There are two bones in your lower leg. One’s big and buff and one’s pretty wimpy. When you walk, that big tibia takes ~80% of your weight of impact, and the fibula only has to take the remaining 20%.
But skaters place their weight differently over their feet. In principle a hockey player has 100% of their weight shifted forward onto their tibia.
You can actually see the implications of this in practice. If you break your fibula, 20% of the weight-bearing is gone, and you won’t really be able to walk. But a hockey player who cracks their fibula can and will keep skating almost without noticing something’s wrong. This happens pretty damn often when they block shots. You’ll see them skate easily over to get checked out, step up onto the hallway floor, and then suddenly slump over, with medical staff helping them limp off down the hallway.
I hear people saying, “oh, guess he’s fine!” when hockey players get up and appear to be skating okay: nah. And when a player wants to return to the ice: they may genuinely feel better skating but be too injured to walk.
And over time, if you’re in the weight-bearing position for skating more often than walking, and are skating from a young age, yes, that affects the shape of your weight-bearing bones and external appearance of your legs and feet. I don’t have a survey on hockey players’ shapely ankles compared to the normal population in front of me at the moment, but every single skater I see could be identified by their ankles
I thought this was going to be someone condescendingly explaining hockey to me but this is so informative and well written and I trust you with all my bones now.
Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.
I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.
That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.
I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.
My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”
He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.
Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.
I completely agree. Thank you for sharing this.
I didn’t know this and now that I do I am crying in relief.
choking on water is the worst because how do you stop choking? drink something? well ive got some bad news for you
Lean your head forward, preferably to knee level, and let the water kind of drain out of your mouth. When your are able to, take deep slow breaths. No heimlich maneuver or physical assists from somebody else should be used beyond this, otherwise you could vomit and escalate the issue. Its about keeping the larynx open. Hopefully this helps.
hey so it’s march now aka the beginning of endometriosis awareness month and i feel obligated to remind you that debilitatingly painful periods are not normal. if you or someone you know is ending up sick or bedridden every month, you are not crazy and deserve medical attention from someone who will take you seriously
hey it’s march again let’s get this post circulating again
Sure. I had to get a partial hysterectomy due to fucking Endometriosis at age 28. It’s a minor miracle that I have children at all because the symptoms were *immediately* apparent when my periods began at age 12, but they were ignored by my parents (who told me I was faking while I lay in bed crying from the pain) and ignored by most medical professionals until I self-diagnosed at age 23 and got back on the birth control. I STILL was only pro-diagnosed after my first c-section when they could see the evidence of it while yanking my first kid out of my womb. I still couldn’t get treated for it until after I’d had my second child, after which my uterus began eating itself due to the Endometriosis. Oh, and my fallopian tubes were backflooding with blood because of it, so those had to be yanked along with my uterus.
You know, in all those “humans are the creepy/fucked up alien species” posts I can’t believe we haven’t touched on organ donation yet.
When they heard that the human general had fallen ill to a disease of the organ known as the liver the troops began to hope that it might turn the tide of the war. Research indicated that such diseases could be fatal after all. The organ did something similar to the flagulaxin in that it filtered out toxins so when it stopped functioning the human would slowly be poisoned to death by his own body. Or so they believed.
But then he came back.
A foot soldier was captured and answers demanded. Was it a medication? Had the sickeness been a ruse to fool them?
“Nah, man. This kid on a motorcycle wiped out on the I9 freeway so they gave the general his liver since they were a match.”
“They…what?”
“They gave him his liver. The kid was dead, and he was an organ donor. And he was a genetic match to the general.”
“They…cut the liver out of one of your young and placed it in an elder and it…worked?”
“I mean, he wasn’t that young. Mid twenties or something. But yeah, that’s essentially it.”
The interrogator and his assistant both regurgitated their most recent meal and ran from the room. Living in places like the “Australia” were one thing, but taking the organs of dead bodies and placing them in the living? What was WRONG with this species?
No wait make it better. A living person can donate a piece of their liver! It doesn’t have to be a dead person.
“You killed one of your own to replace the broken part of the higher ranking human?”
“No of course only a small piece of a one was needed to replace the general’s bad one”
“Who got the bad one?”
“No one! it was thrown away”
“Someone, gave a piece of their organ to someone else to use??? And they both lived???”
“Yeah”
But what if the aliens were like salamanders who can naturally regenerate damaged body parts? And when they find out humans lack that ability they think “We have an advantage over them” then to their shock they discover that we’ve come up with work-arounds for that lack. Also prosthetic limbs. “Wait … You’re telling me that you can’t regrow your leg … So you just BUILD one?!”
