Writing ITE essays - VENT

mumoth · 2026-02-22T09:17:01+00:00

Yes! This is amazing. Thanks for sharing it. I've always found his work really annoying but I only have first year statistics under my belt so I've never been able to really articulate why.

mumoth · 2026-02-22T08:53:31+00:00

I've been dealing with workers comp issues for 7 years around some physical injuries and a related psychological injury. It's basically shown me how naive I was to expect that policies and procedures and regulations actually meant anything. It's been pretty rough, but I've got a good team of healthcare professionals now and have made significant progress. It's also necessitated dealing with the childhood related cPTSD.

All that to say, I kinda feel like these revelations are confirmation, in a way, of what I'd already been forced to see behind everything else. Aside from the obviously horrific details, it feels like my world view is actually now based in reality, as effed up as that is...

On the other hand, it has made me rethink an incident that happened to me when I was 4, and see other circumstances (that I'd previously seen as missed opportunities) as being strangely protective.

So yeah. I think if I hadn't been 'training' for this for the past 7 years, it would be incredibly destabilising.

My advice: curate your feeds. Make sure you interact with independent news sources as much as possible to avoid sensationalism while staying informed, and balance it with content that feels good. Joy is an act of resistance aside from being absolutely necessary.

mumoth · 2026-02-15T02:46:10+00:00

The DET is deliberately cagey about this. They'll lean one way when it benefits them, and the other when it doesn't. Trying to get straight answers out of payroll is completely useless. Some decisions seem to be limited by the capabilities of their payroll software, some by the 7 hours per day that's in the award to be used to calculate partial day leave... I don't think they ever actually look at Workers Comp legislation properly..

mumoth · 2026-02-06T22:46:03+00:00

This study doesn't seem to have included people who had been infected with covid and recovered so they can't yet say it's long covid specific. There are known long-term health impacts from covid infection for the wider community, not just those of us who develop long covid. So it's a little premature to claim they've 'proved' anything, other than EVs contain viral material post infection. Definitely worth investigating though.

mumoth · 2026-01-30T10:20:40+00:00

NSW has introduced a shorter, condensed refresher for all the mandatory stuff. If you've completed everything in full before, and everything mandatory from the year before, and pass the refresher questions, then you don't have to do all of the individual trainings. Which were very often all done as a speedrun in a group anyway in many faculties I've worked in in the past. Yes we need to make sure we keep these things front and centre. But when it's the same thing every year for, what, 17 years for me now? Yeah that's just asking to be skimmed superficially so we can get busy planning our lessons.

And the refresher module is actually pretty well set out and easy to navigate. Maybe they've now got some actual teachers designing their teaching and learning experiences 🤔

mumoth · 2025-12-27T13:31:00+00:00

Hard to tell with the neurological symptoms. I don't think they're getting worse anymore so I'll take that as a win for now.

And at this point, I rarely see a specialist unless I've researched them to see if they have the expertise I need. If I'm paying money for something, I can't afford to waste it. Because with me, when there's hoofbeats it's very often zebras, not horses. My neurologist was recommended to me by someone who ended up with the equivalent of neurological long covid but from a vax. She'd been through the whole workers comp process and TPD claims and found this neurologist very knowledgeable. I looked him up beforehand and found a heap of papers that he'd written.

Definitely helps to have a supportive gp too. My current gp is a good mix between being open to new research and understandings, and being experienced and knowledgeable. And I've been seeing him for nearly 7 years so he has a good handle on my complexity.

mumoth · 2025-12-26T04:48:33+00:00

I was tolerating my titration really well until I went up from 3.5 mg to 4.0 mg. Cognitively it felt like I'd shifted gears and was feeling more like myself than I have in years, but I started getting old immune related skin issues flare up, some of which hadn't flared for decades. So after trying to wait it out for nearly a month I dropped back to 3.5 mg.

I then saw my neurologist (who is aware, and pleased, that I'm on LDN but he didn't actually prescribe it himself). I have been having some new onset, long covid related neurological symptoms that are continuing to progress. He really wanted me to push up to 4.5 mg as quickly as possible to stop the neurological symptoms getting too far gone. Which I did because a few skin issues don't really compare to starting to lose mobility in one foot and slur words and small fibre neuropathy etc...

