#medical trauma and doctors straight up treating me like shit has been my life lately

[gregmarriage]

i wish all doctors and “medical professionals” a very fuck off and die x

[vtforpedro]

medical update - long post, TWs in tags

my head is as bad as it's been since the beginning of it all. it's been seven months since it's been at this level. nearing the end of my rope here anyway. so the only thing that's keeping me from getting the official IIH diagnosis is a lumbar puncture. I was gonna do one cause my neurosurgeon wanted me to get one and as he was on the way out of the door (in april 2020) he's like 'oh yeah if you read anything about death/emergency surgery from getting a lumbar puncture with a chiari malformation don't worry about it' me, who had not been googling things anymore cause it was making my anxiety really high, now very worried about it: haha ok!! yeah so there are numerous documented cases of people with chiari malformation having an LP done and for whatever reason, the sudden decrease in spinal fluid causes the chiari (cerebellar tonsils have herniated into the spinal cord opening in the base of the skull) to 100% herniate and results in immediate life-saving full-on brain surgery right then and there so!!! I never got an LP because I was like, fresh in the middle of the worst of the medical trauma, three weeks out of the hospital where my intense phobia of IVs came from, no one was believing me about any of it etc etc lmao goddd I wish he hadn't said anything cause my anxiety brain is stupid but when I saw him in late october and he finally believed me and started talking about IIH, the actual diagnostic tool (the last one anyway) is a lumbar puncture. to rule out anything in the spinal fluid (which is pretty much already ruled out for me because it's been 19 months and I would've had other stuff happening if it were something in the fluid) and check the pressure in my brain. IIH is intracranial hypertension for who knows why. I asked my neurologist yesterday if I get it, since we have ruled everrrrything out, and my pressure is high, will I get the IIH diagnosis and he said correct. like it's the only thing I'm missing!!! but the problem with getting the diagnosis is there are legit two medications they use to treat IIH and they are not without potentially severe side effects (they lower spinal fluid production and fucking with your brain when they don't really know Why can. fuck your brain) and I am already terrified of new meds. I don't want to go through all this shit just to have horrible things happen when I try to treat it, you know? but weight loss is clearly not working, at least not yet and I don't know if it ever will. if it doesn't, I'm going to have to have surgery. that's the only way to fix this :/ I talked to my neurosurgeon in october about the risks of herniation with an LP and I think he got frustrated lmao because he's like 'it's like the biggest myth out there! I've never seen it in my entire career' but it's not a myth because it HAS happened. I would say him being a renowned neurosurgeon means that it's probably a really low risk? but it's not a fuckin myth and with him being a renowned neurosurgeon I have no doubts he knows that. because I saw a neurologist team shortly before I went back to him that said 'oh no, we never order LPs for chiari patients. it's taught in school because the risk is too high' so I'm like ok my neurosurgeon is fantastic at what he does but he was playing fast and loose with the truth, so do I want to trust this guy? I'm being told they teach it in school to not do this because people have died. I'm being told by my new neurologist that he thinks the benefits far outweigh the risks, my chiari is so mild, it'll be done in the hospital under the right settings with monitoring, etc etc, and that he considers my neurosurgeon the true expert on the matter and to maybe listen to him and himself and not what a different neuro said WHICH WOULD BE OKAY if the risk wasn't fucking DEATH in a horrible way during a fairly common procedure!!! like it's considered 'invasive' but it's still done often enough my brain is at a complete standstill. I am living in such horrible agony that I want to end my life. if I get the LP, I could actually experience relief for a while because

of the removal of some SF resulting in less pressure in my skull. or I could just straight up die lmao but also I don't want to be on meds to treat it even if I do get the diagnosis!! I am in the middle of applying for disability (not even 50% of the way through and it's a long process ._.) so if I get this diagnosis and I add it to my claim, this, along with everrrrrything else, gives me an even higher chance of getting approved and if this doesn't go away from weight loss, I will be forced to do an LP anyway because I will have to confirm the pressure in my skull so they can perform surgery. but that would be months away, maybe even late next year, because I do still have to lose all the weight first so my dilemma is, do I just go ahead with the LP despite the risks (no matter how low they are and I genuinely don't know how low from getting so many mixed answers from doctors) because I could get relief and because I could get the diagnosis to add to disability? what happens if the Worst™ happens and I never walk out of the hospital, you know? it's scary. it's genuinely so terrifying to me. I'm having traumatic nightmares about this shit my cognitive function has been declining enough that I have zero recollection of a few things happening. it's not just forgetting, it's a complete blackout. I'm mixing up meds and a couple other things. and it's scaring me. neuro referred me to a neuropsychologist to evaluate this stuff my head is so bad I am in a constant heightened state of extreme anxiety and depression and stress. I'm starting to get heart palpitations again. like something's gotta give, right? I don't know what to do if you or someone you know has had a lumbar puncture, please please please do NOT tell me any horror stories about it (I legit can't handle it). if you've had one and it was easy peasy lemon squeezy, can you tell me about it, please? hanging on by a fucking threeeeeeead. love you all very much

[carriecutforth]

