• Member Since 4th Sep, 2015
  • offline last seen 15 minutes ago

DivinePanzer


Wanna be Hero, Like my idol Zero

More Blog Posts9

  • 383 weeks
    Why must life be so hard?

    $2000 isn't even enough to live for 3 months?! What the bumfuck?

    So I borrowed another 2k off my life insurance, because why not? I figured that plus the $500 I get for being disability would at least get me started. I've only seriously started looking for apartments in the last few days, but I'm already worried. Worriedly so.

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    1 comments · 496 views
  • 410 weeks
    Season 6, the Crystal Heart, No such thing as canon

    So I doubt I will ever pen the self insert I have in my head, because, well, it is a self insert, I daresay everyone thinks of it, and it would be too personal and unpopular to be worth it. OTOH there may be enough interesting things I could do with it...

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    0 comments · 310 views
  • 414 weeks
    Mega Man Zero Crossover?

    DestrinBriar's Blade of the Void is one of my favorite fics ever. X was cool, but Zero had more personality. The body design in the MMZ series was kinda hit or miss to me, until they started showing some art(Or fans made their own). But the music! OH THE MUSIC!

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    2 comments · 341 views
  • 414 weeks
    My last romance I swear!

    So.

    They say write what you know. I don't know romance. Sure, I've had crushes, but that's all physical, and my mind is a black box.

    Seriously, I open the freezer to try and decide what I want to eat, but it's like I feed parameters into a box and it deliberates and sends the answer back. My decision making process...isn't.

    Maybe a Magic 8 Ball would be a better comparison.

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    0 comments · 281 views
  • 414 weeks
    Why I hate my body

    I have Genetically Predisposed Dystonia. At least that's what Mayo Clinic says, and I'm inclined to believe them. How it's different from Parkinson's and Cerebral Palsy I doubt I will ever really understand. Maybe for the same reason I doubt really understand the difference between Cyan, Blue-green, Turquoise, Teal, etc...

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    6 comments · 322 views
Apr
19th
2016

Why I hate my body · 11:24pm Apr 19th, 2016

I have Genetically Predisposed Dystonia. At least that's what Mayo Clinic says, and I'm inclined to believe them. How it's different from Parkinson's and Cerebral Palsy I doubt I will ever really understand. Maybe for the same reason I doubt really understand the difference between Cyan, Blue-green, Turquoise, Teal, etc...


ANYWAY!, my brain is overactive and sends movement orders to certain muscle groups, causing them to constantly spasm. Least it's not quite as bad as my mothers. She has the dubious honor of being the only person, at least as of the early 90's, to have all four types:arms, legs, neck/torso, and voice. She, well at least she USED to get Botox injected into her neck (I stopped talking to her) to alleviate some of the movement and improve her voice. How it helps, or how dystonia affects the voice I don't know; my sister and I found her HARDER to understand after her injections, thanks to it killing her voice to a whisper.

Botox, or Botulism Toxin if you prefer, works by eating the nerve ending at the injections site, regrowing after about 3 months. I'll get back to that.


Way back in 3rd grade is when my first symptoms started appearing. My left hand would twitch outward towards the pinkie, mom took me down to Mayo, I remember a blood test but the results came back negative for GPD(I guess the human genome isn't fully mapped or understood yet.) As this is when my memories start being somewhat clear I 'm not sure if Mom became a bitch out of guilt, or if she always was.

In middle school it began affecting my left leg, twisting the ankle and my toes in. They tried botox a few times, which sucked as the target muscle was the one in between the shin bones, right in the center. Somewhere along the line it started affecting my right hand, but as I'm right hand dominant it's not noticeable until I try and do something dextrous like putting a computer together.

In high school my grandmother had surgery for something, and mentioned me to her doctor., who then thought he could help correct my gait. I will always remember that pre-op appointment. "I will slice your [front] muscle in half, take this half{left if you were facing me} and reattach it over here [outside of my foot].Then while we're in there, we'll chop off your heel, slide it over a few millimeters and screw it back on." it didn't help much, though whether it was because of the surgery itself or me not taking PT seriously...

In college I managed to get fired from McDonald's. It was shortly after that that my friends noticed that my head was drifting off towards my left shoulder. In a few years, it was bad enough(with a few other issues contributing) that i was semi seriously considering suicide by my 26th birthday.

My left ear was almost glued to my shoulder. My torso was twisting and contorting heavily; several times jerking forward enough to headdesk while i was at the computer. It was getting bad enough that I could no longer immerse myself in whatever game I was playing. I had stopped reading books entirely as it was both too difficult to get comfortable and I would keep losing my place thanks to the head jerking. I was denied disability, lived with my father, had no prospects, hd to quit my job, and was generally miserable.

My mother's doctor had mentioned a surgery to her, though he had scared her with how he emphasized the risk of brain bleed and/or damage. That was a non issue for me when she mentioned it to me, and thanks to the ACA I had insurance under my father. Course, by this point it was early June, and I'd hit 26, and get kicked off, in November so we had to scramble to get all the paperwork and appointments scheduled and done.

We live about 3.5 hours away from the Mayo Clinic, and given that my appointments were spread over 3-4 days we stayed in a hotel. There was a nurses meeting, a pysch eval, speech test, a memory or IQ test for a baseline if they needed to measure any change after, and one or two others that I'm forgetting. The psych eval was kinda....fail. The doctor I was SUPPOSED to see was sick so they called to reschedule. My house. That was 4 hours away. I had had another appointment in the morning and rather than head back to the hotel we saw a movie.
Luckily they found another, who sussed out I was depressed, but if they gleaned I was suicidal nothing was mentioned in my paperwork that I got.

This is why I bought a smartphone once I got home.

