Bit of a frustrating day today, if I'm honest. My grandmother has been in the hospital for a couple weeks now, and last night she was going to be transferred to the nursing home to recover from surgery. This was going to be the second attempt at this. The last time, she was in the nursing home for maybe a couple days before a new infection was discovered and she was sent back to the hospital.

The transfer was supposed to happen around 6 PM or so last night. I get a text from my mom, whose spending pretty much all of her time with my grandma at the hospital, that says she's still there at 7 AM this morning. Great. I call my mom around noon, since that's about when I woke up and saw the text, to check and make sure she was able to go home and at least sleep for a little bit.

During this call, she tells me they're giving my grandma a blood transfusion because her blood oxygen has been low. I have no medical knowledge, but I guess a transfusion would fix that. And literally, as I am typing this, I just got a call from my mom at 10 PM to tell me they still have not transferred her to the nursing home. If they don't do it by midnight tonight, they have to start the paperwork process all over again because of insurance or whatever. Love this country. Love when insurance postpones the most basic shit for no real reason.

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I'm going to preface this by acknowledging that nothing I'm saying here is new. I'm sure everything I'm going to say has been said elsewhere, possibly and probably by people who are smarter and more eloquent than I am. But I'm going to say it anyway, because maybe more people need to be saying it. Maybe if we keep repeating it, it'll make a dent in the amount of people who, for some reason, subscribe to the belief that you must list all of your personal information on your socials for any stranger to see in order to be considered trustworthy or Valid™.

No one on the internet needs to know your personal information. No one needs to know your real name, your location (vague or otherwise), your race, gender, sexuality, diagnoses, age, blood type, etc.

Now I understand how this post coming immediately after my intro post can appear hypocritical, given how much info I provided about myself. But if you pay attention to the info I gave, I intentionally kept things vague while also being informative.

For example, I said I'm disabled and chronically ill. I didn't tell you my diagnoses. I said I'm mentally ill, and the only thing I specified is that I have things that aren't just depression and anxiety, so you may infer that I have something 'more serious' (not that those illnesses aren't serious!), but have no idea what they are.

I am also an adult. I gave my age, something I did not have to do, because I wanted to and I have the understanding that there are consequences to giving out my age. In my case, I shared it so that other people here who might find my blog will know if we are around the same age and therefore more likely to get along. I also shared it so if there are minors here who are not comfortable following a blog run by an adult, they can avoid me.

But when it comes to such minors, there is no reason for them to share their age. I might even go so far as to say they shouldn't even declare publicly that they're a minor at all, because it might attract the attention of predators. Hypothetical minor could say something like "I'm a minor, don't follow me if you're older than 18". What is to stop a predator from lying?( Read more... )