Trying to describe a human to a species that had never met one was getting increasingly difficult. To start with, they seemed to exist in every possible state – solid, liquid, gas and crystaline. A core calcium infrastructure with a porous organic compound layered over it, through which fluid and gas travelled under the regulation of a range of organic pipework, pumps and processing plants, all coated in a renewable organic surface layer. That was weird enough.
Then came the discovery that the human was semi-modular. Component fluids could be swapped out and substituted – humanity had built some form of external versions of a range of the organic pumps and processors, and had manual, automatic and remotely operated variants of their core pump processor (the heart). Internal parts could be exchanged, or replaced with suitable originals. Something about needing genuine human compatible parts, known as donor organs, and the voluntary post-life nature of these donations seemed ineffective to many observer species, and postively horrifying to those who held the sanctity of the post-life body. Considering a fallen comrade as an accessible source of component parts was just beyond the pale, and to have an proactive harvesting regime was just unbelievable. What was wrong with these creatures that death should be rejected to such an extent that they would become hybrids of dead and living creatures? Did they think death would bypass them, thinking the component part they carried was already ticked off some post-life database, thus granting them an immunity card in the eternal island vote?
Weirdly though, these quasi-modular humans could not be assembled from component parts. Even the human histories, insofar as the human documentation systems were trustworthy, indicated that efforts to construct a modular human from parts, pieces and high voltage was deemed unwise, and mostly only suitable to be remembered in October in ritual costumes. That said, a human containing sufficient of their original parts could be restored from dead state with a sufficient electric discharge, leading many to suspect that the creatures existed in an energy state alongside their gas, liquid, solid, and crystal forms.
Then of course, was that very human approach to limb loss – construction of alternate limbs from non-human parts. Suffice to say, most sentient machine species are horrified by the process, and many machine worlds are refusing to acknowledge humans are real, and are starting to campaign against the continued discussion of these creatures as organic propaganda.
They may have a very valid point. These things make no sense from a design specification standpoint.
Poliomyelitis is a highly contagious disease that can cause paralysis
of legs, arms, and respiratory muscles. “The polio virus is a silver
bullet designed to kill specific parts of the brain,” Richard Bruno, a
clinical psychophysiologist, and director of the International Centre
for Polio Education said. “But parents today have no idea what polio was
like, so it’s hard to convince somebody that lives are at risk if they
don’t vaccinate.”
When Lillard was a child, polio was every
parent’s worst nightmare. The worst polio outbreak year in US history
took place in 1952, a year before Lillard was infected. There were about
58,000 reported cases. Out of all the cases, 21,269 were paralyzed and
3,145 died. “They closed theaters, swimming pools, families would keep
their kids away from other kids because of the fear of transmission,”
Bruno said.
Children under the age of five are especially susceptible. In the 1940s
and 1950s, hospitals across the country were filled with rows of iron
lungs that kept victims alive. Lillard recalls being in rooms packed
with metal tubes—especially when there were storms and all the men,
women, adults, and children would be moved to the same room so nurses
could manually operate the iron lungs if the power went out. “The period
of time that it took the nurse to get out of the chair, it seemed like
forever because you weren’t breathing,” Lillard said. “You just laid
there and you could feel your heart beating and it was just terrifying.
The only noise that you can make when you can’t breathe is clicking your
tongue. And that whole dark room just sounded like a big room full of
chickens just cluck-cluck-clucking. All the nurses were saying, ‘Just a
second, you’ll be breathing in just a second.’”
Nyquil fucks me up every time I take it and furthermore, has the audacity to make me forget what fucking happens every single time. Since taking it at about midnight last night, My day:
Woke up at 4-6 AM and apparently did the dishes
Fiance gets up at 8:00AM, allegedly has fully cognizant conversation with me about his plans to stay late and tutor classmates. I don’t remember even being awake.
at 9:32 AM, my Dad called me and i had a 23-minute phone call with him that I have no recollection of, but apparently I spent most of it discussing the merits and drawbacks of the various tablets my mother is interested in. I was mad about how expensive updating storage capacity was for most of them.
Felling way more sober than I actually am, attempt to drive to school at 10:12. and spend enough time confused why my keys aren’t working on my car that my neighbor actually comes out of his apartment to ask what I’m doing to his car. I decide to stay home.
10:40: Send emails to professors to tell them I’m in no shape to be in class. I think I am eloquent. Upon opening my email later I realize I’ve sent them emails with the subject line “fuckt up” and message: “sorry, love you.”