The Shit

Tumblr is telling me to go ahead, put anything...so here it goes

I haven't been public about this for reasons that will be apparent but gonna start this with all the trigger warnings. I'm writing it here cause I can't talk to the majority of people about it cause most people can't even grasp, and then questions start, putting me in the situation of feeling like my GIANT SWEATER of trauma is being unraveled answering questions that lead to more questions and gah PLEASE DO NOT RETUMBL-- I just need to scream in the void This is the shit: On the day my sister-in-law's mother died she had to call form-1 my baby brother because his psychosis (undiagnosed mental illness which I will get to) was terrorizing their family (three small kids). My mother WHO IS SCHIZOPHRENIC had him released into her and my ANTI-VAXXER ANTI-MASKER narcissist father's care, but NOT before they found out, incidentally due to the FORM 1, he is ALSO really sick with leukemia. I only found out because I decided to dip into the special folder for emails called MOM that I try to avoid reading as long as they can FOR REASONS. But I felt for some reason an urge to, and then I had to try to parse out what had happened from her ramblings that are A LOT. Then I had to confirm with my poor sil who is at her wits end and was in no position to tell me herself. My dad stopped talking to me back in November when I called him for his anti-vax rhetoric as being EUGENICS when he told me it is just the flu and only killing old people and the disabled. I reminded him I've been immuno-compromised my whole life (he KNOWS this) and got chronic fatigue after a flu in late 2016 (he knows this), and did he not care if I DIED? (apparently not) But I was like lol, fine, don't talk to me anymore. Die mad about it for all I care. A lot of people are like: 'oh, that's tough, losing a relationship with your father' and I'm like YOLO (it really isn't if you knew him). SO THEN I have to reach out to my dad: "Why isn't my brother in the hospital being treated by medical professionals for YOU KNOW, HIS LEUKEMIA." My dad responded that the doctors were JUST GOING TO PUMP HIM FULL OF DRUGS! And that HE is treating my brother's leukemia with I dunno baking soda (he told me before it is a cure for cancer). THEN HE GOES RADIO SILENT. I have no idea where my brother is cause they got him an apartment somewhere in Toronto. *though I do have a Machiavellian plan to try to find out. The reason my brother has untreated psychosis is that even though I've begged my parents since he was a TEEN to get him diagnosed, they refused. It's like they have the opposite of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy in that their ABLEISM is soooo bad they refuse to see he has been very sick, and even if he was really sick, 'doctors are stupid' <--quoting my dad. This is the backstory. My dad was always on the road for his job. My mom had my baby brother AGAINST all wishes of her doctor to ever get pregnant again. I'm not talking aborting, she got PREGNANT on purpose again to SERVE GOD'S GREATER PURPOSE even though it might kill her and said future fetus. So he was born with a lot of issues because of the very bad pregnancy's complications on TOP of the very hereditary bipolar/schizophrenia, AND everything else we got going on besides. After he was born, my mom went into a very deep depression for years and then would vacillate between that and mania. Which meant me: THE ELEVEN year old was forced to raise a baby that wasn't hers and had no ultimate authority over. I was called by everyone his *BROTHER'S NAME* SECOND MOM. *More on this later Our relationship is very strained because of this, particularly when at 17 I had enough momming a child while being constantly undermined by my parents absolute shenanigans. So there was resentment when I quit being his 'second mom' and that he equally resented for things like, trying to put him into bed, when my mom would come in and say let him stay up all night or getting him to eat something other than candy for breakfast (you can guess the dynamic with my parents here). Even if my disabled ass could sue my parents for his

care, he doesn't WANT me to be in charge of his care.

And yet still, I tried to advocate for him for years fighting my parents TOOTH and NAIL to get him on disability and out from underneath their thumb so he could have a measure of independence and autonomy. They had every excuse in the book not to get him diagnosed including expense. It was so goddamned awful fighting with them on this cause in their mind: he was going to live with either them or me forever (they decided this for me and my ex-husband and kids with no consultation), so WHY bother set up his future for him??? So when he was 20?, I hatched a Machiavellian PLAN: I got him, against my parent's wishes, into college for the sole reason of getting the resources for him to get diagnosed so that he could get on disability. AND IT WORKED! (kinda) Except my parents twisted him so much into only talking about his autism spectrum symptoms and NONE of the psychosis because their ableism is sooooo entrenched. (but I did manage to get him on ODSP). And subsequent times I forced my dad to take him to a psychiatrist, he's like: 'oh, I forgot to talk about the psychosis we just talked about the aspergers. Besides people with psychosis are untreatable, you can't convince them otherwise' (see again, my mom). Over the years, I have begged my dad to take my brother to get properly diagnosed and treated (I'm not meaning forced, my brother is also agoraphobic, and won't leave his place UNLESS he is driven by my dad and was living in a city far away from me). I said, I was very concerned for his kids but my dad always gaslights me (and tells everyone I'm crazy -- the IRONY). So now my mom is writing me emails about how this is all my sil's fault because 'she is on drugs' (she is not), 'she is sleeping around' (she is not), 'her kids are scared of her not my brother' (it's the exact opposite). WHICH IS A HUGE TRIGGER FOR ME because She did the exact same thing to ME with my other brother (a diagnosed PSYCHOPATH) who used to beat me and the rest of us mercilessly when my parents weren't around (and they never believed me, and told everyone not to believe me because I was crazy), who pulled a KNIFE on me and threw a drawer at me when I was NINE MONTHS PREGNANT, and how absolutely awful I was AS HIS SISTER to kick him out of my house with no place to live or go (cause he was living with me and my ex-husband at the time because THEY KICKED HIM OUT OF THEIR PLACE and didn't want him back.) Are you beginning to get a sense of the dynamic of my family? Soooooooo the last few weeks my brain has just been in total trauma mode going processing, processing, processing, processing as the final total realization of how absolutely awful my family is finally laid bare (I mean I knew but at least I can stop feeling guilty about cutting them out of my life). So back to the 'second mom' shit, as relevant to my trauma brain processing the last few weeks. This whole shit above is just the tip of the iceberg. I was raised as a Joho in which a lot of my trauma comes from a pedophile left loose on three generations of girls in my family over a thirty year period, and if anyone came forward they were threatened with disfellowshipment and there is SO MUCH there it would take me several Tolkien novels to get how absolutely awful, extensive it was, and how the coverup went straight to the top. ANYHOO. So who was calling me my brother's 'second mom???' Well since, I wasn't allowed to have any association with non-witnesses, it was my congregation. No one questioned that I was being parentified and it was a deeply abusive situation. NO WHAT HAPPENED instead was, this sister in the congregation told everyone (when I was fifteen and 80 pounds soaking wet at the height of 5'10 1/2) that my brother WAS REALLY MY CHILD cause it was so obvious the way that I was the one who took care of him. And the elders of our congregation MARKED me as bad association for loose morals for having a supposed child out of wedlock when I was ELEVEN YEARS OLD. AND NO ONE in my congregation would talk to me, and I had NO IDEA why, cause they never told me that I HAD BEEN

