To be clear, I have been through post-exposure prophylaxis for rabies. In 2005 or early 2006, I forget which exactly, @urbanprole and I woke up with a bat in our bedroom bc our apartment maintenance hadn't closed up the HVAC system after replacing filters. I shooed the bat out with a broom and it was acting normally for a bat but we didn't take any chances. (Thankfully, MK was at her dad's that weekend.)

I felt absolutely wretched the next day - the worst I've ever felt, excluding surgery and childbirth - after each series of shots. I had to get 2 sets on different days. I got 8 shots the first day, and Emet got like 13 or 15 bc she's very tall, and it's done by mass. The only thing I can think to compare it to is the depths of COVID, but without the coughing. Your immune system is Working Hard to update itself so it can recognize and fight any possible exposure.

I basically laid in bed and ached and sweated and groaned, but after it was over, I was fine.

Fewer than 20 people have ever survived rabies, and none are known to have survived without immediate post-exposure prophylaxis. Do not fuck around with this. Do not approach strange stray or wild mammals, especially without protective clothing.

Several comments on this post talking about 'why can't the US eradicate rabies entirely' and my friends, it can be really hard to understand how fucking big the United States is, and how weird it is to have basically 50 small countries in a trenchcoat. Like, we're fighting each other right now in courts over medicine, for one thing, and for another...

Like, one of the people commenting on this post and wondering this is from Portugal. Portugal is 35,603 square miles, and the United States is 3.97 million square miles. Portugal is 0.0093% the size of the United States, which... yeah. Like. The single state that I grew up in (Pennsylvania) is 46K square miles.

So, like, for one thing, this country is trying not to explode while a small group of people try to make it explode. And for another?

The US? Is. Fucking. Huge.

Australia doesn't have Rabies, because as far as I'm aware it just never got here and we work hard to keep it that way.

But we do have Bat Derived Lyssavirus, which is basically a rabies doppelganger... Don't fuck around with bats. Go to a Dr if you come into contact with a bat because you don't always notice a scratch/bite in the moment.

No need to be afraid of bats, just appreciate them from a distance... They're wild animals. If you find a bat in distress call a ranger.

I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to convince coworkers starting a bat-box monitoring project that, even if they don’t intend to handle bats, they should get their rabies vaccinations.

bats are the only reservoir species for rabies here, and it has a pretty low prevalence. so is it likely they’re going to come in physical contact with a bat? not really. is it likely any bat they come in contact with will have rabies? also no.

but it only takes one, and pre-exposure vaccine is WAY less of a trial than post-exposure (and if, for some reason, you are exposed and DON’T get a post-exposure vax, then you’re dead).

As a wildlife professional mentioned, you should get post-exposure prophylaxis regardless of whether you have a vaccine or not if you're exposed. The vaccine is just to raise your chances if your risk level is high.

For a confirmed direct exposure, like a bite from a wild carnivore, yeah - sorry, I should have clarified that. In that case, what pre-exposure vaccination does is decrease the number of post-exposure doses required - 2 shots versus 4 or 5 vaccine + RabIg.

(I have it on good authority that the reaction from two doses post-exp is much gentler than to 4-5 plus immunoglobulin.)

Indirect transmission is so rare, though, that pre-exposure vaccination with regular titer checks is considered protective for workers in environments where incidental/indirect exposures could take place, in concert with PPE.

Yeah that would have been nice when I had mine. IDK if the dosing has changed but I got 8 shots and @urbanprole got thirteen.

(She's 6'8" and built like a brick house tho.)

It was pretty awful.

Adding from the notes because i think this is important

rabies shots are hyped up as being like so scary that people will avoid seeking treatment because they're "Probably" fine and people need to know that it's no where near as horrific as everyone says

Horror stories have the potential to cause needless death

(CW eating disorders)

god i feel so strongly about this bc i could not figure out how to strike a balance between “eating foods that make me feel good” and “not relapsing back into disordered eating habits” until i switched my mindset from “i need to remove unhealthy foods from my diet” to “i need to figure out which foods makes me feel good and add them to my diet”

examples:

moving from “i want a snack. chips sound really good, but i can’t eat chips because they’re unhealthy, so i guess i just won’t eat anything” to “i want a snack. chips sound really good, so i’m gonna eat some, but because i haven’t had any fruits or veggies today, i’m gonna eat some grapes with them”

moving from “i’m craving a burger and fries from mcdonald’s, but that’s unhealthy, so i’m just gonna eat some plain brown rice and grilled chicken even though those don’t sound good” to “im craving mcdonald’s, but last time i ate that it upset my stomach, so i don’t think eating it would make me feel good. but i think what my craving is telling me is that i need carbs and protein, so how about i make some steak and mashed potatoes for dinner?”

