Been thinking a lot about emotional labor & boundaries & being taken for granted & how happy a looooooot of ppl are to just sit back & let *someone else* (me, for this particular sitch) do all the work.

I'm doing this shit all by myself. & I can't do it anymore today bc of my back - I'm now in a ton of pain, about 7/10 on the pain scale. & I'm doing it ALONE.

I am SO. FUCKING. TIRED. of doing shit like this alone.

I also tried to do a bit of decorating tho'. Like put up holiday lights & some stuff like that. & already got food prep done. & had a 3-hour IOP session. & my back just went out. & the front toilet plugged up & I don't know why, there wasn't a damn thing in there.

Yeah, I'm sick of doing shit alone.

That's out of left field. The basics: I'm here at a family home putting the place together for a belated Xmas dinner. Nothing hard, not too many people, so that's OK, it's not like a party for 40 people or something.

@Victor I have it. My mother has it. My sister has it...

Seriously, our sarcasm is an intergenerational family tradition, passed down exclusively through the female line.

There needs to be a word that describes sarcasm, but extra. Like when you put snark in there too & just go over the top with it.

Snarkasm. Yeah, like that. So extra you get off on it, even.

Dunno if it'd work for everybody in pain, probably not, & probably ppl who do use it get varying results. It's sure helping me tho'. Two thumbs up.

Seems to help if I turn the unit on at the highest level I can tolerate w/o it stinging a bit, & leaving it on for about 30 minutes at a stretch, varying the mode. That seems to relieve pain for up to a few hours w/o the need for medication.

I have a disc protrusion at L5-S1 that's generally inflamed & sometimes presses on nerves nearby. My entire back aches constantly from the muscles tightening up to protect the area. I've had a hard time accessing PT & massage (tho' just got a new referral, so keep your fingers crossed) & don't exercise much bc I'm exhausted all the time, so this is a big deal.

I did a bunch of poking around on PubMed and stuff before I picked it up, to get some idea of how effective they are & for what kinds of pain. So far the unit has consistently dropped my pain level from about a constant 4-5/10 to a 1-2 level dull ache. I can actually *function*.

I picked up a TENS unit to see if it'd help with my lower back pain and holy yowza. This thing is *great*.

I made coffee this morning. It tastes of cigarettes and despair. Perfect for a morning in the foggy woods.

This is a big deal. It's an even bigger deal if it impacts a patient. This is why medical facilities of all kinds are regulated up the wazoo: to try to prevent and solve problems.

I work for a hospital & we go over safety procedures again & again & again, because engineering failures happen for the same reasons why healthcare failures happen: multiple points of failure all add up until something collapses.

@MidnightRider Definitely. My heart aches for Allan McDonald, who tried so damn hard to delay the launch and couldn't.

@MidnightRider LOLSOB yeah unfortunately, that happens way too often. They definitely had go fever for that one.

Or, rather, it isn't down to human *negligence* or carelessness. Sometimes it is, definitely. A lot of times, it isn't. And it's interesting to me to see how often the solution to an engineering problem is to *over*-engineer the new structure. Like, figure out how tough the environment will be on the structure, then make it 5x or 10x stronger than it needs to be.

And when something fails, it isn't always down to human error: sometimes it really is that the humans who built something *just didn't know* that the materials weren't suited to the environment, or that a sexy new design wasn't going to cut it at a particular location.

Not every engineering failure ends in deaths, but plenty do; and even when there aren't deaths, there are often serious injuries, and of course the destruction of materials, structures, and building equipment (like cranes or tugboats or barges, etc.). Hence the saying about policy being written in blood: all too often, people have to die before something is made truly safe.

...design ideas that seem good at the time, but then environmental pressures prove more than the design itself can handle, changes made to a structure while it's under construction that aren't properly documented... lots of reasons, really. And of course, every safety policy is written in blood.