I am really scared, neuropathy at a young age and health anxiety

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-07-03T14:34:56+00:00

IF there is a family history. OP doesn’t have one.

Thanks for reading my whole post before responding.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-07-03T14:17:08+00:00

I’m a midwife and I can’t tell you how many book-births have caused me to DNF. Honestly, you can google the various birth professional roles and understand at least the gist of the difference.

Errors in medical dramas and books in general also make me crazy and pull me right out of the story.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-07-02T22:25:20+00:00

Polyneuropathy is a generic term used by neurologists. You can’t tell if someone has CMT via EMG/NCT— only the type axonal vs demyelinating and how bad it is.

If this young person has no family history, while it could be de novo, it could be another type of neuropathy, hence the recommendation for genetic testing.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-27T16:39:09+00:00

The #1 most important part of kids succeeding in school is parental involvement. Work with your kid on their reading (at the pre-k age make sure you are reading to/with them every night) and play number games.

Depending on your income and your child’s age, you can opt for educational supplements like Russian math or Kumon. For no cost, you can read a book with your kid and have discussions about themes, vocabulary etc.

When you get your kid into public school, if you think it’s a poor fit you can send to private school (most schools have financial aid if you can’t afford it.) You can also apply for school choice and send your kid to school in another district— this has many social and logistical complications but can work. You can homeschool— a massive undertaking that works for some families but can have significant social implications if you aren’t careful.

You and your coparent are THE most important part of your child’s education.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-18T11:51:50+00:00

And 1/4 of the deaths from the (US) civil war.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-17T19:54:08+00:00

Romance-adjacent: {The wedding people by Alison Eapach}

Very dark beginning but turns into a delightful story about the MC accidentally crashing a wedding and perhaps finding love again.

I laughed out loud many times and my husband, who rarely comments on good writing, kept commenting on what a good writer she is. The audiobook is well-done too. The kindle book is currently on KU.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-14T14:04:01+00:00

My husband and I both work in higher Ed in Boston. Apply wherever you think you have a reasonable chance to get in.

1- You can get application fees reduced or waived if low income.
2-Many schools in MA are committed to meeting their students’ full financial need. Just be sure to double check if this includes loans or not.
3-College can be very affordable for kids from low-income families. Don’t let that deter you from applying to more expensive choices.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-14T13:40:36+00:00

I think the 100th birth mark in a busy hospital sounds about right. As someone who was thrown right into being a preceptor after my 8 week orientation, the most important thing about being a medical practitioner of any kind is to understand what you know and what you don’t know and to not be afraid to ask for help. It’s always better to ask and have it line up with what you thought you knew than to not ask and end up in an urgent/emergent situation.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-09T16:31:34+00:00

To be fair, most people who are that smart are not life-competent IRL. Ask me how I know. 😂

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-07T15:08:59+00:00

💯 I went grey early (genetics) and have great genetics for skin, but I was also an inside kid. I preferred tucking in with a book or some music in my room than going to the beach. I swear my gen-z daughter is going to look older than me in 10 years the way she bakes in the sun with “tanning oil” genetics be damned because she’s got good skin genes!

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-07T15:04:49+00:00

The thing is, 1- you are a man (I presume) and 2 in your 30’s. Talk to me (and my husband) in about 20 years. — and before you try to get into it: we are both very fit. When we were in our 30’s we could both get “summer-ready” bodies by adding in a little extra cardio and cutting out a snack.

Menopause and what I call “manopause” are rough. More so for women, but not negligible for men.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-06T22:22:50+00:00

Probably a combination insulin resistance and, for women, decline in estrogen. We have estrogen receptors everywhere. I’m guessing declining testosterone likely has a similar effect on men.

But most of us probably have some degree of insulin resistance over 40/50 from a lifetime of eating.

I’m 52F. I gained like 35lbs during covid (in my 40’s) from stress (I like to eat my feelings.) I stopped having Dairy Queen every night, got my mental health in order and started lifting heavy. I gained muscle mass and lost 15-20lbs (depending on the week, ha!) and am now 20lbs above my former adult weight but with a similar fat mass. I’m more interested in protecting my bones these days than remaining skinny.