Anyway, I had a video taken of when I walked down a hallway that they showed me post op. I was more disturbed by the fact that I have a very sparse, almost bald spot on the back of my head than I was that my head had been parallel to the ground.

I was so focused on the benefits(or dying, either way would have been an improvement) that it wasn't until I was on the gurney being wheeled to the operating room that I fully realized I was having brain surgery! They implanted 2 electrodes into a very specific part of the brain, with leads subdermally going from the top of my skull to my left shoulder where the battery is. Electrodes and the battery was 2 surgeries, that they've since combined into one.

So I basically have a pacemaker for my brain. My friend told me repeatedly at his birthday party how excited he was, as he had always wanted a "cyborg buddy." I made a fool of myself too, yay Long Islands!

Last October my mother had the same thing done. I have repeatedly accused her of using me as a guinea pig.

Fun and games don't stop there however. There are 2 types of batteries:Standard and rechargeable. Like a Bahamut damn fool I let myself be convinced to go with a standard battery, as the nurse and my mother thought the rechargeable would be too high maintenance. Also, it was twice as expensive as a standard.

For other patients who don't use a lot of voltage, a standard can last 3-5 years, while a rechargeable lasts 7-9. Dystonia patients need constant therapy and usually a higher voltage to boot. so theirs last 1-3 years.

Mine lasted 14 months. And with the chicanery that is insurance in the USA, it died by the time it could be replaced.

Mother learned from my example and got a rechargeable as well. Huh, she CAN learn maths.

The nurses and doctors have given me conflicting reports on what happens if the battery completely discharges:It will need to be replaced after 1 complete discharge. It can take 3 before needing to be replaced. So I just don't let it go below 25%, which equates to charging it every 3-5 days.



AND THAT'S WHY I DON'T WANT TO GO TO EQUESTRIA!

Comments ( 6 )

This makes me wonder about what sort of recognition that receivers of new and interesting medical technology should have. I've hurt myself before, we all have, and we're really lucky that people in the past took the time to learn about the human body, and document their findings so that trained experts could treat us.

I guess I've never considered this before, but while being a researcher is very prestigious, with good reasons, a researcher is not much of a researcher without specimen. Some kudos has to go to the subjects. I'm not sure if this 'cerebral pacemaker' is old hat or new shiny in the medical community, but thank you for helping people of the future :twilightsmile:

As for Equestria; maybe you'd end up a unicorn, and this condition relocates to your horn, which translates into having powerful, but wild and uncontrollable magic. That's an adventure-hook! :pinkiehappy:

3883291 I think it's been use for Essential Tremor patients since the 90's;how widespread it's become since then I couldn't tell you.

I did ask, because it REALLY didn't make sense to me how introducing MORE electricity to an overactive brain would help rather than hinder, well, everything. They flat out admitted that they didn't know, just that it did help.

There was a piece on the news in Minnesota about 5 year ago now? Showed a world-class violinist going to Mayo to get DBS to control the movements of his Essential Tremor of his hands. I think they had him play in the Operating Room. Made me happy I had dystonia;since my head and torso move so much I got to be unconscious for it all.

Generally for DBS they want to make sure get the best results so you're awake in a BIG FUCKING METAL HALO as they position the leads.


On the one hand, yes research is expensive and can eventually save lives. On the other hand medicine has just gotten so expensive, that you now NEED insurance to afford anything more than a checkup.

I'm just waiting for superAIDS;Have you ever read Orson Scott Card's Ender quartet? In that there is a planet whose population with a intelligence gene which has been tuned in such a away that 99% of the planets geniuses have OCD. Another planet has a genetically modified super virus that loves to try anything to evolve creature and is generally lethal. They take this virus and the one genius whose doesn't have OCD to make something that will very quickly rewrite planets A genetic code; ridding them of OCD with the cells being changed quickly enough that rejection(and thus death) doesn't really occur.


I'm not sure if I would want to become a pony, given that the magic might not play well with implanted medical devices like mine. I guess it depends on if they need to remove arrowheads and the like from patients before magic surgery.

3883549 Well, luckily for me, I think I'm covered if I get sick.

As for becoming a pony: Well, it would be your own headcanon (funnily appropriate word, there :twilightsheepish:) which would determine how implants in the head affect magic.

3884282 It's more like 'As the transformation spell reshapes my head, will the bits of metals stir my brain into a slurry? Will my battery explode under pressure and dump lethal amounts of lithium and other bad chemicals into my bloodstream?'

Luckily, I do have a solution(maybe)! It's even canon! Inspired in part by http://www.fimfiction.net/story/187407/my-incredibly-convoluted-life-as-a-changeling-monarch and how noone can turn Sunset into a pony,(Main character is a human-turned-changling, kills Chrsyalis, hive helped him keep his sanity for a while. I forgot why exactly he broke down, but he asks Celestia if she's real, spends a week trying and failing to convince him, so she ends up draging him to the EQG verse. They stay as ponies and Celestia feels guilty and brings Sunset back to Ponyland. Since they didn't go through the portal, she's still human.) VAPORIZATION! Forcibly convert the body's current mass top energy trap the soul, either in your body or a crystal for a time, use the energy to build a new body from scratch, dump soul back in!

Easy Peasy!

3884367 If you wish. It'd be quick and easy to write, too. Can't say I followed the other paragraph, possibly since I hadn't read that story yet, but it sounds fairly intriguing.

3884496 It is a sequel, the guy does get pretty angsty, but it does have a very powerful line aimed at Rainbow that resonates with me.

Basically my solution subscribes to the idea that the Elements disintegrated Twilight, killing her in such a way that she went to a special part of the AEtherial Realm where Celestia retrieved her and made a new body for her.

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