Good work on the comic. It invoked both humor and compassion, oddly at the same time.
Fyi, I’m currently reading I Saw You… and enjoying it. With all the continuously strange, outlandish,and downright scary Missed Connection posts on Craigslist, I can see a sequel. Any in the works?
hell no, there’s no sequel, unless someone else wanted to do it. I hated being an editor and I hate missed connection ads. But I’m glad I learned my lesson on an anthology rather than my own work. never again. That shouldn’t reflect on the work done by other cartoonists inside the book, it’s more of a personal thing regarding an editorial role
God damn lack of universal health care, this experience is a perfect example of why the politicians & lobbyists holding this back are mother fuckers. Cant diagnose you in 1 day - well then I guess since you don’t have insurance we will just stop trying, good luck not dying!
And republicans are arguing that government funded health care would negatively effect the health of Americans.
I am so sorry for your experience. That’s unfair crap. I believe that all people have a basic right to a life as healthy as modern knowledge and abilities allow and that you are being denied that right because of greed. Greedy politicians, greedy insurance companies & greedy pharmaceutical companies. Its inhumane and god damn it unamerican.
The really fucked up thing too is that this is an issue that most Americans agree on. For once we all get together as a group and agree not to be douche bags and we still have to deal with this bullshit.
Anyway, sorry about the rant.
Hey Julia, if your income is low enough you might be eligible for decent health benefits from whatever county you live in…it might be less expensive than the ER. If the answer’s no, maybe ask them when their fiscal year is up. That’s usually when they get more cash for grant-based programs that run out of money pretty fast. Just make sure you call right after the fiscal year to get a good place in line, so to speak. You might get your hands on free rent, medical coverage, etc. Here in Portland there’s a grant-based program where they’ll actually move people into houses and pay the rent.
i actually, for once, agree with a TV show (House) I don’t think lupus is a real thing. I think it’s an umbrella label for multiple diseases modern medicine hasn’t figured out yet, since science isn’t even half way there as to figuring out, well, anything. We can’t even cure the common cold (although I find no need to pursue that avenue, it’s just interesting to point out) There is no evidence that lupus is genetic and it was only coined as a term in the 50’s, which smacks of bullshit. I personally think it’s the body’s inability to process unnatural air/food/medicine, etc…which in turn fucks up the immune system. Hence, as House would say, it’s never lupus. But the medical community has to label everything so we dont get our panties in a bunch when they can’t do it. For example, the chest pain I have right now might be Costochondritis. Sounds fancy, right? well it means…wait for it…NOTHING. it’s literally a name for nothing. They just couldn’t let it rest though, they had to come up with something to quell the masses with unexplained chest pain. I just get frustrated with all this because if I was a person of normal, average health, I’d get to just shrug it all off, but once you have a labeled disease, whether its bullshit or not, you have to run to the hospital like a whiny little turd because you have no choice. Guh, sorry, I could rant about this forever. I kind of want to delete my own comment on my own website.
Just received my copy of “I saw you” (as an anniversary present from my husband… can you see why we’re still married?) and love it. Still waiting on Fart Party vol 1. I’ll give it a few more days since we live in the boonies and mail is slow and stupid here.
Also stupid: lupus. Sorry to hear you aren’t well.
It’s true though. With every one of us being treated the same although we all have little genetic quirks that make us all speshul snoflakes, who knows? Some people could prolly live off of cornsyrup, cheap liquor, and spam for the rest of their days and die at a hundred from a fall in their bathtub while the rest of us react with death-causing things of a variety and multitude that can only cheer a pessimistic hypochondriac but scare the bejebus out of the rest of us.
I’m not saying that universal healthcare is the absolute solution*coughyesIamcoughcough*, but it sure would go a long way in helping everyone. Gee, how could we go wrong? It’s not like this country denies us technology, better and more powerful gas-sipping cars, medicines, excellent schooling, or a choice or sumthin like that under the guise of its your money/freedom/guns at risk…
universal health care isn’t the answer at all! it would just be a nice benefit. As much as I support it, we’ll never have an infrastructure that actually can support the masses that would flood the free health care industry. But then you get the problem that if you increase staff, the level of incompetency rises, hence the number of misdiagnoses, etc…and really it all boils down to science and how much we really don’t know about the human body. As much as I hate to say this, but I’m a full believer in natural selection. But only on a very primordial base because if natural selection ruled, then I would have been dead years ago. But that kind of perfectly illustrates how everyone assumes that they’re oh so special and have the right to live, when really, they probably don’t. (I am pointing that finger at myself)
aaanyways, that’s enough for rants today. i propose an early moratorium on the subject, since it’s like screaming into a pillow.
