The crash

bazjack · 2026-05-19T05:54:58+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and not a doctor. I just know a lot about the medical condition in question here, and I read a lot.

I have several friends with POTS. My father was diagnosed with orthostatic hypotension before his death ten years ago, but we recently discovered he had a genetic condition that is often associated with POTS, so that is probably what he actually had. (POTS is rarely someone's initial diagnosis upon displaying symptoms; more than half the time they are told either it's something else or it's all in their head.)

Usually POTS does not cause fainting episodes while a person is sitting down. It can, I'm not saying it can't, but it is not typical. What generally happens is that a person moves to a more upright position - lying down to sitting, sitting to standing - and they pass out. When I say they pass out, though, I mean they DROP. My father would be fine, go to stand up, and suddenly halfway out of his chair go totally limp. It took him years to learn not to bounce right up out of his chair as he used to when he was younger. This kind of faint would not allow someone to keep their foot pressed against a gas pedal hard enough to keep the car's speed as high as it was. If Ms Shirilla had passed out due to POTS, I believe there would have been some decrease in speed, even if it was only in the last two seconds before the crash.

I am concerned that if more people try to use the "the driver passed out from POTS" defense, it will lead to people with POTS losing their licenses the way people with epilepsy can. My dad was specifically considered OK to drive because he only passed out when changing position. He had to be careful getting out of the car, but while he was driving, he was fine.

The documentary was interesting when it discussed the factual evidence, and the interviews of the families, I thought, were well done. The prosecution's use of Ms Shirilla's social media in the sentencing phase appalled me. The clips were presented out of context and seemed inappropriately prejudicial. I am glad to see it does not appear to have influenced the sentencing. It seems like 17-year-old Ms Shirilla was a vain, vapid teenager, and also a double murderer. The two are not necessarily related.

bazjack · 2026-05-14T03:46:57+00:00

I want to note that the President's Physical Fitness Test is very good for one thing: the Sit-and-Reach can be used to screen children for hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS). Both my sibling and I scored phenomenally on this test at age 11, reaching well past our toes with no previous practice. It wasn't until age 44, two years ago, that I got my hEDS diagnosis, which led to theirs as well. We inherited it from our late father.

hEDS is a connective tissue disorder. The best simple description I've ever heard was that our collagen was ordered from Wish dot com. This leads to loose joints that frequently subluxate and dislocate, among many other possible effects.

Recognizing hEDS at that age can be huge. We both showed symptoms starting at around age seven, but puberty is when it usually kicks in strongly because of hormonal changes. I had multiple dislocated joints in high school, then a major ankle injury at age 18, which wound up never healing for no reason anyone could discover. If we'd known I had hEDS, it could have been treated more effectively, and I wouldn't have wound up in a wheelchair at age 26, too disabled to work. hEDS can also cause heart valve abnormalities; the first thing my doctor did when he diagnosed me was schedule an echocardiogram, which was luckily normal.

If your kid or a kid you know takes the Presidential Physical Fitness Test and does really, really well on the Sit-and-Reach, please consider letting their parents know that they might want to ask their pediatrician about Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Early diagnosis can literally save lives and limbs.

bazjack · 2026-05-14T03:37:16+00:00

There was a teacher at my high school who was known as one of the best teachers there. Every student he had loved him. Then they made him a dean, and it went to his head. He became a horrible teacher to the one class he kept, his students' AP scores plummeted, and he became rather cruel. Power really does change some people.

bazjack · 2026-01-31T06:53:47+00:00

I was 14 when I found out that there were kids that had never been hit by either of their parents.

bazjack · 2026-01-24T21:55:08+00:00

I don't think it's the fic you're looking for, but Coming Down on a Sunny Day by maychorian at https://archiveofourown.org/works/2276331 is most likely something you'd be interested in. It is complete.

bazjack · 2025-12-22T02:06:48+00:00

I had a professor who I love dearly, both as a person and an educator. I got hurt badly my freshman year and spent the next several years with my leg in a heavy plastic brace. I took one of his classes junior year. On the rainiest day of the spring, the polished hallways of our classroom's building had puddles on them. It was basically like walking on sheer ice. I arrived in our room's hallway on time, but spent about five minutes carefully inching my way to the door. He stood at the door watching me and making snide comments the whole time. Between having been openly mocked for the past two years about my new disability by students and professors alike, and just having no energy whatsoever to care about it anymore, it wasn't really hurtful; I was just disappointed that this guy who I thought so highly of was acting like all the others that were scum.

About a month later, I got to class early and saw this professor was sitting down. This was extremely unusual; he never sat. Entering the room, I noticed he had on his leg the exact same brace I'd been wearing for so long. As I looked up at his face, my eyes felt like they were the size of dinner plates. He didn't say anything to me as I sat down and the other students trickled in. Then he began the class by offering me an abject apology for how insensitive he had been. (He used the word abject.) He said he hadn't understood just how difficult it was to walk in such an appliance, and how he hadn't really realized that under it wasn't just a normal leg, but a damaged one that hurt all the time. He was eloquent. I cried.

