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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: September 5th, 2025

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  • They wouldn’t have even necessarily had to “release” it. Texas as I understand it has large pockets of people just refusing the MMR vaccine among others leading to outbreaks of measles, and undocumented immigrants are more likely to just not have access to healthcare to get those vaccinations themselves meaning they’re more vulnerable to it.

    Measles is incredibly infectious. Like it can hang in the air for up to 2 hours, has something like a 90% infection rate if you aren’t immune. If you aren’t doing your absolute best to contain it, then it will spread if there’s people for it to spread to.


  • omg right? My partner and I probably wouldn’t have married either. At minimum not when we did, but we had a bit of a scare years ago with her late ex-spouse’s family possibly thinking about fighting me for custody of the oldest of anything happened to her during the initial health scare that put her on disability to begin with from the pseudotumor.

    It’s a long story but the short version is that basically no court out here wanted to touch letting me adopt our oldest because they wouldn’t accept the proof that the other bio parent was deceased. So when she got put on disability and that overtook the survivor benefits we decided the best thing for us was to marry so we could guarantee a bit better that he stayed with me if anything happened to her.


  • I haven’t actually heard of TVP, I’ve heard of seitan though I’ve never had the chance to try it. But yeah that’s the big problem, most of the plant based proteins that I’m aware of are either very high carb or you need a large volume of them to get that protein content. Both of which don’t work with her restrictions.

    I don’t have particularly high hopes for seitan given what I’ve heard about it as far as like the texture aversions in the house go. She’s in the spectrum too and most likely where there kids get it from. She actually got kind of informally diagnosed through them being diagnosed before her health started really going downhill. But I’m willing to give anything a shot, especially if there’s a chance to make the food budget stretch a bit more with all these dietary restrictions in the house with our limited income. I’ll be on the lookout for them.


  • I’m not sure we’ve never actually found seitan around to try it. Wholeheartedly agree about the caregiver burnout and the way the system works though. So much “invisible” care work it just expected to be done for free with zero support it’s crazy.

    The wildest part about that to me was that Medicare would pay me to care for her… if we weren’t married. But because we are I’m ineligible for that.


  • The only problem with that is we live on a fixed budget as I don’t work since they all need varying degrees of care around the clock. We live entirely off my wife’s disability and whatever assistance programs we qualify for. I have neither the time, the energy, nor the money to prepare meals for myself entirely separate from their dietary restrictions.

    Each kid eats maybe a dozen things themselves, 20 for the oldest, and there’s maybe 6 that overlap between them. By the time I’ve figured out what they’re willing to eat and made it I almost zero desire to even look at food let alone prepare an entirely separate vegan meal with all of that no money I have to purchase vegan ingredients that again likely nobody but me would be able to eat.

    (Edit: I should add I’m not completely against the idea of changing my own diet. It’s just that by the time I’m feeding myself I’m so done with the whole thing that my “diet” is whatever I can easily shove in my food hole without fussing too much about it)


  • I end up having to walk away from a bunch of my comments in the middle because smol childrens but then my phone decides to refresh the app entirely and lose the post because I was out of the app for longer than 30 seconds and I can’t be arsed to track the comment I was replying to back down to finish the draft that I know is saved.


  • One might think “Why get this surgery then?” if it’s like this. Which is a fair question. For my wife in particular she had a condition called pseudotumor cerebri where she was producing too much cerebrospinal fluid and not getting rid of it fast enough so it was compressing her brain and optic nerve much like a brain tumor (hence why it is called pseudo tumor). She was significantly overweight at the time and had this issue before. It resolved temporarily when she lost weight but due to heavy food insecurity and other trauma when she was younger she struggled to keep the weight off. So she had 2 options: Aggressive weight loss from bariatric surgery, or getting a shunt implanted in her skull to drain the fluid. She chose the bariatric surgery that gave her the best chance of not still needing the shunt, which was the DS. Since having severe OCD she knew for a fact she could keep up with the vitamin supplementation and use managing the vitamins as an adaptive outlet for the OCD.

    Why specific formulations and times for vitamins? A couple reasons, one is ease of absorption. Certain formulations have to be basically digested a little first to get properly absorbed which because of the surgery her body just doesn’t properly do. This is basically why she needs the supplements to begin with. Since her body only properly digests part of what she eats she doesn’t actually absorb a bunch of the nutrients from it and needs to supplement the vitamins her body can’t absorb well from food. The second is that certain vitamins interfere with the absorption of others, calcium inhibiting iron absorption for example.


  • I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m going to be adding some addendums/emphasis and providing some additional context for some things about her condition in here. I do not mean any of this to say that I believe that you personally are or plan on discounting her condition. It is meant only for emphasis because the particular bariatric surgery she had, the Duodenal Switch is significantly more involved than most other surgeries. A lot of people end up having to have the surgery partially reversed because they can’t keep up with the vitamin supplementation and end up hospitalized and dying of malnutrition.

    The malabsorption means that she already has to have many small meals through the day. Then each of those meals needs to hit certain macros while being under that volume.

    So like to give an example. She needs at least 200g of protein in a day while staying as far under 50g of carbs as possible (fiber included) to not be utterly miserable. That’s not “the doctor told me to get this much” they told her to go for 150g. That’s the levels she’s found over the years result in her not being in significant gastrointestinal distress and actually having decent energy levels along with the roughly 50 vitamin supplements she HAS TO TAKE TO NOT DIE OF MALNUTRITION because and I cannot stress this enough the malabsorption means she CANNOT properly absorb most of these vitamins from food. They need to be very specific formulations at specific times of day to keep her levels up. Like 125,000IU+ PER DAY of Vitamin A (This is WILL KILL YOU levels for a normal person BTW) to still be partially night blind from deficiency (yes she has seen a doctor about it to make sure it’s nothing else)

    That 1.5 cups of black beans is around 22.5g of protein and 60g of carbs. So that’s 2 entire “meals” of nothing but beans to have a little over 1/10th of the protein she needs in a day and 20% over the entire day’s limit for carbs.


  • idk the amount of times I’ve tried to explain my wife and kid’s dietary restrictions that mean veganism is basically impossible for us in other places I get a lot of hate.

    The kids are autistic and have major taste and texture aversions, which maybe we could work around with the right things. My wife though had a malabsorptive bariatric surgery that means she needs to eat Low carb, High protein, and most importantly Low volume meals. When you need like 1.5 cups of beans to get the same protein as like 3oz of ground beef and only have a 6 ounce stomach volume you kinda have to go with the one that gives you the most protein for the least volume.



  • Yeah idk, I’m 35 and I’ve felt like a teenager trapped in a slowly decaying meat prison since I was like… 17 maybe? Even as I graduated, got a job, got married, started a family… Every step it was just like “Surely this is where I finally start to feel like a real Grown-Up,” and every time it just doesn’t change. I still feel like a stupid teenager pretending to be an adult. One that does an alright job pretending mind you, but I still feel like I’m just pretending even after this long.





  • On yeah it’s insane to think they planned for him to get grazed in any version of this. Seems like the most plausible version of the “it was faked” theory is that the dude was supposed to be there, get off a shot and like hit something nearby at most and Trump getting injured at all was a total accident.

    But yeah I’m only talking hypothetically about the theory. I agree it’s way more likely that things just shook out like you said.


  • I thought by “faked” people usually meant “the guy never meant to actually hit him,” not “he didn’t shoot a real bullet,” or did I miss something in that discourse?

    Like I thought that the idea for this theory was the bullet was supposed to just hit the teleprompter so he could be like “There was an attempt on my life,” and either it or a piece of glass from the prompter grazed his ear.