#save me mayo clinic save me

[kenonade]

while working on the exhibition there wasn’t a moment where i wasn’t thinking damn. i sure wish i didnt have to do this so i can do the art i want to make.

now that the things that needed to be put up have finally been put up i cant think of any art that i want to make!!!!!!!!!! why!!!!!!!!!!! god why must you hate me so!!!!!!!!!!!!! without the whims of my gracious overlord art teacher i literally dont want to draw anything. ive been open and closing procreate to blank canvases for the first time in my life. last week i only logged 2hs of screen time when my average is around 6-7h.

i usually get the version of art block where everything i draw feels like garbage. ive never gotten this version where i dont even want to draw at all. </3

[shirogane-oushirou]

ren save me... ren... save me ren... (the us american healthcare system has attacked me once more)

[undeadorion-archive]

Specifically physical health, mental health is a whole other kettle of fish.

For example, I had chronic ear infections from the time I was born until I had my tonsils out at 5. The entire time growing up, my mom told me I had scar tissue around the bones in my ears from it and I'd need surgery once I was an adult. A surgery that had a chance of making me go deaf. I had that hanging over my head for ages until I finally had the courage to ask a doctor about it. He said my records didn't show anything about that, but he referred me to a specialist. He checked me out and said there wasn't even a speck of scar tissue, but I likely had a mild audio processing disorder instead. No one knew where the hell she got the idea about the scar tissue.

Another example. Since we were teenagers, my younger sister had a rather aggressive tick. Like she'd sometimes pull a muscle doing it, but she'd never actually feel it happen. One day, when we were in our 20s, my mom insisted that my sister was destined for early onset dementia and an early death as early as her 30s or 40s. She insisted that she'd sent my sister's brain scans to a the Mayo Clinic (because she thinks I'd think you can just do that) and the reason for her ticks was the blood vessels in her brain were too small and eventually it wouldn't be able to get enough oxygen. Well, my sister's going to be 40 next year. It turns out her ticks were actually Tourettes and there's nothing wrong with the blood flow in her brain.

Then again, my mom also told us she was a nurse until I saw her resume and she was just a desk secretary and she never went to any sort of medical school. Even after that, she was always coming home with tales of her heroic actions saving lives like by sitting on a patient's gurney and giving them chest compressions until a doctor could get there. Meanwhile she had so many health issues she couldn't carry a laundry basket up the stairs. Never mind the legality of giving treatment to a patient without a medical license.

[kittyeekcube]

Hi everyone! I hope you can have a good moment today or that one can find you very soon! 💛

I’m here to share about my wonderful friend Létonia! 💜 They have a life threatening condition and deserve all the care and treatment and support!! It would mean the world to me if you could help raise money for their journey and medical travel to the Mayo Clinic! If we can share this post for more visibility for their fundraiser so more people can see it and they can reach their goal, that would be so amazing!! Any shares, donations, and words of support would be much appreciated!! Please donate what you can! Thank you so much for listening!! 💖

[tookishcombeferre]

i look at you, in the looking back glass twelve - reading through mayo clinic articles analyzing symptoms, trying to find reasons, meaning, a lesson, or really just anything to make the torment make sense. parents know the answer, hold every key to this jötunn's true identity, yet choose to bury it beneath "normalcy." glamor, gloves, and masks only cover superficial cracks, and my power only grew, because in a world full of ugly ducklings, prize winning golden gooses, and sweet nightingales there is you - maleficent's raven, or are you poe's doomed to whisper "nevermore," ever more. i look at you, in the looking back glass sixteen - lost in wonderland seat belt on the roller coaster of life broken and bent as the world takes you for a ride flung this way and that way, clinging for dear life music your only tether to the world of your birth the words cycling in your mind a swirling vortex of an icy blast - do not fail, do not fall, make something of your life - do not fail your classes do not fall in love incorrectly make something of value out of your life. do it all on your own. i look at you, in the looking back glass twenty, nearly twenty-one - pacing the bridge lost in hysterics, and debating the worth of your life. weighing the scales of good and merit. against the mistakes and botched jobs you have done. heart beating frozen in your chest, and true love is so hard to come by. music plays softly and the birds you have said "good morning" to, each and every blessed day, come to rest in your path. tomorrow, you owe it to them to explain goodbye, but only for now. i look at you, in the looking back glass twenty-five - packing up your classroom for the very last time. you will miss those faces. but, your body will not miss the discordant sounds from the intercom, or the pacing. limitations have always been part of your vocabulary. or, at least, they should have been. weary. you are weary and you have aged three years for every one. so, you stand, clumsily on your feet one last time. pick up the box, saying goodbye to this chapter of your life. spotify recommends me my middle school favorites i hold them in my arms the way they should have been cradled. i hear the taylor swift anthem of 2012. i tether them back to reality and take the coffee away. i hear that marianas trench song that stayed my feet. i leave an extra treat for my unkindness and my murder, "hello again." i hear the song "all star" on the radio. i hold their hand and remind them they have saved the world. i stand on the other side of the looking back glass hearing all the names, seeing all the sights, riding each memory like an ocean wave, i wonder what you'd think of who you became: actor, singer, poet, parent, teacher, and friend. nine years feels like a blink, feet steady as you walk one foot after one foot roses still blooming and no longer wilting petal by petal. no longer counting the days 'till the curse will be permanent. look at you go. so many victories and you dare to call them simple. you have put color back in the sun, brought life back into stone, pulled yourself up out of your wreckage by trusting again. my dear, listen to me, we are a marvel. ~ "through the looking back glass:" the darker side of disney: part 1 P.S. Shuller ** Some personal reflections on writing this below the cut. TW: Suicidal Thoughts and Ideation **

