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- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
A relative got billed thousands of dollars for post-medical transport back home. Insurance covered the cost to fly him to the hospital, but not the trip back. This guy has spent decades enjoying his home in the middle of nowhere, but everything has gotten harder as he’s grown older. He knew he was getting short of breath more easily, but didn’t realize his lungs were severely deteriorating – until his wife found him passed out on the ground instead of doing yard work.
Now he has to use oxygen (5l/min) all the time, is mostly stuck in the house, and lives too far from most services to do anything. His wife can drive to town to get groceries and the like, but he has to calculate if he’ll have enough oxygen to make a trip, and his wife doesn’t want him driving at all lest he get dizzy and cause an accident. Airlines won’t let him fly.
The couple are having a hard time finding people to drive all the way out to their place to help take care of things. They are pretty much stuck out there with a lot of chores they can’t do and very little entertainment. They did finally manage to get someone to install a generator so when the power goes out (which happens often enough), they can keep recharging the oxygen.
Prior to this, he’d been making long trips to see doctors for back and neck pain because there weren’t any close providers, but those docs somehow missed his breathing issues. I don’t know if he was seeing a GP as well, but his choices were limited. Family had urged him to move somewhere more … well, if not urban, at least suburban for over a decade because his medical care never seemed very good. Now it is nearly impossible.
Does that answer the question? The guy went from doing yard work one day to incapacitated the next. I’m sure the change is usually less instantaneous for most people, but there are cases like his where healthy to ‘not’ is fast.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It sounds like your mom did you wrong. You can’t change that. You CAN change what you do now.
Look, I’ve known more than a couple people who heard the same and worse from their mothers. One girl knew their dad had been abusive and their mom had to step in and take punches to keep the then-toddler girl from getting hit. A guy who’s dad ran off had a young mom who really never meant to be a mom, was bad at it, and couldn’t afford to feed her kids. I don’t know the full stories for all my acquaintances, but those are two who both heard their moms say things like, “I wish you were never born.” and “You ruined my life.”
It sucks to hear that, but moms are not perfect, have their own stresses to deal with, and sometimes too much heart break can get a person to say things they should not.
Maybe life IS meaningless, but there’s a bunch of us fuckers stuck here who are all struggling to make a go of it despite the circumstances, and while we can acknowledge that everything sucks, you probably don’t know we think that because we’re not in the worst of depression at the moment and try to fill the emptiness with small pleasantries rather than slip back into the well of sorrow, saying a mindless patter of things like, “It’s a beautiful day” or “We needed the rain”, or “Great game last night.”
You are not alone. You can get through this. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Try to do something – anything – for yourself, or for someone else, or for everyone.
- Comment on I'm leaving the US for good, anything I should do before I leave? 3 months ago:
This surely varies by state, but in Alaska, for example, I’m told Japanese vacationers LOVE to try out guns. So, if you can rent a gun on a range, shooting off weapons is the most American thing I can think to do before you leave.
- Comment on Is it possible to eat a toxic amount of culinary herbs/spices? 3 months ago:
en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_herbs_with_known_adver…
The list itself says it is incomplete and I immediately thought of a couple items not listed that have known toxicity issues:
- Comment on Is cops being evil/lazy/incompetent a USA specific thing, or is it the same everywhere in the world? 3 months ago:
I think Germany is known for serious police. In fact, I half remember a joke about that… something about the perfection of a British Cop, a German car, and an French Chef – compared to the misery of a German Cop, a French car, and a British Chef.
Obviously not funny in the mangling, but the joke wasn’t that German cops were bad, just not the generally pleasant ‘fair cop’ stereotype of Brits.
Personally,. the stereotypes that have stuck in my head are: that low-level officials in India (including cops) can be bribed to look the other way for minor things, Nordic cops are well trained in de-escalation and restraint techniques where no one gets injured, Brit cops might be fair or might be racist, but the laws give better protection to citizens, and that German cops are stern, and will rigidly follow and enforce all laws and rules… generally. Not sure if it is true or not, but I’ve also heard that German cops will fuck you up if you give them reason, but you’d really have to give them reason.