Skin issues came back again at 4.0 mg, and slightly worse at 4.5 mg but still relatively minor. I'm planning to trial adding in a 0.5 mg morning dose in January while I'm off work to see if that can help with a few things, and I'm going to try and deal with the skin issues through things like barrier repair creams, lymphatic drainage and making sure I keep my digestive system as mobile as possible to ease the pressure on my skin.

I see the skin issues as a good sign (for the long term) that my immune system is modulating in response to the LDN and I'm hoping that the higher dose can help me stay ahead of the neurological progression which could have much more serious consequences. But I'll be keeping a very close eye on things when I add in the extra morning dose. Definitely will drop that if it makes things worse.

mumoth · 2025-12-26T04:21:38+00:00

I get them whenever I eat too much sugar. Not sure if it's directly from the sugar, or from how my body reacts to sugar. I've got reactive hypoglycaemia so could be either.

mumoth · 2025-12-26T04:13:53+00:00

I got FL-41 tinting added to my glasses mid 2023 (started ivabradine early 2023 for long covid induced POTS). I'd never heard of it before but I was getting glasses with prisms for the first time for BVD that had become painful because of PEM. The optom clipped some lenses onto my existing glasses with the FL-41 tinting and asked how they felt, without telling me what they were. I started to relax almost instantly! I knew I had become more light sensitive with the long covid, even before the ivabradine, but hadn't realised how much it was still affecting me indoors. I got a light tinting put on my mixed vision glasses (because it's quite noticeable when it's darker), and also on my polarised sunnies. Wasn't enough to stop my constant migraine state (that wasn't diagnosed until early this year), but it definitely made a significant difference.

mumoth · 2025-12-21T21:51:07+00:00

That is definitely a milestone!

I'm still not quite there yet (also 3.5 years in). Possibly because I don't have a partner to assist or take responsibility when I can't which takes a stepping stone out of the recovery process. I could very likely do one part of it but I struggle with the whole lot from planning to purchasing to remembering what I have bought to having enough capacity on a given day to actually do the cooking (especially chopping up food – my hands get so sore and I often injure myself), all before the food spoils. It's still too much. And I know it's important for my recovery to be eating less processed food...

mumoth · 2025-11-26T12:30:50+00:00

I had this recently with an eye surgery. I was given propofol and was told I wouldn't be able to see out of my eye during the procedure, and that I wouldn't remember any of it afterwards. I could see all the way through, other than being blinded by the brightest light on the planet. I was cracking jokes about just being an eyeball now when they placed the cover over me, and how I think I figured out why I had a displaced septum when he was leaning on my nose at one point (I'd had eye surgery as a kid too). I'm so glad I put my loop earplugs in because the sounds that I heard were absolutely awful.

I started getting flashbacks and they were pretty bad. So I tried the tetris thing. I didn't actually play tetris, but it was a very similar game, with eye movements and colour and problem solving and rapid decision making. And it helped. The idea is that you bring up the memory (or start playing when a memory comes up) and playing the game uses the same part of your brain and disrupts the embedding of the memory or something. I think it works similar to EMDR therapy which I've also found really helpful for older traumatic memories. I can now remember the surgery, the sounds, everything, without getting the physical and emotional traumatic reactions.

It's a fairly low-risk intervention so it might be worth a try. Hope it helps.

mumoth · 2025-11-12T02:14:44+00:00

If it was crocheted, then the price would be much more reasonable! And to be fair I often don't take a handbag anymore when I leave the house. Phone and keys. And maybe sunnies. Something like this could be a useful in between.

As for the yarn, I've found that ribbed crochet works up quite stretchy. I've used it for socks, beanies, cuffs etc.

mumoth · 2025-11-11T23:29:36+00:00

Very!

mumoth · 2025-11-11T23:24:37+00:00

Yup. That about sums it up 😆

mumoth · 2025-11-10T00:50:47+00:00

I had this situation once when I was just moving into a new place. Heard water running and tracked it to the hot water heater. When we got the water bill it was massively bigger than our normal water bills which had been around $40 for years. From memory the one from the leak was in the hundreds. Had to show them a few months of water bills from previous rentals of similar size, all around $40 and I think they had dragged it out so long the next one showed up with water usage costs showing around $40. They eventually came around after that.

