suggested Doreen get a mastectomy. During the discussions with her husband she decided to get breast reconstruction. Recovery was tough, but luckily Doreen says her husband was home.

Originally chemo was suggested so Doreen and her husband prepared for these treatments however when they went the morning of the first treatment they decided not to do it. Doreen’s husband didn’t like the idea of chemo so they cancelled the appointment that morning. They told the doctors that chemo was on hold until they could get more information.

After some research Doreen decided to have some testing on the cancer tissue. Fighting to get the testing done was crazy but she was persistent. She went through appeal boards and review boards but she won! The results came back on the tissue and it showed that chemo wasn’t needed!!! Doreen fought through this whole situation as the strong one, she is one tough cookie.

Relay is a part of the family as well. Her daughter, Victoria, started a Relay team at her college, St. Rose in Albany, and is extremely involved. On her fundraising page Vicki says “When I was 10, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. I've spent the last 9 years Relaying in the hopes that no other little kid has to fear growing up without their mom. This year, I'm honored to serve as the President of Colleges Against Cancer and once again work to put this all together. We celebrate, we remember, and we fight back against this terrible disease and the people it affects.” You can also see the St. Rose Relay page at https://www.facebook.com/SaintRoseRelay/

Doreen is healthy now and has even started a 5k training program. She still reminds every one of the importance of mammograms and taking care of their health!

Tom has an unusual story as well, a bit more unusual than some that I have heard. Tom loved to play street hockey but took a hit to the head (tough player) and fractured an orbital bone several years ago. He also had developed a hernia when he played in a memorial game for his uncle. He went to his primary doctor and was told to get an ultrasound of the hernia. As soon as he had finished the ultrasound and arrived home the phone was ringing. The doctor told him and his mom to get back to her office right away. She said that behind the hernia were 4 tumors – a 22 cm tumor on the right and left side of the hernia and 2-10 cm masses on his spleen. It was strange because Tom had also developed high blood pressure.

Dr. Anne Thomassen, Tom’s primary doctor, sent him to Dr. Lata Thatai for the biopsy. The results were surprising to the doctor so she sent him for a second biopsy. She was still astonished by the results so she suggested they would do the hernia surgery first and retest the tumors. When Tom came to the office, thinking he was going to start some type of treatments, Dr. Thatai said the pathology report indicated something she had never seen. Tom had both B-cell and T-cell Hodgkin’s and Non-Hodgkin’s cancer in each of the 4 tumors. One is an aggressive and the other is a non-aggressive type of cancer. Dr. Thatai contacted a doctor at Brigham & Women’s Hospital to get some treatment ideas but was told not to treat the cancers at the same time. Dr. Thatai didn’t want to take a 50/50 chance on curing one of the cancers but not the other type so she contacted another doctor to get more advice. She contacted Dr. Jeremy Abramson at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Abramson asked Tom if he’d be willing to take all the Hodgkin’s chemo drugs at the same time for 6 rounds of chemo. Tom accepted. Dr. Thatai wanted Tom to do 8 rounds of chemo but he did 6 rounds of chemo since the drugs are VERY strong.

Tom also shared how his faith has helped him through his journey through cancer. He said “I had asked my priest for the sacrament of the sick, and went to a healing mass, where they used (for the first time) the healing oils from St. Joseph's Oratory, the same holy oils from the same place that Brother Andre Bessette (now known as Saint Andre) came from in Montreal. I have known of the holy oils and miracles since I was young, and was stunned when I saw the bottles we always got from St. Joseph's.” He had two moments before he started chemo that he feels these faith-events affected in his treatments and cure.

Although he has some health issues now that are separate from the cancer Tom feels his is doing well. Tom has lost special people in his life to cancer – an aunt and a friend. He attributes his 5 years cancer free status to Dr. Thatai and Dr. Abramson (and I believe Tom’s tenacity in taking multiple chemo drugs to destroy 2 separate types of cancer at the same time).

Bianka Beaudoin, Community Manager for American Cancer Society’s New England Division, has been working for ACS for 6 years. Bianka relays in memory of her father. She is very passionate about Relay! I appreciate the love of someone special in her life that drives her (as it does so many of us).

Bianka Beaudoin, Community Manager for American Cancer Society’s New England Division

Bianka signing the shirts

While I attended this event, Derry was celebrating their 20th year for Relay for Life. Even though the weather was a bit damp, the spirits of the people at this event were not….they were exhilarating, supportive, appreciative, and welcoming.

Every event I attended in the last few weeks were wonderful, as usual. I am so blessed to be able to attend the Relay’s and be welcomed by the people who have been touched by cancer. I am honored to be able to share their stories.

More to come soon!!!