Benefits of going to a small college: they know I’ve got exciting drug reactions already and are sick as well and reply with “I understand and hope you are feeling well soon, here is today’s lecture slides” and “lol” respectively.
~11- 12:30 : Get lost in neighborhood walking dog. In my defense, it’s 99% off-beige generic prefab housing on nonlinear-bordering-on-noneuclidean streets and Charlie had no interest in going home either.
12:30-3:00: Wall
3:00 : phone alarm goes off and I suddenly realize fiance was supposed to be home an hour and a half ago. Fly into immediate panic, try to find phone to call him and/or the sherrif becuase he’s obviously dead in a ditch or something. I am holding my phone the whole time.
3:16 : Fiance gets home, I cry like a bitch, the dog also cries, everyone has a really bad 15 minutes.
3:33 : Realize I haven’t actually ate or drank yet today. Immediately consume a quart of apple cider and plate of taquitos. Make pork chops and potatoes and don’t stop talking about what happens if a werewolf has sex with a dog while shifted the entire time.
4:00: pass out on couch to the soothing sounds of Mario Oddesy
1AM: Why is it thursday?
The moral of the story is that you should always write down any drug reactions and label medication you should take with a large index card that says “DO NOT TAKE THIS IT FUCKS YOU UP THEN YOU FORGET” in large, friendly letters.
Everyone who loves this post as much as I do will be very happy to know these two amazing girls are still doing good and just celebrated their two year anniversary back in September. :3
Here’s a pic from Alana’s instagram.
CUTE~~~<3
A Second Much Needed Reblog Update:
This is a message from Alana to all those who love her story.
I am in tears holy SHIT this is so sweet and good and cute and it is so nice to see this on my feed cuz everything has been kinda shitty but this… This is sweet.
12+ hours: hell yes. decadence has a name and it is ME. the dream. im marrying my bed you’re invited to the wedding. i might feel groggy and angry for the rest of the day when i actually do get up but WORTH IT.
12+ hours (ALTERNATE): i am deeply clinically depressed and approximately three (3) inches from death at any given moment
11-10 hours: ideal. im functioning at perfect 100% capacity my body and mind are a well oiled machine. im ready to knock out all my errands and chores in under an hour, work a full day and then study that language im trying to learn
9 hours: good! i could have slept longer, but getting up was no great horrifying trauma either
8-7 hours: the “””””medically recommended amount””””” for adults, but in reality more like a “fine, i GUESS” amount. normal mild levels of angst at having to get out of bed
6 hours: silent unceasing internal groaning for at least the first hour after waking. dont expect any kind of quality conversation for the first 2 or so hours. ive got a Less Than Medically Recommended Amount Of Sleep, that means im a martyr right???
5 hours: pretty unpleasant. feels gross. expect a moderate crash during the late afternoon. this is the first number that is considered worthy of entry in a college student sleep-measuring contest. altho if you try to enter with 5 hrs dead-eyed hordes will instantly materialize from the bushes and one-up you “5 hours??? HAHA SWEET SUMMER CHILD. I HAVENT SLEPT IN 3 YEARS”
4 hours: a Very Poor Decision. deep seated, incoherent rage upon waking that persists up to several hours. consume large amounts of your stimulant of choice, but you’ll still feel like a cave troll. constant aftertaste of chemicals and regret
3 hours: half awake half walking in some astral plane haunted by the wails of the newly-dead. children and animals fear the emptiness in your vacant eyes. a very respectable entry to any sleep-measuring contest. you’ll still get beaten by the “2 hour” and “all nighter” people, but everyone knows this is Bad
2 hours: you can get up, but only by rending your soul from your physical body in a paroxysm of agony, since it will refuse to leave the bed. you are now soulless and will feel absolutely zero emotion until sometime in the late afternoon/early evening when your soul returns and ALL the emotions will hit at once, leaving you alternately sobbing or creepily hyena laughing
1 hour: you fool. you imbecile. your hubris and weakness has brought you to this point. they are coming. you cannot escape. why didnt you just stay awake. why didnt you just pull the all-nighter. the strength of your no-sleep headache threatens to stab through your skull like an ice pick. all you can taste is blood. they are comi
0 hours: THIS ACTUALLY ISNT AS BAD. HAHA I’M NOT EVEN THAT TIRED! WATCH ME DOWN 15 MOUNTAIN DEWS IN 15 MINUTES. I CAN FEEL MY HEART BEATING IN MY EARS ISNT THAT WEIRD. WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY EYES ARE BLOODSHOT AND I CANT FOCUS, IM COMPLETELY NORMAL RIGHT NOW. GUYS I CAN HEAR COLORS.