[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

I just think at some point in my life, there is going to be a wonderful comedic opportunity to crush an apple and I should learn how or train now. e: Anybody else have any ridiculous goals right now?

I installed Debian + KDE on my mom’s laptop. She hasn’t had a complaint since. How tech-savvy is she, you ask? I’m sitting with her right now, so out of politeness she put on headphones to watch her favorite soap opera. Mind you, the headphones weren’t plugged into the laptop. She was sitting there, headphones on her head, sound coming through the speakers, watching her soaps like this is how it’s meant to be done.

That's it

I love them so much. Has this sublemmy got any more POTA fans by the way? Y’all looking forward to Part 2 Chapter 1 (aka Planet of the Apes 4)?

*Sorry about the video format, I don’t know how to publish videos directly. :’)

Too many "doctors" have told me that I'm just whining and the Mayo Clinic is just some expensive place for privileged people and the reason I haven't eaten for months is because I don't want to.

This entire time I have said over and over that I didn't want any medical advice. I have said that I only gave updates because people asked me to.

Frankly, I wanted to do one single rant and be done with it.

Now I'm sorry I ever said anything because people would rather harass me over it.

I really didn't expect to be harassed on the day that I finally got some good news about my health. Thanks, Lemmy.

I'll just stick to my normal communities where people don't pretend to be doctors.

Edit: if you actually want to know how I'm doing and do not want to lecture me or tell me your theories or give me treatment suggestions, feel free to send a private message.

Background links:

https://lemmy.world/post/12194311

https://lemmy.world/post/13579250

https://lemmy.world/post/13834878

So, after nothing for a week do to the first doctor's colossal fuckup or whatever it was, I got in to see a GI behavioral therapist today. She hypothesizes that something behaviorally triggered the heaving and the not eating and so on, possibly even the kidney stones I had a month or so before this all started (we'll probably never know), and it just became something that never went away.

Much to my mother's displeasure, since she's decided that in all of her social worker schooling that she had almost 40 years ago I had a phobia, the social worker said it isn't a phobia. It's an aversion, but not a phobia.

So, she has a couple of things she's having me do. First, go see another behavioral therapist in Indiana. She's getting me a list. She says it doesn't have to be one who specializes in GI problems, which is good, because there's only one of those in Indiana and she's not on our insurance.

Secondly, she is having me do deep breathing exercises, especially in the morning before I've done any heaving. She thinks that if I do it properly, the extra oxygen should relax my muscles and stimulate the vagus nerve, which will hopefully stop the heaving.

The only thing I didn't like is that she didn't let my wife sit in via Facetime or speakerphone because that was not allowed, which means I have to rely on my anxiety and stress-ridden brain to remember everything because my mother sure won't. What a mistake to bring her along.

I'm still hoping to see an ENT while I'm here because no ENT has ever evaluated me and it's worth an evaluation, but I'm in triage for that, so if they don't have me go in tomorrow, I'll have to do it in Indiana because we leave on Friday, or at least will be kicked out of this AirBnB, and my mother refuses to stay in a hotel.

Anyway, this is the first day since I got here last Monday that I actually felt like they were helping me and doing something about my problem. It would have been really fucking nice if they had done it without only a 2 day window, but it's better than nothing.

I don't know if they're going to do anything for me because of what the first doctor did, but I feel like they owe me some sort of reimbursement at the very least. Apparently a patient advocate will be reaching out to me in the near future.

And now, more crazy mother stories!

From Monday:

I went to take a shower and when I told my mother, we had this conversation-

“Take your phone with you.”

“Into the shower?”

“Well what happens if they call?”

“You’ll have to answer it.”

Then I give her my phone and she asks what code she’s supposed to enter when they call. She has the same make and model of phone as I do. You don’t need to enter a code.

The best part is we had this exactly same conversation last week.

Later we go shopping and we buy a couple of boxes of Ensure (my main source of nutrition).

“How long will these 32 Ensures last you?”

“At six a day-”

“I thought you took four a day.”

“I did, but the doctor told me I should take 6-8.”

“He did?”

She was in the room at the time. It was also last week.

