The Gaming Den

To be protected by FMLA you need to qualify in part by how many hours you've worked in the past year. Without FMLA protection, your employer can require you to work basically whenever they want and your options are to suck it up or risk getting fired.

That's not really true - even if you suck it up, you risk getting fired.

We live in a society with very few protections for workers, and even those that exist usually require you to file complaints through an endless bureaucracy at your own expense after you've lost your job for blatantly illegal discriminatory reasons.

In any case, you can tell your employer that you are unavailable to work on that particular night and see what happens. If you're lucky, they'll think that taking a stand makes you management material. If you're not, you'll lose your job. If you haven't been there long and the pay isn't great, I'd risk getting fired.

Given the circumstances described, I think your best bet is to draw a line in the sand and just say "I told you I'm not available on Tuesdays. I'm not going to be there." In most states you can be fired without cause, so unless you have some sort of evidence of discrimination, when they want you gone you're gone.

Remember the three rules of business:
1. Be polite.
2. Be direct.
3. Always be shopping the job market so you're prepared for being fired today.

Do you qualify for anti-discrimination under the ADA?

Zaranthan wrote:In most states you can be fired without cause, so unless you have some sort of evidence of discrimination, when they want you gone you're gone.

Also, your employer doesn't always have to tell you the cause, as long as they promise they totally have one that isn't illegal.

And keep your proof at home, not at work.

This is less asking for a diagnosis (I already know it: "hayfever, like many people. Also it's Summer") or treatment suggestion (again, already covered: "take antihistamines, rub the lotion on the skin"), more curiosity:

Is there particular rhyme or reason to which parts of you get affected by hayfever? Like, the corners of the eyes make sense, but specifically "somewhere sort of between the left ear and the throat where you can kind of soothe it by rubbing on the ear or by scraping your tongue against the roof of your mouth kind of"? And the Achilles tendons? I don't recall reading about how Achilles had bad allergies, I thought it was just he needed to wear pumps to protect himself from really short people with knives.

Koumei wrote:This is less asking for a diagnosis (I already know it: "hayfever, like many people. Also it's Summer") or treatment suggestion (again, already covered: "take antihistamines, rub the lotion on the skin"), more curiosity:

Is there particular rhyme or reason to which parts of you get affected by hayfever? Like, the corners of the eyes make sense, but specifically "somewhere sort of between the left ear and the throat where you can kind of soothe it by rubbing on the ear or by scraping your tongue against the roof of your mouth kind of"? And the Achilles tendons? I don't recall reading about how Achilles had bad allergies, I thought it was just he needed to wear pumps to protect himself from really short people with knives.

Positive feedback will give you "random patches"; that is, you'll get a spot with a lot of immune activation (by chance fluctuations), which will then snowball locally. It might then stay "primed" for future

Also it might have something to do with where different lymphatic ducts drain out. https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/patie ... ode-biopsy

There's still a lot we don't understand about the populations of immune cells that are resident in the skin and GI tract. If we knew more about why these persistent immune activation disorders stayed in one particular patch (in the corresponding population of resident immune cells), we'd know more about how to treat them.

Probably the weirdest question I've asked here, but roughly how big is a human ventral cavity?

I'm hoping to play a kobold necromancer soon, and I kinda like the idea that she rides inside a skeleton's torso, I'm just trying to get an idea of how cramped that would be.

Prak wrote:Probably the weirdest question I've asked here, but roughly how big is a human ventral cavity?

I'm hoping to play a kobold necromancer soon, and I kinda like the idea that she rides inside a skeleton's torso, I'm just trying to get an idea of how cramped that would be.

I reckon that if you have a small kobold and a reasonably large humanoid, there ought to be plenty of space. Even if you had a larger kobold and not the largest human, your necromancer ought to be able to put a soft cushion on the hip bones and be able to make it work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventral_body_cavity (looks bigger as defined than I'd have thought)

You might want to go with a skeletal horse however, because that way the ribcage is horizontally aligned so you can sit or lie in it (and it's substantially larger). Hell, depending on how it holds its head you could lie down and use it as a firing platform for crossbows.

