The "what's On Your Mind?" Thread -2018

[Willowy]

It's not that bad, surprisingly. I have a system .

 

[foxxycat]

I assume. That and hunching over while folding. I guess I'll have to pay more attention to my posture

how about dumping on kitchen table- sit in chair-fold-put a foot stool underneath to raise feet up a hair=it puts less pressure on lower back.

 

[arouetta]

I went upstairs to take a nap and was reminded of the other sad thing about being a crazy cat lady...cat puke and hairballs. Sigh. Another load of laundry, and the nap is delayed until the mattress dries.

 

[Alicia88]

Unfortunately, I don't even have a kitchen table right now. I mentioned that my apartment is tiny, right? LOL - my kitchen is kind of a walk in and back out affair. I have no room for a kitchen table. Reason #72 why we need to move.

 

[artiemom]

Alicia88 Can you dump the laundry on your bed, and fold/sort from there? That is what I do.

 

[Alicia88]

I would, but I like watching tv while I fold laundry. Lol

 

[Margret]

Alicia88 , where's your television, the laundry room? What furniture is available in the room where you're doing the work?

Margret

 

[Alicia88]

Lol, I don't have a laundry room. There's a washer and dryer in the basement of my building. I sit on the couch in the living room to fold clothes.

 

[1 bruce 1]

Have you had him tested for food allergies? It's also possible that the scent of something you're cooking or have cooked could set him off. Vapors from drapes or furnishings? Grass or tree pollen you bring in on your shoes or clothing? Allergies are boogerbears to find. I hope you do find the problem.

I'm so sorry you had such a vivid, terrible nightmare. Those linger after you wake up. Try to replace it with some happy memories of this cat. It might make you feel a bit better.

I haven't. What's so odd is all this started randomly when he was 5. He had no issues, no coughing or asthmatic episodes and no poop problems. It's so frustrating, frustrating enough with problems that can be managed but scary when those problem can become life threatening with little warning.
He doesn't have access to our kitchen ever, but I can imagine smells or smoke from certain dishes (we do a lot of test cooking!) can travel through doors so I can't rule this out.
I am 99% sure the second attack was from cleaning/redecorating fumes (sanding, paint, and floor polishes in areas he doesn't have access to, ever). He was far, far separated from this area but I think enough fumes over the course of many days was enough to create a reaction.

 

[Alicia88]

I also have a computer desk and chair in here but that's it.

 

[arouetta]

How about this? Sit on the couch sideways, one leg off the couch, the other either under you or cross wise, whichever feels better for your back. If the basket is shallow, bring the chair over and put the basket on it. If the basket is deep, bring the chair over and dump some of the unfolded laundry on it, and every time you empty the chair, you put more of the basket on it. Body fold the clothes, and put them on the couch in front of you so you aren't bending over to make your stack.

 

[arouetta]

I found the program 60 Days In on demand, been watching it. This episode they said that a mentally ill inmate has not been taking his medication, he spits it out and then sells it to other inmates. Then they specified the medication is Seroquel.

Being on Seroquel myself, I just got to ask a question. Who the eff takes Seroquel for fun??? It's not like it's going to make you high. It's going to knock you cold and make you fat.

 

[Alicia88]

How about this? Sit on the couch sideways, one leg off the couch, the other either under you or cross wise, whichever feels better for your back. If the basket is shallow, bring the chair over and put the basket on it. If the basket is deep, bring the chair over and dump some of the unfolded laundry on it, and every time you empty the chair, you put more of the basket on it. Body fold the clothes, and put them on the couch in front of you so you aren't bending over to make your stack.

Sounds like a plan.

 

[Willowy]

Being on Seroquel myself, I just got to ask a question. Who the eff takes Seroquel for fun??? It's not like it's going to make you high. It's going to knock you cold and make you fat.

I googled why people take it recreationally (if the FBI wants to look at my search history it might seem suspicious ), and, yeah, it seems like those who use it recreationally do it for the sedative effects. Either to be able to sleep after using uppers, or to disassociate for whatever reason. I would imagine that sleeping through most of the day might be tempting for people who are locked in a cage.

This is weird, I just thought of it, lol. My youngest brother has been diagnosed as "on the spectrum". We take a family vacation to Orlando almost every year, and my nephew likes to go to WonderWorks. They have a brainwave machine where you can control a ball with your mind. My youngest brother and I can practically flatline our brainwaves and always win (if we go against each other we tie, run out of time so the game ends on its own). My other brother and nephew have their brainwaves spike all over.

Last year my brother had gone to the doctor because of a particulary bad anxiety attack, and the doctor prescribed a daily anti-anxiety med (I don't remember what, not Xanax though). And when he tried to play the brainwave game, his brainwaves were spiking all over the place, and I beat him easily. Even though he had been able to flatline that game every other year we've gone. So what were those meds doing to his brain? Was that normalizing his brainwaves or something else? Haha, now that I've thought of that I'm so curious.

 

[Margret]

Ever seen this cartoon before?

It's titled "Death's Dispensary," and it helped to end the cholera outbreak in New York City in 1866. New York City Cholera Outbreak of 1866 We already knew that cholera was caused by fecal contamination of drinking water - that had been discovered 12 years before by John Snow, during the Broad Street cholera outbreak in London (1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak - Wikipedia) - but new ideas take time to filter their way down into the public consciousness, not to mention taking time to result in expensive changes to the way we distribute important things like water.

When is the last time you heard of a cholera outbreak? If you're like me, it was in a news report about a refugee camp with inadequate sanitation (something that we've seen way too much of lately, but that's for the IMO forum). Cholera was one of the reasons our ancestors tended to die young. Another was Smallpox, which we've discussed fairly recently and I won't rehash that discussion here, except to say that vaccination has wiped this disease out entirely.