MARKED. But the caveat was I was not allowed to talk to people outside of the faith. And we only found out about this a year an a half later when she said the same shit back in my hometown where he was born to a sister who was at the hospital where my brother was born. AND NO ONE thought, hey: maybe if we think she had a baby when she was eleven we should um CALL CHILD SERVICES or some shit? So i was like 16 1/2, not allowed to have any friends OUTSIDE OF MY PARENTS, find out THIS SHIT, and then people wonder why I had my first manic episode at 17??? Yeah, so this is where my brain has been stuck the last month, complicated that I knew I would be at risk for hypomania with things opening back up, and I'm supposed to be shooting a pilot for a potential series I'm the creator/co-shorunner of, so now I've had to go BACK on seroquel and it's the worst while i try to acclimatize myself to the drugs and stave off hypomania at the same time. WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

[thenightisland]

you know the drill:

this is becoming like its own series but idk how else to explain this awful year i don’t even feeling like properly linking so here’s just the URLs of the other ones in the series: 1. http://thenightisland.tumblr.com/post/161087786689/explanationsupdates-under-the-cutmore-i 2. http://thenightisland.tumblr.com/post/161920216354/additional-updatesexplanations-under-the-cut 3. http://thenightisland.tumblr.com/post/163767959805/updates-under-the-cutmore-post-one-post-two-on 4. http://thenightisland.tumblr.com/post/164398486219/on-the-fourth-edition-of-what-the-fuck-is

one of the assessors got jumped a while back. she was just walking past a pt in the main assessment dept and he jumped up, punched her in the back of the head, took her to the ground and beat the fuck out of her. she was out for weeks and weeks and had broken facial bones. i can’t believe she didn’t quit.

our nurse executive quit though. not like, went prn or gave two weeks notice, like just straight up was like I’M DONE and walked out which honestly is the closest i’ve ever come to respecting him.

while having more psychologically unstable pts isn’t new, having more medically unstable pts has been a problem lately. like our crash cart is not like a medical hospital’s crash cart it’s like. an ambu bag some iv supplies and a stethoscope no lifesaving medications. when a pt has a medical issue we send them out to a medical hospital because obv we don’t have the resources to treat complex medical issues where we work. which didn’t used to be an issue because you’d used to see maybe two medical codes a year on my unit. we’ve had /ten/ since my last update post /just on my shift/. two of which weren’t even “pt is going downhill fast” codes they were “pt has no heartbeat and isn’t breathing” like we had to fucking bring two people back from the goddamn dead /within ten minutes of each other/. we’re all like we’re psych nurses man if we wanted to do this shit we’d work er. [and the er we’re required to send these pts to is awful like they sent us back a guy who had almost died twice in three days who had an /untreated brain tumor/ bc obv he’s totally fine]. or we’ve been doing mash unit style medicine like the suicidal kid with partial thickness burns all over his chest and neck that literally no one was doing anything about. we were debriding burns with a mixture of different PO IM and SQ drugs to achieve the same effect as IV morphine because debriding is extremely painful but not doing it will just make things worse and no one else seemed to care so we just fucking did it. like we’ve done so much medical nursing lately. like the one with the uncontrolled severe seizures that led to the medical hospital labeling her first break schizophrenia despite no family history of mental illness but /five different medical issues that all cause psychosis/. or the one they let on the unit despite being on the do not readmit who has untreated hiv that he actively tries to give to other people and /active tuberculosis/. or the one with the aneurysm. or the one with severe CHF. and on and on and on. and remember: we’re not the most medically unstable unit in the hospital because we have a 40 bed /geriatric psych unit/ so you can imagine the kind of pts /they’re/ getting. on the plus side, all of our ten odd codes lived.

my personal life is still a goddamn mess, of course, but that’s a given. don’t even know where to begin with all that. and i can’t talk about a lot of it which makes it that much more fun.

i had an entire crisis about the odyssey [which tbh is still kind of going on even after /weeks/] because i’m getting so cagey in memphis because i fucking hate this town. and i just got back from new orleans which is the closest thing i have to an ithaca at the moment and it killed me to come back to this fucking city.

i’m also really paranoid right now because after i come back from vacations, something terrible always happens and i’m not exaggerating it’s like clockwork to the point that the bad things have all happened between friday and sunday after i’ve returned from my vacation, each time, without fail. well that would be this weekend so i am just waiting to see what great horrors await me this goddamn time. [last time, it was the whole coworker killed in vehicular homicide thing]. but i guess paranoia isn’t the right word. you’re only paranoid if you’re wrong, and my life has already set the precedent. so i guess anxious is the better word.

the anxiety is increased given that my mother has been out of work all week because they’ve had trouble regulating her blood sugar and so she’s been really sick and even said so herself she’ll probably end up in the er over the weekend because she doesn’t think she can make it till her next doc appt because she’s miserable, and she’s already been in the er once when this weird shit started happening a month or so ago so the Vacation Curse has me even more concerned than usual, which is saying something. 

