When he was a 24-year-old medical student living in London, Faii Ong was assigned to care for a 103-year-old patient who suffered from Parkinson’s, the progressive neurological condition that affects a person’s ease of movement. After watching her struggle to eat a bowl of soup, Ong asked another nurse what more could be done to help the woman. “There’s nothing,” he was grimly told.
GyroGlove’sdesign is simple. It uses a miniature, dynamically adjustable gyroscope, which sits on the back of the hand, within a plastic casing attached to the glove’s material. When the device is switched on, the battery-powered gyroscope whirs to life. Its orientation is adjusted by a precession[sic] hinge and turntable, both controlled by a small circuit board, thereby pushing back against the wearer’s movements as the gyroscope tries to right itself.
It took you much longer this time until you leaked precum. At this rate you’ll be out here in months! This is good! Most patients stay years until they can control their full balls for a full hour of teasing. See you tomorrow, same time. Bye.
my cat got heat stroke today it was so scary :( he’s home and recovering now but wauugghhhhh this fucking heatwave in the PNW is no fucking joke, we’re not acclimated to this and neither are our pets, keep your babies inside and watered don’t be like me and have to have a public meltdown in a humane society vet wing
here’s the pissed off charcoal lump himself recovering in our nice cool dark room with his personal charcuterie platter
It can be hard to spot sometimes so keep an eye out for the signs, also cats do not naturally pant like a dog! If your cat is panting they are overheating!
If your pet is showing signs of heat stroke call your vet! In the mean time do what you can to cool them off such as putting wet towels on them, going in a cooler room, and giving them access to water. Do not dowse them in freezing cold water, a drastic temperature change from very hot to very cold can cause other dangerous issues. It’s very similar to treating heatstroke in humans, get out of the heat but don’t freeze.
[Image description: Two charts as posted by medianox-astrum.
The first chart lists “5 signs of heat stroke in dogs” next to a photo of a dog:
1. Excessive & ongoing panting 2. Brick-red or blue-purple gums 3. Lethargic, collapsed, seizures 4. Excessive drooling 5. History of exercise on a hot day, being left unattended in a hot car, or unable to get out of the sun. If you suspect your dog is suffering from heat stroke then you need to contact your vet immediately!
The second chart lists “5 signs of heat stroke in cats” next to photos of kittens:
1. Open-mouthed breathing or panting 2. Brick-red or blue-purple gums 3. Lethargic, collapsed, seizures 4. Excessive drooling 5. History of being left unattended in a hot car, or unable to get out of the sun (e.g., tick paralysis) If you suspect your cat is suffering from heat stroke then you need to contact your vet immediately!
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
Video Transcript:
Person 1: “What’s a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know?” Person 2: “Most hospitals in America are non-profits. That means they must have a Charity Care Policy. This is going to sound weird, but what that means is if you make under a certain amount of money the hospital legally has to forgive your medical bills. Let me show you how this works. Type in the hospital name with financial assistance after it. It should be the top link, lets check. What you want to look for is financial assistance applications policy. Lets check the policy. From here, what you’re looking for is a scale, that is right here. 0%-300% of the federal poverty guidelines, they will forgive 100% of your medical bills. So you can see here, that 300% of the federal poverty guidelines is $37,470, so if you make under that amount [annually] the hospital will legally forgive your medical bills. And if you’re a larger household, you can check it out from here. If you want to test it out, I run a nonprofit that does this. So, dm me, and I will actually do it for you. Lets see if we can crash those medical bills.”
[image id: static image after “dude” is the first reblogger’s medical balance adjusted to 0. end id.]
[transcript additional note: everything after “let’s check” is for the specific hospital used as an example; from context, it sounds like the exact numbers to qualify may vary from hospital to hospital but that all U.S. non-profit hospitals do have this.]
Upcoming Post: How to Buy a Wheelchair Without Insurance
I’m planning on writing a guide to help people navigate buying a wheelchair without insurance (primarily aimed at US readers).
What I need from you: tell me about the struggles and barriers you encountered (other than finances) when trying to purchase a chair for yourself when insurance wouldn’t cover it.
Feel free to share and reblog as needed, but please don’t respond unless you’ve gone through (or tried to go through) the process of buying a chair without support from insurance. Tumblr conversations are hard enough to follow as it is.
If you wanna submit an anonymous ask replying to this (or use the Ask form on my main site), feel free. Just let me know that this is the post you are referencing.
that feeling when you get that *italian hand* good doctor
What do you mean there’s blood tests for neurotransmitters?
Where do I find this kind of doctor???
I hate to be this person. But. You CANNOT TEST FOR DOPAMINE AND SEROTONIN IN THE BRAIN. Not the way it’s being implied here.
I’m sorry, because this comic is otherwise uplifting and I know what it’s like to think you should just be able to do stuff and then it turns out there was something actually stopping you the whole time. HOWEVER. I am seeing a lot of people in the notes going “wait you can test for dopamine and serotonin? why won’t my shitty doctor do that?”
I don’t know what happened with this OP. Maybe they misinterpreted their doctor. Maybe their doctor misspoke, or actually misunderstood the results themselves. But when you test for serotonin and dopamine in blood or urine, you are testing for their presence in your body, which is separate from their function in the brain. In fact, the serotonin test is specifically designed to detect cancer, because certain kinds of tumours release it. The dopamine test is usually looking for excessive levels as well, because excessive dopamine in your body can cause all sorts of unpleasant physical effects (something that funnily enough I have just been discovering due to trying a new antidepressant that stimulates dopamine specifically.)
There is a reason that antidepressant medication is a frustrating black-box mystery, and that reason is the blood-brain barrier, which prevents us from being able to easily test the levels of basically anything that’s going on in the brain. We can’t do even the most obvious before-and-after empirical comparisons - we can’t test serotonin levels in the brain, then take a serotonin-increasing drug, then test afterwards to see if it works. There are levels on which we don’t really know, still, how drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) actually work in the brain - we’ve just made educated guesses based on as much lab work as we can do without literally opening up someone’s skull.
(Fun fact: I once participated in a study using one of the most advanced fMRI machines in the world in order to try and measure serotonin and dopamine activity in my brain, among other things. The goal was to find a diagnostic method to actually take these measurements, and to examine whether these two neurotransmitters were significantly involved in chronic fatigue syndrome. To the best of my knowledge, 7 years on, that study has not been published - there are potentially a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is quite possibly that it didn’t work. Do you think anyone would be forking over tens of thousands of pounds/dollars to stick me in a giant magnet machine if there was a blood test they could do instead?)
And just to head off someone doing a three-second search and coming back saying “BUT THERE’S A RESEARCH PAPER”… yes, there are several. Some small studies have been done, because finding a way to do a blood test and get accurate results of what’s going on in the brain would be phenomenol. Emphasis on small studies there. Thus far, the results have suggested a cautious correlation between “taking drugs that we think increase serotonin in the brain” and “serotonin levels rise in the blood” - but we still don’t know if that’s actually reflective of what’s happening inside the black box that is the skull. Even testing the cerebro-spinal fluid via lumbar puncture - which is a way more invasive and higher risk procedure than a blood test btw so don’t casually throw that out as an option - isn’t clearly correlated with neurotransmitter activity in the brain.
TL;DR:there is no blood test for “are your levels of serotonin and/or dopamine low in your brain in a way that is causing you depression or fatigue”. However, the OP’s described symptoms are very much in line with what we understand about how those neurotransmitters function - so I sincerely hope they found things improved anyway.
(Edit: just realised this comic was originally posted in 2018. I’m not going to go bother OP about it but I would be really interested to know how things have been for them since then.)
