sanguinifex:

miseriathome:

While I’m complaining, what’s up with medical assistants being absolute dogshit with drug names? The last one who did my intake said “ugh, I bet you would know how to spell all these, since you’re Pharmacy.” Like… first of all, I can spell all of them because I’m the patient who is on them. But also yes, I took Medical Terminology I at a community college and I have a basic fucking grasp of common chemical roots???? I’m not even on any weird meds–only one of the meds I listed isn’t on the top 100 drugs list, and it’s spelled exactly how the syllables sound. I can literally see your screen and the fact that your EHR system populates the suggestions after the first few letters. So sorry you suck at your job, but this is a remediable issue and it is entirely within your own power to change the fact that you are unfamiliar with extremely common meds while working a job where you know you will have to type drug names. Skill issue.

You’re entirely correct, but it’s not just medical assistants. On a health insurance needs assessment, you collect the prospect’s medication list so you can check it against the available plans’ formularies. I don’t know if it’s different for people under 65, but most seniors can’t pronounce most or any of their medications and often don’t know what they’re for. At least a third of the time, they’d have to spell them out letter by letter. Generics were the worst, because they’d hear the ones like Eliquis in ads.

Most of the population can’t look at an unfamiliar string of letters and sound it out. I think this has caused a lot of the problems we face in, well, everything.

Yeah, valid. Lots of people don’t know what they’re taking, and that’s both terrifying and unfortunate. I am biased towards the chronically ill tumblrsphere, where we take way too much personal ownership over understanding our health.

My ~weird~ med is hydroxychloroquine. I think it’s very easy to break down, but retail pharm techs wh ofill it for me will more frequently than not omit at least one syllable. But medical assistants will flat-out give up and say “hydroquine” or “hydro…………”

Same medical assistant as above tried to spell cyclobenzaprine with S-I- ☹

While I’m complaining, what’s up with medical assistants being absolute dogshit with drug names? The last one who did my intake said “ugh, I bet you would know how to spell all these, since you’re Pharmacy.” Like… first of all, I can spell all of them because I’m the patient who is on them. But also yes, I took Medical Terminology I at a community college and I have a basic fucking grasp of common chemical roots???? I’m not even on any weird meds–only one of the meds I listed isn’t on the top 100 drugs list, and it’s spelled exactly how the syllables sound. I can literally see your screen and the fact that your EHR system populates the suggestions after the first few letters. So sorry you suck at your job, but this is a remediable issue and it is entirely within your own power to change the fact that you are unfamiliar with extremely common meds while working a job where you know you will have to type drug names. Skill issue.

(Source: miseriathome)

If you’re a parent and you sucked at it and your kid moves out and surrounds themselves with people who are better than you and now they don’t care to see you anymore because honestly what benefit would there be to them, I think that’s your own problem actually and you should bear that without involving your kid in it, like maybe you should have tried being a better parent if you wanted to foster your kid’s investment in that relationship, maybe if you actually cared selflessly about your kid you would leave them the fuck alone because you are a detriment to their well-being but idk what do I know, I just live an existence

(Source: miseriathome)

Literally what is up with nurses who come into the med room while I am restocking, and then instead of asking if they can interrupt me to grab their meds, they start???? playing tiktoks on their phone?????? with their volume up???????????? Girl, you are not being polite by letting me finish, you are in fact being very rude and sending the message that you think my job is unimportant enough that you can distract me for your own self-entertainmend. God forbid I breathe too loud when a nurse is trying to count meds, because ~ooh counting is so hard~, but as soon as it’s me doing the work, then yeah obviously the polite way to wait in line is to subject me to noises and speech I have no ability to shut off. Right up there with the nurses who said “oh you can go ahead, we’re just talking” and then had a loud-ass bitch fest right next to me while I was trying to work. Like okay.

(Source: miseriathome)

Today in the cursed world of healthcare, I watched a doctor use her cell phone to text my name, phone number, and symptoms to another clinic for referral. She told me that calling takes too long and if the clinic isn’t staffed, they won’t pick up, so texting is much faster.

Which is why the first thing I did after coming home was dial up Ethics and Compliance to report that my HIPAA privacy rights had been violated.

The bar is so fucking low. It’s genuinely absurd to me that so many people pass med school and still can’t wrap their heads around the concept of PII. On the internet, we would call that shit a straight up doxx.

(Source: miseriathome)

Pretty sure I got a guy fired from my voting location tonight. Honestly, good fucking riddance. If you’re going to be a partisan shithead, say offensive crap to your coworkers, and violate ethical guidelines that you swore to uphold, then you shouldn’t be a goddamn poll worker. Tonight was his last chance to be a professional and he blew it. Five years is a long time to fix yourself, and my god did this guy not step up to the challenge.