I concede and I too am a beleiver in natural selection though I would be dead as of September of last year, or dying painfully. I suppose the tragedy is that I live…le gasp!
One hypothesis on auto-immune problems is the survivors of the various city plagues (the Black Death, the Great Influenza of 1918 etc) were those with extra sensitive immune systems and they passed that tendency on to their kids.
Sucks now but at least they had descendants.
My wife has a genetic auto-immune disorder which expresses itself as super-dooper bad eczema. It’s like her immune system is in constant fight mode against NOTHING. So she itches ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Like, for the last 20 years at least. She can put creams on, but until they find a cure for immune diseases (like … um …. what’s that one called? Oh yeah: AIDS), she’s stuck.
The best they could come up with was the drugs they give to transplant patients to stop their immune systems rejecting their new organs. And even those drugs fuck with the organs you already have.
yea, my best friend has been on chemo for over a year just to keep her body from attacking itself. Puking up blook regularly, not fun. Not being able to drink or any other sorts of artificial party enhancers, also not fun (I don’t know how you take in so much Maker’s). And also not fun is waiting around in the hospital in all that pain while the doctors and nurses figure out you’re not just some junkie trying to score painkillers.
I’m with you on the weird-health-shit thing. I’ve had enough medical crap happen to me in the last few years to last me until I’m 80. Well, except I likely won’t live until 80 because of the thyroid cancer that won’t go away… even though everyone else’s has. Except my friend from college, who is having the same issue… we’re trying to figure out a way to blame it on the school and make some money in the process.
If you want access to great health care and are totally desperate, throw a brick through a post office window. It’s a federal crime so you’ll get federal prison health care, which is awesome. Beats joining the Army.
Geh - Its harder than you’d think to get arrested if you don’t fit the demographic. I had a roommate who robbed a bank, they set up a repayment plan with him and gave him community service when he got caught. I myself do stupid shit all the time but I’m an adorable pale skinned lady so I never get in trouble. I am obviously not serious but I thought maybe I should say so expressly as this sort of thing doesn’t always translate to type.
Maybe to facilitate natural selection me and you can be sent somewhere fun, denied medication and left to die frolicking amongst giant birds and floweres shaped like rotting noses. Like a leper colony but ummm good? I’ll start packing!
hey i had shingles once! when i was 9! itchy as hell, but so fun to pick at the little fishegg-looking things cultivating down my arm. plus i got to miss a week from school, woo!
Hang in there Julia. I know exactly when you are dealing with. I was diagnosed with SLE when I was 17. Every time I go to the doctor with a new symptom/issue they never seem to be able to help me, even if it is a simple case of allergies! Which ends up costing me a lot of time and money. Meanwhile the health insurance companies try to get out of paying my medical bills every chance they get. They try to exclude me w/ the pre-existing condition rule or limit the number of docotors visits they will cover.
I feel ya. I have mild urinary-tract symptoms, plus a few stray blood cells where there should be no blood cells, which have led doctors to inject me full of radioactive crap, and poke things up where no things should be poked, TWICE, to find nothing. The last urologist I saw diagnosed “prostatitis,” which means, “Huh, you seem to have some discomfort in your prostate, which we don’t know what’s causing it.” He wanted me to take drugs with extremely scary side effects, all of which I would immediately have felt if I took them (I get hypochondriacal symptoms like CRAZY), so I just said screw it.
They don’t call it the PRACTICE of medicine for nothing.
a good start to reducing “unnatural air/food/medicine” is to get the fuck out of new york. i just spent 3 weeks outside chicago mostly in the oregon woods, and within a day of getting back i felt ill-at-ease. whiskey brought me back to the Great Equilibrium, but it basically convinced me to move.
fwiw, my crackpot Western-Medicine-Is-Evil sentiment is that the definition of AIDS has followed a very similar path of an umbrella “anything that causes nausea” pattern that you describe for lupus in order to support the bunk label of epidemic it was given in the ’80s to continue selling the toxic drugs meant to treat harmless retrovirus HIV — the drugs that eventually cause the immune deficiency.
i am very pleased at the opportunity to contribute crackpot to your blog.