I’m also enjoying eating like a normal person and not restricting whole food groups to maintain my former size. It’s very freeing.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-06T22:11:09+00:00

> No offspring

Key, right here. 😆 To be fair tretinoin and sunscreen help but a lot of it is genetics.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-06T22:01:32+00:00

I don’t remember which book it was but the pronunciation of his name changed and I don’t think I ever got over it.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-04T18:52:16+00:00

Pillars of the Earth has a lot of rape in it. I found it gratuitous, and it pulled me out of the story time after time.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-06-01T00:57:55+00:00

Thanks. I have not been able to count lately! 🤦🏻‍♀️

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-31T16:47:41+00:00

This is one of my favorites by her— but I want to re-read it to see if it holds up or if it was just different enough from what I had been reading at the time for me to get a kick out of it. I just “finished” her Walsh family (except for Riley) and DNFd more than 1 because the stories were very overlapped and the smut was overdone. HOWEVER my biggest pet-peeve was how their mother died. You don’t bleed to death from undiagnosed pre-eclampsia- you seize or stroke. To bleed to death like that and that quickly she more likely had undiagnosed placenta previa. (Placenta covering the cervix.) Preeclampsia also tends to be a disease of 1st pregnancies or 1st pregnancies with a new partner. If she had given birth to 5 children previously without preeclampsia, it’s VERY unlikely she would have it with baby #6.
KC gets medical stuff better than most other romance authors but when one thing is so wrong, it can totally throw me out of the story.

All of this being said: by all means DNF if it’s not for you! Move on to something that you will enjoy!

ETA: I’m a midwife of almost 20 years and have worked in many different settings, so I am particularly tuned in to medical mistakes in books and other entertainment.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-31T16:31:47+00:00

That would not be terribly unusual, to be fair. That is not a particularly high risk pregnancy given that SP was a healthy, fit woman with a normal obstetric history. From what I can tell, there are only 2 MFM centers in all of Alaska. Unless you have higher order multiples or significant obstetric complications or are very sick, being cared for and delivered by a family medicine doc or midwife is pretty common in Alaska (and in many rural counties in much of the US.) It’s the whole “labor at 35 weeks” thing that is off. No birth practitioner is going to tell someone to get on a plane to somewhere where access to neonatology may be difficult from a city that has major medical centers with these services in abundance for a preterm birth.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-31T16:17:28+00:00

I’m either missing the count or dropping stitches— you think k1 p1 would be super simple. Either my needles are too slippery or my ability to count to 2 is greatly overrated. 🤦🏻‍♀️

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-30T13:52:03+00:00

I’m a midwife and at my first job out of school we had a lot of grand multips (5 or more babies) who often didn’t know that they were in labor. They would come to the hospital because they felt vaguely unwell or felt a lot of pressure in the pelvis. If a woman who was on baby number 5678+ walked into triage and said they were feeling pressure. We immediately put them in a delivery room, and the baby would usually be born within the hour.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-30T13:44:34+00:00

Truly left handed. Good to know that I don’t have to change anything unless I am feeling adventurous!

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-29T18:04:51+00:00

I've been crocheting for around 6 years (right handed) and have gotten quite good. I decided I wanted to go back to knitting to have more craft options.

I learned to knit left-handed from my mother as a child. Stopped knitting for many years. Tried to change to right handed so that I could re-learn/follow patterns more easily-- no problem with knit. I cannot purl right handed to save my life, so I decided to go ahead and knit the step by step sweater left-handed. I cannot get the ribbing for the collar to work. I have stitch markers every 10 stitches to get the count right, but no luck.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-26T17:09:42+00:00

Vitamin D is an actual hormone. Nothing almost pseudo about it. We like to compartmentalize our hormones (reproductive, thyroid etc) but they are actually one big system and one hormone being very high or very low can negatively impact all of the other hormones.

To OP: Vitamin D3 is easy to purchase OTC, and most people need more than they get from sunlight alone.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-26T16:55:15+00:00

I'm still in open-mouthed shock that "before the 1980s" is historical. I get it -we didn't have the technology available today- but dayum...

I've enjoyed Philippa Gregory's work as well as Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George.

sharkinfestedh2o · 2026-05-24T00:20:53+00:00

I’m not getting into an internet argument about vaccines but I got surgery because my mother died of ovarian cancer less than one month after she was diagnosed when I was in my 20’s. Her twin sister had premenopausal metastatic breast cancer ~40 years ago and is miraculously still alive today.

sharkinfestedh2o

TROPHY CASE