We are driving back-

“I thought the Mayo Clinic was going to be like the ER, where a whole team of doctors works on you at once.”

“Mom, I’ve been in the ER four times in the last year. They don’t do that there.”

“Yes they do, I’ve seen the shows!”

Then, when we get back-

“Ok, we’re back, I’m going to my room so you can have your chicken.”

“I’m not going to have my chicken yet, I’m going to get my coat off.”

“That’s fine, I’m just going to go now before it starts smelling.”

I go to my room. 2 minutes later- knock knock “I’m going to have my chicken now.”

Yesterday, she kept getting tornado alerts on her watch because it's localized to Indiana and kept saying, "is that in Rochester?!" Yes, it's snowy with a chance of tornadoes. She also this morning said "there's salt on the ground. Is it slippery out?" Not anymore due to the salt.

As for today, the appointment was at 9:45. She insisted we leave at 8 to get a parking space in one of the multiple 10-storey parking garage. I was able to talk her into 8:45. She complained the whole way there that we would be late and started panicking in the car in the parking garage since there was a slow line in front of us. Then we got out and she looked at her watch and it was like 9:03. She said, "wow, we have so much time!"

I celebrated something finally happening by buying a $30 bottle of ruby port, which I am looking forward to having this evening.

We're either leaving tomorrow or Friday and then I don't want to see my mother for a while.

EDIT: Just got denied a Mayo ENT consult and was told to get a local one (which is fine). So I guess we're going home tomorrow. Thank god.

EDIT 2: I just got a call from the Mayo patient advocate. They will not be charging me for the GI visit and they will be reimbursing us for some of the AirBnB cost. I appreciate them making things right.

I saw my gastroenterology doctor for my initial evaluation visit on the 26th, he sent me to a neurologist the next morning. The neurologist didn't find any issues but did theorize it might be behavioral and sent his notes back to the gastroenterologist maybe 20 minutes later.

After calling the gastroenterology department every single day since that afternoon, plus also sending multiple messages through the patient portal, each time saying I would be happy just to talk to a nurse, I was finally told today that the doctor I saw has been out since last week and will be gone until the ninth!

I asked if I could see someone else. No I couldn't.

Thank god I saw the neurologist after him, so at least I could call them and see if I could get a referral, but I’ve been waiting a week and no one told me until today!

So I wrote a very long and angry email to the patient advocate, although I did avoid the words ‘malpractice’ and ‘lawsuit,’ but I sure thought about it. Then I sent another message to the patient portal and called the neurologist to see if he could refer me to a behavioral specialist since he theorized it was behavioral. They don’t know if they can get me in by the end of the week.

We already extended our stay here until Friday. We were supposed to leave today. They told us expect 5-7 days (minus the weekend).

I've gotten no answers. A couple of theories, but that's it.

Why did I even bother coming? We had to drive 8 1/2 hours and my mom spent a bunch of money on this AirBnB. Now we'll have to drive 8 1/2 hours back and I may not even get the referral.

If they tell me I have to come back at some future date, as I feel right now, I'm going to tell them to get fucked.

This is supposed to be the top medical clinic in the country and I've been treated like shit.

I have no idea what to do now. I guess if they can't get me in, go home and hope there's a behavioral therapist worth a shit in Indiana that my insurance will accept and hope it really is a behavioral issue.

Just now as I was writing this, the nurse from the gastroenterologist got back to me. She said I'd have to wait until he got back on the ninth. Thanks a whole fucking lot for that.

Edit: Well since I wrote that, it's been a whirlwind.

A couple of hours ago, I got an extremely apologetic phone call from a different GI doctor who saw that I wrote a big, still cordial, but in my mind huge fuck you, to the nurse. He scheduled me for a blood panel right away, a meeting with the GI behavioral specialist tomorrow and is trying to get me into the ENT.

Apparently the original doctor didn't even take good notes, because this doctor wanted to send me to a dermatology clinic for pain and I had to explain to him that pain was never an issue, which greatly confused him.

Anyway, I got the apology that was warranted (although admittedly not from the right doctor) and even though it will mean staying the rest of the week, at least things are back on track.