(Source: miseriathome)

mollybeenoel:

(via arcaline)

shencomix:

ALT

ALT

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bunchabears:

ALT

Hang in there! 화이팅!

Two months ago, we ran out of toner for one of the critical printers at work. I, being the only one who ever orders the supplies for this machine despite constantly begging for literally anyone else to participate, naturally had to order the new toner. I bought 3 cartridges.

Each time this happens, the printer has to stay down for several days while the toner ships. Over a dozen reports that print on a daily schedule have to be individually rerouted to the backup printer. In addition, the workstation connected to the printer also has to have its default printer settings flipped, which only managers can do. While we wait for a manager to show up, everything that needs to be printed from that workstation (around 20 pages/hour) has to be manually reprinted to the backup printer.

Meanwhile, all the stuff that couldn’t print to the main printer just sits in the virtual queue. Once the toner actually gets swapped, the entire backlog has to be allowed to clear. There is no workaround for this because the print jobs are stored on the cloud; cancelling a print job does not delete it off the network, so the network just queues it back up again. Only IT has the ability to clear a printer queue, which would require opening a ticket and waiting however many months it takes for our outsourced IT department to give a shit about a non-critical issue.

Clearing the backlog takes 20-40 minutes of continuous printing each time, and somebody has to babysit the printer and keep refilling it with paper throughout. This obviously wastes a lot of time, toner, and paper (and the paper we use for this printer costs an extra $1 per ream due to the nature of the documents we print). Not only that, but it causes the printer to overheat, shortening its lifespan.

I made a pretty big stink about all this the most recent time it occurred, two months ago. Ordering toner is a matter of calling the printer servicer and following the prompts on the phone tree; there is no need to talk to a human at any point because once the system has looked up the printer ID, it says “based on your usage history, you need X supplies” and all you have to do is press 1 to place its recommended order. This can be done by anybody at any time, with no special credentials needed.

This work area is overseen by a specific specialist four days a week. I covered this position for months after the last specialist got fired, then was turned down when I applied for the promotion. But the person who did get hired for it doesn’t do jack shit, and I continue to get stuck with all the work they won’t do–maintaining the printer is only one example of many. So even though I am not in that space as frequently as they are, and even though I don’t get 8 hours a week of workshop time to take care of literally anything extra that needs to be taken care of, and even though I don’t get paid extra for doing specialist-level bullshit, and even though I know the specialist knows about this responsibility and how to take care of it because I trained them and I wrote the SOP for their position which includes ordering the fucking printer supplies… this somehow continues to still be my problem.

So what happened today? The printer ran out of toner, of course! And all the backup toner boxes had “used” written on them, but were left in the normal toner storage spot, rather than being moved to the “used toners for recycling” spot. So I had to place another toner order, reroute a bunch of reports, and flag down a manager to flip the default printer settings, all while staffing a completely different position in the department.

(Source: miseriathome)

my-psychological-tower:

They call me “Password” because of my complexity and length

The surgeon’s daughter was reportedly interested in medicine and pleaded with her mother to let her witness the operation, according to The Times, citing the trial. The youngster was allegedly handed surgical scrubs and joined the team.

Prosecutor Julia Steiner alleged, “She took the twelve-year-old girl into the operating theater, where she drilled a hole into the exposed skullcap alone and without help. Beforehand, the accused explained the function of the drilling device,” The Kronen Zeitung stated, per a translated article.

The incident allegedly occurred when a minor procedure — which involved inserting a probe to measure intracranial pressure, that required drilling a hole into the skull — had to be performed at the end of the patient’s surgery, The Times reported.

The female surgeon allegedly left the procedure to a male junior colleague and moved away from the table to make a phone call, and there are conflicting reports about what happened next, the paper stated.

“My biggest mistake was letting her go to the operating table,“ the female surgeon said, as judge Gundula Neudeck responded, “Your biggest mistake was probably taking her there in the first place; a child has no business being there,” according to The Telegraph.

Both the junior and senior surgeons have been fired, and if the court finds that the daughter did operate the drill during the procedure, the pair could face a potential conviction for causing bodily harm by letting an untrained person treat a patient, the paper noted. This typically carries a prison sentence of up to a year or a fine.

sovietnam:

(via saucepanguy)

gamebird:

thistlecatfics:

Talking about Incest in Public

(both the painful traumatic kind and the hot fictional kind)

As it turns out, lots of the people who read and write taboo fiction have survived some deeply fucked up shit. After talking about incest with other survivors on the Moon, Sun & Stars discord and answering questions, I decided to share more about my experiences and the things that helped me survive and the things that helped me heal, because there are a lot of us, and a lot of us feel very alone, and maybe there are other people who aren’t incest survivors but who might want to know more to better support the survivors in their life.  

