#even on medical grounds

[fuckingarataswespeak]

let's go ireland!

[papertowness]

there was absolutely no reason for james wilson to look at his best buddy / coworker like this after said best buddy / coworker just accused him of dressing up to impress somebody at the place they work at

[boarprinceofdelusion]

Recognizing Early Signs of Mental Illness

[palms-upturned]

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[skimblyspones]

Sometimes I forget how much shit McCoy canonically knows, at least to a degree of competence. Like ok sure he's not an Engineer or a bricklayer but he's damn well more than "a simple, country doctor"; he's got the sciences badge instead of the medical one for a reason

[kieren-fucking-walker]

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[centaurianthropology]

On Faceless Death, From the Perspective of Someone Who Deals with Death Every Day

This is a post I’ve toyed with writing for a while, and I keep thinking about writing it every few months when a new tragedy or accident or some other event that leads to loss of life comes up, and I see the inevitable deluge of people celebrating the deaths.  And these are very rarely the deaths of known actors, those whose actions, both good and bad, are public record.

These are, for lack of a better term, the unknown and faceless.  The “Ten People Die in Such-and-Such a Circumstance” people.  What is known about them is usually that they were in a place when an event occurred, be it a concert, a festival, a town, whatever.  But there are assumptions made about them because of where they were and what they might have been doing.  People claim that “everyone” doing a specific thing or being in a specific place was a member of XYZ group, and that’s why it’s fine to laugh and celebrate the deaths of these very ordinary people.

And I call them ordinary because they are.  Because all death is ordinary, because everyone is equalized in that.  Because these are not known actors, but those people who simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and their names, their faces, their stories are likely known only to those they left behind. 

I am a medical examiner.  Every day I go to work and I’m greeted by photos and stories of the dead.  These are also often people who were in a certain place at a certain time, who have judgment passed on them.  These are the woman found in a cheap motel room with a syringe floating next to her in a moldy bathtub.  These are the tatted-up uncle walking his nephew home when he’s caught in a drive-by.  This is the wealthy man who is bludgeoned to death while out walking on a secluded trail.  These are the kids caught in cross-fire as their older siblings shoot out their disputes.  These are an old woman dying alone at home and not being found for weeks because no one thought to check on her.  These are young college students driving home from a party when they roll over and get ejected through a windshield.  These are the rich, the poor, the addicted, the previously-sick, the expected-right-up-until-it-wasn’t.  These are those who at least someone will claim weren’t “innocent” victims.  These are people of unknown pasts and stories found dead far from home, whose stories and even identities may never be known.  Sometimes it’s natural, sometimes accidental, sometimes they kill themselves or someone else kills them.  Sometimes we just can’t tell because they’re so decomposed by the time they’re found that all we can say is that there’s no obvious trauma and no retained bullets. 

And the thing that unites all these cases, from the mundane to the photos that still haunt me, is that they’ve almost all left people behind.  These are the people who death truly hurts, because for the dead there is no more hurt, but for those that remain there is nothing but hurt.  The woman who overdoses in the tub is found by her boyfriend.  The old woman finally has a daughter who comes from hours away to crawl through a window and find her.  The nephew sees his uncle gunned down.  The siblings realize exactly the cost of their war when their baby siblings are bleeding out.  They are the ones left behind.  They are the ones who feel the guilt and the grief and the hole in the world where their loved ones used to be. 

And every time I see people celebrating the death of some stranger whose name and life is unknown to them, purely because they were at a certain place at a certain time, or they are assumed to be “one of those sorts of people”, I think about these deaths: lonely or in public, in fear or shock or the simple and chill acceptance that comes with realizing they will die.  I think about the conversations a medical examiner or a paramedic or a scene investigator has with those left behind.  I think about these lives, each unique, intricate, and gone.  I think about the tattoos that tell a story.  I think about the color of clouded-over eyes.  I think about the clothing they or someone else chose for them.  I think about text conversations, about emails and scribbled-down notes in handwriting so bad I can only make out a few words.  I think about all the things that they have done or could have done, all the paths they have walked and will never walk.