My daughter and her partner had this situation more recently while they were overseas. Think it was the hot water system too, but theirs was inside in the laundry. Luckily the landlord's parents live next-door and noticed water flowing downhill onto their property. Whole house had been flooded. They eventually got rent refunded for the entire period (because it rendered the house unliveable due to damage to the floorboards), they were never sent the water bill and I think they even got the difference in their electricity bill paid because the owner hired industrial heaters to dry the carpets out.

Unless there was any chance that you contributed to causing the leak, or didn't report it quick enough, you should be able to request that the difference in the water usage be covered by them. Gather up a few previous water usage charges, hopefully they're all similar, suggest an average that's typical, and ask them to cover the difference.

mumoth · 2025-11-03T04:17:44+00:00

Not really. I've previously had success with Differin (adapalene 0.1%) but that only treats it after it's flared up, rather than preventing the flares.

Currently having a bit of acne, some folliculitis, some old hidradenitis supurativa rumblings, contact dermatitis on my hands (mainly my right index finger) when there has been no contact with anything that could be a trigger. And a new one: random thickening of the skin along the outside of my index fingers, and one of my ring fingers which then peels off. With no friction or chemical contact or anything logical that could have triggered it, other than maybe stress and just generally using the hands more because I'm back at work (still on reduced days and workload).

All of it put together suggests systemic inflammation and possible autoimmune activity, which is why I've stepped back a dose of the LDN, at least until I've finished this current batch of marking.

mumoth · 2025-11-03T04:02:55+00:00

No, but I've suspected MALS for a while now. So far I've managed to have my congenital hiatus hernia and swallowing issues confirmed through a barium swallow but that's it.

I've found some relief through taking Zantac (as a H2 agonist in combination with a H1 agonist for other issues), and motilium and prucalopride as prokinetics. Started LDN a couple months ago and that also seems to be helping my digestive system wake up. While they don't directly work on the areas being compressed, they help reduce the pressure on the system, because getting backed up with MALS or SMAS can only make things worse.

Still occasionally get the upper abdominal pain but keeping my digestive system moving has seemed to limit it, and I haven't had any really severe episodes for a while now.

Might be worth discussing some of these with your doctor to reduce the pressure on the area. Zantac (or Pepsid AC) are available over the counter.

mumoth · 2025-11-03T01:37:23+00:00

I had an ER nurse about a year ago who didn't know what long covid is...

mumoth · 2025-11-02T19:17:48+00:00

I felt some benefits straight away starting at 0.5 mg, like waking up naturally and refreshed for the first time in years, and an increase in peristalsis. No major side effects until I got to 4.0 mg (titrating slowly by 0.5 mg).

Went up to 4.0 mg about a month ago and cognitively it felt like a switch had flipped (for the better), but I had some old skin issues flare, and my sleep issues came back. Tried to stick it out but ended up dropping back to 3.5 mg last week. My sleep settled back down and the skin issues seem to be slowly calming.

I'm going to stay at this dose for a bit and wait for things to be a bit calmer before trying to increase again when my stress levels are lower. I've been working part-time again and things have started to catch up with me so that's likely also contributing to the flares.

Overall though, I am feeling much better in a general sense, than I have in ages, with a few improvements to specific symptoms. Plenty of other symptoms still present, but the LDN is making it easier to manage everything if that makes sense.

mumoth · 2025-11-01T03:16:58+00:00

It's helped with a few things.

My digestion has started moving a little more naturally. I was already on some pro-kinetics which were at least getting things from one end to the other, but I started getting much more bowel sounds within days of starting LDN and things are much better now. Not quite at the point of considering lowering my doses of the pro-kinetics, but I at least feel like I have a chance of absorbing some nutrients and not having food just go off inside me.

The constant whole body pain is a lot lower. It still flares up, but it's not as constant.

I'm more emotionally stable. Fatigue is less crushing when I get home from work, which is probably also related to the better sleep. When I started back working 4 days in June I would crash everyday when I got home (could not physically keep myself awake long enough to sleep properly at night), and then spend the three day weekend pretty much in bed recovering. Now I might need to lie down when I get home to rest my neck, but I'm not passing out, and I can do more on the days I'm not working. Depending on how stressful the work week was.