–

Incest is not just a sexual act between two family members – it’s a larger system of absence of boundaries within a family, and it’s almost always part of multiple incestuous dynamics, even if only one might be the obvious or explicit dynamic. 

If you’re an incest survivor, you’re almost certainly not the only one in your family. 

-

“The true characteristics and dimensions of incestuous abuse have been masked by the taboo and silence that have surrounded its occurrence. Recent research demonstrates that incest occurs regularly in our society, perpetrated by individuals who, for the most part, would otherwise be regarded as fairly normal. The taboo on incestuous relations is a deterrent to some would-be perpetrators but not to others. The taboo contradicts the reality of incest prevalence, a fact which led Armstrong (1978) to comment that th taboo has been on the open discussion of incest and not on its perpetration.”

-Christine Courtois, “Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy” 

–

To use my family as an example - 

My (similarly aged) brother did sexual things to me as a kid, and I had a range of reactions to it including pleasure and enjoyment. And confusion. And fear. I do not think he is bad or even what he did was bad. I think we were both two kids who existed in a family with incestuous dynamics, and we were both shaped by those dynamics and trying our best to survive. 

From a young age, I existed as a physical comfort object to my mom (when she was sad she’d get into my bed to hold me until she felt better while I dissociated), and I took on the idea that my role in the family was for my body to be used to make other people feel good. The sexual behavior by my brother felt like an extension of how my mom held me. 

My mother was the victim of incest from her uncle, and her parents sided with her uncle over her when she spoke out about it (even after he was facing legal consequences for his behavior with kids outside of the family) (even after he fled the country). She didn’t know how to emotionally regulate herself, and I don’t think she had (or has) the capacity to understand a child’s need for physical autonomy and boundaries because her own were never respected. 

There were other incestuous behaviors and dynamics within my family which I’m continuously discovering and unpacking. I think my mom’s uncle abused my grandmother too but I’ll never know for sure. It’s deeply uncomfortable to look back on a happy family story or a childhood nickname and see something sinister underneath and wonder if you’re being paranoid or if it’s actually that bad.  

–

Things that have helped: 

Long term relational therapy (5+ years). EMDR. Adopting a cat. Adopting more cats. Antidepressants. Reading about incest (realistic, terrifying, academic). Reading about incest (fictional, hot, amateur). Being a competitive athlete. Getting a graduate degree. Going on long walks late at night. Telling my family I had Covid so I could skip a family vacation. 

These books specifically: Healing the Incest Wound by Christine Courtois, The Myth of Normal, Dissociation Made Simple, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, The Narcissistic Family Unit, Clementine Morrigan’s writing x1000. 

The protector parts: Eating disorder. Self harm. Drinking. Perfectionism. Depression. Suicidal ideation. I’m grateful to these imperfect protectors I’ve leaned on over the years. 

Things that have not helped: 

You will be shocked to hear that people on the internet yelling about how people who find fictional incest hot are disgusting and bad and dangerous did NOT in fact help me unlearn the belief that experiencing incest made me disgusting and bad and dangerous. Luckily, I’m built of spite. But it certainly did not help. 

(If I think about my vulnerable pre-teen/teen self reading those things, I become deeply angry. How dare you hurt her in the name of protection.)

-
I don’t cater to all these vipers
Dressed in empath’s clothing
God save the most judgmental creeps
Who say they want what’s best for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see

-Taylor Swift, But Daddy I Love Him

-

After I discovered fanfiction in middle school, and then after I realized that there was a world beyond OFC/Draco Malfoy fic, I read a lot of Blackcest. I devoured any I could find, hopping through rec lists on LiveJournal. 

Reading Blackcest fics, first Bellatrix/Sirius then Sirius/Regulus mostly, allowed me to see my experiences reflected. Those fics gave me a way to contextualize my family and my role in it. I hate the expectation that kids who experience bad things should go to a safe trusted adult rather than find art that romanticizes their experience. The whole point is that there isn’t a safe trusted adult. The whole point is that I needed the art. I got to hold the romanticized narrative until I got far enough away that I could put it away in a box until I had enough therapy that I could safely open the box and build a new, more honest story. 

Obviously plenty of people love incest smut and fic and art. It’s taboo! It’s angsty! It’s a classic! Probably most of those people don’t have direct personal experience with incest in their families. I’m glad they read and write fics too. 

But for me – have you ever experienced something you believe so strongly you will never be able to say aloud? That any time you see your secret referenced it’s in shock and disgust and revulsion? You can pretend – you’re very good at pretending – but you know it’s real, and you know it’s your secret you’ll hold onto for the rest of your life while the world reminds you how disgusting you are? 