I'm doing some reflections on turning 30. My birthday is coming up in January. I just went to my first Marianas Trench concert yesterday. I've been a Trencher since I was about 12 (2009ish). When I was at the concert, they played two songs from their older albums. (Masterpiece Theater for sure and I can't remember if the other song they played was also from that album or one of their other older albums.) I was lucky enough to have a friend who knew the venue well and got us ADA seating so I could stim while the concert was going on. I was able to have a whole little runway up in the balcony to dance like I used to as a young person. I remember listening to the song "Alibis" from "Fix Me" a trillion times (not literally) when I was in middle school. As I got older, "Ever After" and "Porcelain" became incredibly important songs to me. It was the song "Ever After," if memory serves, that stopped me from deciding to jump off a bridge while studying abroad. I don't think anyone knew how bad it was. But, we get through things, and I'm nine years on the other side of actively thinking of an attempt. I'm so fucking happy and proud. Yet, at the time, I had been absolutely certain my parents were going to disown me for coming out as nonbinary when I returned home. I was terrified of being homeless. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get through school. But, I wasn't sure how I was going to get through life any other way than coming out. Yet, somehow, I managed to stay in the closet and keep living. There are still times where I feel like I wasn't brave enough to accept my fate, and I should have just come out anyway. But, kids, safety is SO FUCKING IMPORTANT. Stay safe first and don't be a martyr. Your feelings, like mine are valid, but know that making my choice is a valid one even if the feelings surrounding it get messy. Things are better now with my family. (As in my dad and I just don't broach the topic, and my mom is trying to get us to facilitate conversation but I've just given up. But, I'm at least "Still a part of the family Madrigal" so to speak.) However, as I was thinking about all of this now that I'm rested from the concert, I decided I wanted to write a series of reflections on life bridging my life from the two different sides of it. Side one is the musical side of it. I love rock music. I love opera. I love all sorts of crazy stuff. I've never met a genre of music I don't like. And, I have a history there. A lot of that, however, is darker and sadder. It's willing to acknowledge its mess and nuance. However, I also have a two year old. I'm watching a lot of Disney movies. I'm watching lots of stuff that has happy endings. But, there is a lot in there that is *sad!* There is a lot there that is dark. There is so much more than just the happy-happy, goodie-good, fun stuff. So, the old school emo and goth parent in me wants to explore that. I want to live into that reality that life is one of push and pulls. It's dark and light. It's not happily ever after. It's happily ever for now, and dark tomorrow. It's windy and rainy for twenty minutes and sunny skies forecasted in about an hour or two. I have a history, and I want the space to record the hard fought wisdom I've earned. I don't know if it will benefit anyone. But, I know it usually benefits me to write it. If you've read all of this, thank you. I'm just kind of in a pensive mood lately. So, thank you for bearing with me.

[dmitri-smerdyakov]

Chapter Six: “Iceberg! Right Ahead!”

Hello all! I’m afraid that chapters have been slow because six weeks on from me going to work at camp and thinking "ugh my throat and chest feel scratchy", I'm STILL ill. Today has literally been me going to the doctor first thing, going to the pharmacy to get antibiotics, going to a health clinic for a chest x-ray, and then going home to nap before watching television. I am, in short, VERY sick, which is why I had to take a break writing this chapter because all of last week was me battling sinusitis and a chest infection. I'm still not well at all but I wanted to get this down because, hey ho, I love writing it!

As of the end of this chapter, there's about an hour left of the film to cover - plus deleted scenes and my own additions. I'm hoping this fic will be about ten chapters, but we'll have to see how it goes.

A lot of the first two sections of this chapter are lifted heavily from Jonathan Mayo's book "Titanic: Minute by Minute" - it feels very jumpy and chaotic, and it's for a reason. In the film, the time between Fleet calling out the iceberg warning and the actual impact is something like two minutes - in real life, it was barely forty seconds. The Titanic really did not stand a chance sadly. As I saw it once so adequately described online (on Quora I think - I still have the screenshot of it saved to my phone), "the sinking was a 'perfect storm' (in calm seas) of COCK-UPS" - the crew not being trained on evacuation procedures, the missing binoculars for the look-outs, the lack of lifeboats, the fact the iceberg warnings from other ships were ignored etc.

