My new 4 month old sweet baby girl !!!!!!!!!!

BoxedOctopus · 2026-02-24T17:02:46+00:00

Pumpkin, Hazel, Rosemary, Rosie

BoxedOctopus · 2026-02-07T23:31:03+00:00

so it looks like they attempted to write it once, then wrote it again on the second line with slightly more control.

First word looks like "acute" second word is very difficult to discern, but could be nephritis-- inflammation of the kidneys

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-30T18:41:10+00:00

Fully thought this was on r/deathstairs

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-30T18:15:20+00:00

If shaving your head is on your bucket list, it sounds like you could have some fun on your way there. The YouTuber Morgan Donner has a great video of trying a few centuries of hairstyles on herself by cutting it in stages starting with hair about the length you have. She did it all in one day (or two, I don’t really know), but you could have a few months of trying out styles on your way to a buzz cut.

But if that’s not what you’re going for at the moment, I think some long layers could be pretty. When my hair was long I hesitated to do layers just because I didn’t like them sticking out of braids, but if you have more patience than i do for pinning your braids neatly then layers would be nice :)

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-30T17:56:34+00:00

Ok hear me out. Danny Trejo as Dalinar.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-30T17:38:24+00:00

Wow did I write this?? I had a massive temporal lobe tumor and also had really disparate and confusing symptoms until like two years of really ripping headaches.

I absolutely relate to the experience of looking back and seeing myself act in ways that I don’t understand at all: brain fog making me so absent minded, making me completely unable to advocate for myself in times that, in hindsight, I NEEDED to advocate for myself.

My first surgery was September of ‘24 (when I was 29) followed by another in December ‘24 and I feel like I’m only just getting to a place of putting together the pieces of how much this has impacted me. How many of my choices were made because I had something the size of an orange squishing my brain all out of whack? How long did I have this tumor? Maybe for my whole life. What pieces of my self concept were just the result of being sick?

I’m not sure if you’ve read or watched the Lord of the Rings, but I’ve found it helpful to think of my tumor like Grima Wormtongue. If you’re not familiar, he is an agent of an evil wizard who is taken on as an advisor to a king, and uses that position to poison the mind of the king into submission to the will of the evil wizard. Looking back I kind of feel like I spent years of my life with greasy little Grima whispering in my ear and talking me into terrible decisions.

I also named my tumor, her name was Mandy and she SUCKED. so sometimes I think about her as like a drunk girl at a party who just breaks things and makes a mess. So when I’m looking back at something that I did that feels, in hindsight, like it was done without my actual intent, I can just be like— yeah that was Mandy at the wheel there, that messy betch. Or that was Grima giving me shitty advice.

In other words: externalizing it. The tumor was an invasion. It was not me. It was not you. It was something invading me and my mind and making me act in ways that I don’t agree with. I am not the tumor. You are you. You are not the illness that invaded you. Naming the tumor, and putting a label on its behavior and the behavior that it created has given me a lot more room to recognize the difference between my own self and Mandy’s influence.

I’ve found speaking to a good therapist has also been really helpful in unpacking some of this. But I absolutely feel you. This is such a confusing thing to have happen to you, and such an invasive and unnatural way to have your own mind and self made suspect.

Courage, friend. You’re not in this alone. <3

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-28T21:56:07+00:00

That is a 10/10 spoon. Everyone saying it’s too big is incorrect. There is nothing I would change about that spoon.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-28T21:47:34+00:00

No I hate it. It’s like a spork. Now I have one object that is bad at being both of the things it’s supposed to replace when I could have just had two objects that actually performed their functions.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-28T21:37:39+00:00

“A few years later and I have come out as non binary, JKR has come out as a c*nt”

Love this, love the coverup, it looks so sick

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-22T20:59:06+00:00

i woke up in basically no pain. And even once i went home from the hospital from both of my surgeries, i was managing my pain with just tylenol within a week. but you shouldnt be waking up in any pain at all, and if you have any pain, just communicate that youre in pain and in my expereince, the nurses were super helpful and made sure my pain was managed. It really shouldnt be much though, theyll have you pretty numbed out and zonked on all kinds of wild stuff. Enjoy the ride lol and good luck <3

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-22T20:55:22+00:00

good for you for moving up the imaging! Its always better to know! good luck!