My father was a very angry man and he died angry. The dementia didn't help, but he was very angry before the dementia. And I do not want to die like him, so I try not to get angry, but I hit my limit and actually lost my temper and it worked out for me for once.

I'm still not going to be an angry person, but maybe I won't be as polite as I used to be before either, at least not in a medical setting.

I know I will, but it also leaves an edited mark on the comments so I'm curious about your thoughts

They were both in their early 80s and had been together long enough they decided to move in together.

She had 5 huge framed paintings (prints) that no longer had walls to hang upon, and she wanted me to have them. All 5 of them.

Gigantic shitty prints with ostentatious gold-painted frames, featuring rose vases and fruit baskets and the like.

I think we are all familiar with this kind of "old lady" art. It was popular among the same clientele who would purchase ugly mass produced china to keep and not use. Basically department store rubbish of their day.

It was completely okay that she offered them to me.

It was not fine that she would not take "no thank you" for an answer and kept on pressing.

It was not fine when she would not accept my answers of "I do not like them" and "I do not want them" and "they are ugly" and "if you insist on giving them away, give them to a thrift store".

It didn't feel particularly pleasant to me when she acted as though she was doing me a great favor, and insinuated I was being ungrateful by not appreciating their inherent value.

Finally I cracked and said okay I will take one of the paintings, may I have that big rose painting at the front?

Yes.

It becomes my property, you won't ask for it back?

Yes it's yours!

I picked up the painting and out the front door I went. I leaned the painting up against the elm tree on the boulevard at a 45 degree angle and proceeded to kick a hole right in the center.

I went back and said do you still want to give me those other paintings?

Later that week when I was taking gramps out for lunch he told me that it was one of the funniest things ever, and he completely agreed that it was the right thing to do given how absurd her insistence had gotten. He also said he was made to suffer for my actions though lol - although he really did not lay any blame at my feet, he let the punishment roll off his back like he always did, good guy!

I would of course never behave that way now that I'm an older man. I would just more insistently say that I'm not going to take them under any circumstances.

I was inspired to tell this story based on something I read in another thread. People were delighted to tell their mom they're just going to throw her china in the garbage and relating how mom was freaking out, and they were relishing it!

It's very sad, but with the holiday weekend I've been able to keep it in the back of my mind instead of the front. Now that Mom is sharing info on services, i can't imagine actually going there and seeing and what to say... and it's getting to me, a lot. Today is a celebration day in my house and i don't want to bring my family down, so i just need a place to rest this until i can get back to it tomorrow and begin processing. Sorry for public journaling.

[deleted]

I just got to work at 02:30, covering the second half of the graveyard shift. Pretty quiet night.

I mean like I accept who I was born as but if given the choice I’d choose to be born a woman, yk? Idk but I kinda envy them a bit but i’m fine being an unsexy man

image unrelated

Either through memes or comments I keep seeing this sentiment pop-up from time to time. And I'm wondering what your (yes, you) consensus is on it.

I for one am too pessimistic to do anything with potential hints. Like even if there is a good chance I still just don't want to risk it.

Personally: Hiking, biking, photography, DnD, and fixing things.

It sounds like a lot (because it is lol) but with ADHD having a group of hobbies I can orbit around (especially if they can overlap (like these ones))can help me avoid diving into too many new hobbies.

Hello! Another super-long Flying Squid post from my visit to the Mayo Clinic here in Rochester, Minnesota. I'd link to the background, but there's been too many (requested) update posts at this point. Sorry for anyone new to this who actually reads to the end.

I'm sure they're super busy considering the number of patients, but I haven't heard from the gastroenterology department in a couple of days despite calling over there. The Mayo clinic doesn't operate on the weekends, so I'm just in a holding pattern, which is excruciating. But it has given me time to make some observations:

• Outside of medical offices and waiting areas, being at Mayo feels like being in a combination of an art museum and an airport. I don't mean like an airport with a lot of art in it either, I mean like there are areas that feel like you're in an airport based on the people traffic and the seating and the noise and so on and then there are other areas where you're in a little side room looking at hand-blown glass sculptures while you listen to a woman playing a grand piano outside of it. And then you go into an exam room and it's like a normal such place except with nicer-looking equipment.