There was a time, just a few generations ago, when the biggest risk for a new mother was to give birth in a hospital, because doctors prided themselves on coming directly from the autopsy room, with blood still on their hands, to do physical examinations of women in labor. They considered hand washing to be a form of superstition, practiced only by those "ignorant" midwives (who had a much better survival rate in their patients - gee, I wonder why?).

So, what is new? Well, how about AIDS? Does anyone here doubt that AIDS is real? And is it truly "new"? Well, the answer to the second question probably depends, at least partly, on your definition of "new." I went to a parochial high school run by a fundamentalist church and, while there, had a friend named Nelson who seemed to be a little odd. What I didn't realize at the time was that Nelson was gay, and was deeply closeted (as he would have had to be to survive in my high school). When we graduated in the early 1970s, Nelson came out of the closet and moved to San Francisco. This was before HIV had been identified, let alone drugs developed to treat AIDS, and I've heard from people who lived there that being part of the gay community in San Francisco at that time was like living in a war zone, so many people were dying of this unidentified disease that seemed to strike gay men preferentially. Nelson was one of the casualties. So I tend to date AIDS to the early 1970s, but that's my personal viewpoint, based on my experiences. It actually goes back farther than that. The first reported death from AIDS in North America happened in 1969, and the patient admitted himself to the hospital with symptoms in 1968, where he reported that he'd had symptoms since 1966, when he was 12. (Robert Rayford - Wikipedia) Poor, poor child. HIV dot gov has an AIDS timeline, which begins in 1981, because that was when the government first started paying attention to it. (A Timeline of HIV and AIDS) So, I can personally remember a time before AIDS (or at least before AIDS in North America), which makes it new by my standards.

Worldwide, the first known case of AIDS occurred in 1959 in the Belgian Congo (CNN - Researchers trace first HIV case to 1959 in the Belgian Congo - February 3, 1998). which is still within my lifetime. According to the same article, researchers believe that the mutation that led to AIDS occurred shortly after WWII, so before my birth, but not by much. Where did it come from? Probably monkeys. How? No one knows - I would guess a bite. As for mutations, well, HIV appears to be in a constant state of mutation, which is one of the reasons it's been so hard to develop a vaccine for it.

Other "new" diseases:

• Chronic Fatigue
• Fibromyalgia
• Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy

Are these really new? I doubt it, though Chronic Fatigue may be. I think these have merely become more well known recently. As for Chronic Fatigue, my personal suspicion is that it may actually be post-polio syndrome in people who were vaccinated with a live polio virus, but to my knowledge that's never been tested. The reason I think this is that both the time line and the symptoms seem to fit, which is enough to make it an interesting idea but hardly enough to make it any more than that.

Some new diseases are merely old diseases with new names:

• COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, which killed Leonard Nimoy) used to be called asthma, or emphysema, or something else more specific.
• PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) used to be called battle fatigue, or malingering. With the name change there also came a realization that you don't have to be a soldier to have PTSD.

Which pretty well covers my contributions on this subject for the time being.

Margret

 

[Willowy]

Are these really new? I doubt it, though Chronic Fatigue may be. I think these have merely become more well known recently.

I'm not sure if anything is really new (besides recently mutated viruses of course). I used to read so many old kids' books from the 1800s. How many characters were described as "being of a delicate disposition" or "having to take to their beds often"? A lot. We just have names for that now.

 

[Mamanyt1953]

(and I've no idea how that works, because there's now a metal plate in the back of the wrist holding the bone fragments together), I'm beginning to be able to put weight on the wrist (cautiously, of course), and I can feel it growing stronger by the hour.

It works because most of the pain of a broken anything is the shifting of the bones. Those bones are now stabilized and not shifting, so...no (or very little) pain. And don't push it. Let the "cautious" part of that sentence be your watchword!

I'm going to draw a comparison that people are going to think is unfair or wrong of me to say, but oh well, you all know me here. You never used to hear of a grown man that did what he shouldn't with young children. Does that mean child molestation is something recently created? Freud wrote of female hysteria and women lusting after their fathers when he heard patient after patient saying what their fathers did to them as children and decided there was no way that many men were perverted. Was he right and the modern trend of molesters being close to home is something modern and never known in the past?

Reiterating what several people have already said, it just wasn't talked about. The most you would ever hear about such things is, "Oh, poor things, they have a 'funny' uncle." And all too often, the "funny" one was the one with the money, hence the power, in the family. And all too often, mental illness or deficiency of any sort resulted in the sufferer being locked in a basement or attic if the family lacked the funds for an "asylum."

Lol, I don't have a laundry room. There's a washer and dryer in the basement of my building. I sit on the couch in the living room to fold clothes.

Well, I was going to suggest an inexpensive card table that could be folded away, but I like arouetta 's suggestion even better!

Today is my birthday. 65, heaven help me. I've been fielding FB messages like a mad thing.

 

[Willowy]

Hehe. In our family we tend to refer to canned pet food as "Kibbles 'n' Snouts" (points if you get the reference). I just found a small piece of pigskin in a can of Friskies. Well, kibbles 'n' snouts indeed! Extra snouts in that one.

 

[Katie M]

I'm not sure if anything is really new (besides recently mutated viruses of course). I used to read so many old kids' books from the 1800s. How many characters were described as "being of a delicate disposition" or "having to take to their beds often"? A lot. We just have names for that now.

For a while, it was actually considered fashionable to be as pale as a tuberculosis patient. How weird is that? Who wants to look like they're on the verge of dying?

 

[Alicia88]

Happy birthday!
I don't buy myself things often, but I bought some new nursing bras online and they're the most comfortable bras I've ever worn. I'm glad I bought them .