Potential warnings for this chapter include a man hitting a woman, same man also slut-shaming her, swearing (let Newt/Tina/Theseus/Lally swear, goddammit!), people being idiots, passengers panicking because they've been locked on the lower decks, a very sad Thomas Andrews, and my un-beta'd writing.

The soundtrack that corresponds with the scene(s) at the beginning of this chapter (and the last bit of the one before it) is called "Hard to Starboard" and I highly recommend listening to it (or watching the scene if you haven't already seen the film) to get into the mood!

[darkanddirtyknb]

Update

Hi loves! Thank you to those who sent me well wishes! I got a couple of questions, so I’m just going to answer them here to save on duplicating the same ones. Everyone should have been answered privately. If you didn’t get a message from me, then I probably didn’t receive yours--Tumblr loves to munch on my messages. The surgery I had done was on June 8th. It’s supposed to help alleviate a few of my conditions, but it will take about six months before I’ll know what it’s really going to do. Right now, I’m in a pretty bad state. I’ve been sick since the day of the procedure. I’m having a lot of side effects and one of them is that my fibromyalgia pain has gone from bad to almost unbearable. I have some upcoming appointments to discuss how to manage this for the time being. I also have a cortisone shot coming up to manage my tendinitis. We’ll see whether or not this one takes hold. The first one did, the last one did not. I’ve been going through some mood adjustments too. I’ve been fighting for so long and I can say with all my heart that I was doing a damn good job of being strong. But lately, I feel like I’m on the brink of a mental break. It’s all catching up to me and now that the pain is worse than it already was, I don’t know how much more I can take. It feels like every time I try to do the right thing, to make things better, everything just goes in the opposite direction. Sigh. But it is what it is, right? I have to get through this. I was denied coverage for Mayo clinic since I have state-based insurance and their financial assistance programs don’t cover enough of the out-of-pocket costs for me to go. That was another setback. I just feel like I’m never going to get to the bottom of this. But that kind of thinking isn’t going to do me any good either. I just have to keep digging for that silver lining. Thanks again to everyone who has followed me on this journey. Your love and support is much appreciated. Take care! 🖤

[kuramirocket]

Mexican Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa: From Migrant Farmoworker to Neurosurgeon

Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa is a world-renowned neurosurgeon and researcher who specializes in brain tumors. Originally from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa was just nineteen years old when he came to the United States. According to a CNN profile, he worked as a migrant farmer until he enrolled in university, graduating from the University of California at Berkeley when he was 23. Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa went on to attend Harvard Medical School and began his career at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he led the Brain Tumor Stem Cell Laboratory and published extensively on the role of stem cells in brain tumors and their potential impact in fighting brain cancer. Today, he is Chair of Neurosurgery at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, where works in the clinic and leads NIH-funded brain cancer research. Over the years, he has had many scientific accomplishments, including developing new software to help identify tumor areas with the greatest malignant potential and developing new and minimally invasive surgical procedures. 

 Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa insists, “I just think of myself as a regular guy.”

“I’ve never been one who declines adventure,” he says.

Early life

The oldest of five children, Quinones-Hinojosa as a child had nightmares that he had to save his mother and siblings from fires, floods, avalanches, says his memoir, “Becoming Dr. Q,” which he co-authored.

His interest in medicine may have stemmed from this sense of responsibility, along with his baby sister’s death from colitis (the memoir is dedicated to her).

Short visits to California’s San Joaquin Valley, where Quinones-Hinojosa’s uncle Fausto was a foreman at a ranch, is where he worked at age 14, he spent two months there pulling weeds, making money to bring back to his family.

“That hard-earned cash proved that people like me were not helpless or powerless,” he wrote.

His uncle agreed to let him work a short stint again at the California ranch to supplement his income. A plan began to form in his mind.

Passage into the United States

Quinones-Hinojosa had $65 in his pocket when, the day before his 19th birthday in 1987, he decided to cross into the United States.

Risking arrest, deportation and even death, Quinones-Hinojosa had a plan: He would cross the border in a “Spider-man climb” up an 18-foot-fence, hop over the barbed wire and make a leap into California, he wrote.

With his uncle’s assistance, Quinones-Hinojosa ended up back in the fields in the San Joaquin Valley. The vast farming terrain was teeming with corn, grapes, tomato, cotton, cantaloupe, broccoli, cauliflower. He lived in a trailer.

“There’s a lot of sentiment against immigration nowadays, but at the time, when I came, the U.S. needed my labor.” Quinones says.

Quinones-Hinojosa remembers driving a tractor and seeing agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service pass by. They would take other workers away, but somehow, he avoided being caught.

Quinones-Hinojosa had wanted to make enough money for his parents and siblings – who later came to the United States as well – and intended to go back to Mexico after saving money. “When you’re making $3.35 an hour, you realize that that dream is going to take a lot longer,” he says.

