If it's something we can't buy, there must be another way.
I was diagnosed with atypical CF just before I turned 36 years old. At the time, cystic fibrosis had a life expectancy of 36.
Having spent the first half of the year being given endless crap by doctors about twice a week, every week who treated me like a hypochondriac though I was dying, I took some pleasure in routinely walking into the ER for the next six months, announcing I was a "newly diagnosed 36 year old cystic fibrosis patient" and watching their eyes pop out their head and roll across the floor.
The above is sort of the glib, funny anecdote version of my generally upbeat attitude that so many people are shocked by and feel compelled to remark upon. It's absolutely True it's just not The Whole Truth.
The reality is that atypical CF is a mild form of the condition and I don't know an average life expectancy for it. There may not even be adequate data to establish such a figure.
The larger context is a tale I hesitate to put on this blog because there are a lot of people on planet Earth incapable of really hearing me and understanding me and many have no interest in trying. Many just want to insist "What you just said PROVES to me you are EXACTLY everything you say you aren't!"
As noted elsewhere, I grew up in The Deep South of the USA. This is a region with a high percentage of Christians, so Christianity shapes the culture and lingo there and that's my default culture, which helps convince people I'm Christian no matter how often I tell them "No, I'm NOT."
In fact, I believe in karma, reincarnation and astrology, a fact that gives me substantial friction with Christians and with some Christian sects.
None of that happened this time.
The drugs did not seem to be working. Nothing seemed to be happening. Instead of having stuff happen and then falling asleep, I had insomnia and was up for something like 24 hours.
At that point I realized "The drugs aren't working. I could be DEAD within 24 hours."
With that thought, I fell into a very, very deep sleep and I dreamed I was under sentence of death for being cold to a man who was friends with me.
I was molested and raped as a child and did a lot of therapy and reading and what not and also had an affair with a man who used to tell me "Unlike your husband, if you left him for me and we got married, I would support your desire to go to school. We could study together. You could finish your bachelor's while I pursued my PhD."
All of those highly conditional, emotionally manipulative, lying bullshit "promises" never did anything at all for me materially. And then I made friends with a guy, someone I just hit it off with and he was all "Damn! A beautiful woman who WANTS an education! What could be sexier than that?" and I was soon back in school, wrapping up my associate's degree so I wouldn't lose my old credits and had some hope of finishing a bachelor's someday.
I had always felt like I had to choose between having a brain and having a sexuality. I felt like the world wanted to know which arm I wanted ripped off, my right one or my left one?
And then I met this guy who literally said things like "You should go, girl!" and it helped me stand up for myself in my oppressive marriage and return to school.
I felt he was a good man and I felt I was trash and I just wanted to be respectful to him. I didn't want to "be temptation" or something. I didn't want to in any way hurt him.
So I was cold to him. I didn't want him to know how much I liked him and felt for him. I wanted to err on the side of not being a problem for this man.
I woke up from my dream and vowed to set this straight, to tell him how much he had meant to me, how much he had changed my life. And with that I fell asleep and when I woke up the drugs were clearly working.
So I called him and I asked his permission to leave messages on his machine telling him all this stuff and he said "yes." At some point, he felt like I was trying to destroy his marriage and I felt really hurt by that, like "I ASKED your permission and I'm extremely sick. You couldn't have just said "Hey, woah! Stop. I don't like what your recent messages say." or something?"
So we had a falling out and stopped being friends. But not before he saved my life because he's the physician who told me that it absolutely COULD be a parasitic infection.
The other thing that went on during that time is that I routinely hallucinated conversations with The Grim Reaper until one day he showed up on a black steed in the bizarre world of my mind, leaned down, peered into my face and then twirled around to gallop off. I ran after him screaming "Take me with you! Don't leave me here!"
With that, I knew I would live. The death watch was over.
I also wasn't happy about it because I faced a long, hard recovery.
I'm not religious and I'm not a fan of religion. I believe people like me invented religion. I think different people have different minds and we are prisoners of the way our brains perceive the world. Wherever you go, there you are.
That does NOT mean the views of one group are necessarily more valid than the other. Hammerhead sharks are shaped that way because they sense electrical impulses and that's how they find their prey.