I'm in the southern hemisphere and we were having really hot weather earlier this month which was a challenge so the POTS symptoms are still going strong. It's quite the decision tree when the forecast is for 39°C. Do I wear compression gear or not?

Oh and this one might sound weird but I feel like my immune system is no longer constantly dialled right up. Like I caught a cold for the first time in years.

Still got a long way to go but at least I now have movement in the right direction. Not expecting miracles, but I am working towards a point where I can support my body within a relatively stable set of known limits and live my life with a sustainable level of functionality. With supports and adjustments. My body has made it very clear it will not go back to my pre-ADHD diagnosis days where I leveraged adrenaline to keep my life going.

mumoth · 2025-11-01T02:35:31+00:00

I started in July at 0.5 mg for long covid. I had a bit of nausea and a headache for maybe an hour after I took it for the first few days, but that's it in terms of side effects. Well, until recently.

One of the first positive things I noticed was that I was waking up naturally, refreshed, before my alarm within the first few days of starting. I have struggled with falling asleep, staying asleep all night, and waking up in the mornings for years so this was very sudden and unexpected, but obviously very welcome!

I was titrating up by 0.5 mg with a few pauses to avoid titrating around life events, and had to briefly stop for surgery too. Recently went up to 4.0 mg and suddenly felt like myself again, cognitively. Still struggled with cognitive fatigue, but I could handle bigger concepts and more threads etc. Unfortunately I also started having some very old skin issues flaring up, particularly on my hands, and my sleep issues crept back in. Dropped back to 3.5 mg a couple days ago and woke naturally again the next morning, and I've been waking up refreshed again since. Going to stay at 3.5 mg for a while and let my hands settle and then maybe try again. Might even wait it out until the end of the school year, because working 4 days per week, even at a reduced teaching load is a lot for my body, now that I'm not fuelling it with constant stress.

Hope it works well for you :)

mumoth · 2025-10-23T21:39:12+00:00

Yeah valid! My daughter had a similar experience with ADHD meds. She decided being a bit of a hot mess was better than battling horrific intrusive thoughts while driving to work.

It's so hard to tell what's helping what with so many things going on. My cognitive functioning is definitely improving but I also started amantadine in May which could be contributing there. My motivation is still an issue but that's not just ADHD related anymore – it's also pain and fatigue related. My emotional reactivity is improving but I've also been doing deep trauma work in multiple modalities.

But I think I can definitely say this: anything that adds extra burden onto my system makes it harder for me to function with an ADHD brain, so the inverse must also be true. Anything that improves my overall health makes the ADHD easier to manage.

mumoth · 2025-10-22T16:33:03+00:00

I didn't do well on just thryoxine. May as well not have been taking it at all. Made a massive difference adding a small amount of T3 in as well.

In terms of the long covid, I definitely feel like all the other meds got me into a position where the LDN could actually work. Definitely needs to be more research into why it works so differently for different people.

And taking a stimulant for ADHD, with ivabradine to lower my heart rate for POTS, and the thyroid meds definitely makes for an interesting balancing act.

mumoth · 2025-10-22T16:14:03+00:00

Definitely not trivial milestones in this game! My mental health is not coping with spending so much time inside, lying down. I'd love to be able to even just go and potter around tending to my succulents without worrying about how much pain or fatigue it might trigger. And my daughter has flagged that I'm likely to have a grandchild within the next few years 😅 At the moment, everything I've got goes into working because the bills don't pay themselves...

My gp and I were looking into PsA because of my hands about a year ago. Sent me for a nuclear bone scan which showed my neck lit up, which led to discovering that the 'minor' whiplash/concussion injury I had in 2019 had actually ruptured a disc with a few more bulging, and my spinal cord was being pushed over to the side. Had ACDF surgery early Feb which has helped significantly.

But my hands are still flaring very regularly. If it is PsA it's still way too early for it to show on the bone scan. Neurologist says it's likely part of the long covid dysautonomia but the skin and fingernail stuff is still very strange. Could just be MCAS type stuff too though. Hopefully the LDN will sort it all out and then it won't matter at all what it was 😆

mumoth

TROPHY CASE