there’s a new psych doc working now and everyone is really unsettled by him and we’re pretty sure he’s a genuine psychopath like completely without exaggeration and he’s already done a lot of really creepy things to/with staff members and one nurse said in passing “i’ve known a lot of doctors like him he’ll end up fucking a pt at some point” which we initially left to hyperbole but he’s been doing shit like transporting female pts to other units without the staff’s consent in his own car which is like all kinds of not allowed, and the way he talks to some of the staff is just downright rapey honestly. and so we had a rough case this summer who, through the combined efforts of my squad, we got her from a diagnosis of intellectual disability with schizophrenia, nonverbal, self harming all the time, history of physical and sexual abuse, constantly in restraints and on a 1:1 obs level to a new diagnosis of autism spec with ptsd because her “hallucinations” were /flashbacks/ and she ended up very social and verbose and like fucking read william blake for fun and had a great sense of humor and was off all special observations and had a transfer to another facility pending so she could get more 1:1 long term therapy, and the creepy doctor was covering her case while her actual doc was out of town and he rode all the way to the other hospital with her which is another thing you do not do, and we found out from a coworker that she is now a /2:1/ [two staff members within arm’s reach 24/7], self harming again, in full shutdown/meltdown mode, and nonverbal. and it was such a rapid deterioration that all of us lost sleep over the possibility that this creepy doctor might have done something because even after she was at the other hospital and therefore no longer our pt, /he kept going to see her/. which fucked us up a lot because we were the ones who worked so hard for so long with her. like even the thought of it.

recently had 25th birthday so naturally had a crisis about that because i’d always said my goal was to be out of memphis by 25 and yet here we are. 

another of our fave pts, esp one of /my/ fave pts, died out of literally nowhere. the day before my birthday. so that was great.

also felt really surreal to see the news about the convictions in the holly bobo case, which i found out about when one of my coworkers was reading the news on his phone during a lull one night i forgot that to him and everyone else it’s a national news story [hell it even has its own wikpedia page] but to me it’s just /holly/ because she was /in the class above me in our nursing program/. my first semester in college i remember seeing her face on missing posters on every building on campus. so it was really a weird moment of dissociation for me. glad the motherfucker was found guilty on all charges, obv. 

the tech of mine who got his skull slammed into the floor, the one who’s been out with what can only be called severe psychological trauma, is supposed to be coming back the third week in october. which i just. i mean i’m glad because he’s one of our best guys, but i’m also like /why the fuck would he come back/ because he could be a fucking english professor again. motherfucker spent part of his youth growing up in italy and montreal, lived on the west coast for years, /was/ a college professor, did time as a script doctor in LA, and was a fucking thriller novelist who just gone girled himself for whatever reason and ended up working with us. there’s literally a reddit thread asking if anyone knows what happened to him and i want to be like don’t worry it’s fine he works with me. but so we’re like why would you come back to this place after what happened to you when you have so many other options available to you????? what are you running from that makes you so desperate to keep centering your life around a locked acute psych ward???? why did you gone girl yourself to begin with??? like he was screwed up enough there for a while that he wasn’t even answering his calls or texts and our boss had to send the police to do welfare checks on him because he lives alone so it’s like man why not go back to the life you had before and /get away from all of this/ it’s not like my situation where i’d rather be living a different life but have never done so, he already has the foundation because he’s already lived a different life he has an in that i don’t have and i can’t for the life of me figure out why he thinks working as an acute pysch tech is the better option. 

but i mean. we /do/ call our unit the hotel california for a reason.

[omgktlouchheim]

Word Vomit Wednesday - Traveling While Healing

CW: Sexual Assault

 A little over a year ago I realized I needed to change my life. I had been living and bumbling around New York City for nearly a decade and was finally receiving some great career opportunities and a sense that my life was coming together. This “sense,” of course, was something I was just trying desperately to convince myself of. The fact is, I was constantly getting sick and was consistently in a huge amount of pain. Which wasn’t new to me. I’ve been in physical pain since I was, at least, eleven or twelve years old and just coped with it because it was my “normal.”

Jump back to June 2016. I’ve been to an allergist, ENT, had a CT scan of my sinuses, given so much blood to labs for testing I might as well have been at a blood drive, and I’m sitting in my PCP’s office as she’s going over results. I know exactly what those results say before she opens her mouth. I’ve been in this scenario over and over and over again in the course of my 29 years on this earth. The verdict: I’m healthy. Or, as the lab results put it, “unremarkable.” Oof. (My whole body is one giant flaming knot and the medical establishment has to then go ahead and bruise my ego too? That’s low). Given that all the labs came back fine but I was still in so much pain and had so little energy, my doctor diagnosed me with fibromyalgia.

What is fibromyalgia, you ask? In a nutshell: no one f*cking knows. Is it an autoimmune disease? Maybe. Are there genetic components that would make a person more likely to develop it? Perhaps…? What are the best ways to treat it?? *Shrug*. Essentially, it’s a diagnosis that doctors of the western persuasion give to people who they just don’t really know what to do with and don’t really have the growth mindset to figure out. *Side note: fibromyalgia has been strongly linked to trauma, which does make sense in my particular case, and I will come back to this later. So, one of the ways in which I began to make changes to my life in order to heal was making more time to travel.

It started off small, taking the Amtrak to visit friends in Vermont in August, heading out West to visit family in Washington, California, and Arizona in September, hopping on a quick flight to Montreal for my birthday in November. It felt so good to get away. I was all of a sudden having new experiences while also spending time with people I care about. Every time I left it felt like the “refresh” button was being pushed on my life. I began to feel like I was living my life instead of watching it pass me by and I began to be excited about the future even though I was still hazy about what it looked like. One thing that I knew for certain was that I needed to put myself first in ways that I had never been able to before (i.e. not feeling bad about having needs and getting them met). Which, let’s be honest, can be truly terrifying in and of itself.  On top of that, I still needed to contend with many American medical institutions. If you don’t know anything about the healthcare system in America, here’s the Cliffs Notes synopsis: It’s a shit show and everyone is screwed except for super wealthy people. Fun!