Those impulses in living things exist whether you have the equipment to read them or not, but no amount of preaching by hammerhead sharks will somehow make "believers" without that physical ability capable of sensing what the hammerheads sense.
From a sociological point of view, religion is a repository of human wisdom: best practices and such attributed to some ultimate judgemental authority -- "God" -- before we could make compelling scientific arguments or articulate why it mattered.
A lot of that wisdom is about things like no sex before marriage. In a world with a low life expectancy, no antibiotics and unreliable birth control, a brief roll in the hay could have ruinous consequences from which one would never recover and those consequences would impact the lives of many people, not just the fool who made the mistake, so it was imperative that village elders and what not find SOME means to compel as many young, inexperienced fools as possible to follow the rules.
Much to my personal frustration, I'm not a programmer. I never learned to write code, at least not more than a little HTML and CSS, but I spend time hanging out with programmers.
I believe it's all a simulation in 4D. I believe there is "code" within us mentally or spiritually and if you are ill, that "code" needs to be edited. You need to figure out what you are messing up and fix it.
And that framing helps me understand another kind of code: DNA.
I have a genetic disorder but I didn't get better by editing my DNA. Instead, I edited the inputs to my body.
Those are some of my mental models. You may see it as "woo" or religious mumbo jumbo or something.
I see my body as a living metaphor for the contents of my mind and soul. I see my health issues, which have a significant respiratory component, as being about a need for rights to help me breathe free or die trying.
I am not religious and I wish religious types would stop trying to cram their interpretation of my life down my throat. If you want to get value out of this site, I will suggest you need to at least TRY to see life through my eyes and stop trying desperately to tell me what I think and what I feel and what I meant by that.
I don't think positive health outcomes are entirely about eating right or something like that. I believe you can do all the right things "materially"/physically and still get struck by lightning or hit by a car because the universe decided that it was time to edit you out of here for some reason.
And I believe that reason may well be something like "You are under sentence of death for being cold to someone who was kind to you and made your life better."
Having spent the first half of the year being given endless crap by doctors about twice a week, every week who treated me like a hypochondriac though I was dying, I took some pleasure in routinely walking into the ER for the next six months, announcing I was a "newly diagnosed 36 year old cystic fibrosis patient" and watching their eyes pop out their head and roll across the floor.
The above is sort of the glib, funny anecdote version of my generally upbeat attitude that so many people are shocked by and feel compelled to remark upon. It's absolutely True it's just not The Whole Truth.
The reality is that atypical CF is a mild form of the condition and I don't know an average life expectancy for it. There may not even be adequate data to establish such a figure.
The larger context is a tale I hesitate to put on this blog because there are a lot of people on planet Earth incapable of really hearing me and understanding me and many have no interest in trying. Many just want to insist "What you just said PROVES to me you are EXACTLY everything you say you aren't!"
As noted elsewhere, I grew up in The Deep South of the USA. This is a region with a high percentage of Christians, so Christianity shapes the culture and lingo there and that's my default culture, which helps convince people I'm Christian no matter how often I tell them "No, I'm NOT."
In fact, I believe in karma, reincarnation and astrology, a fact that gives me substantial friction with Christians and with some Christian sects.
Source for the title of this piece.
Note: Maybe you shouldn't even by on my blog looking for home remedies. Maybe this is NOT a wise idea AT ALL.At the ER, I was given antibiotics and steroids and probably other drugs and sent home. Typically, unlike most other people seem to report, my sinuses did not hurt when I had an infection. Instead, I would get drugs into me, the infection would start to clear up and THEN starting hurting like a bitch and then I would SLEEP and wake up feeling better, on the road to recovery.
None of that happened this time.
The drugs did not seem to be working. Nothing seemed to be happening. Instead of having stuff happen and then falling asleep, I had insomnia and was up for something like 24 hours.
At that point I realized "The drugs aren't working. I could be DEAD within 24 hours."
With that thought, I fell into a very, very deep sleep and I dreamed I was under sentence of death for being cold to a man who was friends with me.
I was molested and raped as a child and did a lot of therapy and reading and what not and also had an affair with a man who used to tell me "Unlike your husband, if you left him for me and we got married, I would support your desire to go to school. We could study together. You could finish your bachelor's while I pursued my PhD."