I can definitely relate to the whole shingles situation. Much to the surprise of my doctor, I got shingles at age 12…So I know it’s the truth when you say they hurt like a bitch. (Am I allowed to swear in a comment? Meh.)
Lupus sounds like an even bigger bitch. Sorry, dude.
Re: Lupus as a vague, catch-all pseudo-definition:
My doctor once told me I had a “benign ideopathic tremor.”
I said WTF?
So she explained what it means:
Tremor = my hands shake
Ideopathic = they don’t know why
Benign = don’t worry about it
That aside, come live in New Zealand. Free universal health care plus nice beaches. Of course, there are no big cities and the donuts suck - but you can’t have everything, right?
[...] get to reap the benefits of the fart party without dropping so much as a dime. well, recently Julia racked up a medical bill that needs to be paid, and so she’s holding an art show/fundraiser/comic reading/medical [...]
One peeve for us libertarians is that the Marxists and the Republicans both want you to think there’s no difference between fucked-up over-regulated crony-capitalism (but I repeat myself) and a genuine free market.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I have my book! Thank you! The phrase “public hair” now randomly pops into my head at inopportune moments.
August 2nd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Good work on the comic. It invoked both humor and compassion, oddly at the same time.
Fyi, I’m currently reading I Saw You… and enjoying it. With all the continuously strange, outlandish,and downright scary Missed Connection posts on Craigslist, I can see a sequel. Any in the works?
August 2nd, 2009 at 1:15 pm
You sure know how to invite disaster.
August 2nd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
hell no, there’s no sequel, unless someone else wanted to do it. I hated being an editor and I hate missed connection ads. But I’m glad I learned my lesson on an anthology rather than my own work. never again. That shouldn’t reflect on the work done by other cartoonists inside the book, it’s more of a personal thing regarding an editorial role
August 2nd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
God damn lack of universal health care, this experience is a perfect example of why the politicians & lobbyists holding this back are mother fuckers. Cant diagnose you in 1 day - well then I guess since you don’t have insurance we will just stop trying, good luck not dying!
And republicans are arguing that government funded health care would negatively effect the health of Americans.
I am so sorry for your experience. That’s unfair crap. I believe that all people have a basic right to a life as healthy as modern knowledge and abilities allow and that you are being denied that right because of greed. Greedy politicians, greedy insurance companies & greedy pharmaceutical companies. Its inhumane and god damn it unamerican.
The really fucked up thing too is that this is an issue that most Americans agree on. For once we all get together as a group and agree not to be douche bags and we still have to deal with this bullshit.
Anyway, sorry about the rant.
August 2nd, 2009 at 2:17 pm
You know what I think should be a medical disease?
“I’m-invincible-because-I’m-young-disease” or in some extreme cases “demented teenager syndrome”
August 2nd, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I was diagnosed at 5 with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease with many of the same “im old as fuck” symptoms.
I live in Canada and get the meds free, although the symptoms are worsening yet. Fuck Big Pharma. I feel your pain.
August 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Melissa, I agree. No need to apologize for justified rants.
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Hey Julia, if your income is low enough you might be eligible for decent health benefits from whatever county you live in…it might be less expensive than the ER. If the answer’s no, maybe ask them when their fiscal year is up. That’s usually when they get more cash for grant-based programs that run out of money pretty fast. Just make sure you call right after the fiscal year to get a good place in line, so to speak. You might get your hands on free rent, medical coverage, etc. Here in Portland there’s a grant-based program where they’ll actually move people into houses and pay the rent.
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:13 pm
I like the c-scan panel
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Well, you showed that House guy a thing or two. http://www.itsnotlup.us/
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
i once had a really bad pain in my side. it lasted a whole day. then i farted, and i felt better.
i am not joking, either.
August 2nd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
i actually, for once, agree with a TV show (House) I don’t think lupus is a real thing. I think it’s an umbrella label for multiple diseases modern medicine hasn’t figured out yet, since science isn’t even half way there as to figuring out, well, anything. We can’t even cure the common cold (although I find no need to pursue that avenue, it’s just interesting to point out) There is no evidence that lupus is genetic and it was only coined as a term in the 50’s, which smacks of bullshit. I personally think it’s the body’s inability to process unnatural air/food/medicine, etc…which in turn fucks up the immune system. Hence, as House would say, it’s never lupus. But the medical community has to label everything so we dont get our panties in a bunch when they can’t do it. For example, the chest pain I have right now might be Costochondritis. Sounds fancy, right? well it means…wait for it…NOTHING. it’s literally a name for nothing. They just couldn’t let it rest though, they had to come up with something to quell the masses with unexplained chest pain. I just get frustrated with all this because if I was a person of normal, average health, I’d get to just shrug it all off, but once you have a labeled disease, whether its bullshit or not, you have to run to the hospital like a whiny little turd because you have no choice. Guh, sorry, I could rant about this forever. I kind of want to delete my own comment on my own website.
