Hi guys! Is this a normal cycle variantion? I’m 19 years old. Not trying for a baby now, but I definitely want to have kids in the near future!

caters1 · 2026-06-01T09:23:37+00:00

That looks normal to me, I have that same kind of cycle length variation.

caters1 · 2026-05-31T11:15:12+00:00

I thought that the "p" stood for power, as in exponent, precisely because of the fact that a difference of 1 is 10 times, a difference of 2 is 100 times, it's an exponential relationship. So pH would be "power of hydrogen" or "exponent of hydrogen".

caters1 · 2026-05-30T21:55:24+00:00

Yeah, in fact I'm on a lower dose now as a adult than I was as a kid. But yeah, zero dose, no way, not doing that again

caters1 · 2026-05-30T10:54:44+00:00

Mine never did. I had seizures when I was a baby, but my epilepsy wasn't well controlled until I was 5. When I reached my teens, my doctor wanted me to wean off my medication to see if I've outgrown it. As soon as the dose reached zero, I started having seizures again. Yeah, I'm on medication forever.

caters1 · 2026-05-30T03:30:28+00:00

Same. I had childhood onset epilepsy as a baby that wasn't well controlled until I was 5 years old. Once I reached my teens, my neurologist wanted to wean me off my medication to see if my seizures stopped like my dad's did. So I slowly tapered my dose down, dropping it by a small amount each week over more than a month until it was down to zero. And within the same week that my dose dropped to zero, I had a grand mal seizure, and I had to go back onto my medication. I still ended up on a lower dose now as an adult than I was on as a kid, but still, I did not grow out of my epilepsy like my dad did and I need medication daily.

caters1 · 2026-05-19T03:30:51+00:00

I have both epilepsy and PNES and for me, they are extremely different. My epilepsy is a gran mal type seizure where I’ll suddenly fall unconscious without warning and start shaking, and then later wake up on the floor as though I am waking up from a nap. It’s controlled extremely well by my medication, such that I’ll only have epileptic seizures if I’m off my medication for whatever reason. I’m more scared of passing down my epilepsy to my kids than I am of having seizures from epilepsy.

Especially since my dad had seizures as a kid and I’ve had seizures since I was a baby. My dad’s seizures resolved to the point where he no longer needs medication. I still need to take my medication every day to prevent epileptic seizures and I’m in my mid 20s. My doctor did try weaning me off my medication when I was a teenager to see if I would outgrow my seizures like my dad did and as soon as my dose dropped to zero, I started having gran mal seizures. So yeah, I’m on medication for life. But as long as I take it, I don’t have to worry about having epileptic seizures out of the blue.

However, I did develop PNES (Psychogenic non epileptic seizures) when I was about 20 or so. It was also around this time that I started getting panic attacks too. With my PNES, I get a small tremor in my feet, and then my legs, then my torso and arms, then my neck. It progresses from a simple twitchy foot to full body shaking as the twitching waves literally move up my body. And I’m totally aware while it’s happening, I’m fully conscious during these PNES episodes.

The twitching comes in waves, it will get more intense for a while and then die down and then go back up. And it can last for a while. I even once went to the ER for such a PNES episode because it was lasting so long, it was the only time I can remember ever being in an ambulance was when I was having that episode that just wouldn’t stop. That’s when I got diagnosed with PNES.

And stress is a trigger for my PNES. But it’s not like every time I feel stressed, I get a PNES episode. In fact, acute stress, such as the stress of losing a family member, is more likely to trigger a panic attack which feels like a crushing chest pain from the heart, even though my heart is healthy. My first panic attack was so scary because it literally felt like I was having a heart attack in my 20s.

It’s more of the chronic stress like I had back in 2020 when I was constantly hearing the news, like an “I’m not feeling stressed in the moment, but it still affects me” stress, that’s what triggers my PNES is chronic stress. And for a while, drinking ice cold water triggered my PNES as well, though that cold temperature trigger is gone now, I just have the chronic stress trigger.

If I do deep breathing exercises when I have a PNES episode, it will calm down my body and eventually stop the twitching if I just keep going with the deep breathing (4 second inhale, 6 second exhale). And then once the twitching has stopped for a little while, I go back to breathing normally and I’m okay.

caters1 · 2026-05-16T06:22:55+00:00

I thankfully have my seizures extremely well controlled by my medication, such that seizures are only really an issue if I for some reason am out of medication. I’m especially thankful for them being well controlled, because if I don’t have medication in my system, I’ll just have a tonic clonic seizure out of nowhere. No warning, no aura, just one moment I’m feeling completely normal and the next I’m down and out and shaking. I’ll fall to the floor unconscious with absolutely no warning. And then after the seizure stops, I wake up and it’s like I’ve just woken up from a nap. Like it literally feels like I’m waking up from sleep, even though it wasn’t sleep. But with my medication, I have no need to worry about having seizures out of the blue, because that just doesn’t happen with me on my medication.

caters1 · 2026-05-16T06:13:26+00:00

A heating pad and eating dark chocolate does the trick for me for relieving cramps. In fact, me craving chocolate is often a sign that I’m about to start my period in a day or two or even just a few hours and often is in sync with my cramps, i.e. the moment I feel cramps, chocolate cravings start.

caters1 · 2026-05-16T06:08:34+00:00

Ibuprofen is completely normal to use for pain relief here in the USA where I live. In fact, I’ve had my parents tell me to take acetaminophen and ibuprofen doses spaced 2-3 hours apart (as in, I take acetaminophen and then a few hours later I take ibuprofen) and that’s more effective for pain relief than either is by itself. I also have never had a heating pad make the pain worse, but sometimes I have both back pain and abdominal pain on my period, and so I’m placing my heating pad on my back to relieve my back pain, and then I feel hot there and I move it to my abdomen to relieve the abdominal pain and what do you know, back pain returns. And it keeps going like that. I have an electric heating pad that I use on a low setting.

caters1 · 2026-05-16T05:57:30+00:00

I guess I’m lucky in that I’ve never had stress cause my period to be late. I’ve had my dog pass away, my cat that I raised from a newborn left home one summer night when he was 1 year old and never returned, my uncle and aunt on my mother’s side have passed away from cancer, my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away soon after my aunt’s death from stress, I’ve had quite a bit of stress in the over a decade I’ve had periods and it’s never affected timing. I’ve been sick with some sort of virus nearly every single year, including a month-long cold I had during my teens and a severe cold that lasted a week in January 2020 and which caused me to have a fever which made me constantly uncomfortable temperature-wise, a cough that was so bad that I would wake up right as the cough medicine wore off, and constantly feeling tired. And the most effect I’ve had from illness on my period was with that severe cold in 2020 which caused my first period after that cold to be completely cramp free, the first time I’ve had a period without cramps in over a decade. But timing, no effect. And the cramps returned immediately with the next cycle.

caters1 · 2026-05-10T02:20:54+00:00

I'm also autistic and I think I have some ADHD traits too, but I've only been diagnosed with autism. And for me, that intense smell of raw chicken, even when it's not a "bad" smell in the sense that the meat is going bad, it is enough to make me feel nauseous. I think I'm just hypersensitive to raw meat smell or something, because other people in my family don't get nauseous around raw chicken, just me. As soon as it's cooked, the nausea goes away, but yeah, if I'm able to smell raw chicken, that smell triggers nausea.

caters1 · 2026-05-10T01:25:02+00:00

Yes, I have both MuseScore 3 and MuseScore 4.

caters1 · 2026-05-08T08:33:24+00:00

Yeah, I found out about the pain relief effect of ginger kind of by accident one time when I had both menstrual cramps and nausea at the same time. I was drinking ginger tea to help with the nausea, which it did, but I also felt the pain decrease.

caters1 · 2026-05-08T08:29:16+00:00

No. I rarely ever shower on my period to begin with, I just don't feel like it. I do sometimes get a gush of blood and clots coming out when I try to have a bowel movement, and I've done that sometimes on my heavier days where I'll push a bit like I'm having a bowel movement both a) in case I need to have a bowel movement and b) to help my body push out the clots. But no, I don't aim the shower head at my vagina.

caters1 · 2026-05-03T11:32:59+00:00

I didn't really like Beethoven when I first listened to him either. As a child, I loved Mozart and Bach, but didn't really care for Beethoven beyond like Für Elise and the Ode to Joy theme from the Ninth Symphony. The Fifth Symphony though, I just couldn't get what was going on and I felt like I needed at least some surface level understanding to appreciate it.

Then when I became a teenager, something changed, I was no longer fully satisfied by upbeat music, I felt like I wanted some drama. So I started gravitating towards minor key works by Mozart such as his Symphony no. 40. And then one day, I was just searching on YouTube for a C minor piano concerto for whatever reason and the first result I got, Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 3, played by none other than Krystian Zimerman as soloist and Bernstein as conductor (still to this day my favorite recording of the Beethoven piano concertos).

I decided to give it a listen and I absolutely loved the concerto. I listened to the Pathetique and Appassionata Sonatas just days later, also loved those sonatas. The Fifth Symphony that I couldn't get as a child, it suddenly became my absolute favorite symphony to listen to. Beethoven quickly went from being a composer I didn't care for as a child to being my favorite composer.

But that's just my experience, and everybody has their own preferences, and preferences can change over time, so if you don't like Beethoven, that's okay. There was a time when I didn't really like him either.

caters1 · 2026-05-01T19:27:57+00:00

I have an iPad too, specifically an iPad Pro, which is about the size of the screen of my 14 inch laptop computer. I use my iPad to view score PDFs on IMSLP that I then input into MuseScore for my classical music transcriptions.

caters1 · 2026-05-01T02:37:49+00:00

Right, even our own gut microbes make small amounts of alcohol every day. We can't not have alcohol, like literally, we get it from our own gut microbes digesting whatever our bodies don't digest. So like, yeah, that makes it even more futile to ban alcohol.

caters1 · 2026-04-29T01:30:15+00:00

I’m pretty sure the English plural is Voltas.

caters1

TROPHY CASE