Y’know, I ain’t around these parts too much anymore (Yahoo can go huff a dong), but I just wanted to tell y’all my tale of the 2018/2019 holiday season…
December 17-20: Got the flu (later confirmed to be one of the strains protected by this season’s vaccine). Felt shite, took cold meds, still felt shite but not so much that I could justify not starting the Q1 spreadsheets at work.
Dec 21: Knew the crackles in my lungs were pneumonia. Couldn’t keep my blood oxygen above 90%. Went to the ER that night. They wanted to send me home. I said “I know something is wrong, I would be very uncomfortable going home.” They managed to find a bed in the hospital, said “fine, we’ll give you observation until tomorrow.”
Dec 22: Decompensated quickly. Parents apparently came up north, though I don’t remember seeing them before I woke up again. Couldn’t get aortic O2 saturation above 65% so I ended up intubated.
Late Dec 22-Early Dec 30: Completely unconscious, with the first
two days on paralytics so that the ventilator did 100% of my breathing.
The 36 hours on either side of my sedation are completely blank in my
memory.
At some point my secondary infection (which was never discerned, though extensive testing for bacteria and fungi was done) caused me to become critically ill, and there were preparations made to fly my to Mayo for ECMO. Thankfully, the high-dosage steroid treatment they gave me when I started getting worse helped, and I began improving slowly.
Dec 31: I start to see the world again. My first “memories” are strange delusions brought on by the anesthetics. I thought I had been in a coma for 6 years, and that I was in Cleveland. Why the fuck would I be in CLEVELAND?
I remember seeing the news, something about New Year’s Eve. I fell back asleep, into Seroquel dreams.
Jan 1: My memories start genuinely coming back. I discovered I was too weak to
extend my arm fully, and too shaky to eat Jell-O. The Jell-O DID get
delightfully wobbly, though.
Jan 2: Little Raven’s Birthday. Finally get out of ICU. Moved up to the general wards. Still can’t breathe easily. Food is vile-tasting. Can barely eat. Choke down a lemon bar and cry about how much better Brendan’s were and how much I miss my brother and how I refuse to make my parents go through that again.
Jan3: Manage my first wobbly steps with a walker. The floor hurts my knees and feet. The blood in my eyes is finally being cleared by my body.
Jan 3-5: Slow improvement. Slow for an otherwise-healthy young adult, at least. It feels like forever. My dad and I watched an unbearable amount of cross-country ski qualifying races for the Olympic teams. There’s a terrifying night-vision cam in my hospital room, which wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t have a creepy smiley face.
Jan 5-9: Transitional care, getting physical and occupational therapy. I finally
got home to my apartment (and cat!) that afternoon. I spent the next week regaining my strength and seeing specialists to try and find out why I got so sick. Consensus so far is “flu sucks and you’re unlucky?” I’m hoping to have better answers next month at my secondary follow-ups.
I aged my husband and parents about a decade during my hospital stay. I missed a month of work and am still fixing problems that arose with the backlog.
My Christmas dinner was a 10% dextrose solution, since I was still paralyzed and couldn’t have anything down my NG tube yet. New Year’s Eve drinks? “GIVE ME SOME FUCKING WATER!” – but not being able to have any, because I was still overloaded with fluid due to the standard protocol to prevent hypoperfusion when someone goes into septic shock.
Just to make it clear: I would not have survived without the tens of
thousands of hours of training and practice that my medical team devoted
their lives to acquiring. I would not have survived without the
millions of hours of research and trials that allowed the machines that
kept me monitored, cooled when my fever continued to spike, and breathing in a life-sustaining way when my lungs weren’t able to exchange gasses.
I am a fat bitch, but I am physically active, eat fairly decently, and don’t smoke or drink excessively. I am not someone who “should” be threatened by deadly complications due to influenza-caused pneumonia.Yet I was.
And YOU could be, too. Get yer flu shot, if you can. If you can’t, yell at others until they do.
It’s not too late in the season, trust me. People still die in March. People like you.
Okay, so, Labradorite. Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are. I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense! (Once again, I’m not a scientist! Correct me if I’m wrong!)
Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them – usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium. Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless. We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).
Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed. They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone. Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing. We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).
But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things. Labradorite is special. It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored). These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.
See, labradorite is actually just… grey. From most angles, it looks like this:
You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”
Why just the one angle? It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.
Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly. Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction. These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures. Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.
When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect. Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes. The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on. Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.
(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)
If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone. But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors! We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.
Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!
But whatever color it is, Labradorite will always be the Best and Coolest Rock.
Shiny rock science!
I’ve actually started collecting labradorite specimens.
[Caption: A realistic digital painting of personified Mercury. Portrait is from the hip up. Mercury is a pale headless man dressed all in black with a silver pinky ring on his right hand, which he holds over his heart. His shape is blurred on either side of him as if shifting faster than we can blink. The “planet” Mercury floats where his head should be, a deep burgundy crystalline sphere with a ragged crack down the middle revealing glowing-hot violet crystals inside. The background is a gradient from soft pale violet to deep pink.]