Working with death on such an intimate level is an incredibly humbling experience.  It makes me realize how small we all are, and yet also how vast.  How our lives and deaths spread out to touch so many others.   It’s why, with very few exceptions, I view all deaths as tragedies.  Yes, including the death of that nameless, faceless person you’re thinking about right now who was probably a member of some group you think deserves it.  Because lives can change.  Paths can change.  People can change, right up until everything stops.  Death is the one thing that guarantees a person will never change.  Maybe you think that because they might have been a part of a certain group, they are purely and simply Bad People, or that they must have done terrible things and their death is therefore somehow a good thing.  In your hypothetical world where this very real death can be used for moral clout and grandstanding.

But you don’t know who they were.  You don’t know what they did or who they left behind.  Death is never clean.  It is a fracture that goes through so many lives.  There are so few people in the world whose loss is a genuine net good.  Of course they exist, but I find that they are rare.  And I certainly can never assume that someone I don’t know, who was simply in a place at a time and may or may not be “one of those people”, whichever people are being discussed, would be so bad that their death should be celebrated, and that the pain of those left behind should, in turn, also be celebrated.  I think the world has more than enough casual cruelty without adding to it in that way. 

[lucyvaleheart]

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[sa-bo]

Genuinely need a break from this arc real quick why does One Piece delve so deep into the ethics of war this arc, like holy shit I'm gonna fucking die

[binders-and-beanies]

Pondering bottom surgery in the tags I mf guess

[vampyroteuthid]

we had a surprise euthanasia today and the poor creature was covered in maggots . which i then had to clean off the floor. and i also got pissed and shat on (simultaneously. different animal). BUT cleaning out the sink (loose teeth in there among many other things) is still the most disgusting part of this job so far

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I went to the hospital earlier this month because I've been having some unexplained medical problems, and they basically told me "we don't know what's wrong with you, but we're gonna charge you $7000 anyway!"

And of course this hospital doesn't allow payment plans! I either have to pay it in full and wipe out my entire savings, OR I have to let it go to a collections agency and tank my already underwater credit so I can make a payment plan with them. But paying off debt to a collections agency doesn't help your credit, so I wouldn't even be able to dig myself out of the hole a little at a time! This is hell. America is hell. I don't want to live here. I would never have chosen to live here.

No matter what happens, my medical issues continue and I'll never be able to get a car because my davings are too low and I can't get a loan without a ridiculous interest rate. And my student loans are coming due this summer, so that's another nail in the coffin. I can't quit the job I hate because I need to pay off so kuch debt, and I can't afford to move anywhere with better paying jobs or cheaper housing, so I am fucked by circumstance.

What else is new? Join the club. My entire generation is trapped like this, and there's nothing we can do. The government will bring back debtor's prison before they forgive anything.

I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. How is this society sustainable? How did it get this bad? How does a global superpower fail on such a grand scale without completely falling apart at the seams?

[muttever]

i love how it doesnt matter how much time money or energy i put into trying to feed my dog a diet that wont cause his kidneys to fail, i can count on no one else giving a fucking shit and leaving out the other dogs food for him to eat whenever im not looking

[mantisgodsdomain]

Asks for the Random Character Asks

Marigold: 12, 13, 15

(for this ask game)

12. Crack headcanon

The reason she has so many flowers in her mane is because she fucked up with a transmutation early on and rooted them in there and her mentor Didn't Help At All so now they're just stuck in there as a permanent part of her body.

15. Worst thing they've ever done

As previously mentioned, "worst thing they've ever done" is ridiculously hard to define and extremely subjective at best. For Marigold specifically, it's even harder to define than most. She... doesn't do really things directly, after all.

She's a catalyst, and though she acts to make the situation immediately worse, she generally has little interference beyond that. She's an observer, not a direct actor, she's an alchemist, not a poison-brewer - part of what makes her so difficult to pin down and immune to consequence is that unless it's to gather test subjects for raw field data, she's almost certainly just... not acting directly. There's a medium. An in-between. A client, somewhere along the line, asking for her charms.

Though the "what they would think of when asked the question" question might work under normal circumstances, Marigold is an exception to the rule - as previously mentioned, she would not personally consider any of her actions to be immoral. She's done things that weren't amazing, of course, but it's not like she'd consider herself a bad person - just someone with professional pride. You wouldn't expect her to offer a subpar product to a customer, would you?

