The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Did you know stress can make you go blind?
I'm not talking psychosomatic, as was the topic of discussion in the CWR thread today.
Central serous chorioretinopathy
I had an episode about a year back, which thankfully abated on its own. Retina almost back to normal by the time I reached the hospital.
I was far less thankful when it happened to me again yesterday. Imagine a barcode, the size of your thumb, overlapping the center of your vision and slanted down and to the right. It wasn't a grey void, it came ribbed with stars and stripes for your displeasure.
It did go away after an hour, and I didn't bother to go for a checkup since there's not much need to do anything unless the visual disturbance persists for months.
It did make reading impossible, like trying to resolve text after being blinded by a flash, except it took its sweet time fading.
Eh, what's one more Sword of Damocles hanging over me as it goes? They're going to be fighting each other for space and place of prominence before they'll get me. I certainly don't have the option of "reducing stress" as is advised, what am I going to do? Quit my job and lay about? Give up on career progression? Fuck it, if my ethics questions are any hint, going blind would do more for the latter as I'd become effectively unfireable under the disability accommodation scheme.
Wow, and here I thought that Yakuza 0 plotline was contrived.
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I mean, yeah... If your job's stress level can't be reduced below the threshold that it might permanently blind you, then yeah if we were friends I'd strongly advise you to quit or reconsider how immovable the stress level is.
I would wager the job is only a minimal contributor to my stress. It's tiring, and occasionally thankless, but as medical jobs go it's among the better ones I've had and few better are on offer with my current qualifications.
That's the rub. I need more qualifications. Hence grinding to near burnout for exams. The last time this happened I quit my job and was studying full-time. This instance came when I'm dying inside waiting to see if my borderline score gets me into psychiatry, after a sudden doubling (and recent octupling) of the competition means that a score that would have been a shoe-in a year back leaves me in limbo today.
There's no escape. Worst case I lose significant vision in one eye, and the odds of that, while not zero, are small enough that I have to keep on pushing forward. While CSR is a chronic condition with an unpredictable course, I only have the earliest stages where it resolves without further care. Treatments exist if it ever becomes something that doesn't go away after (semi-paradoxically) stressing me the fuck out for a few hours. If it comes to that point, I'm going to quit my job and lie in bed for a week. Maybe ten. And then take a bunch of meds and have lasers cauterize my eyeballs, if all else fails.
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