3, 35 and 40 for the book ask :)
3. Already answered!
35. What do you think of Ebooks?
Mixed feelings. I much prefer physical copies of books. However, I am a book borrower not a book buyer and my library is extremely slow at getting new books, especially more obscure books not originally published in the UK, if it gets them at all. And then there's a really long waiting list. So I see online there's a new diverse romance come out I want to read - chances of my library getting anytime soon are practically nil. I started borrowing or buying ebooks which are cheaper and reading on my phone - not a lot but enough that I finally bought a Kindle last month. Do I feel good supporting Amazon? No. But it did seem like the best way to be able to read certain books and I was getting tired of reading a lot on my phone - a Kindle has better visibility. I can also see the benefits when travelling. Don't worry though - 90% of what I read is still paperbacks. If I had a choice I'd always go for that.
40. Has there ever been a book you wish you could un-read?
Yes, actually. Two spring to mind, both from my childhood. The first was a totally age-appropriate story about a boy, possibly called Luke, whose brother had leukemia. It was one of those children/YA (I guess it would be Middle Grade these days) books with a Worthy Theme that Kids Might Relate To to Help Them With Difficult Stuff. Not my sort of book even then but for some reason I got hold of it. It really, really upset me. I started becoming terrified of getting cancer, of someone I loved getting cancer, of dying, of loved ones dying...
The second was a biography of the cellist Jaqueline du Pre that my uncle bought me as a present when I was 10. My uncle has a habit of misjudging presents but I didn't know that and while this wasn't a kid's book, I guess it looked innocuous enough. This may seem totally different to the above book but it really isn't. Du Pre developed the condition of MS and the biography went into detail about her condition and its effect on her life including her sex life (which I found morbidly fascinating without really understanding it) and eventually her decline and death. Like the above book, this absolutely grabbed me and obsessed me and scared me.
Basically, I cannot engage with fiction that deals with terminal illness, especially cancer. I just can't. I can't watch medical dramas - I can't even deal with Call the Midwife! To this day I will not read any book that has this kind of plotline or theme. All through my teenage years, I refused to read any book that didn't have a happy ending. It was only when studying Greek forced me to engage with Greek tragedy that I started to let in a couple of "sad stories". Even now I will always take happy endings over sad ones, I avoid angst and I never touch misery porn stories. I can deal with the genre of Tragedy (as in Greek or Shakespeare) because it is not so much sad as inevitable, if you get the difference. Chekhov is on a very thin line. In real life too I find terminal illness, hospitals, doctors really awful, more than is normal, I think. A lot of my friends at school wanted to become doctors - I would do literally any other career. It's my nightmare. Whether my horror of these things came before these two books or not I don't know, but I do remember they had a really profound and negative effect on me and I really wish I hadn't read them at that point in my life.
3 notes
·
View notes
How do you get in the mood or mindset to write all these AWTR headcanons?
Honestly getting into the mood or mindset is never really the issue for me, it's getting out of it that's the problem 🥴 when I get on a tear for a specific fic usually that's the Only fic I'll think about for like the rest of the day or next few days, cuz my brain wants to build and build on the story and create scenes and pull it all apart to look at everything in it and blegh. Yeah. And with as heavy as AWTR has been (especially more so even in my head cuz that's all uncut stuff and full hd picture scenarios playing out 😅) I've had to take a break for a min and write something lighter. So yesterday and the day before I worked a little on Medusa au, cuz those two idiots are eventually just Soft and in wove 🥹
10 notes
·
View notes
got tagged a while ago now by @swanfey to list 10 songs i have on repeat at the moment, i'm finally feeling okay enough to listen to music again so i can actually do this now :'D
(that being said, unfortunately bc i went a few weeks without listening to much, some of these songs are the same as the music tag meme i did back in late april oops)
Ruby with the Sharpest Lies - Des Rocs (literally just discovered that one last night and i know it's gonna be on repeat for a while lmao)
The Magic 8 - Set It Off
The King and Queen of Gasoline - Hot Milk
LITTLE ONE - Animal Sun
Hot Mess - Friday Pilots Club
What You Wanted - Shinedown
Sweet Talk - Saint Motel
SHUT UP - Hayes Warner
My Stupid Heart - Walk off the Earth
literally Burn the Ballroom's entire discography lol
i'm writing this at 1 am so unfortunately no brainpower to tag others sorry ;v; but anyone is welcome to do it if it tickles your fancy, tag me and i'll check out the songs you post!