A different education

Quinones-Hinojosa spent two years at San Joaquin Delta College, taking classes during the day and continuing work for California Railcar Repair in the afternoon. 

Quinones-Hinojosa got offers from several universities, he recalls. He chose University of California, Berkeley, because of the scholarship the school offered, but also because he learned it was the epicenter of a social movement in the 1960s. He enrolled at age 23.

But the environment wasn’t entirely supportive. A teaching assistant once told him, “You can’t be from Mexico. You’re too smart to be from Mexico.” He said nothing, but the comment stung. These words would later spur him on to prove people like this wrong.

Next stop: Harvard Medical School. When he matriculated, the U.S. population was about 18% minority, but faculty at medical schools was only about 3.7% minorities, Quinones-Hinojosa wrote in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. While a student, he earned his U.S. citizenship in 1997.

One of his medical school classmates told him no one could pronounce “Alfredo Quinones,” and suggested he change his name to Alfred Quinn. Instead, he lengthened his name to Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, honoring his mother’s family.

“Alfredo is an outstanding surgeon, and takes very humane and very skilled care of patients with brain tumors,” says chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “His mission is to not only deliver the best possible care, but also to do cutting edge research in order to better understand the diseases and to ultimately find better therapies for those diseases.”

Despite Quinones-Hinojosa’s prominent career, longtime friend, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, describes him as down-to-Earth: “He’s easy to talk to to. He puts his hand out to shake your hand, and it’s this wonderful warm grip. He’s super friendly. Nothing at all pompous about him.”

Operating on the brain

As a migrant farmer, Quinones-Hinojosa’s work was full of hazards. With the machinery he operated, a wrong move could mean his finger or hand might be gone; he could even have lost his life. One machine he sat on, for picking tomatoes, he called “the astronaut chair.” He had to manage it with both hands and arms.

These days, at Johns Hopkins, he has a different “astronaut chair” – where he sits in the operating room, using his hands, feet and mouth to control instruments and a microscope.

“All that practice began when I was working in the fields,” he says.

Quinones operates on about 250 brain tumors every year. He uses his operating room as an extension of his laboratory. He wants to learn the motor pathways of the brain, what makes the cells “move like spiders” and how to attack them.

He’s working on a method to use human fat cells to fight brain cancer. From the fat, researchers derive mesenchymal stem cells, which appear to be effective in identifying cancer.

“It’s almost like you give a hunting dog something to smell,” Quinones said. “We give the cells the smell of cancer juice and they go back and chase these cancers incredibly well.”

You can tell how much Quinones-Hinojosa loves what he’s doing now by the way he talks about the brain.

Brain cancer, he says, is “the most devastating disease that affects the most beautiful organ in our body: the brain. I’m biased because I’m a brain surgeon."

A patient of 56 years of age of Annapolis, Maryland, learned she had large brain tumor – a non-cancerous meningioma – in 2008. Nervous about her first appointment with Quinones-Hinojosa, she found him to be “a ball of energy,” who was confident that she would be OK.

“He’s just so kind and so friendly and he feels like he’s somebody that you’ve known all your life,” she said.

The morning of the surgery, Quinones-Hinojosa eased the patient's fears. “He told me, ‘No matter what happens in the rest of the world, I will not leave you, you are my concern,’ ” she remembers.

“I guess that’s the thing that makes him so kind and so compassionate, is where he came from,” she said.

In some ways, Quinones-Hinojosa, now 45, is a “regular guy.” He wants his three children – 7, 11 and 14 – to be happy. He tries to exercise to keep himself in good shape, especially for the half-marathons he runs with patients to raise money for brain cancer. He uses the expression “holy guacamole.”

There have been so many moments in his life when a combination of luck and determination carried him through. 

Sources: (x) (x)

[officialpenisenvy]

save me mayo clinic...... mayo clinic save me

[aliendeity]

uh oh thought about the ultrarich for too long and how $250k could literally save my life and find my dream MAYO clinic visit so maybe then can figure out what’s wrong with me and i can get the medical care i need

[wyrdify]

A bit of an explanation for the stronger depression because I’m an info-dumper, and this shift is boring as fuck right now anyway. Plus, I know it affects my ability to write, and, well, I haven’t done that in a while, which is what most of y’all follow my blogs for.

---

We’re gonna break it down into parts:

Seasonal depression. Winter tends to increase my depression overall due to less sunlight, colder temperatures, and more time indoors. This is something to check on for yourselves, by the way. 

Apartment bound. Save for the one night a week when I get to go to trivia, I am basically stuck in my apartment 24/7. We are working to get my car fixed to help remedy this problem, but I have not driven in over a year, and we’re entering the winter season in New England.

