I know it’s illegal but whenever I get antibiotics from the doctor I save a few and give them to friends or coworkers who don’t have insurance so that when cold season comes they might be able to shorten their illness
That is not good- that’s not quite how antibiotics work.
Antibiotics kill some bacteria, but don’t manage to kill other bacteria. Just like when you get a particular sickness (or a vaccination), your body can protect you from future infections, any bacteria that came into contact with the antibiotic is protected from future doses of that antibiotic. Bacteria are very virulent breeders, so they spawn more resistant bacteria.
If you take the full dose of antibiotics, your natural antibodies can deal with the cells that are resistant while the medicine kills off the bacteria that isn’t resistant. If you don’t take the full course of antibiotics, then your body has to deal with both the resistant and the non-resistant strains of bacteria, and it can become overwhelming. Also, most bacteria are able to pass on genes between still-living cells, so that previously non-resistant strains become resistant, and you have inadvertently cultivated a stronger strain of bacteria.
Furthermore, colds and the flu are viral infections, so antibiotics don’t work against them anyway. The best protection against viral infections are vaccinations, as there are not many viruses that we have developed anti-viral medication against, once you already have the disease. If there are anti-viral medications, it is even more important that you take the full dose of the medication, because anti-viral medication is even harsher against the body than antibacterial medication is.
Yeah, not how it works at all. I get your intent there with health care access, but that’s literally worse than not taking any antibiotics for your friends, on pretty much every level.
Sharing is not caring when it comes to medication It is risking the health of everyone involved
This. Because we have clients who save their animals’ antibiotics and give them to their other pets when they get sick or injured to save money.
Helpful to remember when you’re having a POTS spell. The squat can be done assisted by a wall or chair. Adjust as needed.
Squats tend to do the opposite of help me but the leg crossing one has been helpful!!
I don’t know what POTS is but maybe this will help someone
POTS is short for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome!
it’s a condition in which standing up causes things like dizzy spells / greyed vision / collapsing / weakness / fainting / difficulty breathing, etc. mostly because of bad circulation and low blood pressure.
If standing up makes your head rush, then doing the above should help!
Holy freaking crap. I have NEVER seen a POTS resources post, I don’t think, and definitely not in cute comic form. (It’s a super rare, obscure thing so there’s just not much help out there.) And yes, it really sucks. Thank you so much!
Let’s say you make some vegan chocolate chip cookies. (I looked a recipe up for the sake of this post). These cookies are made with almond milk.
You have a friend that you’ve known for a few months now, and you think it would be nice to surprise them.
So, you offer them one of the cookies. You don’t tell them they’re vegan. As far as your friend is aware, they’re made with cow milk and chicken eggs.
Your friend takes one bite, and a few minutes later you’re using their epi-pen on them and calling 911.
See, what just happened is that your hypothetical friend here has a nut allergy that you didn’t know about, and the almond milk in the cookies was enough to put them in the hospital.
You could have avoided this whole situation by informing your friend that they’re vegan, thus prompting the question “It’s not made with almond milk, is it?”
This doesn’t just apply to cookies. While I’ve never found one, if you happen to know of a vegan fake meat that’s not made with soy and looks and smells exactly like the meat version, don’t serve it to someone and not tell them until after they eat it.
“But I, a vegan, would never do that!”
Great, then this post isn’t about you. This post is about the people who post shit like “when you give your friend vegan food without telling them and they like it *insert gif here*”, and it’s also about the thousands of people who reblog it.
- Avery
And some people have dusgestive issues or health issues that conflict with some vegan ingredients too
I can’t have soy products. At all. It makes eating anything a real pain in the ass, but it’s also one of the top reasons I’m not vegetarian or vegan - a LOT of substitution is done with soy-based products and those will put me in the hospital real quick.
being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying
define proper diagnosis. I mean, does that just mean the diagnosis you want?
no :) it means going to 10 different doctors who disbelieved your symptoms until the 11th found cysts on your ovaries :) which may mean infertility :) sit on a cactus :)
I call bullshit
Of course you do. Like the first 10 doctors. 😒
I call bullshit on the story. If you think you have an issue you should see a specialist not just your PCP.
Like the 4 “specialists” I saw for the crippling numbness in my face and legs I had for over a year while they told me it was “stress”? When it was finally found that I had scars on my brain and spine? Those “specialists” we’re male neurologist who wouldn’t give me an MRI because “women stress too much”. Go fuck yourself.