I literally didn’t go to the doctor, any doctor, for years because it can be such a nightmare and it overwhelmed me to the point of defeat. I didn’t see the point in fighting if I was never going to get the help I needed so I continued to ignore all the messages my body gave me because that’s what I knew how to do. The difference between late-twenties Katie and early-twenties and child Katie though, is that late-twenties Katie knows that she is worth fighting for and deserves better. She deserves better treatment, she deserves respect, she deserves getting what she needs come hell or high water. I (thank you third person, your services are no longer needed) am only one person and, chronic illness or not, need help and shouldn’t be shamed or ignored for asking for it.

Here’s what I know about traveling with chronic conditions. When traveling, medical issues don’t just go on vacation from you. And it’s imperative that you have a doctor you trust to communicate with you if something happens while you’re away. This was not the case for me. On the aforementioned trip in September, I was just coming out of severe withdrawal from a drug my doctor (who is no longer my doctor) had put me on to treat the fibro, which my insurance (which is no longer my insurance) decided to, out of the blue, no longer cover. Not even the amount to wean me off (it was some serious shit). It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. So frightening that I was afraid to go to sleep in case I died. Not a trip that I was planning or am planning to take any time soon. By the time I got to Washington most of my withdrawal symptoms had gone. Except on the second day there. My right leg seized up and I was unable to walk for the rest of my stay in Seattle with my brother and his wife. Oh and I was in an excruciating amount of pain. So, what did I do? I called my doctor. For three. Straight. Days. I left so many messages that one time I got a recorded voice saying that the health clinic’s mailbox was full.

Thank goddess I was with family and that they didn’t mind pushing me around in a wheelchair or switching around plans so I would be in the least amount of discomfort before heading to California. Thankfully, by that time the pain had let up and of course that’s when my doctor #nolongermydoctor decided to call, chastise me for not going to an ER (FYI: unless I am bleeding out of all of my orifices I refuse to enter those rings of hell and that’s a whole other article in itself), and ultimately offer nothing useful in trying to help me in case it happened again. This should have been my first big tip-off that I needed to find another doctor. Instead, I convinced myself it was a fluke until she and her office pulled similar shit with me right before I was leaving on a two-month trip that would take me from New York to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, back across the United States to The Bahamas, then finally back to New York. Once again, thank goddess for my uncle who is a retired doctor and was able to call in my medications for me the night before I was leaving and with a half an hour before the pharmacy closed.

For people who have chronic illnesses, or any illness that requires medication and who plan to travel, one thing to find out about from your insurance company is a “vacation waiver.” Because I was traveling extensively for the first time and out of the country, I needed to have extra refills of my prescriptions so I didn’t run out and burst into flames (*not necessarily a side-effect of stopping medications early, but you never know). I was surprised and relieved that my insurance actually offered a waiver specifically for that purpose. So make sure to give your company a call and find out what the waiver is, how long it’s effective for and how many times a year you’re able to access it. This was probably one of the only times where my insurance was actually helpful.

So, what have we learned so far? Living with chronic illness means needing to be on top of every medical issue to make sure that it helps you live your life rather than keep you stuck and in pain. It is no easy task. Some medical professionals will not help you. On the flip side, vacation waivers! Besides keeping in order all of the things meant to keep a person with chronic illness functioning, there is still needing to deal with symptoms. Chronic illness is exactly what it sounds like. Chronic, consistent, every moment of every day. Some days are better than others. People can also be happy and chronically ill at the same time. Around the time that I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia I was also diagnosed with PTSD (told ya I’d get back to trauma!). It is very common for people who have been diagnosed with fibro to also have a history of and are survivors of trauma including sexual assault/abuse, which is the case for me.  It’s kind of a chicken and egg conundrum which is also why treating fibromyalgia is so difficult. Not only do scientific and medical institutions know very little about our nervous systems, they also can’t treat the things that can trigger us.

I could be anywhere in the world and if my brain senses anything resembling my traumatic experiences, my nervous system goes haywire and I’m stuck in our very primal fight, flight, or freeze mode. And it did happen. Here are examples of the most extreme experiences from my New Zealand/Australia trip. One time was walking around in Melbourne with my mom. I felt so overwhelmed from the moment we got there and once that feeling set in it did not go away. Even eating didn’t help. My body felt like it was on fire, I had no patience for anything, I didn’t feel safe, I just needed to get back to my room and my stuff as soon as possible. The other time we were heading to Dunedin, New Zealand. The night before we got there, I woke up super early in the morning because I started having flashbacks of my assault. I don’t know what triggered them, it just sucked and it took me forever to get back to sleep. When I woke up to get ready for the day I realized I couldn’t move. My hips felt like they were locked and it was extremely painful to do a few things. Things like: lie down, sit, modify my position to get from lying down to sitting, standing, and any movement in general.

Being a person with chronic illness who also wants to function in society and explore the world is really hard. You can’t leave your disease in your desk at work to take care of when you get back. You can’t leave your symptoms with the cat-sitter. You can’t even put your baggage in your baggage to whip out just in case you have a day where you’re not doing anything. It’s just going to be your travel companion no matter what, and it will pop up when it gets the message to. The way society is set up does not make it easy for those of us living with chronic illnesses and even the most well-intentioned people don’t understand or know what we really need. That also doesn't mean that you're going to ruin any travel experience because you have particular needs that you need to put first. At this point, my healing journey is tied into all of the other journeys I’ve taken and will continue to take. Right now my takeaway is learning to accept myself no matter where I am and what I’m feeling. And have better doctors because ain’t nobody got time for that bullshit.