My soul-sucking job. I cannot emphasize this one enough. My hours just got cut again for the week of 12/11 when I was promised they wouldn’t be, and I’m going to have to scrounge around to get them back up to 28.75. That’s all I’m allowed to work, and that’s for $12.75/hour (minimum wage). Management is poor and retaliatory, coworkers/assistant managers micromanage me to death, I don’t get recognition or praise for the work I do---the list goes on. But, because I can’t drive myself anywhere, and other work-at-home jobs that aren’t strictly customer service are hard to come by, I have to stick with it.

December in general. It’s a hard month for my family. Eleven years ago this Christmas Eve is when my paternal grandmother passed away (maternal passed away last year in late November, and I wasn’t as close to her for various reasons). While the wound isn’t as fresh as it was when I was 21, it still fucking hurts, and I still have trauma related to this whole Christmas season that I’ve been trying to deal with. When your grandmother was the center of your family, and she was the one who made Christmas a big deal at her house, the holidays lose a lot of their cheer. 

I have bipolar depression (bipolar II). If you want to learn more about what that means, Mayo Clinic does a decent breakdown here about bipolar in general. I’ve had this since I was at least in my teen years---that’s when I remember the depression getting worse, at least---but I wasn’t diagnosed until a couple of months ago. It means that when I hit a low, I hit a low, and I can stay in it for days to weeks at a time. Hypomania? Lasts maybe a few days if I’m lucky. Then there are the mixed episodes, also known as depression with the energy to act on it (for me, at least).

I’m not out to my in-laws. Because these are the holidays, I’m spending more time around them. I love my in-laws, but they are staunch conservative Catholics, and I’m not out to them as nonbinary. I get misgendered (not intentionally) a lot when I’m around them, and it’s hard. I’m sure a lot of my gender-nonconforming friends here can relate.

---

What I’m doing about each of these things:

Seasonal depression: Being aware of it, turning lights on, and staying on top of my diet.

Apartment bound: Working on getting my car fixed (husband is researching tires), finding opportunities to get out when possible.

My soul-sucking job: Just taking it one day at a time, venting here and there, keeping my head down, doing the bare minimum work wise*, focusing on what I can control, continuing to look for other jobs, working on a loan repayment plan to get my FAFSA done to get college restarted so I can work on an MLIS, not responding to work emails or slack messages while not on shift.

*paying minimum wage = minimum effort

December in general: Acknowledging the grief, communicating about it and when it’s hitting harder, not pushing myself too much. Also going to try and decorate the apartment for Christmas to get some of that holiday cheer in.

Bipolar II: Educating myself on my disorder, therapy, medication (and working with my med manager), tracking my sleep, journaling, writing poetry, tracking my moods.

Not Out to my In-Laws: Husband and I need to find a time to talk to his mom alone about it, and that’s probably not gonna happen for a bit. So, I’m tabling it for now.

---

Doing all of these things doesn’t change that the depressive episode is still hitting hard right now. It was super bad yesterday, and I’m sort of crawling out of it just now. I’m still going to isolate for the time being, especially since I have the Bioshock collection to distract me for a bit (started yesterday, and whoo boy it’s a trip so far). 

I’ll respond to discord messages when I get the energy, and my brain stops being snappy. That’s one part of depression no one likes, and it’s one reason I isolate: I can be mean, and I don’t want to be mean to my friends. My brain goes “Lol no one’s listening to/they’re ignoring you anyway, so go isolate.” You know, that leftover toxic thinking from being raised by abusive parents where I had to scream for even slight acknowledgment. Super fun. I’m working on challenging it, but, in the meantime, I just step away and not talk so I don’t say something mean. 

Anyway, this got longer than I thought it would, and I got distracted several times by work. Thanks for reading if you did. Have Vincent sitting on the internet as a reward.

[glassesmcfancyhair]

A doctor is just a person who passed medical school. For every top of the class, wants to be here and save lives bro there is someone who was like “well, I guess I’ll go to Med school, my dad was a doctor” and they don’t care! This is just A Job to them, it’s not about helping or saving or curing. They went to Med school because it was what daddy paid for and they passed but weren’t stellar and now they have the same credentials as the guy who really wants to help and fix and heal. You don’t know the difference until you start talking to them, and given how health care is, you’re very often stuck with a shitty doctor for a while.

I went through three doctors before finally a specialist at the Mayo Clinic figured out it was a tumor. One of the doctors before the Mayo told me to stop wearing platform shoes because that was obviously the problem. It took 35 years for me to be diagnosed with bipolar, despite being under constant doctors care for mental and behavioral issues. My wife has lupus and didn’t get diagnosed until her late 20s, again because doctors just would shrug and go “try sleeping more and eating better”.