• Rochester's population is about 120,000 people, but between the Mayo Clinic and the hotels next to the Mayo Clinic, the downtown is full of skyscrapers, making it look like a massive city... until you leave the downtown area at which point it's a standard town.

• And to cement in that point, outside of downtown, almost everything commercial is along the same road or at least very close to it.

• According to the demographics I looked up, Rochester is 6% Latino, and yet almost the entire international foods aisle of the Walmart grocery area plus multiple other displays throughout that part of the store are dedicated to Mexican food. Not a complaint, or criticism, just weird that they're devoting so much space to such a small population segment, especially considering who knows how many of them aren't of Mexican heritage or from Mexico. I'm happy that Mexicans or people of Mexican heritage get to have a lot of comfort food though, since they may not be here for pleasant reasons. Anything to make any patients at Mayo more comfortable is a good thing.

• The Goodwill is full of brand new items. I mean brand new. We didn’t look at most of the clothes (although everything on the socks display was brand new) but like everything in the garden aisle was new, with multiple copies of the same products to buy. In the electronics area there were 10-15 HDMI cables still in their plastic clamshells amongst other things. I know there are a lot of doctors here, but they are just donating new items in bulk? (It did still have the standard musty Goodwill smell.)

• For some reason, there are two malls here. One is absolutely massive. Again, something you would expect in a much larger municipality.

• There's also an absolutely massive pawn shop, I guess because people need to pawn stuff to pay their medical bills?

• Despite having a pretty much captive audience of people who are either Mayo patients or their caregivers, there is essentially nothing to do here in terms of entertainment. One of the hotels has a comedy club, there's a few bars, some outside stuff that is not doable when it's this cold and that's about it. The county museum doesn't even open until next week. You would think this would be the perfect place to open up all sorts of entertainment venues. The closest city is Minneapolis and it's an 80-minute drive. Rochester isn't even on an interstate. And, of course, on top of that, there's the huge number of Mayo employees who are also stuck here. I don't get it. I would have expected the greater Rochester area to be a bunch of antique shops, tourist traps and "old timey" stores. Nope.

• There is a weird as hell fast food place here called Mochinut where they sell "donut" rings made out of mochi balls and also sell "rice hot dogs" covered in various shells. I'd be willing to try it if I was eating, but I've never heard of anything like it before.

Also, were you hoping for more stories about my crazy mother? Here you go:

• What she is and is not willing to pay for is weird as hell. She paid for this AirBnB, which I am grateful for, and she said she wanted to help with our medical debts, which I am super grateful for. On the other hand, she hasn't offered to pay for gas, she has not offered to pay for the occasional chai latte I get for myself, and outright said, "you'll have to pay for it yourself" when I picked up a replacement charge cable for my phone. And yet she happily bought me a not especially inexpensive Mexican mango drink in the aforementioned huge Mexican foods section at Walmart that looked good to me. I'm willing to pay for all of it myself if necessary, it's not that, I just totally don't understand what she is and is not willing to pay for. It feels like it's really random.

• The other day, she came into my room and said, "I wonder where the behavioral unit is?" I said I didn't know and that she should Google it. She said, "don't you have a map?" Yes. It's called Google Maps. This is 2024.

• Because the neurologist said he was leaning on the issue being behavioral, my mother (at least for a while, we think she's come around a little) decided that it is definitely behavioral and that we should just leave and find a behavioral therapist in Indiana. However, last night she said, "do you think it could be related to smell since you're smell-sensitive?" Then went back to it being behavioral for sure.

• Later, she decided to look up Mayo Clinic behavioral doctors and somehow got onto their clinic network page and started saying things like, "where the hell is Yuma? Is it close to Rochester?" This was after I told her that the Mayo Clinic's network is nationwide.

• Thank god my wife said I should Facetime her when we get in to see a doctor after we didn't think to do it the first time because I didn't realize just how bad her hearing and memory problems are. She just basically makes up things she decided she's heard the doctors say. This second time, I've had my wife to back me up on it.