August 2nd, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Just received my copy of “I saw you” (as an anniversary present from my husband… can you see why we’re still married?) and love it. Still waiting on Fart Party vol 1. I’ll give it a few more days since we live in the boonies and mail is slow and stupid here.
Also stupid: lupus. Sorry to hear you aren’t well.
August 2nd, 2009 at 7:32 pm
It’s true though. With every one of us being treated the same although we all have little genetic quirks that make us all speshul snoflakes, who knows? Some people could prolly live off of cornsyrup, cheap liquor, and spam for the rest of their days and die at a hundred from a fall in their bathtub while the rest of us react with death-causing things of a variety and multitude that can only cheer a pessimistic hypochondriac but scare the bejebus out of the rest of us.
I’m not saying that universal healthcare is the absolute solution*coughyesIamcoughcough*, but it sure would go a long way in helping everyone. Gee, how could we go wrong? It’s not like this country denies us technology, better and more powerful gas-sipping cars, medicines, excellent schooling, or a choice or sumthin like that under the guise of its your money/freedom/guns at risk…
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm
universal health care isn’t the answer at all! it would just be a nice benefit. As much as I support it, we’ll never have an infrastructure that actually can support the masses that would flood the free health care industry. But then you get the problem that if you increase staff, the level of incompetency rises, hence the number of misdiagnoses, etc…and really it all boils down to science and how much we really don’t know about the human body. As much as I hate to say this, but I’m a full believer in natural selection. But only on a very primordial base because if natural selection ruled, then I would have been dead years ago. But that kind of perfectly illustrates how everyone assumes that they’re oh so special and have the right to live, when really, they probably don’t. (I am pointing that finger at myself)
aaanyways, that’s enough for rants today. i propose an early moratorium on the subject, since it’s like screaming into a pillow.
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I concede and I too am a beleiver in natural selection though I would be dead as of September of last year, or dying painfully. I suppose the tragedy is that I live…le gasp!
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Being made of meat SUCKS.
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I’ve had shingles, too. I got it while working on a roof!
But seriously, my doctor said shingles can be triggered by stress and sunlight. And you get a lot of both while way the hell up on a roof.
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:15 pm
One hypothesis on auto-immune problems is the survivors of the various city plagues (the Black Death, the Great Influenza of 1918 etc) were those with extra sensitive immune systems and they passed that tendency on to their kids.
Sucks now but at least they had descendants.
August 2nd, 2009 at 10:08 pm
My wife has a genetic auto-immune disorder which expresses itself as super-dooper bad eczema. It’s like her immune system is in constant fight mode against NOTHING. So she itches ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Like, for the last 20 years at least. She can put creams on, but until they find a cure for immune diseases (like … um …. what’s that one called? Oh yeah: AIDS), she’s stuck.
The best they could come up with was the drugs they give to transplant patients to stop their immune systems rejecting their new organs. And even those drugs fuck with the organs you already have.
The other solution was to *ahem* get pregnant.
August 3rd, 2009 at 2:35 am
yea, my best friend has been on chemo for over a year just to keep her body from attacking itself. Puking up blook regularly, not fun. Not being able to drink or any other sorts of artificial party enhancers, also not fun (I don’t know how you take in so much Maker’s). And also not fun is waiting around in the hospital in all that pain while the doctors and nurses figure out you’re not just some junkie trying to score painkillers.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:26 am
watch out for snakes! (it could be snakes).
August 3rd, 2009 at 9:46 am
Can I offer you samples of Cellcept instead? :/
I’m with you on the weird-health-shit thing. I’ve had enough medical crap happen to me in the last few years to last me until I’m 80. Well, except I likely won’t live until 80 because of the thyroid cancer that won’t go away… even though everyone else’s has. Except my friend from college, who is having the same issue… we’re trying to figure out a way to blame it on the school and make some money in the process.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:26 am
I had the same pain last week, combined with two days of nausea. It went away as soon as I ovulated. True story, can’t explain it.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 am
If you want access to great health care and are totally desperate, throw a brick through a post office window. It’s a federal crime so you’ll get federal prison health care, which is awesome. Beats joining the Army.
