The Gaming Den

White-ish discharge from the breast sounds very much like galactorrhea, meaning it's probably milk. Milk production is regulated by a hormone called prolactine produced in the pituitary gland. The most common causes of a prolactine excess are certain medications or just over-activity of the pituitary gland. I'd expect high prolactine to supress the sex hormones, so either yours hasn't been elevated for that long ( ) or something more unusual is the case here.

Anyway: the medical specialist you'd refer an adult man to is (usually) an endocrinologist. Find a local GP to refer you - it's just good policy to have one you have a good rapport with.

Are there legal ways to get steroids?

Basically, my health progress has hit a snag recently, my diabetes is killing my gains and my autoimmune thing knocks me on my ass every now and then. I'm not trying to look like HHH or anything, I'd just like it to be a bit easier to gain muscle and get a boost to energy.

I'm almost positive that should I want to get steroids illegally I probably could if I put my mind to it, however I don't quite trust my own judgment and would like to avoid the side effects as possible (I don't want boobs, I don't want my junk to shrink up, and I don't want to go into insane rages).

Health and gains are really not the same thing. Strength training is fairly terrible at burning calories and strengthening your heart, while cardio is fairly terrible at building muscle. Improving your health and cultivating muscle are - after a certain level - entirely different problems and have to be approached as such. If your goal is to improve your health, one of the side effects of longterm steroid use is an elevated risk of heart disease. That's probably not a good call for a diabetic.

DSMatticus wrote: If your goal is to improve your health, one of the side effects of longterm steroid use is an elevated risk of heart disease.

Well, shit. My Grandfather died in his 50s from heart disease and most of the men in the Mom's side have issues with that. Okay, that idea's scrapped.

Especially since "autoimmune things" often get treated with anti-inflammatory drugs that also can be tough on the heart, liver or kidneys when taken for extended periods. I wouldn't recommend loading more straw onto your camel without doctor's supervision.

My doctor currently has not prescribed any treatment as it's technically not severe, it just makes me exhausted randomly for no obvious reason.

What do they mean by foamy urine? Should there be no bubbles in pale urine at all? That seems like a bit much since I can pour water into my toilet and get bubbles, so my assumption here is that bubbles that go away quick is "whatever" and having a foam head like poured beer is "get yourself checked." I'm not a doctor though and kidney disease is scary, so thoughts would be appreciated.

If you live anywhere coastal, think of it like sea foam. If it's the regular kind of sea foam that pops and deflates right away, that's fine. If it's the kind where the bubbles have stretch and staying power, that's because there's contaminents that are making it that way - mostly proteins. If there's protein contaminents, that usually means that the filters on your kidneys are damaged and you are leaking proteins directly from your blood into the collecting ducts. That's bad.


Your piss shouldn't do this.


But it's probably going to do this if you piss with any force.

-Username17

Thanks Frank. It's comforting to know my pee is way more like the second picture than the first. There's days where I feel like health related anxiety is even more likely to kill me than my other bad habits.

isn't that called hypochondria?

Thankfully, I'm far short of being a full-on hypochondriac. I'm just a bit of an anxious person in general and have a family history of diabetes and high blood pressure. Things like heart and renal disease are uncomfortable topics because in the very long term they're a reasonable fear for anyone.

Basically, I was always into V:TM for the immortality, not the Catholic guilt.

I can't recall if I've mentioned it before, but about a year ago, I was diagnosed with dysthymia, a form of depression. I'm aware that there's evidence that depression can actually damage the brain, and that this might cause the executive dysfunction, lack of motivation and other issues.

So I asked my new psych if there was a way to basically heal my brain faster. She recommended an antioxidant diet, since apparently there's a current hypothesis that depression is caused by inflammation of the brain.

A cursory Google showed that antioxidants themselves have low bioavailability? What can I do to actually combat inflammation effectively, especially potential inflammation in my brain?

I really enjoy my coffee, both for its flavour and its ability to help me think and function. However, I find that it ratchets up my anxiety quite a bit, to the point where I occasionally completely lose it over nothing and have to take quite a while to calm back down again. Is there anything I can do to avoid this effect, but still have my (caffeinated) coffee?

To me that sounds like a symptom of over-consumption of caffeine, so... you probably just need to drink less of it, and less often?

Schleiermacher wrote:To me that sounds like a symptom of over-consumption of caffeine, so... you probably just need to drink less of it, and less often?

I have one coffee a day. Maximum. I hardly consider that over-consumption.

No, I agree. But in that case, I don't know. Sorry.

I find that if I drink coffee on an empty stomach, it leaves me very jittery. So, I'd suggest that you be sure to eat something with your coffee.

A strange one:

I can flex something inside my skull (I think it's some muscle close to the jaw articulation/ear) and by doing this I can hear a continuous sound, kind of like a mix of a drumroll and white-noise, on both ears. Since this sound seems to be coming from something just besides the eardrums, it appears loud to me, enough to drown regular ambient noise and distant conversations.

Any ideas of what is this?

TiaC wrote:I find that if I drink coffee on an empty stomach, it leaves me very jittery. So, I'd suggest that you be sure to eat something with your coffee.

I always do. It makes the effect significantly less frequent, but it still happens.

nockermensch wrote:A strange one:

I can flex something inside my skull (I think it's some muscle close to the jaw articulation/ear) and by doing this I can hear a continuous sound, kind of like a mix of a drumroll and white-noise, on both ears. Since this sound seems to be coming from something just besides the eardrums, it appears loud to me, enough to drown regular ambient noise and distant conversations.