• She told me yesterday the she was very disappointed with the Mayo system (due to the wait) and that she expected what would happen was I would get into an exam room and there would be a whole group of doctors there with different specialties who would all check me out at the same time. She keeps saying, "this is just like a regular hospital!" And I tell her, "yes, except that it has some of the best doctors in the country!" As if that wasn't a huge difference.

• Even though she has been told both by me and by Mayo employees that if they were going to contact me through the patient portal, I would get an email and even possibly a text message, she told me to check the portal every couple of hours on Thursday and Friday. On top of that, she wanted us to go over there yesterday because she seemed to think we could harass the admissions lady into getting the doctor to see us.

• Every so often, she has had to be talked down from the idea that the gastro department will never call us back, but then a few minutes ago, she told me she was going to contact the AirBnB people to see if it would be possible for us to leave next weekend instead of Wednesday. I believe what finally convinced her that I was going to stay as long as possible whether she wanted to be here or not was that my wife told her last night that if she took the train home to Indiana this weekend, my wife would drive an hour and a half from Terre Haute to pick her up in Indianapolis, drive an hour and a half down to Bloomington where she lives to drop her off and drive the 80 minutes back to our home in Terre Haute and I would just check into the cheapest motel. It really shouldn't have taken her almost a week to realize that I'm staying until I get answers or I absolutely have to leave.

Finally...

• This morning, she said to me, "I guess we can relax for the weekend." I don't think that's something she's capable of. We can't think of anything better to do on Easter Sunday here than go buy a jigsaw puzzle today for us to do tomorrow. I hope it doesn't end up in one of us killing the other over a missing piece. There are board games here, but the only one that looks good to her is Scrabble, and she is an evil Scrabble player who always wins through placing tiles in the most dickish ways she can, and the only one that looks good to me is Boggle and I am, not to toot my own horn, an amazingly good Boggle player who even kicked her ass in it when I was a teenager, so there wouldn't be a point.

End of super long post.

Can you tell I'm bored yet?

With the discussion of whether assisted dying should be allowed in Scotland befing brought up again, I was wondering what other people thought of the topic.

Do you think people should be allowed to choose when to end their own life?

What laws need to be put into place to prevent abuses in the system?

How do we account for people changing their mind or mental decline causing people to no longer be able to consent to a procedure they previously requested?

I went to the neurologist this morning and after all of his tests, he said he couldn't find anything neurological that could be wrong with me. He thought it might be behavioral, but that wouldn't explain the morning heaving. He sent all of my records back to the gastro doctor and we'll see what they say when they get back to us. So I'm kind of feeling a bit deflated.

Meanwhile, my mother is driving me insane to the point that I had a minor breakdown in the car while she was yelling at me. I had to repeat over and over that she needed to be quiet and she kept saying things like, “you have so many rules!” Finally, I said, '"these are the code words. If you hear me say the exact sentence, ‘you are making me anxious’ she had to be quiet and count to 30 in her head." She agreed. Angrily. She doesn’t find that reasonable.

She's also quite hard of hearing despite having hearing aids, so I'm having my wife sit in during these evaluations via Facetime so I can tell my mother "the doctor didn't say that" and have someone else agree. It still hasn't worked 100% of the time, but it has worked.

Also, every single time there is a possible diagnosis or she reads something that she thinks sounds like my symptoms (and she's always wrong about that), she decides that's definitely what I have and she definitely knows what should be done about it.

This time it's worse, because she was a psychotherapist and she actually knows a little about behavioral therapy. But I feel really bad for her clients, because they had a totally crazy lady for a therapist. And she kept some of them on for like a decade after she officially retired. They came to her house. So they actually liked whatever she did for them. All I can think is that she has a completely different personality as a therapist.

Oh, she also thinks that the dry heaving every morning is inconsequential and I should just accept that I'm going to have to live with it the rest of my life. What. The. Fuck?

I guess it's been so long since I've spent more than a few hours with her that I forgot how truly nuts she is. And a bit on the narcissistic side.

Edit: Ugh. This fucking guy again.