I once played a gnome winter witch who had one of his undead minions carry him around in one of those chest mounted baby carriers.

A more normal question--

Is it possible to get disability pay for depression? If so, what is the, like, bar for "ok, yes, we recognize you cannot function, here is money" for depression? And how much would I be able to expect?

Because.... I'm just really goddamned tired of trying to function in capitalism with my depression, and looking for a job that won't screw me on hours, and... fuck. But also if disability wouldn't pay my bills either, then there's no real point.

I am not an expert, but Google turned up this: https://www.disabilitysecrets.com/win-c ... ssion.html

Totally agree on the capitalism bit. Now that Ess is dead, it's "Congrats, your husband is dead. FUNCTION!" Our country is heartless. We have no compassion for anyone for anything.

@Prak: That's really both a legal and a medical issue. Probably more legal than medical, because the people deciding if you get anything are most likely social services clerks and medical experts working for them (and, eventually, judges).
See if you can contact social services administration for details of the process. They will most likely want treatment records and statements from the physicians who have been treating you for this problem.

Speaking as physician working in psychiatry, I'd prefer my patients to get to a point where they don't need disability benefits, but I can imagine how getting decent psychiatric care might be difficult in the US.

I've had this persistent leg pain for the past two months that starts on the outside of my left thigh about midway between my hip and knee, which runs down to my knee and kind of curls around the top on my kneecap. It's not bad enough to impact my life activities but it's annoying as all fuck. Any idea what it might be, and whether I should actually see a doctor? I don't like going for frivolous reasons.

Persistent?
As in constantly, wether or not under stress/in motion or not?
Doesn't really matter, if ANYTHING hurts for 2 months you go see a doctor.

Yeah. It doesn't seem to hurt more or less based from movement or rest, and I've tried heat, massaging it, and NSAIDs (naproxen, aspirin, acetometaphin, Ibuprofen).

I was hoping to avoid seeing doctors, I don't like them. Every doctor I've had as an adult were either negligent to a literally criminal degree, or disorganized to the point of alarm. I remember my last doctor told me my numbers were great and looked like I wasn't diabetic. The next visit, she looked at the same numbers (I hadn't even done any further bloodwork, they were literally the same results) and went off about how I needed to get my life together, and I had obvious kidney damage, and I was going to die if I didn't go on insulin immediately. I also saw her notes and she had me listed as "openly defiant" about taking my meds (no, I have severe ADHD and it's more challenging for me to stay on any sort of regimen)

Better than the one doctor I had that yelled at me for losing 20 pounds in three months when she told me to lose 50. Yes, I'm fat and it makes my health worse. I get it. But I didn't get that fat in a few months, give me some time.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I've had this persistent leg pain for the past two months that starts on the outside of my left thigh about midway between my hip and knee, which runs down to my knee and kind of curls around the top on my kneecap. It's not bad enough to impact my life activities but it's annoying as all fuck. Any idea what it might be, and whether I should actually see a doctor? I don't like going for frivolous reasons.

Does it seem to follow the pathway drawn out and labled "L2" or "L3"?

-Username17

L4 seems closer to be honest, it just stop at my kneecap.

In any case, if it seems to be following one of those pathways, it may well be nerve related, and the difficulty may well be in your lower back or sciatic notch. If we were to assume that the problem is in fact in your lumbar spine, we'd do a pin pick test as so:



That the pain originates in your lateral mid-thigh and runs down to your knee is highly suspicious of neurogenic pain. Because you factually have a nerve root that runs from your lumbar spine and collects information from that part of the leg. If it gets damaged or impinged upon anywhere along its length, it may falsely report pain sensation from that region.

-Username17

Well, crap. I might have to find a new doctor then. Wish me luck.

Not that I'm trying to out-doctor Frank ('cause I know I can't), but you might want to start with new insoles or shoes.