Any ideas of what is this?

My best guess would be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_ty ... ry_control

Nachtigallerator wrote:

nockermensch wrote:A strange one:

I can flex something inside my skull (I think it's some muscle close to the jaw articulation/ear) and by doing this I can hear a continuous sound, kind of like a mix of a drumroll and white-noise, on both ears. Since this sound seems to be coming from something just besides the eardrums, it appears loud to me, enough to drown regular ambient noise and distant conversations.

Any ideas of what is this?

My best guess would be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_ty ... ry_control

You solved it. Making a tight fist and pressing it against my ear forces the sound to be produced on that side, so I'm one of those individuals with a voluntary control over that. Thanks!

So, I believe I've mentioned my schizophrenic uncle before. He wound up in a nursing home after the last time I mentioned him, and things were actually going pretty well. He seemed like he was comfortable and about as happy as a septuagenarian with fairly severe schizophrenia can be. But then he had some kind of episode - confusing reality, packing his things and trying to leave, telling the staff someone was coming to pick him up, some threats of self-harm/violence, etcetera, etcetera. A lot of us thought it was just stress at first - he wasn't adjusting as well as we thought and he just wanted to go home (but with grandma and grandpa gone, there is pretty much no one to take care of him, and he can't take care of himself). But it looks worse than that. I didn't get a chance to talk to him during this period, but what I heard from family members was that he was even more incoherent than usual. Doctors were tentatively suggesting dementia (yes, in addition to the schizophrenia), but they have no real idea, tests start, blah blah blah.

Eventually we find out he has some pretty bad gallstones and he was maybe in pain at the time and definitely is now, maybe the pain from that is the stress that set him off, what the hell do I know. Anyway they decide to remove those even if those aren't the cause because they're hurting him, but he just never wakes up. He's alive, but he's not talking anymore. He's 'asleep' a lot, but even when he's 'awake' (?) he's either totally nonresponsive or clutching his head and moaning like he's in horrible pain. He won't eat, but he will pull out a feeding tube. You can't talk to him, he doesn't seem to acknowledge your presence. He still has his pupilary light reflex, but it's abnormally slow. It wasn't a stroke or aneurysm or any physical damage that would show up on an MRI (apparently), but his EEG is... well, he's being passed around so many doctors right now we haven't had a chance to talk to anyone in depth about them yet, but we've been told it's bad.

The doctors seem convinced that this is it and Glen as a conscious, thinking human being isn't coming back. I believe them - there's no reason not to. But what the fuck happened? What the fuck just flips a human being off like a lightswitch? Grandpa made sense; heart attack, interrupted brainflow to the brain, enough of your brain is gone that you just can't come back. Grandma made sense; stroke, interrupted bloodflow to the brain, enough of your brain is gone that you just can't come back. But they're telling us Glen's brain looks fine on an MRI - he just stopped being Glen one day (or perhaps more accurately over the course of a few weeks or maybe months, if no one noticed). Like he went to sleep and just didn't reboot. Is that really how degenerative mental illnesses can work?

Dementia is not a sudden process, but it's sadly not unheard of for elderly patients with previous mental impairment/suspected dementia to come out mentally worse after surgical procedures. I am not aware that anyone has demonstrated a conclusive mechanism for this yet, but something about the process of shutting down higher-level operations might kick down the fragile balance in a pre-damaged, elderly brain. The other hypothesis is that surgery is the cause - inflammatory signaling molecules from the surgical site wash over to the brain and the already damaged neurons can't deal with them. This is an area of onging research, though. I can also quite well imagine that a history of schizophrenia would obscure the earlier signs of dementia to his caregivers, so the disease may have been there for a few years already, and it just precipitated after the operation.

The most common type of dementia (Alzheimer's) does not neccessarily detect on an MRI scan - that just shows you the gross structural state of the organ. Alzheimer's is degenerative, but the symptoms are caused by a lack of activity and connection in the neurons handling memory processing. It's chiefly a disorder of cellular function, not of gross structure like a big stroke. And while an MRI has great resolution, it is not a microscope or a functional test - if only the synapses are broken, you won't really see that there. The MRI will eventually become abnormal as the degenerating neurons die and are removed and there's just too little brain left, but that can take years. Some patients die with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's without ever having abnormal MRI scans.

The EEG, on the other hand, is a broad functional test - it shows activity states in the brain. If that's abnormal, it's definitely the thing I'd want to have explained in more detail at the next opportunity.

Nachitigallerator wrote:Dementia is not a sudden process, but it's sadly not unheard of for elderly patients with previous mental impairment/suspected dementia to come out mentally worse after surgical procedures. I am not aware that anyone has demonstrated a conclusive mechanism for this yet, but something about the process of shutting down higher-level operations might kick down the fragile balance in a pre-damaged, elderly brain.

I did not know that, and it's a lot easier to make sense of what happened now that I do. Thank you.

I knew things like Alzheimer's didn't detect on an MRI, but I also knew that they were slow, and this... well, a few months ago you could still talk to him. He was coherent. He understood you and you could understand him. Even if we missed some of the warning signs, I could not wrap my head around how he'd skipped 'worse' on the trip from 'bad' to 'worst.'

My aunt went from perfectly fine on her own to forgetting how to eat in less than a year after her father died . . dementia is an evil bastard of a sickness <.<