the thing about the three musketeers (book) is that there are three musketeers (guys) and also a fourth dude who’s always hanging out with them and is part of the friend group. yet he is not one of the three musketeers
I am, like, a long running proponent of the “eat something and you’ll feel better” crowd and am often one of the first people to suggest “maybe it’s time for a snack before I get whipped into a frenzy” but I really do resent how instantaneous it is. like it’ll feel like I’m having my worst day in months and then I’ll start eating and literally before I even finish I’m like oh yeah the world is beautiful
y’all didn’t even add a tutorial of how to do this so imma put one right here
1. type in cmd.exe into your windows search and right click on Command Promt search result and select “Run as Administator”. 2. Type/Copypase in
net.exe stop “Windows Search” and make sure Windows Search is in quotations. It should then respond saying “The Windows Search service is stopping” and then tell you it’s stopped.
This is only a temp fix though, if you want it switched off permanently then do THIS:
1. Press the Windows key + R at the same time and type in services.msc.
2. Scroll until you find Windows Search and double click it to enter its Properties window.
3. Change the Startup type to Disabled. Apply this change and you can exit out.
By taking biopsies from long COVID patients before and after exercising, scientists in the Netherlands constructed a startling picture of widespread abnormalities in muscle tissue that may explain this severe reaction to physical activity.
Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.
“We saw this immediately and it’s very profound,” says Braeden Charlton, one of the study’s authors at Vrije University in Amsterdam.
The tissue samples from long COVID patients also revealed severe muscle damage, a disturbed immune response, and a buildup of microclots.
“This is a very real disease,” says Charlton. “We see this at basically every parameter that we measure.”
I feel insane seeing stuff like this because this research already exists for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a post viral condition caused by multiple types of viral infections that a LOT of people with “Long Covid” meet the diagnostic criteria for.
This article mentions that ME/CFS is a “similar complex condition” but that’s DEEPLY underreporting the similarities. The phrase “post exertional malaise” (now researchers are trying to replace it but this article uses that phrase) was INVENTED for ME/CFS. It’s the only known condition, before “long covid”, that causes these kinds of symptoms after exertion!
It’s good to know for sure that it’s the same mechanisms at play when the inciting viral infection is Covid and not, for instance, Epstein-Barr or RSV, but half the time it doesn’t seem like researchers are making comparisons at all, just reinventing the wheel and acting like “long covid” is a totally new phenomenon with no previous point of comparison.
There are literally drugs in human trials to try to treat the mitochondrial dysfunction in ME, this dysfunction is well-established and fairly well understood and I feel insane when ppl report on long covid without mentioning that there is already a named and studied condition that accounts for this subset of symptoms!!
SOME researchers are drawing comparisons but they’re largely ME researchers who everyone else is largely cignoring because of the widespread perception that ME is a fake disease for lazy women.
That same perception btw is why “graded exercise therapy” (GET), or exercise gradually increasing in intensity, cwas for years the go-to treatment despite MOUNTAINS of evidence that it makes ME patients sicker. Some end up permanently bedbound and unable to even eat or drink without a feeding tube/IV because the damage is so bad!
The GET recommendation was finally changed only in the past few years in the US and the UK, and many doctors hate that they’re not allowed to recommend it anymore, because they insist despite the evidence that ME/CFS is psychological and ME patients are just “deconditioned” and too lazy to do anything about it.
Now the same kind of “treatment” is being recommended for long covid patients despite evidence showing exercise is having the same kinds of cellular effects as it does in ME patients. “Taking PEM into account” sounds gentler but I’m deeply concerned about the reinvention of GET for patients who meet all the criteria for an illness that’s been shown definitively to become permanently worse with GET.
This mitochondrial damage is progressive in ME, and there’s no reason to believe patients who meet all the criteria of ME after Covid won’t experience the same progression if they force themselves past their energy envelope in such a systematic way.
PEM happens in part (it’s complex) because your anaerobic threshold gets dramatically reduced with this mitochondrial damage. Every time you hit that anaerobic threshold, you’re injuring your cells more and more. It’s deeply worrying that GET is being recommended for long covid patients who meet the criteria for ME when research like this study keeps showing it’s the same phenomenon.
If you have Long Covid
for the love of your remaining life
DO NOT LET THEM MAKE YOU DO GRADED EXERCISE THERAPY
I have Long Covid. I recently got in with a cardiologist who used exactly that word—“deconditioned.”
Maybe my resting heart rate spikes to 180 bpm because I’m just “deconditioned.”
She told me many of my problems could be resolved if I “just start exercising.”
