When people find out I’m an anarchist, a question I frequently get is “how would people with chronic illnesses like diabetes access treatment under anarchism?”
There are a lot of unspoken assumptions packed into that question that I thought I’d explore a bit.
The first is, of course, that people with chronic illnesses can access treatment in the context of capitalist modernity. Not everyone can! Many people in the world of states and capital suffer and die from lack of access to treatment.
Not because the treatment is unavailable, but because access is mediated through capitalist gatekeeping. People, today, right now, in allegedly rich countries, die because they cannot afford insulin. For them, the question of “but how would we access insulin under anarchism” is moot. Many others access it only at the cost of medical debt and other forms of indenture.
Hey #disability and #chronicIllness and #rheumatoid disease folks, this is one of my favorite places to chat though it's still very quiet, hasn't reached critical mass.
Hi! I'm Darnielle. I've been chronically ill for 17 years, and I was late diagnosed with ADHD last year. I want to put a spotlight on the overlap between chronic illness and ADHD and give people who experience both a community that understands the challenges brought on by both.
My autistic grandfather dutifully cared for his wife (the grandmother I never got to meet) at the end of her fight with breast cancer.
Grandma Mary really wanted marijuana joints to cope with her pain, but the doctors only permitted her to use morphine (this was in the late 1970's). She couldn't administer it to herself so my grandfather injected it into her veins for her.
He told me this story one summer day when I was over at his apartment with my father. I was 10 years old at that time .
What prompted the story was grandpa Bill giving us a tour of his tackle box. I saw a syringe next to the rubber worms, and I asked what it was for. He explained that the fake worms injected with air made them seem life like to the fish, they'd wriggle about in the water, and were more likely to get a bite.
Then, he paused and told the story of that needle, and what it was originally for. After grandma Mary died, he kept all those remnant from that time, and everything seemed to have a repurpose . I watched him grimace as he took the morphine syringe in his hand and he angrily snapped it in two, and threw it away.
That was the first time I ever seen the gentle man look angry, actually, full of rage.
Only now, as I lay here in the hospital bed, after having a dose of Dilaudid, as the burning hot pain relief sears through my veins and breaks open my weary heart. I feel my grandmother, and I didn't have to meet her, to begin to feel her pain.
I feel grandpa's pain too. Repurposing the hurtful memories, the tools we are are actually given , when what we needed was something totally different. The autistic tendency to survive and "make due" with rampant unfairness.
Does anyone else get unbelievable exhaustion in the early evening? Like, my body feels so heavy it’s an effort just to lift an arm. I just lie in bed and listen to audiobooks until sleepingtime. #ChronicIllness#Spoonie
A new way of thinking about persistent infections, such as long COVID and chronic Lyme disease
“Infection-associated chronic illness” sounds like a mouthful.
But using that name has sparked a paradigm shift in how researchers and others view ailments that can keep people sick for years—with few or no options for getting better.
Blooming Lovely
Sometimes I am very lucky and my partner not only buys me flowers but helps me take photographs with them too. I haven't talked a lot about my partner on the blog, partly to protect his privacy and partly because he isn't very interested in sex, and this is, after all, a sex blog.
Omg having enough oxygen overnight has made such a huge difference in the quality of my day! I feel more awake, more creative, more ambitious. (Not a HUGE improvement, but every little bit helps) #Spoonie#ChronicIllness
For the last few weeks I looked at my HFV (heart frequency variability) every evening and compared to how I slept, and how I felt that day.
For me, there is definitely a connection btw my HFV and how im feeling.
The higher the HFV was, the better I felt, less pain and fatigue etc.
You can see exactly where I had good days. (They seem to come once every month, curious... cycle related?) #MECFS#chronicillness
My partner checked the area and redness has gone down. It is swollen but not as red. No streaking. Took my 12th dose of Keflex (40 doses total is the full course). Basically, the point at which I was going to go to the hospital is if there was no positive change in the direction of healing or it got worse.
To go to the hospital, we are looking for signs of worsening such as :
Increased redness + increased swelling
Red streaks moving outward to new tissue
fever
disorientation
The reason why it's wait and see at home, has to do with the fact that my immune system has been put to sleep from the Prednisone (why healing from infection has been so slow), and so I can catch a plethora of things at the hospital including COVID.
This could be so so so much worse,
KNOCK ON WOOD.
Please still keep me in your thoughts, I'm not out of the hot water quite yet 🥺
Let's hope for reduced swelling by tomorrow morning 🤞
It might look like it to many, but given the effort some of us put in just to stay alive and function each day, we can assure them that we are not lazy.. just exhausted.
A longer (two-part) News in Brief from the Science for ME forum for week starting June 26. This weekly news summary includes research, advocacy, coming events, and more: