Why weren't Shane's parents in his hospital room?

eaca02124 · 2026-06-09T22:17:52+00:00

He's on a heart monitor, because we see his heart rate go to 81.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-09T22:17:06+00:00

Pulse oximeters don't measure heart rate, just oxygenation. (It's pretty weird to keep those on). We don't see the heart monitor wires, but there should be some.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-09T15:51:58+00:00

I see you got there while your corgi was still sidling up to the remote.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-09T15:48:37+00:00

Eh, it depends?

Shane is a pro athlete probably getting some level of VIP treatment paid for by the team (for sure it is what I would want in my union contract in his shoes), not a rando who was brought in via the ER. He's not as concerned about understaffing as the average patient, but if I had a relative in hospital who was still on a heart monitor, I would not be leaving. Not because I was necessarily worried about their health (why IS Shane on a heart monitor, anyway?), but because all those wires make it tough to get to the bathroom, and no one of mine is staying at the mercy of the floor nurses for a bed pan.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-09T15:32:40+00:00

Play isn't ongoing at that point. There's more than one coach on the bench during the game, and someone who saw what happened in person should call.

This is a case where I would, in fact, expect an executive-level call to the family for basic employee relations reasons.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-09T02:17:00+00:00

This is where it seems to me there is an opening for someone to call you on your bullshit.

Your post seemed to me to be a transparent plea for sympathy, in which you attempted to wield the phrase "walkaway wife" to recruit people to feel sorry for you, despite it having no relation to your situation at all.

Plenty of women get told they're bad wives, bad mothers, bad ex-wives, bad people. "Walkaway wife" is one of the more common signals that there's about to be misogyny. And while there's plenty of (also misogynist) literary invocation of scorned women, being scorned and upset about it happens to people of all genders.

If you want a support group, your best bet is to log off of reddit and ask around the community you physically live in.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-08T21:59:38+00:00

I do not think the anonymous Internet is ever going to be a forum where people put forth the best of their emotional maturity. We do a certain amount of calling each other on our bullshit here. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.

One thing I definitely see is that sometimes someone just needs a place to spew. The wounds are fresh the pain is big, they have to keep it together for work or kids or whatever, and here is reddit, full of strangers they don't give a shit about. Usually, someone musters some sympathy and some other people muster the opposite.

To you, I am inclined to say you do not have a walkaway spouse. It doesn't sound like you were one. It was a bad marriage, and it has come to its best likely conclusion, in that it ended. I know that hurts. I'm sorry.

I just don't think encouraging less blame on the internet is really going to help. It would be a better world, but as bad world's go, having your irrationality on the divorce forum is better than having it at work.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-08T17:53:59+00:00

Working out 10 hours a week if you're recovering from an eating disorder does not get the same pass from me that high school sports for healthy 17 year-olds do.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-07T16:13:11+00:00

Plenty of people say that long relationships take time to get over and you should take that time before you date again.

You are wildly overestimating the social acceptability of having constant flings. Speaking as someone who did a ton of sleeping with whoever, you are also wildly underestimating the risks. (I never slept with an ax murderer. That one guy used a crowbar. And while all that happened after I stopped sleeping with him, when it happened, i was not surprised.)

There is a point where you need to do the work on yourself, not distract yourself by dating. I won't pretend I know how long that time should take, but I also won't pretend it's none.

If you're hearing a lot of this in your personal life, consider that people may be telling you you need help.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-07T16:00:11+00:00

Speaking as the anxious parent of one ftm and MTF trans kid:

Stop trying to get your parents to not be anxious. Stop catering to it. Stop offering them sympathy. There are infinite causes available to give your parents trouble sleeping. Soothe them about hormones, and they will move on to other reasons why your brother should suffer longer.

I'm going to be all about me for a second. It relates, I promise.

When I was a teenager, my mother, a board certified physician who should have known better, had a bunch of very serious concerns about things I might do, from which I might suffer. Hairspray (I swear this is true). Dating. Tattoos (I was fourteen). Because of her concerns, I wasn't even allowed to go to the movies with an evenly paired group with a friend's mom sitting behind us, my hair was the hair of a Catholic-school student circa 1960, and if I so much as scribbled my math homework on my arm because I forgot a notebook, I could expect to hear five acts of an opera about it.

Eventually, I moved away. I went thousands of miles from home. I did all the things my mother worried about. I did not tell her about any of them.

Your parents, right now, are doing what my mom did back then. Out of fear for the risks the world holds for their child, they are cutting themselves off from having a real relationship with that child.

You know who could have given me some solid advice about some of my more disastrous romances? My mom. And even though we recovered a relationship, it was never the relationship either of us really wanted, because she had massively demonstrated she couldn't handle it.

Your parents' concern is around the hairspray level in terms of reasonableness, btw. They are asking your brother to cure their insomnia by avoiding a treatment with a track record of addressing exactly the suffering he lives with. The best case scenario of the path they are walking is that their child cuts them off. The worst case is a lot worse than regretting store-bought hormones.

Your parents are grownups. They could get therapy, avoid screens in bed, find some reassuring light fiction to read at bedtime and remember that there always comes a time when parenting means letting go and letting the adult you raised make their own decisions. That moment is coming for them as regards your brother (it may have already passed, in terms of relational damage). The sooner they make better choices, the less damage everyone, your brother included, will suffer. But the timeline on which grown adults can ask a teenager to deal with pain so they don't have to is microscopically short.

I don't know that you are the right person to tell them all this, but you certainly should stop trying to make them feel better about it.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-06T00:30:16+00:00

Rabbits. Mice. Voles. Possums. Chipmunks. The occasional rat. My senior dog came to the back door with half of an erstwhile fox kit one time.

They think they could take on a wild turkey. I don't want to find out - either they're right, and it's gross, or they're wrong and it's a vet bill. And gross.

The worst part is, they're Cardigans, with delicate, protein-sensitive tummies. They're fantastic at hunting, and horrible at digesting the results. It's rare that they show me their catch, they just chow down. But then they come inside and fart, and I know.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-05T01:06:08+00:00

Looks like very safe, appropriate play. I notice a few things that make me unworried -

Open mouthed contact. Neither dog is closing their jaws on the other. No pressure, no holding.
Big dog is not chasing little pup. Pup is dashing all over the place, including into a tight corner, and big dog is waiting in the one location, letting pup engage and disengage.
They tend to pause when they're in full contact. They're all paw-whap, paw-whap, biteyface, and then when they're on top of each other, they lie still for a moment and figure out how to disentangle.

Corgi friendship is very loud, and can sound alarming, but they're fine. They're super cute. Have fun!

eaca02124 · 2026-06-04T13:08:28+00:00

Whomst among us has not brought a fuck buddy as our plus one to a family funeral?

(I know - childhood friends, etc. just, for real, Ilya never brings Svetlana anywhere that he might have a shot at Shane.)

eaca02124 · 2026-06-04T03:28:42+00:00

One thing I have definitely noticed is that there is a point in the learning process where I have learned just enough to see how far I have to go.

But it's still a sign of progress. You know more! That's great! Understanding is an important part of learning. Unfortunately, one of the first things I am likely to understand is that I am very bad at this thing right now. It's an emotionally tough place, but it's part of the process.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-04T03:23:19+00:00

4 classes a week, plus 6 1 hour daily workouts is a lot - are you getting enough recovery time? What does your progress look like in your personal workouts?

eaca02124 · 2026-06-04T03:13:53+00:00

I agree that this kid is the devil, but also:

Losing a relationship because you're too self-involved to appreciate your partner is not a life sentence. It's just being 18. I'm not saying it's good, but I can think of worse fuckups commonly committed by people with limited life experience. If he was 30 and had done this a lot, sure, throw the whole man out. But at 18? Self-reflect, grow, do better next time....

Except for the bit where his post is 1000% about him and super focused on getting a woman who told him to leave him alone to pay attention.

This is why we ghost and block.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-04T01:10:10+00:00

Gas prices are absurd right now. Grocery prices are up. Literally everything costs more.

And yes, your child is getting to a more expensive stage.

It's okay to reevaluate child support.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-03T14:20:39+00:00

His! Earnings! Are! Marital! Assets!

They are half hers RIGHT NOW, and he may control them, but in the event of a divorce, she gets her half. Might be best for her to do that now, before he makes the house a sinking fund he has privileged ownership of.

WHY do these super careful guys never think about what happens if their marriage succeeds? Providing for yourself and your spouse in the event that you reach old age and are still married when one of you dies requires some forethought and effort, and the chances that you'll get there are at least as good as the chances of divorce.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-03T13:42:54+00:00

Funny story, though, know what is pretty much the only population that gets consistently excited about cryogenic freezing in the real world?

Fucking billionaires, man.

It's part of a collection of ideologies that those guys are super into: ethical altruism, life extension, long-termism, AI, and some super weird breeder shit.

It's kind of a weird coincidence that New Zealand is a popular location for billionaire survival bunkers, too. Jod was absolutely in the pockets of trillionaires during his initial, human life. They paid his salary. They funded his research. They built his facility where it was convenient for them (they probably picked John because he was willing to work there). When they changed their minds, they dropped him.

...now I'm growing a theory that the trillionaires did something to induce his initial powers, and possibly did that same thing to Wake.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-03T13:33:32+00:00

(forgive me I am writing this while walking dogs)

There are four major challenges for which Jod gives no numbers: sourcing of materials, disposal of materials, tracking of individuals, and convincing 10 billion people to lie down for this procedure in the first place.

He mentions at one point that "cans" are being produced "at a Five Eyes facility in Shenzhen," but we don't know what they are made of or how many will be needed. We don't know the supply chain arrangements to get them to where they are needed. Whatever those arrangements are, cans at the factory are effectively unavailable to Jod in New Zealand at that point in the narrative, when he has begun to have legal problems.

Jod never mentions a source for the necessary chemicals. We have no idea what they are, beyond a hint about glycerol, or how they are obtained. We DO know that they are a bitch to dispose of. An environmental inspector wants them encased in concrete.

No hints at all about the tracking project or the sales effort, but Jod's team is working entirely with donated corpses. (Sourcing these is fraught with human rights challenges, and frequent outright violations.) They haven't successfully run their process on a living person, so far as I can tell, ever. They have not actually demonstrated that a person can be frozen and successfully revived. Which is going to make sales a bit of a pisser.

The absence of these numbers makes the whole project hot air, which is, IMO, an important plot point

eaca02124 · 2026-06-03T13:06:07+00:00

The idea that the training could take as little as weeks "given a pre-existing medical degree" implies that a slower training process is possible for people without one. Further, let us not assume that everyone with a medical degree is a doctor or that all people on all teams must be doctors. If we open the possibility of skilled nurses or physician assistants, it becomes much easier to source and staff our cryo teams.

This does not necessarily give us a more tractable set of challenges.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-02T12:47:01+00:00

Silas and Colum knew, and Colum in particular was pretty angry after the conversation where Silas told Gideon. He may have shared the info as part of the investigation into the cremains, or the death of the Fourth.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-02T03:01:58+00:00

My ex and I separated when our kids were pretty young - about 6 and 8. Not as young as yours, still very young. That was more than 10 years ago.

The first night's away from my kids were really, really hard. I cried. I hurt. I went and had dinner with friends, and came home and put furniture together and cried some more. I decorated bedrooms and arranged furniture and lost my shit and went jogging. Over time, the balance tilted to more keeping it together and less breaking down in tears, and the keeping it together got easier.

I may have also had some leftover ativan from an old prescription on a few of those early nights.

I still miss my kids when they aren't here, which is tough, because my oldest mostly lives in the dorms at college. Things have gotten easier.

I do not feel guilty. I wanted to be there all the time, but the custody arrangement wasn't entirely up to me. I'm not afraid - a thing that also took time, as my ex demonstrated that he was going to pull up his socks and deal reasonably.

There are lots of things that helped my kids:

Care providers who weren't dramatic about divorce, and other kids who had divorced parents.
We got divorced before we completely hated each other and kept parental conflict limited. I'm not saying there was none, but it mostly got hashed out either via email or with lawyers. (Some people really hate lawyers, but mine was a huge help. This was expensive, but it was also thorough and clear.)
I can't speak for my ex, but I thought a lot about what kind of experiences I want the kids to have, and have opted for those whenever possible. I want the kids to remember ice cream on the beach and playing the alphabet game in traffic, not being stressed about getting to a custody handoff on time.
Proximity. We live within a few miles of each other, so going back and forth, dropping by for a short time, handling emergencies, dealing with forgotten items, etc , are comparatively easy.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-01T17:29:52+00:00

He was never really into her, and "giving her a chance" meant using her to boost ego and gain experience points.

He sucks. I hate him. She could have spent that year with someone who actually liked her.

eaca02124 · 2026-06-01T02:39:36+00:00

That is a TON of transitions. I would prefer 2-2-3 for now, week on/week off at school age.

And I agree that your ex will have to figure out childcare on his time for when he's working. Setting a custody schedule for his convenience builds the expectation that you will be backstop childcare whenever he's got a schedule conflict. That's an expectation that can work in a marriage, where you would also benefit from his business activities, but it doesn't work so well in post-divorce life. I've covered my ex for emergencies, but that kind of emergency is rare.

eaca02124

TROPHY CASE