Avatar

The Gotham Club Crawl

@doktorgirlfriend / doktorgirlfriend.tumblr.com

The not-so-secret lair of a mad librarian. 18+ followers only. Icon art by @theothersideshowmel.
Avatar

idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol

One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine

scientist when you don't take the medicine they developed to help your pain

As long as you are taking a SAFE dose of it, then it's *good* for you. Pain is bad for the body. The inflammation from prolonged pain can worsen chronic issues and make it harder to heal.

Ibuprofen is best for pain that has inflammation, while acetaminophen doesn't help with inflammation but is more broadly effective on other types of pain. As long as you are taking the recommended dose, you can even take them TOGETHER, since they have different mechanisms of action.

You do need to be aware of how much and how often you are taking any pain medication. Overdoses can be very painful (even lethal.) And if you are in chronic pain often enough that you need more than the safe dose, then you need to look into other medications to manage that pain.

(Also, if you are specifically taking Acetaminophen/Tylenol for your go-to pain management, getting some NAC and taking that with it reduces the risk of overdose AND may strengthen the effect.)

One other thing: NSAIDS (ibuprofen, aspirin, and naproxen being the three big ones) can cause digestive issues with chronic use, including stomach ulcers. That doesn't mean "don't take them," it means "if you're at the point where you're on them all the time, every day, constantly, you should talk to a doctor about either reducing that risk or switching to another medication that doesn't have those side effects."

Hi! I know some things about using OTC medication for pain management, because I have chronic migraines and I didn’t have anything else to treat them with for most of a year.

1: ibuprofen, aspirin, and sodium naproxen (NSAID) are good at reducing inflammation but aren’t quite as effective for pain that isn’t inflammation (for migraines specifically, I find ibuprofen and aspirin don’t help much and often give me rebound headaches once they wear off so I don’t use them for migraines. I *have* found sodium naproxen helpful for my migraines tho and I would definitely recommend ibuprofen for pretty much any pain that is caused by an injury)

2: NSAIDs all get filtered out of your bloodstream by your kidneys. Taking too much of one of them, or taking more than one at a time, will put extra stress on your kidneys. If you have kidney problems I suggest you be extra careful with these and talk to a doctor.

3: Tylenol / Acetaminophen isn’t an anti inflammatory medication but it is useful for treating most any kind of pain. It is the go-to OTC for treating migraines and period cramps specifically, they even make specific pills that combine Tylenol with caffeine and other stuff specifically for the purpose of treating those specific things (excedrin for migraine, midol for period cramps).

4: Tylenol gets filtered out of your bloodstream by the liver. Taking too much can stress or damage your liver. If you have liver problems I recommend you be extra careful with Tylenol and talk to a doctor. A quick google says that it’s safe to use Tylenol and alcohol at the same time, assuming you do not do both everyday or in excessive quantities. If you’re an alcoholic, you should avoid using Tylenol very often (like, once or twice a month is probably fine, three times a week is probably not)

5: taking Tylenol with an NSAID is safe and is a very common pain management strategy for post surgery pain (take one, take some of the other before the first one wears off so you aren’t in too much pain before it’s time for another dose of medication 1, keep going like that until you don’t need to anymore)

6: how much is too much? More than the amount recommended for you based on your age and weight in one day, or if you use them more than half the days in a month (aka if you use them 15 or more days per month). If you’re at this point, you should see a doctor about your pain management options (and hopefully deal with whatever is causing you to need pain management so often). I am NOT saying that you should not use those medications if you need pain management that often, just that you should be aware of the risks and hopefully look for other things that can help so you don’t stress your system out too much.

7: it is worth noting that quite a few of the prescription pain medications are actually Tylenol plus something else, because the Tylenol can and often does make the other thing work better than it would alone. It is entirely possible that a doctor might tell you to take Tylenol every day if that is going to be better for you than the pain.

8: Pain is bad for you. Like, even if you have a high pain tolerance and ‘you can take it’ it’s still bad because pain is a physical stress on your whole body and too much stress IS NOT HEALTHY. Your pain doesn’t need to be unbearable to be worth treating, if you have pain, please do something about it. Pain is your body’s signal that something is wrong and you need to do something about it. Sometimes, especially if you have chronic pain, the pain itself is the thing that’s wrong and the inherent stress of pain can harm you all by itself.

9: how can pain itself harm you? I would like to say that I categorically do not know all the ways it can hurt you, but I do know for a fact that pain can and WILL raise your blood pressure (which can be a problem), and chronic pain can and WILL cause depression, anxiety, and PTSD like symptoms at minimum and give you those conditions at a clinically diagnosable severity at worse (not worst, the worst is if your pain drives you to suicide, which it can and does do to people). No I am not joking about chronic pain giving people PTSD, chronic pain is inherently traumatic in my opinion. It’s basically long-term torture that doesn’t (usually) have a human deliberately causing it, but torture nonetheless.

Even if you aren’t sure about the above paragraph, it is still self evidently true that pain occupies brain space and uses mental energy that you would probably prefer to be using on something else.

Treat your pain. Your suffering does not help anyone, especially not yourself.

Since I am not above using a little gentle emotional manipulation (of saying true things to make an emotional appeal to action) to convince people to be kind to themselves: I love you, random person on the internet, and I do not want you to to be in pain, especially if you can avoid it. I am sad, right now, thinking about all the people who feel like they should tough out their pain for whatever reason, and I am not the only one. Please don’t be one the people making me sad.

So take your fucking medicine.

People are walking biomes if u think about it

To invading germs, you are a jungle full of hungry tigers. To your gut bacteria, you are a warm orchard of perpetual bounty. To your eyelash mites, you are a walking fortress and a mountaintop pasture. How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?

— "Host" by @cryptonature, in his book Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

Avatar

Parasites and other symbiotes (*symbiosis is actually an umbrella term that includes parasites, before anyone asks) outnumber free living organisms in both species and individual numbers, meaning that the *norm* for life on earth is to live your whole life in or on another creature. Us larger independent beasts are technically special in having adapted to survive the harsh non-living world; to gut bacteria and mites and parasitic worms we're like planets keeping them safe from an immense deadly void.