Doctors fuck up. Some are malicious. Some are having a bad day. They make mistakes and give bad information. At the end of the day, they are human.

why is it so hard for able bodied people to believe that doctors are sometimes just incompetent? you realize doctors are people, right? people that can be bad at their job. that happens sometimes. they don't know everything because there's a piece of paper on their wall that says they're smart, actually. they can sometimes be wrong, actually. they can sometimes cut corners and take the easy way out, actually. they can sometimes hate their job and make that their patients problem, actually. doctors aren't all saints who do everything right the first time. please stop invalidating disabled people when they complain about their terrible treatment at the hands of medical professionals. please stop putting the feelings of doctors over the lives of their patients.

[qnewsau]

Treading the Balance with Dr Kerryn Phelps

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/treading-the-balance-with-dr-kerryn-phelps/

Treading the Balance with Dr Kerryn Phelps

Dr Kerryn Phelps’ religious marriage to her wife Jackie in New York in 1998 and subsequent outing in the media really stated the debate around marriage equality in Australia before it was on the radar of even many people within the LGBTQIA+ community.

Dr Phelps has now released Power of Balance, a memoir of both her personal life and life in the public eye, and gave this exclusive interview to QNews.

QNews: Even by the early 2000s there was still opposition to the idea of marriage equality from within the LGBTQIA+ community where some people feared that gay people marrying would turn us heteronormative or that non monogamous and polyamorous people would be slut shamed. None of that really came to pass. Can you talk about that?

Dr Kerryn Phelps: When Jackie and I said we were going to New York to get married in 1998 we knew that it wouldn’t be legal anywhere in the world. That was a very personal decision, and something that we shared with family and friends. But it very soon became public knowledge.

We were in the situation of being the first couple in Australia to be publicly talking about the need for marriage equality, and a need for recognition of long term relationships for those people who wanted their relationships recognised in that way.

I do remember the varying views in the community about that and that it did actually take a bit of time for everyone to be on the same page.

It’s been 20 years since John Howard banned same-sex marriage. That was really framed at the time as a way to prevent same-sex couples from adopting overseas. How did that make you feel as a parent?

The main thing that 2004 change to the Marriage Act did was to stop same-sex couples who had been legally married in places like Canada from having their marriages recognised in Australia.

It was cutting off the option to use the marriage laws in other countries to have those relationships recognised as opposite-sex couples were able to if their marriages were performed overseas.

There were also same-sex couples who were raising children through various ways of forming families. Some had children before the relationship so they wanted recognition of step parents or co-parents, or there were couples who were fostering and wanting to adopt, where they were only allowed to adopt as single people.

There was a situation where some types of families were given recognition and rights and others weren’t and that wasn’t fair to the children or the parents.

There was an incident I remember from around 2010 that didn’t make it into the book- an Australian Marriage Equality fundraising dinner in the overseas passenger terminal at Circular Quay where a guest started choking and you had to jump in to clear their airways to save them. Do you remember that?

I do! I’d heard about the heimlich manoeuvre in my medical training but it was the first time in my career as a doctor that I had the necessity to use that skill. So I was very glad that I was there but I’ve never had to use it again since that night. You describe in the book about how you became an early believer in the medical use of cannabis. Can you tell me about that?

I was a medical reporter for the Today show on the Nine Network and I arranged a trip to the US to report on a number of stories.

I went to the Mayo Clinic, and interviewed the cast of ER which had recently started on Nine in Australia.

I also visited California which was in the process of legalising medicinal cannabis.

I interviewed legislators, medicinal users of cannabis, doctors who were prescribing it. I visited a cannabis club in San Francisco and I saw how that whole system was working.

That really transformed my view about the need for medicinal cannabis to be regulated and used as a part of the treatments that we’re able to offer people who had intractable symptoms that weren’t able to be treated in any other way.

That was really an important first hand experience of speaking to people who are directly affected and who had benefited from it. Australia has now legalised medical cannabis. But the cost of patients can sometimes be as much if not more than accessing marijuana from illegal sources. Do you think medical cannabis products should be subsidised under the PBS?

It’s something for the PBS to look at. There are a lot of people who are gaining benefits where it is being prescribed as a medication and I think under certain circumstances it would be helpful for people who need to take medicinal cannabis to have support from the PBS for that cost. Do you think Australia will legalise recreational cannabis in the future and Is that something you’d support?

Cannabis is not a harmless drug. It has known adverse health effects like bronchitis, cardiovascular damage and mental health impacts.

That said, the current system of regulation does need a review. Criminal penalties for personal use can be counterproductive. Cannabis use should be treated as a health issue and not a criminal justice issue.

If people are using cannabis to self-medicate, I would encourage them to speak to their doctor and if medicinal cannabis is the most appropriate evidence-based treatment for them, they could be provided with a prescription.

In the book, you talk about how you helped Magda Szubanski come out in 2012 so that she could support the marriage equality campaign. Could you talk about that?

Magda had been considering it for some time and I had a number of private conversations with her about it. In the end we had a meeting at Jackie’s parents’ place. Alex Greenwich was there, myself, Jackie, and Magda.