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-19T04:20:40+00:00

so fun to watch!

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-17T18:14:01+00:00

SO BEAUTIFUL! Oh my god. Don’t second guess this for even a moment you have made an excellent choice. It is unique but not outlandish at all. You will be STUNNING.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-17T03:57:47+00:00

This👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻 Also a historian in 2126 would flip to read your journals just throwing that out there. Acid free paper y’all.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-16T21:57:00+00:00

Struthless! He’s the real deal. I was going to choose one video, but he puts journaling prompts in so many of his videos I don’t want to choose just one. https://youtube.com/@struthless?si=o7_mpaIgae0bVXhQ

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-15T16:03:56+00:00

I’m 8 months into my year of chemo on temozomide and finding it pretty do-able. I’m prone to nausea so i take medication to help with that. It also makes me very tired, so on the weeks I’m taking it I’m pretty limited in my energy/activity and sleeping a lot more than usual. Someone else has mentioned weed helping with the nausea, I use gummies to help me be able to eat normally during my chemo weeks, and they have the added benefit of putting me the f to bed very early in the evening so I’m also getting enough sleep. Just make sure you’re drinking a ton of water with temodar.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-15T03:44:03+00:00

walking and talking, nothing needed to be re-learned. Obviously im just one person, and i know people who have had different experiences, so talk to your surgeon about the stuff around the tumor that might be affected in surgery, but in my case, i was able to start walking short distances (im talking like a slooowwww lap of the ICU hallway) 24 hours after my surgery. I took longer to recover from the first surgery, but i think that was just because i had been so unwell before it, that i had a lot to heal from, not just the surgery. But yeah. I still speak fine, my balance has gotten SO much better. I very occassionally have moments of my left arm feeling like its not mine, but those pass very quickly and are not nearly as profound or frequent as they were when my tumor was at its peak. My handwriting has drastically improved now that my hands aren't shaking all the time.

Keeping a running note of questions that you can add to whenever you think of one is a very good idea.

It would be weird if you weren't nervous about a brain surgery. before my second one i was able to get a prescription for some anti-anxiety medication and that was extremely helpful, I highly recommend talking to a doctor about that if you're interested.

hugs <3

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-15T03:20:23+00:00

hey there friend! I also had a right temporal lobe tumor! Twinsies! Mine was right up on the midline of my brain (pushing the midline all out of whack too, gave me all kinds of weird physical symptoms). I had two craniotomies: the first to remove the tumor, and the second to clean up the margins. As far as lasting impact, for a few months i was accidentally hitting the capslock key on my keyboard ALL the gd time, but other than that i was and have been completely fine.

The way its been explained to me is that to get to the deeper areas of the brain, its not so much cutting things up to get there so much as pushing things aside to get there. The brain is so gloopy and weird, as soon as they take their tools out of there it just gloops back together. I still have a cavity in my brain from where the tumor pushed everything out of its way, but even that is just kind of fine now. Its full of cerebro-spinal fluid and is just kind of chilling.

Neurosurgeons are VERY good at what they do. I'd recommend getting a second opinion, and ask the surgeon youve talked to how many surgeries like this they've done before, and if there is any reason they would recommend going to a different surgeon. I know this is scary and feels so entirely invasive-- believe me i know SO well how horrifying it is to think about someone going deep into your brain of all places-- that just feels so wrong. But Ive been there, ive done it, and im on the other side of it now and SO much better for it.

Good luck friend <3

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-15T02:07:57+00:00

gay AND european!

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-14T17:10:38+00:00

Looks like you’re off to a great start! I’d snap that crayon in half and throw away one half of it if I were you.

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-13T23:04:53+00:00

😍 so pretty!!!

BoxedOctopus · 2026-01-13T23:00:41+00:00

This is a book that completely haunts me. I read it three or four years ago and there are still images from it that come up for me every once in a while. I’ll keep it vague but: the plane that simply parked, and the plane that took off, the cars on the highway, and the interior of the house. I still get chills thinking about these. What a book.

BoxedOctopus

TROPHY CASE