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29 votes
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Chatting slow mo with Zack Snyder
4 votes -
The parents in my classroom
25 votes -
I was the poster girl for OCD. Then I began to question everything I’d been told about mental illness.
28 votes -
Dissociation in childhood trauma: my experience
10 votes -
Concussion treatment: the insidious myth about resting protocols that even doctors still believe
22 votes -
I always knew I was different. I just didn’t know I was a sociopath.
32 votes -
What I did when my art got stolen (I got help from lawyers and posted on social media)
17 votes -
Reinventing myself at 55: From commando to interior designer to miniature artist
5 votes -
How I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers
19 votes -
The day I put $50,000 in a shoe box and handed it to a stranger
25 votes -
How Cory Doctorow got scammed (and why AI will make it worse)
60 votes -
Over three decades, tech obliterated media - my front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe
22 votes -
It took divorce to make my marriage equal – I spent twelve years fighting for an equal partnership, when what I needed was a divorce [2020]
29 votes -
I rent a million-dollar home: Why can’t I buy one?
27 votes -
‘An experiment in ritual humiliation’: would a month of rejection therapy make me fearless?
19 votes -
Coming of age at the dawn of the social internet (LiveJournal, AIM, and other pre-Facebook internet things)
42 votes -
Can ‘micro-acts of joy’ make you happier? I tried them for seven days.
11 votes -
My disabled son’s amazing gaming life in the World of Warcraft (2019)
36 votes -
Experience: I own the world’s oldest living cat
43 votes -
My parents’ dementia felt like the end of joy. But when they got sick, I turned to a new generation of roboticists—and their glowing, talking, blobby creations.
19 votes -
I’ve been stopped and searched by the police since I was sixteen
29 votes -
After 800 years, volcanic activity has returned to Reykjanes – Andri Snær Magnason reflects on the Icelandic relationship with volcanoes
12 votes -
My doomed career as a North Korean novelist
24 votes -
How to stop an Icelandic whale hunt – Elissa Phillips and Anahita Babaei on chaining themselves to the crow's nests of whaling vessels for thirty-three hours
9 votes -
Here’s what happened when I taught a fly-fishing course in the waterways of New Orleans
4 votes -
The Day After - Forty years ago my father scared 100 million viewers in America
24 votes -
The Australian scientist who tried to raise the alarm about climate change asks himself "Where did I go wrong?"
17 votes -
I texted my friend for years after she died. Then I received a five-word reply that left me shaken.
21 votes -
The Survivors - One year later, those who lived through the Club Q shooting are still healing. These are their stories.
12 votes -
The Russians snitching on colleagues and strangers
18 votes -
Nicholas’s story: ‘I’ve been locked up for ten years because I’m autistic. Is a chance at life too much to ask?’
32 votes -
‘The only way for us to survive’: The life of a New York City candy seller
15 votes -
I skipped to the ending
53 votes -
I had my first kiss in GemStone III
15 votes -
How did deepfake images of me end up on a porn site?
35 votes -
I ran 365 marathons in 365 days
11 votes -
Why musicians get the yips
13 votes -
I didn’t go to my dream school. Now I’m living debt-free.
22 votes -
"My dad painted the iconic cover for Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung,’ and it’s haunted him ever since"
21 votes -
Four men: Keeping company with outdoor people
6 votes -
What I learned about algorithmic bias from creating the first AI-generated faces on Wikimedia Commons
13 votes -
The great Zelle pool scam - All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.
43 votes -
Why the US left's version of the Federalist Society failed
16 votes -
I used to love Marvel. Now it feels like homework
50 votes -
It's very weird to have a skull full of poison
42 votes -
Writing for Friends was no dream job
45 votes -
I don't feel like a cancer patient
Last year (June 2022) I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I had surgery (which left me with a permanent stoma) and I had a bit of adjuvant chemo to kill off any remaining cells. I've been...
Last year (June 2022) I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I had surgery (which left me with a permanent stoma) and I had a bit of adjuvant chemo to kill off any remaining cells. I've been discharged from oncology, and I've started my 5 year surveillance. Staging is complicated but my I was pT3pN2bM0 (tumour was stage three, I had lots of lymph node involvement, but no metastasis).
Alongside that I've had problems with gall stones, starting in April 2022, and ending this year when my gall bladder was removed.
When I tell people about the cancer they pull on their serious face and say things like "oh no how awful hope you're okay glad to see you're doing so well now it's good news that you're in remission", and when I tell them about the gall bladder they're kind of baffled and not at all concerned.
But here's the thing: cancer was not such a big deal. I do have a permanent stoma, but for some reason my brain has disconnected that from being a cancer thing. I had a relatively gentle chemo regimen (short, and it was CAPOX which is less rough than other meds) -- don't get me wrong, chemo SUCKED, and left me with neuropathy in my feet, but I got through it. When I compare that to repeated[1] hospitalisation for cholangitis (a gall stone stuck in a bile duct causes bile to back up and that causes pretty severe problems), well, those repeated hospitalisations were a much bigger deal for me.
English NHS hospitals tend to have dorm wards. In the ward I was on there were 6 beds to a bay, and 5 bays to the ward, and then a further 6 or 7 single occupancy rooms. Some of the bays were smaller, and had 4 beds. Once the hospital was very full, so I spent a night in a bed (proper bed, not a trolley) but in the ward corridor. I spent over 60 days in hospital for the gall bladder stuff, and just 7 as an inpatient for the cancer. (And Sartre was right, hell is other people ).
There are lots of health forums online and I always feel deeply uncomfortable in the cancer forums. I feel okay in the ostomy forums[2], but I don't use them because they're all a bit odd.
I dunno what the point of this post is. Maybe it's "sometimes cancer is treatable and the person isn't particularly bothered by it", or maybe "people with cancer want support, but sometimes that support won't have anything to do with cancer".
[1] When a stone gets stuck they need to do some emergency work to stabilise you and remove the stone. And if you keep getting stones stuck they want to remove your gall bladder. There's some discussion about when to take the gall bladder out. Hypothetical Bob has a stone stuck - you stabilise him, so do you take the gall bladder out then (when he's still recovering) and then monitor him for a few days and discharge him home to fully recover? Or do you stabilise him, then discharge him home to recover, and call him back for planned surgery to remove the gall bladder? Evidence is inconclusive about which is best, so there's a bit of a lottery depending where you are in England. My local hospital took the later approach. The problem was that i) I had cancer, ii) My gall bladder was very active in kicking stones out and iii) we had several Covid pandemic waves causing huge disruption. These meant that by the time I had recovered enough to have the surgery, and they had a space on their surgical list for me, my gall bladder had kicked out another stone and that reset the whole thing again. They gave up this year and took my gallbladder out.
[2] Online health forums can have this really weird dynamic. English speaking forums are usually dominated by Americans, and Americans fall into 2 groups: 1) People with bad or no insurance and 2) People with good insurance. When someone says "I'm having this problem" the replies from the first group will all be along the lines of "go the the vet and buy this fish medicine" and the second group will be "here's a huge list of tests and products to use".
EDIT: I forgot to mention, I am in England, and so I am very fortunate because all treatment is free and a cancer diagnosis opens up quite a lot of support.
37 votes -
What does any of this have to do with physics?
41 votes -
My secret to dating in San Francisco is a spreadsheet
24 votes