'Walking it off'
Apr. 20th, 2019 12:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jadislefeu(Via umadoshi )
"GenX Tribe: Breaking Bones and Other Stories of Walking it Off"
CW: Link and this post contain stories about injuries, treated and untreated.
I'm not Gen X, but my dad's a Boomer (I was a late in life baby), and he was (and is) very much in that medical mold. He liked to call it 'caveman medicine'. (Luckily my mother was not as much, so I was actually taken to the doctor for things like dislocating my elbow as a kindergartener or having a 104.5 degree fever because I had swine flu.) His opinion is that you should walk it off if you possibly can, and that superglue (with baking soda on it to make it cure faster, and an ice cube on that to keep the exothermic reaction from burning you) is preferable to going to the hospital for stitches.
He yelled at me once because the wound care clinic visits prescribed to keep my feet from going septic after I had to go to the hospital for burning all the skin off my feet cost money, and apparently I should have just stayed at home and suffered? And/or gotten sepsis? (I went into shock! Twice! I burned all the skin off my feet and there was asphalt ground into them!)
I was definitely told that if I pulled something in my back or twisted my ankle (or possibly sprained my ankle!) I should just get up and walk it off. One time when he was in college, he fell roller skating to class and twisted his whole leg and could barely stand, but he got up and kept going and it was fine!
I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about growing up with this kind of thing, except maybe jamethiel, and her dad's a doctor, so there's another kind of dimension going on there. Very interesting for me to read, and really makes me appreciate that my mom actually believes in doctors, because I got off damn lightly compared to some of the stories in the link.
(My dad is even more anti-doctor now, he's been inducted into the weirdo We All Have Candida Overgrowth and Microwaves Cause Cancer and Wheat Binds To The Opium Receptors Of The Brain nonsense via his girlfriend, sister, and mother. I think my mom was a lot more of a mediating influence on him than I ever realized before the divorce.)
I definitely didn't come out of that upbringing unaffected. I'm disinclined to go to doctors for anything I can possibly deal with myself, which ranges from 'treating my ear infections with neosporin' to 'lancing my own boils'.
new CW: animal death
It's also, frankly, to blame for the deaths of my cats, because he doesn't believe in veterinary care any more than he believes in doctors--he bought vaccines from the feed store and gave them himself when they were kittens and then nothing else ever--and I had no money for emergency care, and I knew he wouldn't give any to me, so I tried to nurse Tabby through her final decline without asking (after he refused for Bluebell and my mother cleaned out her savings for her) because I didn't want to live the rest of my life knowing he'd refused to give me the money that could have saved her, and that her death was 100% his fault. (So now I just get to know that it's my fault, instead. Both of them. If I had just realized that Bluebell had gotten out of the house sooner, I could have found her before she froze to death somewhere lost and I never saw her again, it's my fault, if I had fundraised if I had put up posters if I had tried harder--) (I miss them so much. Koschei is a darling and I love him, but Tabby and Bluebell were the first pets I ever had and I'd had them as long as I could remember and they're gone.) But my dad, who cheerfully talks about Tizzy kitty, who was two years old when she never came home but he doesn't see this as a reason to stop having outside cats because he has no goddamn empathy--
This got away from me. I don't have a conclusion.
I want my girls back, and I'm never going to see them again, and I don't even have Bluebell's ashes like I managed to hysterical breakdown my father into paying for cremation for Tabby. (More willing to pay for death than life.)
umadoshi )"GenX Tribe: Breaking Bones and Other Stories of Walking it Off"
CW: Link and this post contain stories about injuries, treated and untreated.
I'm not Gen X, but my dad's a Boomer (I was a late in life baby), and he was (and is) very much in that medical mold. He liked to call it 'caveman medicine'. (Luckily my mother was not as much, so I was actually taken to the doctor for things like dislocating my elbow as a kindergartener or having a 104.5 degree fever because I had swine flu.) His opinion is that you should walk it off if you possibly can, and that superglue (with baking soda on it to make it cure faster, and an ice cube on that to keep the exothermic reaction from burning you) is preferable to going to the hospital for stitches.
He yelled at me once because the wound care clinic visits prescribed to keep my feet from going septic after I had to go to the hospital for burning all the skin off my feet cost money, and apparently I should have just stayed at home and suffered? And/or gotten sepsis? (I went into shock! Twice! I burned all the skin off my feet and there was asphalt ground into them!)