We discussed how and when she could do that because she really wanted to lend her support to the marriage equality campaign and so we made a decision that it would be on The Project and it would be live and I suggested that it would be Valentines Day which was just a few months away.

Magda’s coming out was really transformative to the marriage equality campaign because she has that warm and clever and funny way of putting things, and it made the Australian people really want to become involved in that campaign.

In the book you recount a few run-ins that you’ve had with former Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan. Does he really introduce himself as “the devil” when he calls people?

Yes, he did that to us. Jackie picked up the call and said there’s someone on the line who says he’s the devil. And it was Bill Heffernan.

What were the high points of your time as the Member of Wentworth?

Winning the by-election unexpectedly with a historic swing of almost 20 percent which was thought to be impossible in a suburban blue ribbon Liberal seat.

We’d seen Cathy McGowan do that in Indi and Rebekha Sharkie do that in Mayo but that hadn’t been done before in an urban setting.

Then when we had the power balance after Julia Banks left the Liberal Party to go to the crossbench, we were able to pass the Medevac legislation. That gave a renewed focus on the way Australia treats refugees who need medical attention.

So within months of that byelection all of the children and their families were removed from Nauru, some of them who had been there for years. The consumption of alcohol by Australian politicians has been in the news. What do you think needs to change around that?

I didn’t witness it personally but I had an office that was alcohol free.

People do work long hours in parliament. They will quite often have dinner on the job, so people might have a glass of wine with dinner as you would in the dining room.

I don’t think that a ban on alcohol in parliament is the way to go but I do think there needs to be a Code of Conduct around alcohol.

The other thing to look at is under what circumstances alcohol is available at functions in parliament and I think the government has been working on an alcohol strategy around that.

-Power of Balance is published by Hardie Grant Books.

Kerryn Phelps To Become First Openly Lesbian MP In House Of Reps

Kerryn Phelps On How She Became An ‘Accidental’ LGBTIQ Activist

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[witchofthesouls]

Multiple things going on:

Twitter is a strange platform of social media because there’s a huge amount of celebrities, politicians, corporations, organizations, authors, creators, reporters, and so on. So that old saying, A little bird told me.... Well, the little twittering bird will spread real fast since all those accounts can only condense a message down to X amount of characters. Twitter has become an amalgamation of 3 AM thoughts, personal stories and improv, and breaking news media.

Combine it with the Blue Check of Authenticity, which Twitter touts it as a Tried and True method of solid proof that the account is truly what the person/corporation says it is, now you have a verified major pharmaceutical company, one of the Big Three (Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Eli Lilly) to keep a tight, iron-clad fist around insulin, to declare that the live-saving drug is now free.

And because that “verified” social media business account had to be obviously  given the permission by the higher-ups to green light the tweet, stockholders will not like that news statement. At all. (Is it true? The account has been verified! Is Eli Lilly trying to backtrack?!)

No seriously. People don’t rant about Big Pharma for nothing, especially over insulin since the patent was literal sold for $1 by its creators: Dr. Frederick Banting, Dr. Charles Herbert Best, Dr. James Bertram Collip, and Dr. John Macleod. All of them would be rolling in their graves because they wanted insulin to available to everyone without barriers.

A lot of news headlines and research centers had focused on the tremendous price hikes on insulin and the sheer impact it had. Anyone interested, Mayo Clinic Proceedings The High Cost of Insulin in the United States: An Urgent Call to Action (2020) is a good jumping point to get into it, especially with all the references you can publicly access without a paywall (another separate issue).

Because healthcare is a very profit-driven business in the US, stockholders will assume they won’t get the dividends of yesteryear and/or freak out there’s no future profit out of it (which is very much bullshit, it’s just going to turn into a different strategy, more like long-term stability) and sell their shares to invest in other profit-breaking avenues.

Hence, the continuation of the Blue Check of Chaos Twitter Saga:

Viva la resistance.

[colleenbooksfiction]

LISTENING TO HER OWN VOICE. CHAPTER 20.

Indeed, Sr. Lucia was confined to a lengthy rest at the Sisters of Christian Charity convent in Wilmette, IL. While there, she prayed tirelessly and felt tremendous gratitude for all that she'd accomplished.

She also prayed for her sight, as she worried she was losing it. Her letter writing to here relatives in Minnesota had dramatically decreased. She eventually required the assistance of some of the other novices to assist her in her daily duties.

Her mother superior, gently suggested it was time for Sister Lucia to see a physician. Sr. Lucia worried she might go blind, and she'd had a small fund saved that were gifts from her brother, J.T.

"Mother Superior, I'd like to travel to the Mayo Clinic, but I'll need one of the sisters to accompany me."

[queen-of-confusion13]

Saying "I love you" with a puzzle

The inspiration for this project comes from an Advent Calendar puzzle made by Karen Puzzles on youtube. She is awesome!

Clementoni Disney Gala puzzle. Over 6000 pieces.