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:43 am
Geh - Its harder than you’d think to get arrested if you don’t fit the demographic. I had a roommate who robbed a bank, they set up a repayment plan with him and gave him community service when he got caught. I myself do stupid shit all the time but I’m an adorable pale skinned lady so I never get in trouble. I am obviously not serious but I thought maybe I should say so expressly as this sort of thing doesn’t always translate to type.
August 3rd, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Maybe to facilitate natural selection me and you can be sent somewhere fun, denied medication and left to die frolicking amongst giant birds and floweres shaped like rotting noses. Like a leper colony but ummm good? I’ll start packing!
August 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
hey i had shingles once! when i was 9! itchy as hell, but so fun to pick at the little fishegg-looking things cultivating down my arm. plus i got to miss a week from school, woo!
August 3rd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Hang in there Julia. I know exactly when you are dealing with. I was diagnosed with SLE when I was 17. Every time I go to the doctor with a new symptom/issue they never seem to be able to help me, even if it is a simple case of allergies! Which ends up costing me a lot of time and money. Meanwhile the health insurance companies try to get out of paying my medical bills every chance they get. They try to exclude me w/ the pre-existing condition rule or limit the number of docotors visits they will cover.
August 3rd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
I feel ya. I have mild urinary-tract symptoms, plus a few stray blood cells where there should be no blood cells, which have led doctors to inject me full of radioactive crap, and poke things up where no things should be poked, TWICE, to find nothing. The last urologist I saw diagnosed “prostatitis,” which means, “Huh, you seem to have some discomfort in your prostate, which we don’t know what’s causing it.” He wanted me to take drugs with extremely scary side effects, all of which I would immediately have felt if I took them (I get hypochondriacal symptoms like CRAZY), so I just said screw it.
They don’t call it the PRACTICE of medicine for nothing.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:44 pm
a good start to reducing “unnatural air/food/medicine” is to get the fuck out of new york. i just spent 3 weeks outside chicago mostly in the oregon woods, and within a day of getting back i felt ill-at-ease. whiskey brought me back to the Great Equilibrium, but it basically convinced me to move.
fwiw, my crackpot Western-Medicine-Is-Evil sentiment is that the definition of AIDS has followed a very similar path of an umbrella “anything that causes nausea” pattern that you describe for lupus in order to support the bunk label of epidemic it was given in the ’80s to continue selling the toxic drugs meant to treat harmless retrovirus HIV — the drugs that eventually cause the immune deficiency.
i am very pleased at the opportunity to contribute crackpot to your blog.
August 4th, 2009 at 8:38 am
ur right, you should move to canada…just saying.
August 8th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
That first frame with the doctor explaining things in your voice is fucking hilarious.
August 9th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I can definitely relate to the whole shingles situation. Much to the surprise of my doctor, I got shingles at age 12…So I know it’s the truth when you say they hurt like a bitch. (Am I allowed to swear in a comment? Meh.)
Lupus sounds like an even bigger bitch. Sorry, dude.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Re: Lupus as a vague, catch-all pseudo-definition:
My doctor once told me I had a “benign ideopathic tremor.”
I said WTF?
So she explained what it means:
Tremor = my hands shake
Ideopathic = they don’t know why
Benign = don’t worry about it
That aside, come live in New Zealand. Free universal health care plus nice beaches. Of course, there are no big cities and the donuts suck - but you can’t have everything, right?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
[...] get to reap the benefits of the fart party without dropping so much as a dime. well, recently Julia racked up a medical bill that needs to be paid, and so she’s holding an art show/fundraiser/comic reading/medical [...]
November 18th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
oh krap, I had shingles when I was 27, man that SUCKED I totally feel for ya girl, here’s hoping your situation gets much improved
December 26th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Universal healthcare blah-blah-blah. Evil conservatives blah-blah. I have lupus, too. It fucking sucks.
June 7th, 2010 at 12:42 am
One peeve for us libertarians is that the Marxists and the Republicans both want you to think there’s no difference between fucked-up over-regulated crony-capitalism (but I repeat myself) and a genuine free market.