Kontextmaschine

7th October 2021

Question reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 15 notes

Anonymous asked:

as a communist i should probably be okay that the guy who writes the brilliant but fashy-adjacent blog i read is refusing to seek medical attention regarding his serious neurological issues but jesus christ dude you really gotta see a doctor about this shit, its not normal and it doesn't become normal just because you're a smart dude who is analytical about your body

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

What exactly do you picture bringing someone who went to med school into the loop accomplishing here? It’s like spraining your ankle: I might not be able to describe all the mechanics in detail but I don’t need it diagnosed and there’s not even really a treatment for it, I just take it easy while it heals

Like this is not in fact Twitch Plays Dragon’s Lair, this was never your life course to direct anyway, even if I have been transcribing it in near real-time and further arcs will proceed from decisions yet to be made

Or is this the equivalent of yelling “don’t go into the basement!” at the screen?

Like, back when I was originally like “oh, this is maybe displaced Issues from saving myself from choking once!” that doesn’t really explain the later progression into physical symptoms or anything of that complexity in the first place and might suggest something dangerous still under the surface, okay.

But maybe I haven’t been saying this clearly On Here but I’m increasingly attributing this to COVID, which would account for taking a massive hit to my nervous system in 2020.

Just at the start of the crisis, when it had first been spreading from Boston and Seattle a few weeks, when no one was wearing masks but they were disinfecting their groceries, I noticed I was feeling down for a week. I was still keeping a 3-week grocery stock so I didn’t even go out, I just felt fatigued and noticed my senses of taste and smell were muted but I don’t even know that was even recognized as a symptom yet, I just took it as a depressive period

Two weeks after that was when things really crashed, I didn’t lose control of my self so much as my consciousness, it wasn’t quite like a psychedelic trip but the experience helped. That was a month of crazy and when I pulled myself back together I noticed that individual functions I had heard of as recognizably alterable by physical (incl. chemical) means like “anxiety”, “inhibition”, and “emotional regulation” were also off

Also I was getting neuropathic tingling all up the length of my arms that I originally misattributed to some minor preexisting physical trauma – looking back I kind of question some of my judgment here, but then I suppose it was impressive my metacognizance held together that well at all

Then after 2 or 3 months the physical stuff degraded, I got like -3 or -4 DEX (or rather a -3 or -4 modifier, so -6 or -8) to the point of being unable to walk upright or manipulate objects with my fingers

But all of that has steadily gotten better since. With the “cigarette burn” gaps in my memory as the most obvious example, it appears that the nervous system that, you know, I run on took some widespread but scattershot damage following the passing of physical symptoms in 2020

That’s something that, if not entirely explained, is at least well attested. Will it go on to hide in my nerves like herpes and recur sometimes? Who knows! Guess we’ll find out! If it does, and that becomes a recognized thing, many initial “treatments” will be quack shit and even then the challenge wouldn’t be paying $500 to a guy in an office who studied organic chemistry in college, but finding the right one! Doctors out there pushing ivermectin and— what was that one from 2020? Chloroquine?

In any case things have been all recovering as you would expect of someone with enough neuroplasticity remaining to patch the gaps, which like I said seem scattershot and distributed, weakening a lot but not enough concentrated damage to blow anything out of the water like you’d see with a stroke cutting off blood flow to one brain region

Oh, also, the fugueing, I guess that might look more serious, but it’s experienced as on the normal spectrum of “oh, I puttered around the house but didn’t form any medium-term memories”, and even that’s getting milder. Originally it was like I’ll fully clean a furnace or straight seduce a stranger and only notice after the fact, now it’s closer to like, if I see the dishes in the sink I wash them without thinking about it too much or I’ll notice halfway through a conversation that I’m being awfully charming for what started as an offhand comment.