Both myself and my son have had a similar thing caused by two different issues. For my son, it's that his shoes were causing him to use his muscles unevenly (oversimplified), and it was affecting his knees. My issue has yet to be determined fully, but going to physical therapy helped solve it.

Holy crap, there is a medical topic at the den!

No way I'll lose my time to read it, but I'm sure Frank here stars with his professional knowledge even more brightly than on main topics.

Which may be cool except it directly harms people.

So as a public service I should try to help fellow roleplayers, maybe someone smart will listen.

No offense to Frank, by the way, I'm sure he is a good doctor, the real problem is that medicine system as we know it is a complete peace of crap, being something like a mix of totalitarian cult and a financial scam.

You may heard of "old barbaric" treatments for all diseases like bloodletting, induced vomiting and countless others, which killed much more people than saved, reality is, unfortunately, that modern ones (including most resent scam called "Evidence-based medicine") are generally the same cups of tee, just much more complex in structure, so it's extremely hard to reveal their true nature.

My understanding of all this started from Robert Mendelson books, so if you are interested you can start from them also, but than be ready for a long road ahead of you.

But I provide some TLDR:
- "modern medicine" should only be used in acute life/disability-threatening conditions, list of which, by the way, is much shorter than doctors think. In other situations there will be more harm from treatment than good.

- There are countless lifestyle hazards, with which people regularly voluntary harm themselves. The problem here is that some advice on this matter, like diets and exercise routines are also more harmful than good, but in general this is the easiest part. You only should not think that it's possible to solve all problems just with lifestyle changes.

- Holistic medicine is overran by charlatans also, but it's quite possible even in US (the most marginal country in the world in this regard) to find good doctor or just teach yourself to threat minor acute conditions. It's better not to go with "Kentian Homeopathy" because of too much insanity in their doctrine, but even with it I've seen fine results by a talented practitioner.

- 99% of chronic conditions are caused by just several pathogenic bacteria, which "learned" to trick immune system. If you haven't got tuberculosis or gonorrhea and still suffer something, than generally you are fucked because it's most probably one of the two (or combined) recently "breaded" immune to antibiotics infections, which lead to wide range of symptoms from skin conditions to diabetes, heart diseases and oncology. What to do with it I actually don't know, the only real touch of modern medicine with it is a resent Nobel prize work, which still tries to heal symptoms instead of the real problem, but its better than nothing and we may hope that after a while they'll got the obvious point; and a one guy in Moscow(Russia) who got own extremely nonorthodox treatment, but I doubt there will be many volunteers willing to travel so far to test it. But obviously I don't know everything, maybe there are more "options".

I don't want to start stupid flame here, it's just information I've got in a couple of years of research after my child got into hospital with "life threatening chronic condition". It helped us significantly and it may help somebody else. If you don't trust me just ignore it, if you got some questions I may try to answer, but in general the real situation in all serious aspects of this contradicts so wildly with official medical paradigm, so it's much better to conduct own research to really believe it.

The good news, I think, is that anybody able to grasp piles of books needed to play any serious RPG are quite capable to do such research

elotar wrote:I don't want to start stupid flame here

Um, yeah, good luck with that.

elotar wrote: - There are countless lifestyle hazards, with which people regularly voluntary harm themselves. The problem here is that some advice on this matter, like diets and exercise routines are also more harmful than good, but in general this is the easiest part. You only should not think that it's possible to solve all problems just with lifestyle changes.

- Holistic medicine is overran by charlatans

If you had only written this, it would have been a decent post.

Thaluikhain wrote:

elotar wrote:I don't want to start stupid flame here

Um, yeah, good luck with that.

I don't know, it's a pretty textbook distrust of doctors and modern medicine, a sustained belief in some hokey untested "new medicine". The only original conceit is the qualified approval of holistic medicine rather than the open evangelising of homeopathy or whatever the fuck. I don't think anyone needs to take the time out of their day to traduce this idiot.