My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old. Here’s my impressions so far:
Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal. Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.
Age 1 - 2: Hates you. Hates you so much. You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them. There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.
Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe. Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them. Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.
Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually. I did not realize kids were this cool. Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn. Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”
Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable. Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other. At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult. Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers. (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)
Age 15 - 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience. Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care. Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there. At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny. And they’ll want one. Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.
This is also a pretty excellent guide to writing kids of various ages
Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific
This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.
Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.
I’ve only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It’s hard to even put it into words. It’s not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.
Especially if you have anxiety you’ll know the difference honestly. It’s so much worse. It’s every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there’s something horribly wrong in a way you’ve never felt. It’s your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.
I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.
This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.
Seconding the above : I was going into shock from internal bleeding, and that sense of “something is gravely wrong” was entirely different from my day-to-day whirlwind of anxiety.
For me, it was very quiet. For me, there was a deep sense that I could just lie down on the floor and not have to ever get up again, no effort required.
That combined wrongness/relief was so weird and so unsettling that I drove myself to the ER.
The “impending” part is really key to that symptom, I think, based on my experience. It’s not the existential dread of late-stage capitalism grinding the world into nurdles. It’s a ghost crow on your shoulder whispering “it’s here, it’s now.”
Impending doom is also a feature of anaphylaxis, something I’m intimately familiar with as someone with mast cell dysfunction.
For me, its the overwhelming, near calm certainty of doom that distinguishes it from the jittery panic of “but something could go wrong.”
There’s no “what if?” There’s no room to question it. It just IS. And it’s very different from the “calm” of disassociation too. I’m not disassociated from myself when it happens. I’m probably actually the most present ever.
I’ve turned to doctors and told them calmly and with utter certainty “I am going to die” and the reaction that calm certainty gets is immediate intervention because doctors also recognize that stillness as the body not bothering to waste any time on fight or flight and just going straight to “death is imminent due to some internal failing, act accordingly.”
Talking meaning chatting online, interacting irl, or even exchanging one or two messages. I just want to see how much tumblr users actually talk to each other!
@lgbtqcreators creator meme: [5/8] lgbtq+ celebs “I had to free my own mind of what, at that time, what I felt like masculine adrogynous energy looks like. I was living in my own binary, and I was like there’s no way that I can be androgynous with bigger boobs now. How I feel inside is the thing that I needed to work through.” — JANELLEMONÁE
Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you’ve ever met. it doesn’t have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don’t know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.
Just a reminder my blog is trans inclusive. It’s bi inclusive. It is pan inclusive. It is intersex inclusive. It is ace/asexual inclusive. It is aro/aromantic inclusive. It is queer inclusive.
I don’t support terfs or exclusionists.
If you came here looking for an ally in your bigotry you came to the wrong blog. Go away. You are not welcome here.
One advantage of not really having a strong sense of gender identity is that you’re very [shrug emoji] about how people gender you. Sometimes people call me by she/her pronouns and sometimes they go with he/him pronouns and on the internet people often default to they/them, and neither option is entirely right but also, fuck if I know what would be right, and I don’t particularly care. Therefore I’m perfectly happy to outsource my gender identity to the people around me who actually need to figure out which box to put me in. I don’t need to talk about myself in third person, so really my pronouns sound like a you problem.
My pronouns are I/me and the rest is for someone else to deal with because I have better things to do.
Very fond of macrolabels, like “queer”, that provide zero extra information. Is it genderqueer? Is it romantic/sexual orientation queer? Is it queer as in “none of your fucking business what’s in my pants and what I do with it and with whom”?
This is actually probably the first time I’ve ever read something that accurately describes my relationship with gender–ie, ‘my gender is me and my pronouns are a you problem’–so thank you for that!
Actually I’ve already processed all five stages of grief in regards to a beloved author from my childhood very publicly making the jump from “milquetoast liberal with unexamined biases” to “actively dangerous bigot who will double down into perpetuity” and will no longer be basing any part of my identity on her intellectual property! Thanks for asking!