I very, very slowly and painstakingly explained (for the third time in just this one appointment) that I am a marine biologist who, prior to having Covid (and then until three months after my infection), maintained a level of daily physical activity that would be impossible for most people. Even with severe Asthma that was sometimes disabling, I lived a more active life than most.
I told her that in July I was hauling in salmon nets by-hand, hiking 10-30 miles a day, commuting on a bike, transporting hundreds of pounds of equipment on-foot in the backcountry, and I’d recently begun training as a free-diver. I was diving in a 7mm cold water wetsuits in difficult currents between small islands with relative ease.
By October, going up and down the stairs could spike my heart rate to 200 bpm and I began experiencing fainting spells for the first time in my life. I tried to dive one day and nearly fainted in the water. I hadn’t even begun a breath-hold. I was just swimming. My diving partners had to rescue me and haul me to shore, where it took me an hour to recover.
It was like night-and-day.
She said, “you could start slow.”
I said, “what exercise is slower than using the stairs? I’ve read that exercise might actually harm me rather than help…”
She finally said, and this is a verbatim quote, “look, many of the women who come in here complaining about tachycardia are whackjobs. But you seem serious. I don’t know much about POTS—which I think you probably have—so I’ll refer you to my colleague.”
I was astounded that she 1. Outright called suffering patients “whackjobs” and 2. That she felt the need to specify that these “whackjobs” were women.
Presumably, men are perfectly sane and to be believed. Not like those silly women.
I could only be relieved that I somehow triggered her bias in a way that made her believe me.
What might have changed that? If I were fat, if I were a person of color, if I simply hadn’t lived such a rigorous lifestyle before that convinced her that now I’m “really” sick.
Until I stated my case, multiple times, this cardiologist I waited months to see simply decided I gave up my entire lifestyle for—what?? Presumably no reason?
She heard, “I’d do anything to be active again,” and her response was, “have you tried being active again?”
And then she gave me dangerous advice. My only saving graces were that I did extensive reading before I saw her and that I matched whatever patient profile she has arbitrarily decided to respect.
Healthcare for people with new and long term dysautonomia and fatigue is a nightmare!
Unfair as it is, you must do your own research and be prepared to self-advocate—tooth and nail. And even then, it may not be enough. But do what you can.
really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite
yesterday she told me some story about the Buddha’s wife and child and I was like. Wait. He fucked? And she was like yeah of course he fucked, why wouldn’t he, he was the most attractive and loveable and and wise and etc. person who ever lived. why would he not fuck.
this morning she looked perplexed in the kitchen at me and said “did Jesus not fuck?”
[ID: Photos of a painted clay sculpture of two Przewalski’s horses leaning against one another in an embrace with their eyes closed. The sculpture is from the shoulders up. Each photo shows a different angle. End ID]
This was an older Embrace piece that wasn’t up to scratch, was going to recycle it, instead reworked the faces and manes, and used it as an opportunity to practice painting with acrylics. One of the faces has the more “plastic” look that I’ve been trying to avoid with acrylics (lower left photo). Watering the paint down and then gradually layering seems to keep the matte look I was getting with gouache.
why don’t people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?
I’m gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail
everyone else is like “oh we gotta stay inside the most secure places possible and never leave” and I’ll be storming through the wastelands in my bloodstained suit of armor, blasting the Doom (2016) OST and plowing my way through waves of the undead. one of them tries to bite me but his shitty rotting teeth don’t even leave a dent in my armor before I turn his head into paste. I’ll be unstoppable until I die of dehydration or something like an idiot
this goes along with my other pet peeve about zombie apocalypse stories, namely: why does no one ever think to ride a bike?
bikes are quiet- if the zombies react to loud noises, they won’t hear you on a bike the way they might hear you in a car. bikes don’t need gas, meaning you won’t be stranded if you run out. bikes are much, much easier to maintain than a car- there’s no computer that can short out, no fiddly engine bits that could kill you if you mess with them wrong. you can learn how to maintain a bike with a couple weeks’ worth of classes. almost every adult knows how to ride a bike, and without cars on the road, it’d be much safer to do.
what i’m saying is
American author Mark Twain (b. 1835) lurches from his grave only to give you a massive thumbs up and die again
Mark Twain essentially invented the genre of a bystander sent into a time-travel sci-fi plot just to get someone to draw this image for him. And today we can simply search for such a picture. It is a time of wonders
People are calling women who read ‘spicy’ novels porn addicts on TikTok and when women responded “um. That’s not what addiction is.” People are going “the first symptom of addiction is denial” like okay buddy.
if you think women reading mild straight smut books is ‘porn addiction’ then you’d lose your mind if you read the shit fandom girlies read on ao3
Of Earth and Sea
ALT
ALT
ALT
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