Katie Louchheim is a wide-eyed wanderer who takes a lot of pics of where she goes and is not opposed to a shameless plug! Follow @ktjlouch on Instagram for awesome travel pics, blurbs about living with chronic illness and more.

[renaroo]

The Search (4/16)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typical violence, Psychological manipulation and trauma Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence - Alternate S15] The Reds and Blues saved Chorus, but it has been a year and they are still missing. A motley crew has been gathered with the common goal of finding the war heroes, though the road is more troubled than anyone seems to realize.

A/N: Wooooo getting this one in on the wire! Lots of fun stuff in this chapter, mostly to do with character, so I hope you all enjoy ; ) 

Special thanks to @analiarvb, @secretlystephaniebrown, @cobaltqueen, Yin, @notatroll7, and JP for the comments and feedback!

This fic seems to attract the weirdest comments, so to the guest who shared their... concerns about this fic maybe trying to sneak into the dreaded, horrible, unforgiveable realm of being a Tuckington fic, I... don’t know where you came to that conclusion. Especially on a fic that is... gen... and... doesn’t have Tucker featured as a main character at all. And didn’t list the pairing. Or anything. But you’re wrong. Not because you’re right but because you, as a person, are just wrong. Hope that clears up any of your concerns. 

Family Affairs

As much as Washington just loved to point out how much he hated it — and boy did he — Kaikaina slipped the ship into autopilot, set for their course as FILSS directed it. After all, FILSS sounded and acted a whole lot like Sheila, and they trusted Sheila to man a tank by herself, so Kai figured what the fuck and trusted FILSS with their ship.

After all, they had stolen it. It’s not like Kaikaina had some magical connection to a ship that a computer wouldn’t. She just knew she had to get out of Blood Gulch and find her brother after seeing Church’s big damn transmission to everyone.

It was kinda like a great middle finger to the UNSC. But also confusing, because Kai was fairly certain she was never aware of more than half of any story at any one time. And the Reds and Blues had lots of fucking stories she needed to catch up on.

Hell, she barely knew who Carolina was, and supposedly she’d been around for years!

With a sigh, Kaikaina leaned back in the pilot’s seat and kicked up her feet to the console. Her arms folded behind her mess of hair and she looked out toward the stars around them.

Her brother was still out there. Somewhere.

There were a few heavy footsteps and a chortling noise that only kind of got Kai’s attention from the beautiful space scenery around them. She didn’t fully turn to look and confirm that it was Junior approaching until the alien-dog-human-baby was almost at the console.

Junior looked out into the stars with his dark, soulful eyes, and then leaned in until his mandibles were resting against the smooth top of the console.

“Hey, you,” Kai finally said, tilting her nearest foot just enough that the tip of her boot nudged Junior’s snout. “You just gonna walk up and invade my space without saying at least hello? Rude. Doesn’t your sexy dad teach you nothing?”

With a rattling of his rows of teeth Junior seemed to grumble a low few blarghs at her. Even if she was an expert in Sangheili, though, it was not anything she would’ve been able to make out over the rumble of the ship.

“Rude,” she said all the same, yawning. “Oh my eff, is it like… late or something? Shouldn’t you be in bed?” she asked, swiveling her seat enough to face Junior more completely. “If Washington comes up here and starts yelling at me because you’re not supposed to be awake right now, I’m so going to throw your little butt to the wolves. The Wash wolves. Which I hear are the worst kind of wolves. And it’s not gonna be, like, anything personal. But a girl’s not been yelled at for a few hours or arrested, so I’ve gotta protect my luck.”

To that, Junior tilted his head and let out another series of low rumbles.

“Do you kiss your father with that mouth?” she asked him critically just before the cockpit door opened again.

Fo a moment, Kai’s heart leaped in her chest as the fear of it actually being Wash and her getting her ass chewed again became a momentary reality. But instead she breathed a heavy sigh of relief and resettled in her seat, eyes sliding closed.

It was only Doctor Grey, after all.

“Yo, Doc!” Kai said with her eyes closed, fist bumping the air.

“Good evening, Kaikaina. Lavernius Junior,” Grey replied cordially.

Junior stood up straight and greeted the doctor with a formal honk.

“You making another collect call, Doc?” Kai asked curiously, though not too curiously so as to not lose the sense of her cool. “Or are you finally gonna give me that physical and make me show off the mole on my butt cheek?”

“I’m contacting Chorus again, Private Grif,” she answered before hesitating and looking at Kaikaina questioningly. “I read your medical records and saw no mention of such a mole.”

“What? How’d the other Doc miss that?” Kai asked critically. She paused and tapped her finger against hr chin in thought. “Well… now that I think about it, even I don’t really know what cheek it’s on this time. You’d think I’d know my own ass better.”

Doctor Grey offered Kai a smile that was simply too kind for the subject at hand. “We can give you a true physical and sort that out at a later date, if you wish.”

“Sounds like a date,” Kai said with a wink and a click of her tongue.

“I suppose so,” Grey replied before looking to the door. “Do you wish for me to close the cockpit door, Private Grif?”

“Is that naked physical happening now?” Kai asked back.

Junior chortled.

“I can’t imagine that we’ll have the time for it, I’m afraid,” Doctor Grey replied in a very bemused tone.

“Nah then, keep it open,” Kai shrugged before turning back to her business. “We still flying straight, FILSS?”

“It is the shortest distance between our current coordinates and the ones designated as our next point of intrigue, Private Gif,” FILSS’ electronic voice hummed from the speakers in response.

“Righteous,” Kai nodded.

