emily fraser 🌿🐌✨

How Covid Quietly Rewires the Brain Researchers keep discovering more about the long-term neurological effects of SARS-CoV-2.

Do you have #LongCovid and feel like you have to consciously control your breathing?

An NIH researcher studying this wants to connect with patients.

Free link to my story: tinyurl.com/a8e8v4xv

Email me confidentially: j.gale@bloomberg.net

A government which does not want trans people to exist, and is legally allowed to force detransition in prisons, has created incentive for itself to put more trans people in prisons.

Nevra is a beloved member of the ME community who has been fighting so hard & for so long to stay alive in a horrible situation. Please share/boost & donate if you can afford to!

March is Long Covid Awareness month, because March is a lot like long covid in that every time you think it looks nice enough to go be active outside, you quickly regret it.

All the “what I have is SO MUCH MORE SERIOUS & HORRIFIC than fatigue” was hard to stomach. Like, yes buddy, we know! Please don’t marginalize all of us, including yourself, even further

I don’t know if I would have registered the red flags without prompting, but the very first thing he did when they got married was take away the opportunity she had pretty ingeniously secured for herself to finally become educated & able to support herself independently 💔

Nobody’s Girl is so upsetting on so many levels, including that you know from the forward that her fairytale escape into her husband’s arms was actually trading one (albeit extremely horrific) abuser for another.

Noooooo

This happened to me recently & it went back to normal after I turned my phone off & on 🤷🏻‍♀️

Shared this quote from the depths of cognitive fog so I’m relieved to be able to say I stand by it 🙃 The harm ignorant therapists/psychs cause to clients with Long Covid can be just as enormous as the harm MDs inflict. (APAB until proven otherwise!)

Part of the reason the whole country hasn't been screaming about trans Kansans who drive being made criminals overnight is because there's so much else that's unconstitutional and horrifying.

But part of it is because it's happening to trans people.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, Blind Rohingya refugee dumped by CBP, dies in cold "They just left him."

Nurul Amin Shah Alam's violent arrest, by police who saw his walking stick as a weapon—and who, like the Border Patrol officers who dumped him, apparently made no attempt to reckon with his disability or his mental state—set off events that ended in his death. www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/20...

There is so much anger in me for the "let it rip," "we don't need to mask/you don't need to mask" "All schools and universities must be in person" people, I think its possibly unhealthy for me

Archived link here, thanks to @jacky.wtf for sharing

archive.ph/qBbZJ#select...

It helped. It was getting so bad it was spilling into day to day life, like I started feeling panic in my building’s elevator. So it calmed the triggers & intensity way down, but I still feel panicked at the mere thought of another brain MRI 😭

I’m really looking forward to his book! Don’t want to count my chickens but I think it will be good!

I already had claustrophobia but it made it so much worse! I ended up doing EMDR for it to endure all the claustrophobic medical testing I’ve had to do for Long Covid—MRIs, CT scans, being strapped down on a tilt table, being in a tiny sound booth for hearing tests…

💯💯 And we need to stop pathologizing & punishing girls for their reasonable, life-preserving reactions to harm caused by men

I’m so sorry you went through this too 🫂 Between having to manually breathe & the separate feeling of my lungs not opening, I spent so many nights leaning down on all fours just fighting for air. What if we had been able to sleep instead? 😭

Most of the far end of the neurocognitive terror slowly subsided, but my brain is no longer the brain I possessed in 2019. And I’m sad that the brains of a lot of people I know, to greater & lesser extents, aren’t the same either.

“That didn’t happen & if it did happen it wasn’t that bad & if it was that bad it wasn’t my fault.” He circled between these arguments & damn if that sort of invalidation of trauma isn’t a recipe for ptsd. And made it harder for me to even attempt advocating for myself in a hostile medical system.

This & many other terrifying symptoms made those months from March through fall of 2020 a horror show. And so many of us endured it all alone at home. My only witness was my husband who I think *couldn’t* believe me, in part because he was the one who made me sick & he didn’t want responsibility.

It’s not sleep apnea—it happens while you’re wide awake. You CANT sleep if you want to keep breathing. It’s exhausting & traumatizing & can apparently be deadly. Filmmaker Jen Brea, whose ME went into remission after a craniocervical fusion, also had Ondine’s curse, which resolved after fusion.

So many of us who got sick in 2020 experienced Ondine’s curse. Automatic breathing stops & your brain ends up in combat with itself—the conscious part fights to manually override the unconscious part which is supposed to be breathing but isn’t. You have to fight over & over again for every breath.

I started reading Nobody’s Girl & omg, I’ve only just now gotten to her being hired at Mar a Lago & she’s already endured a decade of unspeakable horrors & fought so damn hard to survive with absolutely no one protecting her. My endless love & awe goes out to survivors everywhere.

Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands by Felix

Crips for eSims for Gaza Crips for eSims for Gaza is a collaboration between Jane Shi, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alice Wong.

chuffed.org/project/crip... this is my regular reminder that we are still here and working to stay out of the red. Celebrate and honor Ramadan by considering spreading the word and donating to us. Let Gaza communications ring freely. You can't stop the signal.

Inheritance by DeMarcus Burke - Rattle: Poetry Son, where is my car? Son, I don’t have money for your mistake. Son, where is my credit card?

These women—
backbones bent like coat hangers,
wallets like open wounds—
love hard.

—DeMarcus Burke

Psychologisation 101 Definitions, Distinctions, and Why It Matters

If someone has sent you the 'brain training' article in the @theguardian.com (yes, while Savannah is being medically abused in a UK hospital 🙁) in hope of you being 'cured' - you can send them back any one of our articles on the subject.

Psychologisation 101 👇
open.substack.com/pub/longcovi...

Let’s support this anti-discrimination legislation so people can wear masks in peace! I submitted a few sentences of testimony & it was easy, but you don’t even have to write anything if you don’t have capacity. You can just register your support!

Standwithminnesota.com