MY SPINE WAS BROKEN FOR 2 YEARS BECAUSE MY DOCTORS TOLD ME I JUST HAD BAD CRAMPS AND REFUSED TO TAKE XRAYS. FUCK YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. WHEN WILL BOYS REALIZE THEIR EXPERIENCES ARENT STANDARD???? I ALSO LOVE THIS IDEA THAT YOU CAN JUST GO TO A SPECIALIST WHENEVER YOU WANT LOL IF OUR PCP DOESNT BELIEVE US WHEN WE TELL THEM OUR SYMPTOMS THEY ARENT GONNA REFER US TO A SPECIALIST YOU FUCKING MOLDY WALNUT
My parents began noticing something large in my throat, saw a specialist….Guess what? Told me to lose some weight..even though I wasn’t overweight. I would have my period for weeks at a time. Was told that it was teenage hormones and stress.
Two fucking years later I attempted suicide they ran a battery of tests as required and bam! They find out that I have untreated Hashimoto’s. The “thing” was a goiter. Possible symptoms of an untreated thyroid disease is the goiter, unexplained weight gain, and depression. All they had to do was test my blood, but they said young people don’t have thyroid problems. 😒
-Allie
Ten years ago, my mother—who is a pretty tough cookie—started feeling both ridiculously wired, anxious, and incredibly emotional. Every doctor she saw told her she was going through early menopause, even though she was still menstruating. Her health declined to point where she was barely sleeping, losing weight, and crying constantly, which was a huge red flag because my mother never cries. Finally, she went to see another doctor 2.5 hours away who referred her to an endocrinologist. And what did the endocrinologist say? He diagnosed her with one of the most advanced cases of Grave’s Disease he had even seen, and said if she had gone just a few more months without being treated, she could have FUCKING DIED.
Also, it turned out that her thyroid levels had been moving out of the normal range in a progressive pattern for years, but nobody bothered to look at her past test results until after the diagnosis. They would just do a test, see that it was “in the normal range” and leave it at that. She could have caught it before she even had symptoms, instead of basically being accused of having hysteria.
i had a brain aneurysm/hemorrhage ten years ago, doctors still tell me im faking my disability BECAUSE YOU CAN TOTALLY FAKE LIMITED MOVEMENT OF THE LEFT SIDE
My sister had intercranial hypertension which was causing headaches, dizzy spells and loss of vision, and you know what the hospital told her? She was being a hysterical girl and making it up. A few weeks later she spent roughly a month in hospital and had several lumbar punctures to relieve her RECORD HIGH spinal pressure that was causing so much strain on her brain and optic nerves she was being sent blind.
Everytime I see this post (and it’s been a good 5/6 times), it has different stories and experiences of women who have been horribly mistreated by doctors and it just blows my mind that this is so big. It’s absolutely disgusting how terribly women are treated in the medical world and something needs to be done about that.
my friend lea had back pain, then pain in her legs and feet, and then numbness. despite seeing 7 different doctors over 2 years, by the time they found the cancer it was inoperable. chemo and radiation didn’t work. the cancer spread. she died and left behind a 5 year old daughter.
A few years ago I would go through spells where I literally could not stand on my own and I couldn’t get out of bed. I would be freezing and too weak to eat. I would keep having heart palpitations as well. I got up the money to go to a clinic and they told me it was just stress and to basically just work on chilling out. I saved up money for a few weeks to do this and I pretty much get a “chill out” from them.
As time went on it got worse, most noticeably the heart palpitations were happening almost constantly. I went again to a different clinic and was told it was normal and that it was probably stress. They did no tests, and they told me it would “just go away”.
Two weeks later I ended up collapsing going down some stairs, and at the hospital it was discovered that I had such severe anemia that my heart could barely keep up with trying to get enough oxygen to my body. I had developed left ventricular hypertrophy (my heart muscle is too big) and because of them ignoring me and dismissing me I’m at a much higher risk of heart attacks and stroke now.
I went to the doctor with severe intermittent pain in my upper right stomach area that was so bad I had to miss school. Despite the fact that my period has been on a regular 3 month cycle for years, and I still had two months left until my period, my doctor told me it was period related cramps and or indigestion. 2 months later I’m in the hospital getting my gallbladder removed. It was so obstructed that there was gangrene developing my my system.
So…everyone who’s given me shit for that one post (about medicine and equal treatment and shit) can just read this because I’m sick of defending my case.
I am an ER nurse and this is the best description of this event that I have ever heard.
FEMALE HEART ATTACKS
I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is description is so incredibly visceral that I feel like I have an entire new understanding of what it feels like to be living the symptoms on the inside. Women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have… you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor the we see in movies. Here is the story of one woman’s experience with a heart attack:
"I had a heart attack at about 10:30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might have brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.
A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation–the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.
After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasms), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).
This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening – we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I’m having a heart attack!
I lowered the foot rest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else… but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment.
I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics… I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to un-bolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.
I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the radiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stints to hold open my right coronary artery.
I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.
Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.
1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body, not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up… which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’ visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!
2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an aspirin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER - you are a hazard to others on the road.
Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road.
Do NOT call your doctor – he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.
3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive to tell the tale.“
Reblog, repost, Facebook, tweet, pin, email, morse code, fucking carrier pigeon this to save a life!
I wish I knew who the author was. I’m definitely not the OP, actually think it might be an old chain email or even letter from back in the day. The version I saw floating around Facebook ended with “my cardiologist says mail this to 10 friends, maybe you’ll save one!” And knew this was way too interesting not to pass on.
RxTimerCaps save lives. The clock resets to 00:00 every time the bottle is opened so I’ll know if I’ve missed a dose. I bought these online. by bionicback via reddit
They seem to be 2 for $15, and look really useful!
I need these
shoutout to folks who take medicine that could be deadly if taken too often or missed but who also have brainfog like a motherfucker especially. It’d be useful for lots of people, but in those cases especially.
MediSafe is a free medicine tracker app for smart devices for those of us who may not have access to $15!
This
is a blog that I repost every year, because it is something that is, for
obvious reasons, very important to me to educate and inform people
about. Since posting about my experience with an ectopic pregnancy and
talking about it, several women have told me that knowing the
symptoms was what got them to the hospital in time. Please read it.
Please tell others about it.
As always, this hurts to think about. My heart goes
out to anyone who may be struggling with fertility issues or loss. You
are not alone. I wish you peace and joy in the life that you have, even
if it is not the life you’d imagined for yourself, and I wish you all
the strength and support you need to find that peace and joy. (And I
also want you to know it’s okay to not be okay now, and it’s okay to not
be okay sometimes even after you are okay.)
First and foremost, I’m glad I’m not dead.
Seriously. I’m really, really glad
I’m not dead. That would have sucked. And, thanks to the fact that I
recognized warning symptoms and had some emergency surgery seven years
ago today, I get to be alive to appreciate being alive. I’m a big fan.
So
in honor of my not-dying anniversary, I’m doing a PSA about ectopic
pregnancy. Even if you never plan on having children, these are
important symptoms to know because you could very well save the life of
someone you love. Or your own. (Unless you do not have female reproductive organs, in which case your
risk of ectopic pregnancy = non-existent. Still, you like people who do,
right?)
An ectopic pregnancy is a pregnancy in which a fertilized
egg implants somewhere other than the uterus. This is a bad thing.
Usually the egg implants in the fallopian tube; occasionally it implants
other places. 2% of all pregnancies are ectopic. That’s 1 in 50.
Certain factors increase your risks–tubal scarring, abdominal surgery,
endometriosis, fertility treatments, IUDs–but it can happen to anyone. I
had no real risk factors.
An even scarier statistic than the one-in-fifty? Ectopic pregnancies are the number one cause of pregnancy-related death.
Part of the problem is that many women with ectopic pregnancies don’t
even know they’re pregnant. Because your body doesn’t produce as many
hormones, you might continue having periods like normal, ignore the
sudden pain, go to bed because you’re feeling tired and dizzy, and never
wake up.
I know that sounds terrible and scary. It is. It
happens. So even if you don’t think you’re pregnant, or if you think you
are just having a standard miscarriage (which was what I thought),
always, ALWAYS call the doctor if you have any of the following
symptoms:
Sharp
pain on one side of your lower abdomen. When you press down on it, it
will be a stabbing pain that you will feel reflected in the other side,
but one side will be more tender. Once your tube actually bursts the
pain will lessen considerably–DO NOT IGNORE THAT. All it means is that
you are now bleeding internally.
Feeling
dizzy and lightheaded when you aren’t lying down. This would be because
of the internal bleeding. Also, difficulty and discomfort breathing.
And
finally, the key symptom: when you lie down, you have a sharp, stabbing
pain in your shoulder. This is called referred pain, and is caused by
the blood filling up your abdomen and pushing on your lungs. (This is
also a symptom of a burst appendix and often happens after abdominal
surgery, in case you were interested.) If you EVER have abdominal pain
that is reflected in your shoulder when you lie down, go to the hospital
immediately. And have someone else drive you.
Like I said, you may not think you are pregnant, but if there is any
chance whatsoever you could be and you have these symptoms, have someone
drive you to the hospital immediately or call 911. If I had ignored my
symptoms and let my husband go to work that day, I probably would have fallen asleep on the couch and never woken up again. I
was in surgery within two or three hours of the pain starting, and at
that point I had lost so much blood I nearly needed a transfusion.
But,
because I am obsessive and had researched every pregnancy-related topic
under the sun, I knew something was wrong. And I’m not dead. And that’s
a good thing.
Here’s hoping you never have to recognize the symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy. But now you can, and that’s the important thing.