I bought this puzzle for my mother-in-law Betty with the money she gave me from her husband. He passed away and she said to take the money and buy something he would buy. So, I decided that a Disney puzzle would be great to give her for her 80th birthday. The idea was to take a puzzle from him and put a personal touch on it and give her 80 days of happy puzzling filled with love. They are the best grandparents to my kids. They even went to Florida with us and spent 10 days at Disney World. They are game on. My mom never got to see my kids, but I am quite sure she hand picked my husband for me knowing that Betty would fulfill her only regret. The chance to be a grandma to her kids like my mom's was to her. Betty is love, plain and simple.

Step 1. Choose a puzzle the right size that has significance and that would be fun to make.

So easy, right? I had watched Karen do a lot of puzzle reviews on her channel, so I knew what to look for. I tried to search for a Disney party puzzle and this is what I found that would work, but there weren't any reviews out there about making it that I could find. The brand name didn't ring a bell. My favorite all time puzzles are made by Springbok. My friend Ben said that they have good pictures, uniquely shaped pieces, and they hold together so blocks of them can be easily moved. I knew what I wanted and rolled the dice that it would be the one.

How wrong can a person be? I was that wrong. If you take a good look at the picture there is way too much white, black, and gold and the pieces are small enough that they could be in any of the spots with those colors. The pieces would fit in the wrong place easily. So many times I didn't know I had the wrong piece until it's missing spot called out for it. And if you get 4 pieces fitted together it is almost impossible to pick them up without falling apart. I finally figured out how to move a strip by pulling outward on the two ends to create tension and they would hold.

I wanted to make a big statement of how much I love Betty, so it had to be a big puzzle. I think it measured 4.5 by 5 feet. It took nine foam boards to fit the entire puzzle, so it was assembled on 9 separate boards and put together at the end.

Where do you start on a puzzle like that? Edges. And sort the pieces. The only problem was that the puzzle was so big and the characters had to many similarities that it was really hard to sort. A pile of one color of pieces would actually be scattered across the entire puzzle. The good thing was the band with the striped coats. That was a starting point. I found out by the end of the puzzle that the color of confetti differs on the right and left sides, so that helped. It was the saving grace of the entire puzzle. Otherwise, it was a slow, piece by piece detective story.

By looking at the picture (no it is not cheating Grandma Bessie) and searching for the exact spot in the picture that each piece came from I was able to assemble it. The characters got different names and I would find who it belonged to and sort accordingly. It was easiest to spot out a few pieces, put them on a paper labeled with the name assigned to the character in my attempt to bring order to the madness, and assemble a few at a time. They could be on any of the 9 boards, so it was a constant shuffling of boards with puzzles on them to get them "home". Yes, this did take months. All day. Every dayNo, I didn't have anything else going on at all. This was my life and I had a deadline.

Step 2. Design the puzzle in a puzzle.

My husband was the star of the project. He had to have gamma knife surgery to kill a brain tumor, so the ride up to Mayo Clinic was spent trying to figure out the secondary image. We wanted to break the puzzle into meaningful pieces. Keily Rodni had just gone missing, so this was a time I will always remember. Searching the cars on the highway for her license plate and praying she would be found soon and making a layout for the puzzle in a puzzle.

I got an idea of the direction we needed to go, and my husband, with the patience of a saint, used all his spreadsheet skills to map it out. We created code talk like "pop that heart". We worked together to create 80 different sections of puzzle that could be made in order, one day at a time. In the picture there are the words "happy birthday Betty" and "love" was on there twice. And there were 80 hearts. It was a positive/negative approach. Some hearts were created using pieces, and other hearts were made by using the empty space. If you are wondering how we did it all I can say is that my father-in-law was in charge, and Betty was the best thing that ever happened to him, so love in abundance along with angels helping was the key.

This is the master puzzle map we ended up with. Each piece is given a number between 1 to 80 according to which day they would be placed, and the puzzle had to be disassembled perfectly. There was a chance that this project was too complicated and wouldn't be any fun to complete, and that would be torture for her.

Step 3. Disassemble the puzzle according to the master map.

All nine poster boards were pieced together and the completed puzzle was then disassembled one number at a time. An outline was made around each day's parts as they were removed and labeled with that day's number. We showed her where it started on day one. The line under "Betty" and the upright of the middle T. The puzzle created new shapes every day. Every piece attached to an already existing piece except for when we jumped to the border. Otherwise there was a specific spot those next pieces would fit.

All the pieces were put in baggies labeled from 1 to 80 put in the puzzle box lined up nicely, and we gave her the giant board with the 80 days outlined on it. No, this wasn't cheating either Grandma Bessie. After her party she started assembling it. It was going to be fun to see it come together and I sure hoped that she would enjoy it. This was the biggest love message I had ever given her...besides the grandkids. And the proof of divine guidance over this project was completely confirmed when there was not a single piece missing in spite of being handled and dropped upteen times.

I love you Betty and I am so glad you are my kid's grandma.