moving from “i’m in too much pain to cook tonight, but frozen food is unhealthy, so i just won’t eat anything” to “im in too much pain to cook tonight, so im gonna eat a frozen meal, but im gonna add some pre-cooked chicken and frozen spinach to it because i think the protein and veggies will make my body feel good”

and honestly this has been so much better for me and i feel so much better both physically and mentally than when i was just focused on “i can’t eat anything that’s Unhealthy”

I've also found that if I'm DESPERATELY craving sugar or want to eat ALL THE CARBS RIGHT NOW, it's almost always because I haven't eaten enough that day, or haven't eaten recently enough, and my body is trying to get me to pay attention to the fact I need some energy ASAP.

So it can be useful for me to go "well, I just realized I haven't eaten in six hours, so how about I make a sandwich and see how I feel, and then I can ALSO have some cookies if I still want some" instead of just having the cookies and feeling bad and headachey later because I didn't have any protein or anything with it. Sometimes I still want a cookie, and sometime I don't, but I don't get that gross sugar bonk feeling.

like I had a friend tell me last night “all my life I wanted to be a girl. even to this day, like if someone told me I could transition & look like you or *insert another trans woman idk* I would do it in a heartbeat” and when I was like omg ur transgender he was surprised? like he was like wait just wanting to be a girl makes me transgender even if I dont do anything about it? and like its harder to pinpoint non binary people but if u have a desire be a different gender ur transgender. transitioning is a choice but being transgender is not.

“One of the symptoms of being a girl is wanting to be a girl.” Don’t remember where I heard that but the quote is my life.

This is one of the posts I can explicitly pinpoint as helping me realize that I might not be cis. The biggest symptom of being trans is wanting to not be your gender. It can also be dysphoria, it can also be euphoria, it can also be presentation, but wanting to be something else is all you really need.

#wait so ur telling me#‘i dont want to have a gender’#can mean#‘i dont have a gender??’
I would also like to know… for reasons

Confirmed. How to know you’re agender: You don’t want to be anything else. You look at the options for gender and gender presentation and decide to go back to bed

Bold of you to assume I got out of bed

Nah but seriously thanks for the insight

So, if I look at gender and say “this is some bullshit and I want no part of it”, I guess that makes me agender?

if that’s how you wanna identify, yeah.

feeling anything mentioned in this post doesn’t mean you have to identify as trans, but feeling anything in this post is literally all that’s necessary to identify as trans if you want to.

fuck gatekeepers forever.

👏if👏you👏don't👏feel👏cis👏you're👏possibly👏not👏cis👏

i mean this is literally what jvn said

This is one of those things where you can go 25+ years of your life not realising that actually no not everyone secretly wishes they were some mashup of male and female and that you are, in fact, genderfluid as fuck.

You can want to be the other gender.

You can want to be another gender.

You can want to divorce all connection to the gender you were born into.

You can want to keep it as an origin point that shapes your journey.

You can want to be more than one gender at once.

You can want to be more than one gender, at different times.

You can want to be no gender.

You can want to be sort of in between genders.

You can want to be both genders.

You can want to be rid of gendered body parts you already have.

You can want to keep gendered body parts while also being another gender.

You can want to be rid of them but not want the side effects of excising them.

You can feel dysphoria at being shaped like/viewed as/treated like a gender you don’t want.

You can feel euphoria at being shaped like/viewed as/treated like a gender you do want.

You can change your mind or adjust your goals or refine your wishes.

You can be stationary and fixed in your identity.

You can be fluid and changing.

You can be extremely gendered in your presentation.

You can be not very gendered in your presentation.

You can be androgynous.

You can be a little of both.

You can be a lot of both.

If gender is a line you can cross, as the words trans (across/on the other side of) and cis (here/on the same side of) indicate, you can cross it in any way you like, including dancing on top of it.

Be happy.

Be you.

This is an extremely affirming post.

Bless tumblr for posts like this, because even though I’m older than a lot of people here this stuff still applies, in a way moreso because it’s stuff that I never had the opportunity to process in my actual childhood.

So I’m processing it now. And this shit really helps, so thanks.

They must be REAL desperate.