This year’s side note: The fact that ectopic, fallopian, and endometriosis are all unrecognized by spellcheck pisses me off. Women’s health matters. Our bodies matter, even though they are consistently given less medical attention and education than they deserve. That’s part of why I do this.
If you have a uterus and you’re having sex with a sperm-producing person, this could happen to you. Know the signs to watch for, especially since you may not even know you’re pregnant.
Do you mean doctors who spent years learning about abled white cis men’s bodies
do you know anything about the world besides what you read on tumblr
Okay but this is true?? Shut up with your bullshit, the medical industry for a very very long time has used the able bodied white cis male as their standard and that has very real healthcare consequences for a lot of people.
Do you know why most women don’t know when they’re having heart attacks? Why heart attacks kill more women than men? Because symptoms of a heart attack are different for women and the ones that doctors usually recognize and publicize are the symptoms experienced by men. Do you know why it’s so difficult for Black and Brown people to get diagnosed if they have skin cancer? Because doctors have been taught to recognize it on white people. People of size are constantly told that their problems are entirely because of their weight and doctors don’t even bother to look beyond that to be sure that’s the case. So those people have medical conditions go undiagnosed properly for years, and die in the process. Fuck, even just the fact that people think it’s okay to charge women more for healthcare because “they have extra parts” (?????) is indicative of the way the male body has been considered the standard for fucking ever. And the healthcare needs of disabled people or trans people? Forget about it.
OP is 1000% right. The medical industry has used the able cis white male body as their standard of care for CENTURIES and that has real consequences for the rest of us today. It’s getting better but it’s not where it should be. So fuck off with your snarky commentary, you’re wrong. The healthcare industry is not equipped to handle the needs of people with disabilities, women, PoC, trans people, people of size, etc. and that’s in large part due to the fact that the established body of medical knowledge was created by studying able, cis, white male bodies almost exclusively.
Hey there folks, speaking as a trained EMT and a pre-med student, I can confirm that the above person is approximately 7000% accurate. In my EMT training, I would repeatedly ask ‘’but what if my patent is a woman” or “what is my patient is a person of color” and at first all I got was shock. Then I got confused bumbling. I got some answers–basic symptoms of a heart attack in women, how to recognize cyanosis in someone of color, the basics of how to work with an autistic patient or someone who for whatever reason can’t communicate well with you. In fact, EMTs and other EMS workers are getting a lot better at learning the differences between the health care for a person of color or someone disabled. We were even told that we would need to ask our patients for their biological sex (I know, I’m really sorry, I know that there are people who find this intensely uncomfortable or even harmful, but there are real medical reasons for this and most decent EMTs will use whatever pronouns you ask them to). But most if not all of the answers we were given about women were directly related to gynecological issues. The guys teaching me? They were good guys. Nice. Funny. Smart. Devoted to caring for patients. Impassioned about protecting people, especially women and teenaged girls, from assault. Largely not sexist toward me or their coworkers. Hell, they were even smart enough to say “listen, boys, the women in this class have a higher pain tolerance than you, they just do, and as a rule if a women says their pain is a 5 on a scale of 1-10, assume it’s somewhere around an 8” when a kid laughed during the gyno unit. But they just didn’t know what to say when I asked “so if you’re supposed to palpate the patient’s chest, what do you do if your patient’s a triple-D” or when I asked “so if your patient gets menstrual migraines, how do you know if this headache is a stroke or not.” They had never been taught. This is a real problem, one that many medical professionals work hard to remedy once they start practicing. But this is not bullshit. At all. The standard patient is a cis white guy with no disabilities or chronic illnesses. It’s a huge fucking problem and I’m going to need you to step down with your bullshit, there, friend.
Thank you words-writ-in-starlight ! It’s a huge problem that a few of the leading med schools are starting to recognize . Let me add that medications and dosing standards in Big Pharma also use the cis male model in research/development. Women’s bodies and hormones affect medication efficacy greatly, yet that is t always taken in consideration when meds are prescribed.
dragon--trash asked: Just read your reply to the medical industry and the issues of race, gender, disability, and transgender health issues. Honestly I have never really thought about that until I read the post and your response to it. I'm not in the medical field but from reading your reply I realized that you are correct and it has given me a new perspective on how far the medical industry needs to go in educating healthcare providers on different people's needs. So, thanks to you I have a better understanding. :D
I’m so glad it helped! I’ve gotten some shit for that post and I stand by it (equality in medical care means *accommodating everyone* so that they can get the same benefits, because, for example, I’m allergic to a vaccine and therefore it’s not equal treatment to administer that vaccine to me even if everyone else is getting it, because I’ll hallucinate for three days and have a sky-high fever–super not fun), but I’ve gotta admit that you’re one of the first…like…nice people I’ve heard from on the matter. You made my fucking day, I hope you have a stellar day yourself, my friend.