She didn’t pay much mind to Grey calling in to Chorus — it was something she did quite frequently on their trip and there had been nothing really spectacular about it outside of an occasional urge to ask Grey if Chorus was something like Paradise Island where all the leaders and soldiers were butch women with fantastic hair (the answer had been no to Kai’s displeasure since some President Kimball was the only one who ever seemed to be on the other line with Grey).

Few things were capable of holding a Grif’s focus for too long and the Chorusian contacts were not an exception to the general rule.

Junior didn’t seem particularly interested in whatever the conversation was either, though, and laid out against the console with another begrudging sigh.

“Dude, I don’t know why you come up here if you’re going to act so moody every time. Like goddamn,” Kai groaned as she kicked back into her seat again. Her eyes focused on the distant stars and she frowned as an itchy feeling scratched at her back.

The little dude was just staring at her. Openly.

“You’ve traveled a lot for being such a little guy, huh?” she asked casually. “The stars and space aren’t even that interesting to you anymore.”

Junior’s teeth clattered together in what passed for affirmation in what Kai considered to be a truly nonsense tongue.

“Yeah, well, just so you know, you’re pretty lucky. I didn’t leave the planet I was born on until I was joining up with the army to find my bro,” Kai explained, sitting more upright. “The first time I was in a transport ship, I pretended I was looking for the bathroom so that I could get in the cockpit and see the stars — they didn’t have windows or anything on the rest of the ship. And they treat military recruits like shit. But outside of trying to find Dex again… I was here to see those stars, up close for the first time in my whole life.” She looked back toward the window, which urged Junior’s gaze to follow. “They weren’t gonna let me stay up there and watch the stars, but I gave the captain a lap dance so they’d shut the fuck up about it. It worked.”

“Bow chicka honk honk,” Junior called out, crawling into the passenger seat finally.

“Dude, no, I banged your dad,” Kai snapped at him. “You can’t make comments at me after I bang your dad. It’s illegal in, like, all of space. Pretty sure. Like what the fuck were they trying to teach you at that prissy prep school? Definitely not the law.”

Blarghing, Junior seemed to want to challenge the sentiment.

Kai shrugged casually. “Hey, don’t take up complaints with the law against me! Go bitch to Washington! He’s the cop, he can change laws and stuff for you. It’s not, like, it’s an act of congress or something. He just has to change his mind. Then you can hit on me and get rejected for being a little perv.”

The little alien rolled his eyes and kicked out his feet to get a better position in his seat, grumbling to himself still with his arms crossed. His frustration was written all over his lizardy face and Kai couldn’t help but smirk at it.

“You know, it’s weird, but even though you’re, like, an alien and crap, sometimes I look at you and you just remind me of your dad so much,” Kaikaina told Junior, immediately causing the little guy to perk up. “Which is saying something, ‘cuz your dad and I were intimate.”

“I hadn’t realized you and Captain Tucker were an item.”

The voice was so unfamiliar and caught Kai so off guard that she nearly fell out of her seat as she whirled around to face it. Her heart only began to calm down once she saw that it was the reporter lady Carolina had brought along. “The fuck. How’d you get in here so quiet?”

The reporter tilted her head and looked back to the ajar cockpit door before turning back. “The door was open,” she said flatly. “Now about you and Captain Tucker—“

“Me and Tucker fucked a few times,” Kai snapped angrily. “That doesn’t make us an item, you old cootch.”

“Bow chicka honk honk,” Junior said in the correct context for, perhaps, the first time since he had joined their team.

Andrews paused and tilted her head. “I think you meant coot.”

Kai folded her arms. “I know what I said.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Kaikaina — or do you prefer Li’l Grif?” Andrews offered peacefully.

“I tell you what I prefer, reporter lady, I prefer to know that everyone on this ship’s on the same mission of the same reason. Because we care about my brother and my teammates and the other idiots that I didn’t bother to remember the names of because they were old or geeky or too gay to care that I somersaulted naked. But then there’s you,” Kai said, pointing a heavy finger toward the reporter. “You want to spin a story. And lemme tell ya, I was the Queen Bitch in high school so I know not to trust people who are interested in spinning stories. Especially when they’re about people I care about.”

Looking taken aback, Andrews tilted her head. “I’m sorry if I offended in any way, Kaikaina—“

“You didn’t, as long as you don’t go full Regina George on us,” Kai warned.

“Regina…?” Andrews tried to follow.

“Ugh, you’re old. I can hear it in your lack of relevant source material,” Kai snapped before getting to her feet and holding out her hand for Junior to take. “Keep driving us steady, FILSS. I’m taking Junior to bed.”

“Request accepted!” FILSS called after them as Kai and Junior shoved past Andrews on their way out.

Kai only momentarily caught the sharp eyes of Doctor Grey on the whole scene.

Carolina was quiet while Wash worked at redressing her leg wound.

He didn’t like it — the fact that she still had not taken time to allow the wound to heal and the fact that she was overly quiet despite their generally positive results. Wash might not have liked when their plans fell completely through, but he was used to it happening without giving them any results. This seemed to be a distinct improvement, as it were.

But he and Carolina went back before the Reds and Blues, as difficult as that was to remember at times. They had known each other since Freelancer, and he had followed her cues as closely as he could since then.

Her silence spoke volumes. It was her considering over their results, it was reliving the scenario as it played out, how she could have made it better, how she could have made it safer.

Washington highly doubted any of it had to do with making sure she didn’t have to use her speed unit and reopen the old wound she wouldn’t allow to heal. Things never came to that sense of self preservation for her anymore.

“I’d ask if you want a penny for your thoughts,” Wash broke the silence solemnly, “but I know you well enough to know that that’d be underselling your thoughts’ worth.”