Beyond that, there's the issue of pinning down a single individual case. Marigold isn't a... "one and done" kind of villain, she gains the sort of status she has from low-profile but consistent evils. She doesn't do anything obvious, she doesn't do anything that can be pinned on her - people disappear, and monsters turn up after, and if they're especially valuable or they survive the period it takes for the transmutation to settle in their bones, she'll trap them somewhere to harvest for more transmutation-fuelling parts later.

That, of course, could be considered a "worst" - but it's still not one single thing you can point to. It's dozens and dozens of things, spread out over years of activity, people who mysteriously vanish off the streets and never turn up again. There is no single monolith of evil that can be pointed to, because Marigold isn't the kind of evil that does big gestures like that. Just... a slow, steady flow of charms into hands that do harm with them, combined with a slow, steady flow of people who leave their homes and don't come back.

...if we had to choose it would probably be something along the lines of experimenting on prisoners provided via negotiations with criminal factions and then bargaining with the factions those prisoners were taken from to sell them back already transmuted into monstrous forms and entirely incapable of resuming their previous lives. She got paid by both sides for it, both for developing specified new strains of transmutative on the prisoners and for returning them to their original faction. The client didn't specify what to do with them after they'd served their purpose, after all.

13. Dumbest thing they’ve ever done

Well! This one's very nearly a Story.

A fun fact about charms: they're not always perfectly consistent, especially if you're making new ones. That's why you test them before applying them to paying customers. That's why you take a constant flow of people unlikely to be missed for experiments. That's why you do experiments in the first place. If something goes wrong, then you need to know what to fix it, and if an unexpected variable throws the experiment-

Well. It could go very, very wrong, or very, very right. But you never turn your back on the experiment. You never assume you know what will happen next until it's good and tested, you never assume things will work out until you're 100% sure, you never assume that nothing can possible go wrong - Marigold knows this, of course, and she acts accordingly. Lab safety is a priority, not an afterthought. When the things you're working with might kill you if it breaks containment, you never leave things up to chance. It's simple safety precautions. Nothing ever up to chance. Nothing ever allowed to fail. And if anything were to fail - well, you being on-hand gives the best possible chance of getting things back under control.

And then, of course, someone comes calling at the door. You're too early into the experiment to excuse watching it as a delay, of course, and you know they know you're home - you mentioned you'd be home just the other day, after all. Reputation is valuable, and the monitoring built into the cage will work just as well, won't it? It might need a few more trials, but you can't really afford to be rude, and you especially can't afford them coming to find you - these parts of your lab are blocked off to guests for a reason, and you can't simply disappear a guest to your house.

Surely, it won't do any harm to leave it for just a few minutes. Surely, it'll mean nothing to leave the transmutation to finish unattended. You return back downstairs not more than five minutes after you left, ready to finish what you started.

The cage is open.

[vampireknitting]

I have to get my wisdom teeth removed here on the 4th and I really wish medical anxiety wasn’t so dismissed or laughed at.

The anxiety has been slowly ramping up since Christmas and now that I have to cut out the only thing that’s managed the fibromyalgia bs. I mean sure it’s just weed. But when my health tanked and I was throwing up half of everything I tried to eat and losing weight like it was nothing. Unfortunately it was the only thing that helped stop the vomiting.

I’ve been put on and taking off several medications over the years for being the unlucky type that doesn’t react well to different meds. All the gut pills they wanted me to take hurt or was you know making me digest my own blood.

The Fibromyalgia began creeping in when I was in high school and the doctors I had told me to eat pills and go away. I had injured my knee and it just didn’t get better. I still have issues with it. Being a childhood cancer survivor means health complaints must be cry’s for attention or drugs.

They asked me to not consume any weed because they don’t know if it’ll hurt me to be put under so they can cut out the heavily impacted teeth. Which fine, I won’t fight because they could label me as some sort of user or drug obsessed or whatever. But the only drug that I know can kill you while being put under is meth.

My sister’s dental surgeon said don’t stop smoking weed because there isn’t anything out that supports either side. Pro weed or anti-weed before surgery. He didn’t want anything to add to the stress of the surgery so he said keep doing what you’re doing.

[queerstudiesnatural]

feeling so shitty :(