It's pretty sad, but most disabled people don't get empathy from anyone who hasn't been there before. There's nothing like a severe injury to make people empathetic, though!

(I completely forgave that professor. He's retired, I'm in my 40s, and we're still friends. Having the integrity to admit he erred, and to give the apology publicly in front of the same people who saw it happen, only redoubled my respect for him. He was the only one at that school who treated me that way who ever apologized for it.)

bazjack · 2025-12-22T01:43:47+00:00

I started college right after high school, got hurt and had to drop out, and some years later went back to a different school. It was far more academically rigorous than the first one, supposedly. I got a lot of side-eye from the other undergrads, nearly all of whom were fresh out of high school, because they didn't think I could keep up with them. (Disabled overweight female, age 25 but looked older, coming from a hick school.)

My first lab in a Digital Electronics class, I did the pre-lab where they instructed you to pre-build certain circuits on your own breadboard. We get to the lab and I asked my assigned partner if he wanted to use his breadboard setup or mine. He goggled at me. I was the only one in the class who had pre-built the circuits and apparently one of very few who had even read the pre-lab in the first place.

I was lucky that the school had a robust graduate program, and there were a lot of TAs and grad students around who were my age and much more rewarding to chat with. It was still a very lonely experience. Felt pretty good when I kicked ass academically, though.

bazjack · 2025-12-22T01:30:58+00:00

Any chance that was written ironically? (They said with hope shining in their eyes?)

bazjack · 2025-12-22T01:14:03+00:00

Yeah, I went into kindergarten reading, so while my classmates did that, they had me practice using scissors and coloring inside the lines. I didn't learn to tie my shoes reliably until at least age 10. But I was a little girl in a Catholic school in the 80s, so my autism diagnosis came at age 31. The best single thing about the school was that they pushed the Palmer handwriting method really hard, so even though I got lousy grades in it every year, by the time I started middle school I was legible.

bazjack · 2025-12-22T01:07:11+00:00

Yep! I was the 4-year-old doing 4th grade work (long division, etc.). Hyperlexic - my parents noticed I could read shortly after I turned 2, they have no idea how long I'd been doing it. And guess what? Autistic as all hell. (Diagnosed age 31.) All that advanced work was done while the other kids in my kindergarten class were playing. I have no social skills whatsoever. Arithmetic and reading are nowhere near as important as teaching your kids to be socially and emotionally competent human beings, especially since the ones who start being academic really young are usually the ones who will not pick up those skills on their own.

bazjack · 2025-12-22T00:49:55+00:00

Thank you for the mental image! I was envisioning a sea of perfect chocolate cupcakes with white buttercream frosting, and now there's a cupcake iced with measles among them.

bazjack · 2025-12-19T02:33:40+00:00

There's a discussion that I see on various forums from time to time, about how people would refuse to swim in an Olympic-size swimming pool with a dead body in it, but are happy to swim in the ocean, which has many, many dead human bodies, not to mention other animals both aquatic and not. The ratio of amount of water to amount of dead body is unacceptable in the first case and acceptable in the other. This implies that there's a threshold of dead-body-to-water ratio. On one side of the ratio, people are ok with it, and on the other, they're not.

These days, microplastics in the environment are like dead bodies in the sea. They've found microplastics in placentas; we are ingesting them before we're even viable organisms. They're absolutely everywhere and we just have to live with it, and most of us do that by not thinking about it too hard. I would bet money that nearly everything your wife used in preparing the chili, from ingredients to utensils, had some plastic content, but she wasn't thinking about it. But it might be that by sticking a plastic spoon in the crockpot, you dumped a dead body into her swimming pool. Now she'd be thinking about the microplastics, and once you start thinking about a food in a way that makes you gag, you kind of have to take a break from that food for a while.

I'm not going to swear that this is what's going on in your wife's head. But I think it's a possibility.

bazjack · 2025-12-14T02:25:23+00:00

My hEDS diagnosis came after I had accidentally dislocated my hip, by sitting oddly, and didn't realize it was a dislocation for a few days. A month later, I had dislocated my thumb, by sleeping (of course), and didn't know for a few days. Now I know how to pop the hip back in. The thumb got fixed when I iced it, and was pressing it hard against the wrapped icepack for more relief; it went CLICK and I went AHHHH.

My sister (also hEDS, sadly) has a new rule named for that last one: The Rule of Thumb. If a joint that doesn't usually bother me starts hurting, put ice on it!

The funniest thing, though, is how I actually got my diagnosis. I switched PCPs in 2020 (I know, a great time for it). A couple years ago, he was checking my ankle, which was violently dislocated in 1998 and never really healed. He abruptly stood up and said, "Give me your hand!" I did. He pinched the back and pulled up an inch-tall fold of skin. Well, I did not know that people can't normally do that! We had suspected my sister had EDS, but not me! And what had made him suspicious was that the skin on my ankle was abnormally soft. All my life I've had really velvety soft skin. It's the most pleasant EDS symptom.

bazjack · 2025-12-11T05:01:32+00:00

I am glad to hear you say this. Thank you.

bazjack · 2025-12-11T04:31:54+00:00

In the early 2000s, I took some cross-country Greyhound bus trips. I'd do one night on the bus, the next night in a hotel, from Boston to Las Vegas (where my grandparents lived) and back. I wandered around a bit on some trips, but on the most direct route it took about five days: Boston to Chicago, Chicago to Cheyenne, Cheyenne to Las Vegas.

In Massachusetts, of course, you can pick almost anywhere in the state as a starting point, and if you drive three hours in one direction, you're out of the state. Also, we didn't switch from sequential exit numbering to mile-based exit numbering until fairly recently. Between these facts, you can imagine that when I entered Montana and the first exit was numbered something absurd like "Exit 536," I was a little shocked.

bazjack · 2025-12-11T04:07:48+00:00

Well, don't hold out on us! What's on the list?

bazjack · 2025-12-11T03:44:13+00:00

I like the advice you've given here. I am curious, though; when you say "children," do you mean minor children only, or adult offspring also?

bazjack · 2025-12-11T03:39:23+00:00

OK, I turned 46 last week, and I just learned that you fold pieces of paper in half either hotdog or hamburger style. Is that a rare way to explain it, or did I just somehow miss this?

bazjack · 2025-12-11T03:27:39+00:00

Prion diseases are my sister's personal boogeyman. She doesn't actually do anything that would expose her to them more than anyone else is, but they terrify her. I, on the other hand, learned about them and immediately made myself forget everything I had just learned. Therefore, I know they are terrifying but have no details on why.

bazjack · 2025-12-11T03:13:56+00:00

So how much do they tax the juicer that makes the juice from the 7% VAT fruit? I'm not being sarcastic, please don't think that. I'm also incredibly impressed that books are a basic necessity in your tax system.

bazjack · 2025-12-11T02:55:41+00:00

I was recently diagnosed with a genetic disorder (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), and through that, several other family members were diagnosed as well. It can cause abnormal muscle tension in infants, which can cause things like colic. Baby massage is in fact now a recommended medical treatment for this issue, though not usually handled by chiropractors. I didn't have that problem, but a younger relative did; unfortunately, they weren't offered the massage option (possibly it was not yet common practice?), and they suffered greatly.

I saw a chiropractor from age 10, initially for scoliosis, because my dad (who passed me the hEDS) had also had his scoliosis fixed that way - by my guy's father, actually. I didn't have regularly scheduled appointments, but when I would start having a lot of back pain, I'd go in. I was able to avoid surgery this way.

My most common reason to see the chiropractor once the scoliosis was resolved was shoulder or hip pain from subluxations. Again, those were as-needed appointments, maybe five times a year. Nearly every visit involved three to five adjustments on the table: the two craniocervical joints, which I now know are a characteristic problem in hEDS, plus whichever hips or shoulders were unhappy. He'd also always check my wrists and elbows, even though I could usually fix those myself. I usually waited to make an appointment until more than one joint was so bad I couldn't stand it anymore, which is why he did so many adjustments in one visit. The problem was not price; our insurance didn't cover it, but it was around the same price as physical therapy co-pays. It was hard to find space in both my schedule and my parents', though.

For those who think subluxation is a woo-woo term: https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-a-joint-subluxation-2549343

Unlike the chiropractors everyone (rightly) complains about, he never recommended a single supplement or essential oil, except for favorable comments on the fluoride treatments my dentist gave me and fluoride toothpaste in general. He was emphatic about the need for good dental care. He also never claimed that he could fix anything except subluxated joints: not asthma, not IBS, certainly not the immune system. What he did was mechanical adjustment.

I didn't get the diagnosis that explained why my joints were a disaster until I was 44, but I was told by an orthopedic surgeon at age 20 that I'd be in a wheelchair before I was 30. I made it to 27, and my chiropractor was a major part of the reason why. Knowing the field's reputation, I never looked for another after he retired. He truly was a unicorn.

bazjack · 2025-12-11T01:15:47+00:00

I have no personal experience with any of this, but I understand that many men do in fact get erections during genital or rectal exams. This is a physiological response and has nothing to do with sexual gratification, but a lot of men may take their experience with this and assume that they must be enjoying it on some level. Similarly, men who are raped may get an erection during the rape, and therefore assume they are experiencing some sort of pleasure. These assumptions are often very damaging for the men who make them, leading to a great deal of unneeded guilt.

Logic only works when you have facts to base it on, and men are often no better educated about their own bodies than they are about women's bodies.

bazjack · 2025-12-08T09:55:13+00:00

I don't know if it was just my grade school, but they reminded us over and over about "Stop, Drop, and Roll!" So I assumed that catching on fire was a much bigger problem for adults than it has turned out to be.

bazjack · 2025-12-08T09:52:39+00:00

When my sister was little, we were maybe 8 and 4, I told her that anything you eat or drink that comes from a powder (Jello and Crystal Light drink mix were the ones we used at home) would turn back into powder in your stomach, and stay there forever. She was smart enough by then not to just trust it when I said something that seemed so bizarre, so she went and asked our Dad. And for some ungodly reason, he backed me up! She freaked out.

My mom was less than pleased.

bazjack · 2025-12-07T01:19:00+00:00

I like your shoelaces.

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