6 notes
·
View notes
october 10 or 11, 2023
right now my spit is sticky
and i want to revel in it:
let it pool in the front of my mouth
and wash it around to coat my tongue
in sticky, dehydrated spit.
we are driving to the hospital.
they will pump me full of fluids
and antibiotics and my spit
will not be sticky again
for two weeks, maybe three.
i think sometimes it would have been easier if i had just died
back in februray when this was still new
and my blast count was up near 90%
i’d live easier in memory
than in sticky spit
and hospital calls.
2 notes
·
View notes
The study of leukemia had been mired in confusion and despair ever since its discovery. On March 19. 1845, a Scottish physician, John Bennett, had described an unusual case, a twenty-eight-year-old slate layer with a mysterious swelling in his spleen. “He is of dark complexion,” Bennett wrote of his patient, “usually healthy and temperate; [he] states that twenty months ago, he was affected with great listlessness on exertion, which has continued to this time. In June last he noticed a tumor in the left side of his abdomen which has gradually increased in size till four months since, when it became stationary.”
The slate-layer's tumor might have reached its final, stationary point, but his constitutional troubles only accelerated. Over the next few weeks, Bennett's patient spiraled from symptom to symptom – fevers, flashes of bleeding, sudden fits of abdominal pain – gradually at first, then on a tighter, faster arc, careening from one bout to another. Soon the slate-layer was on the verge of death with more swollen tumors sprouting in his armpits, his groin, and his neck. He was treated with the customary leeches and purging, but to no avail. At the autopsy a few weeks later, Bennett was convinced that he had found the reason behind the symptoms. His patient's blood was chock-full of white blood cells. (White blood cells, the principal constituent of pus, typically signal the response to an infection, and Bennett reasoned that the slate-layer had succumbed to one.) “The following case seems to me particularly valuable,” he wrote self-assuredly, “as it will serve to demonstrate the existence of true pus, formed universally within the vascular system.”
It would have been a perfectly satisfactory explanation except that Bennett could not find a source for the pus. During the necropsy, he pored carefully through the body, combing the tissues and organs for signs of an abscess or wound. But no other stigmata of infection were to be found. The blood had apparently spoiled – suppurated – of its own will, combused spontaneously into true pus. “A suppuration of blood,” Bennett called his case. And he left it at that.
Bennett was wrong, of course, about his spontaneous “suppuration” of blood. A little over four months after Bennett had described the slater's illness, a twenty-four-year-old German researcher, Rudolf Virchow, independently published a case report with striking similarity to Bennett's case. Virchow's patient was a cook in her midfifties. White cells had explosively overgrown her blood, forming dense and pulpy pools in her spleen. At her autopsy, pathologists had likely not even needed a microscope to distinguish the thick, milky layer of white cells floating above the red.
Virchow, who knew of Bennett's case, couldn't bring himself to believe Bennett's theory. Blood, Virchow argued, had no reason to transform impetuously into anything. Moreover, the unusual symptoms bothered him: What of the massively enlarged spleen? Or the absence of any wound or source of pus in the body? Virchow began to wonder if the blood itself was abnormal. Unable to find a unifying explanation for it, and seeking a name for this condition, Virchow ultimately settled for weisses Blut – white blood – no more than a literal description of the millions of white cells he had seen under his microscope. In 1847, he changed the name to the more academic-sounding “leukemia” – from leukos, the Greek word for “white”.
— The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
3 notes
·
View notes