That at least got a smirk and small huff of a laugh from Carolina.

He looked up to watch the momentary expression unfold. The smile and laugh — those weren’t things from Freelancer. Sure, she smirked and was good for the old sarcastic quips. Still was. But there was a warmth to them now that had not been present before. Wash wondered if his own changes since meeting the Reds and Blues were nearly as subtle.

He doubted it.

Spending time with the Reds and Blues did not promote subtly. At least not for him.

“You really know how to make an ex-marine blush, Wash,” Carolina retorted dryly. She looked him in the eyes. “My thoughts aren’t pretty right now, or else I’d share.”

Finishing up the wrap of gauze, Washington flared his nostrils with a sharp exhale and then tilted his head back to return Carolina’s look meaningfully. “I’ve come to find that when your thoughts are less than pleasant, it’s probably the best time to share them. Or… else…”

She raised a brow at him. “Or else…?”

“It just seems like a bad idea. Getting stuck in your own head,” he said. “Besides, even if I don’t like how it all played out like a tire rolling down a garbage hill… on fire… You got results. Just like you always do. And now we have FILSS navigating the ship instead of a barely legal Grif. So I’d say things are running remotely in the positive thus far.”

“Would you lay off Li’l Grif?” Carolina sighed, leaning back against the wall. “I happen to like her. Besides. She might be loud and obnoxious, but the part of that she’s not overdoing to annoy you is a coverup for how worried she is about her brother.”

Surprised by the depth of her defense, Washington looked at Carolina.

In return, Carolina shrugged. “Girl talk.”

“Girl talk,” Wash replied dryly. “Anything you need to share with me? Besides the fact that I’m an annoyance that needs to be talked over by the second most perverted person in the galaxy?”

Carolina scoffed. “Don’t let Li’l Grif hear you say that!”

“Oh, she’d be flattered,” Wash replied with a twist of his wrist and a roll of his eyes.

“Of being second?”

“She’s met Tucker before,” Wash said flatly. “In… the biblical sense.”

“Oh, god, we need another girl talk. Homegirl deserves better,” Carolina said though it was mostly without malice.

“Hey, we promised not to make demeaning jokes about the guys until we found them again,” Wash reminded her. “That includes my… lascivious teammate.”

Carolina sobered up some at that and inhaled sharply. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just… old habits.”

“Almost as difficult to kill as the Reds and Blues, I know,” Wash said, squeezing Carolina’s knee. “You have to keep yourself together, Carolina. You’re still leading this mission. And the Reds and Blues have to be alive. If you just search your feelings—“

“We already agreed this is Star Wars, you don’t have to keep nerding up the point, Wash,” Carolina rolled her eyes.

“Carolina,” Wash said intently. “Promise me you’re going to not leave me alone on this. I’ve already lost the Reds and Blues… Freelancer… I can only be the last man standing so many times before I get a condition.”

She looked surprised before growing a sour look. “That sob story doesn’t work on me.”

“The truth isn’t a sob story!” Wash complained.

“It is when it’s you, jesus, Wash,” Carolina retorted before leaning her head back with an audible thud against the wall. Her eyes were distant and aimed toward the ceiling, though they seemed to look even further. “You really think we’re going to find everyone alive? All of them?” she asked lowly.

“No doubts,” Wash replied firmly.

“I have them.”

Almost immediately, Wash could feel himself deflated. “What do you mean—“

“I think the guys are alive. I feel like it must be the case because… even if it’s hard to imagine a god that would allow the kind of shit we’ve gone through… the universe itself can’t be that unjust, to make us lose our family again after just finding them,” Carolina answered lowly. “And I want that to be enough to keep me happy, to keep me positive. But when it’s just you and me and I’m not worried about motivating the others and keeping us moving, there’s an emptiness in me. There’s… there’s just a place that Epsilon used to fill. Even when he wasn’t synced with me. And it’s just. Not there anymore, Wash. I don’t… I don’t know if he’s still with us. But I think he’s not.”

Washington absorbed the information quietly, respectfully. He did not have to use words to express to Carolina what she already very well knew — that for Wash there were no simple feelings with Epsilon. That Epsilon was something that he never counted with the guys for himself.

Their bond was not something he could spend his time thinking about, nor did he really want to to begin with.

“I’m sorry, if that’s how you feel,” he finally responded.

“It is,” Carolina said, dropping her head. “Before things got too crazy on Chorus, before the final attack and taking down the Tower against Felix and Locus… Before all that, the Insurrectionist soldier — the one who remembered us from Freelancer. He said something. He said… He said Epsilon was failing. That he was dying. And when I thought about it all — the glitches, the… multiple projections. Just the way he was jumping around between equipment and soldiers and… It was there. Before the Reds and Blues disappeared. He was dying. And he lied to my face — to my brain — when I confronted him.”

Wash’s veins grew cold and he straightened his jaw.

Epsilon, after all, had a habit of dying, or at least trying to, in people’s heads.

“I’m sorry,” Wash said when he could think of nothing else.

“No, I’m sorry. This is a shitty conversation,” Carolina said with a grunt, getting to her feet. “I’m sorry you’re the only person I can have it with, too.”

Wash pushed up from the ground to get to his own feet. “Not even Grey?” he asked.

“Normally, maybe,” Carolina said, crossing her arms. “But lately we’ve had this… weirdness between us ever since I brought Dylan onboard.”

Pausing, Wash tilted his head at her. “Dylan?”

“See? That’s exactly what Emily said, too!” Carolina growled out, frustrated.

Not ready to let that thread go without a fight, Wash opened his mouth and began to argue for more details when the door to the bunks burst open and nearly sent Carolina and himself into fight mode.

“Eureka!” Doctor Grey shrieked. “She found it!”