Then you find that people are writing about what you experienced in a thousand variations that all contain some nugget of your truth.

I cannot express in words how important it was that I found those stories at that time. 

I never commented on a single fic. I never made a single account on any of the sites I read fanfiction on. I clicked the “yes I’m 18” box without hesitation every time. I wish I could go back in time and have my adult self articulate the enormity of my gratitude for each and every author who helped save me whose work exists on sites I can only revisit with the Wayback Machine. 

I understand why people might feel horrified at the idea of a 11-12 year old reading smutty incest Harry Potter fanfic. People aren’t wrong for feeling that way. 

That said, I truly don’t care what people who aren’t incest survivors think.

I’m so proud of that child for finding a way to survive. She might have hated herself, might have fantasized about death, but she survived and kept the truth of her experience wrapped up in a fictional world where it could be safe to explore and kept it there until years and years of therapy made it possible to engage with it in reality. 

-
I’m a real tough kid
I can handle my shit
They said, babe, you got to fake it till you make it
And I did

-Taylor Swift, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart
-

No one is writing about incest the way Clementine Morrigan is right now. I’m so grateful for her. I’m not sure this little tumblr post would exist without her essay series. 

“Incest functions as a spell of unreality. A structure of nothingness. A completely normal and unremarkable family life in which something unnameable is ominously and terrifyingly wrong. You know in the summer when you can see the heat making the air go squiggly? Imagine those squiggles as an indication that in the seeming nothingness, there is something there. Incest is like that. Subtle, pervasive, unthinkable, unnameable. But present, felt.

As a teenager I came up with this metaphor: Imagine you are in a house full of bugs. There are bugs crawling all over all the walls and all the furniture and in your food and even on the fork you are lifting to your mouth. And you feel disgusted, you feel like something is really wrong. But your whole family is acting completely normal, laughing and eating and talking as bugs crawl over their faces and into their mouths. When you tell them you think there are bugs in your food your family says it’s just pepper and not to worry about it.

There is no way to talk about incest without feeling that you are lying. This is because incest lives in the realm of unreality and everything in the realm of unreality cannot be thought or said or named. When you speak of things that happen in the realm of unreality it will always feel like a lie and be treated like a lie. You are breaking the fundamental rule. You are not allowed to talk about what goes on in the realm of unreality because it isn’t real.”

Read more and pay for her writing if you can on her substack.

-

Without a doubt, the not-explicitly-sexual incest from my mom fucked me up more than the explicitly sexual incest from my brother, but I only feel confident claiming the incest survivor label because sexual stuff was done to me by a family member, and I still feel like I’m lying sometimes because it wasn’t bad enough to count. 

I’m a literal mental health clinician who can map out various incestuous dynamics within my family and who has clear memories of a family member doing sexual stuff to my child body, and I still feel like I’m lying. 

I believe you if you feel like a liar because I bet you do. I believe you if the incest never included anything directly physical. I believe you if you enjoyed it. I believe you if you don’t remember but feel like it’s true. 

I love us. 

If we’re monsters, I love our courageous monstrosity.

If we’re liars, I love the way we make up stories to survive when reality is impossible. 

If we’re an uncomfortable truth, good. 

-

It still impacts me. I’m not over it. 

It’s very difficult for me to imagine love that does not include violation. To be loved and to be allowed to maintain a self. 

But I’m open to learning otherwise, and that openness is new. 

-

I was so, so good at living in unreality. I could make myself perfect, such a flawless object until I couldn’t think of anything except killing myself, but even then I still maintained the image of perfection my family expected. 

It’s cool I never actually killed myself. 

I find it hard to be around my family now. There are advantages of living in unreality. I drink a lot more when I’m around my family than I ever did before, but I don’t think about killing myself nearly as much. Reality is worth it. Being able to exist as a person is worth it. 

-
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

-Sylvia Plath

-
I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. (I insist.)

It didn’t kill me then. It’s not going to kill me now. (I remind myself.) 

My life is worth living, and there are fights worth fighting, and it is undeniably true the world is full of horror, but it is good to write and create and be alive, and it is good to try. I’m a little afraid to post this, but the fear and shame isn’t mine to hold, and I never should have been the one holding it. 

Consider this a thank you note sent out to the universe in the hopes the sentiment echoes towards those authors who saved me then and to all the writers who are saving people now. Your art matters. No matter how weird or niche or dismissed or hated it is. It matters. 

Thank you.

There’s a lot of crossover here with other forms of domestic abuse. Lots to think about.

(via fatalism-and-villainy)

elierlick:

This is the first diagram I’ve ever seen with a masculine pregnant person! 😍

(via saucepanguy)