I was definitely told that if I pulled something in my back or twisted my ankle (or possibly sprained my ankle!) I should just get up and walk it off. One time when he was in college, he fell roller skating to class and twisted his whole leg and could barely stand, but he got up and kept going and it was fine!
I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about growing up with this kind of thing, except maybe jamethiel, and her dad's a doctor, so there's another kind of dimension going on there. Very interesting for me to read, and really makes me appreciate that my mom actually believes in doctors, because I got off damn lightly compared to some of the stories in the link.
(My dad is even more anti-doctor now, he's been inducted into the weirdo We All Have Candida Overgrowth and Microwaves Cause Cancer and Wheat Binds To The Opium Receptors Of The Brain nonsense via his girlfriend, sister, and mother. I think my mom was a lot more of a mediating influence on him than I ever realized before the divorce.)
I definitely didn't come out of that upbringing unaffected. I'm disinclined to go to doctors for anything I can possibly deal with myself, which ranges from 'treating my ear infections with neosporin' to 'lancing my own boils'.
new CW: animal death
It's also, frankly, to blame for the deaths of my cats, because he doesn't believe in veterinary care any more than he believes in doctors--he bought vaccines from the feed store and gave them himself when they were kittens and then nothing else ever--and I had no money for emergency care, and I knew he wouldn't give any to me, so I tried to nurse Tabby through her final decline without asking (after he refused for Bluebell and my mother cleaned out her savings for her) because I didn't want to live the rest of my life knowing he'd refused to give me the money that could have saved her, and that her death was 100% his fault. (So now I just get to know that it's my fault, instead. Both of them. If I had just realized that Bluebell had gotten out of the house sooner, I could have found her before she froze to death somewhere lost and I never saw her again, it's my fault, if I had fundraised if I had put up posters if I had tried harder--) (I miss them so much. Koschei is a darling and I love him, but Tabby and Bluebell were the first pets I ever had and I'd had them as long as I could remember and they're gone.) But my dad, who cheerfully talks about Tizzy kitty, who was two years old when she never came home but he doesn't see this as a reason to stop having outside cats because he has no goddamn empathy--
This got away from me. I don't have a conclusion.
I want my girls back, and I'm never going to see them again, and I don't even have Bluebell's ashes like I managed to hysterical breakdown my father into paying for cremation for Tabby. (More willing to pay for death than life.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-20 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-20 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-20 12:51 pm (UTC)I'm especially sorry about the cats, though. Poor babies. I'm glad you're sharing and not walking those psychic wounds off alone.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-20 10:44 pm (UTC)Koschei's a sweetheart and I love him dearly, but sometimes I have to restrain myself from breaking down screaming because he's Not Bluebell. (Tabby was my parents' cat more than mine up until I was 19 or so. And she moved across the country with me because my mom didn't want to have to take care of a litterbox, and my dad had his girlfriend's cats that she was even more terrified of than she was of Bluebell, and which furthermore were allowed outside and I did not want her disappearing into the dessert like Tizzy kitty of yore.) (Tizzy predated me existing, I only know of her from my dad talking about her.) (Honestly, my dad is terrible about cats, he also wanted to get them declawed but very earnest nine year old Jessa who had had a subscription to Cat Fancy for years yelled about how IT'S CUTTING OFF ONE OF THEIR FINGER JOINTS and he relented.)
I was--christ, what year was that, spring 2013, I was 21 when I burned all the skin off my feet walking down my dad's driveway to get the mail (somehow, I've never understood why that happened when I'd walked barefoot on asphalt a million times before) and I had at least the tenacity to yell at him that I needed to go to the ER. (I was actually making an effort to try and deal with it myself, I'd crawled through the house to the bathroom, but when I stood up on my knees to get into the cabinet for a washcloth to try and clean them with I nearly fainted, which in retrospect comparing that experience to the emergency room after when I was acknowledged as going into shock, that was definitely me going into shock on the bathroom floor.)
My mom took me to a lot of therapists (from very early, I went to play therapy in elementary school, probably because of my tendency to run away from class and hide so effectively they called the police) but I'm not sure any of them helped because as a child and teenager I had this terrible tendency to not talk about anything I was actually upset about and just chatter brightly about school and get no utility out of the experience. Which was... probably contentious between them, in retrospect, because my dad has a tendency to do things like yell about how my mom takes TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS OF PILLS A YEAR!!! (She has thyroid problems and migraines and she's on maintenance medication for having had cancer, dad! Most people don't just suffer through life refusing to take so much as an ibuprofen, dad!) (He probably got it from his own father, granddad Didn't Take Painkillers.)