All of those highly conditional, emotionally manipulative, lying bullshit "promises" never did anything at all for me materially. And then I made friends with a guy, someone I just hit it off with and he was all "Damn! A beautiful woman who WANTS an education! What could be sexier than that?" and I was soon back in school, wrapping up my associate's degree so I wouldn't lose my old credits and had some hope of finishing a bachelor's someday.
I had always felt like I had to choose between having a brain and having a sexuality. I felt like the world wanted to know which arm I wanted ripped off, my right one or my left one?
And then I met this guy who literally said things like "You should go, girl!" and it helped me stand up for myself in my oppressive marriage and return to school.
I felt he was a good man and I felt I was trash and I just wanted to be respectful to him. I didn't want to "be temptation" or something. I didn't want to in any way hurt him.
So I was cold to him. I didn't want him to know how much I liked him and felt for him. I wanted to err on the side of not being a problem for this man.
I woke up from my dream and vowed to set this straight, to tell him how much he had meant to me, how much he had changed my life. And with that I fell asleep and when I woke up the drugs were clearly working.
So I called him and I asked his permission to leave messages on his machine telling him all this stuff and he said "yes." At some point, he felt like I was trying to destroy his marriage and I felt really hurt by that, like "I ASKED your permission and I'm extremely sick. You couldn't have just said "Hey, woah! Stop. I don't like what your recent messages say." or something?"
So we had a falling out and stopped being friends. But not before he saved my life because he's the physician who told me that it absolutely COULD be a parasitic infection.
The other thing that went on during that time is that I routinely hallucinated conversations with The Grim Reaper until one day he showed up on a black steed in the bizarre world of my mind, leaned down, peered into my face and then twirled around to gallop off. I ran after him screaming "Take me with you! Don't leave me here!"
With that, I knew I would live. The death watch was over.
I also wasn't happy about it because I faced a long, hard recovery.
I'm not religious and I'm not a fan of religion. I believe people like me invented religion. I think different people have different minds and we are prisoners of the way our brains perceive the world. Wherever you go, there you are.
That does NOT mean the views of one group are necessarily more valid than the other. Hammerhead sharks are shaped that way because they sense electrical impulses and that's how they find their prey.
Those impulses in living things exist whether you have the equipment to read them or not, but no amount of preaching by hammerhead sharks will somehow make "believers" without that physical ability capable of sensing what the hammerheads sense.
From a sociological point of view, religion is a repository of human wisdom: best practices and such attributed to some ultimate judgemental authority -- "God" -- before we could make compelling scientific arguments or articulate why it mattered.
A lot of that wisdom is about things like no sex before marriage. In a world with a low life expectancy, no antibiotics and unreliable birth control, a brief roll in the hay could have ruinous consequences from which one would never recover and those consequences would impact the lives of many people, not just the fool who made the mistake, so it was imperative that village elders and what not find SOME means to compel as many young, inexperienced fools as possible to follow the rules.
Much to my personal frustration, I'm not a programmer. I never learned to write code, at least not more than a little HTML and CSS, but I spend time hanging out with programmers.
I believe it's all a simulation in 4D. I believe there is "code" within us mentally or spiritually and if you are ill, that "code" needs to be edited. You need to figure out what you are messing up and fix it.
And that framing helps me understand another kind of code: DNA.
I have a genetic disorder but I didn't get better by editing my DNA. Instead, I edited the inputs to my body.
Those are some of my mental models. You may see it as "woo" or religious mumbo jumbo or something.
I see my body as a living metaphor for the contents of my mind and soul. I see my health issues, which have a significant respiratory component, as being about a need for rights to help me breathe free or die trying.
I am not religious and I wish religious types would stop trying to cram their interpretation of my life down my throat. If you want to get value out of this site, I will suggest you need to at least TRY to see life through my eyes and stop trying desperately to tell me what I think and what I feel and what I meant by that.
I don't think positive health outcomes are entirely about eating right or something like that. I believe you can do all the right things "materially"/physically and still get struck by lightning or hit by a car because the universe decided that it was time to edit you out of here for some reason.
And I believe that reason may well be something like "You are under sentence of death for being cold to someone who was kind to you and made your life better."
