PlaidRed

Hi folks, 

I still check DA every now and a great then, but I'm more active on several other sites: 

Instagram: Plaidred_pro www.instagram.com/plaidred_pro…
Facebook: Plaidred Productions www.facebook.com/plaidredprodu… 
Tumblr: Plaidred plaidred.tumblr.com/

Hope to see you around. More than anything I miss actually talking with people on the internet. Now all we do any more is press a "like" button and move on. No more comments, no more friendships. -_- I guess i miss the golden age of making friends from across the world. I'd love it if you ever said hi!

picarto.tv/plaidredproductions

I’m testing a live stream service as I’m getting back into digital art. Feel free to stop by and say hi as I do a little art tonight. 

I've been living without a computer for a while because my Mac crashed. I was able to find a place nearby that could install a new hard drive in my Mac for a reasonable price. So now I'm back!

To clarify, really I don't spend a lot of time on DA any more. The best places to reach me are:

Facebook -> [link]
Instagram -> www.instagram.com/plaidred_pro…
Tumblr -> plaidred.tumblr.com/

Instagram is where I'm more likely to post sketches and works in progress. I don't have a lot of time to devote to art these days so most of what I'm doing i would describe as doodles, so I'm really not scanning to uploading a whole lot. 

Feel free to reach out to me on any of those platforms. 

I'll still check in on DA every now and then probably but it's not a regular thing. Thanks!

In these time of trouble please be kind to one another. If you are Christian please know that you are not very Christ like if you are not following the 13th commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Yes, this means loving your Islamic, Jewish, non-Christian, LGBTQA, non-binary, non-white and immigrant neighbors. You don't have to agree with someone's religion or way of life to show compassion as a human being. In all of this do not forget your humanity. 

I myself am moving away from the Christian label I was raised with because I see so little of the virtues they esteem. I don't see the love or forgiveness. I don't see the compassion. All I see is small minded people refusing to accept another view point. 

As a person who lives with a debilitating chronic illness for which there is no cure (aka, a pre-existing condition) I am afraid I will be directly affected by the President's motives. As a woman I am afraid of what he is trying to do to the rights to my body and my decision on when, how and if I want to have a child. I am worried about a great deal of things that are rapidly being put out by Congress right now. 

And yet I know that there are others out there that have a much more to fear from Trump's regime, and I am frightened for you. I am frightened for my gay and trans friends, I am frightened for my non-binary friends. I am frightened for my friends with a different skin tone. I am frightened for my friends who came here from a different country.

Please remember that America is a country that was built on immigration. Long ago the first people to step on this land migrated across a land bridge by the Bering Strait. Centuries later Europeans came across the ocean to this place, and soon it was a continuous stream of different people coming to settle. These people came from different ethnic groups, they came from different religions, they came from different political and economic situations. And yet they bonded together to form the 13 colonies and found the government of this country.

Now there have been many atrocities in America's bloody history. The white Europeans, and later Americans, have done, and still do horrible things to the native peoples that first colonized this land since the last ice age. Americans have also done awful things to other ethnicities, they systematically segregated people of African descent and created an ethic of hatred towards them. America devalued these peoples lives. Throughout time American has always had growing pains, placing hatred on the newest or largest wave of immigration and placing all blame on them. 

What Americans seems to forget is that if you go through every single one of our ancestries you will see that we are all literally children of immigrants. Maybe some of us have had families here for generations, or maybe you are the first generation in this land. Maybe your parents or grandparents still speak the tongue of their mother land and struggle with English. This is nothing new. For those of you that say "You are in America, speak English!" you must be forgetting that unless your ancestry is purely English that your great-great-great grandparents were once foreigners here and struggled to understand the language. I have stories of my ancestors to this land who didn't speak a lick of English. It was their children who went to school and learned English and taught a few words to their parents, but their parents never truly learned English. It didn't matter much, they were farmer people who worked the land. As long as they worked hard and didn't treat their neighbors unkindly they got along fine. 

So have some compassion. Be kind. Be loving. Don't give in to hate. I don't know how to not be afraid. I don't know what will happen in the coming time. Be watchful, stand up with your neighbors and don't give in to the hate rhetoric that is freely flowing around you.

Dear America, I don't know what you are coming to, but I believe that as long as we remember to keep our humanity above all else that we as a nation can pull through this. 

September is an awareness month for Intracranial Hypertension. Never heard of this? I'm not surprised. I ask dear reader that you take just five minutes of your day and read this post. The first step in any fight is education. 

I give you this information not out of a desire for sympathy, but with the goal of raising awareness and understanding of this chronic condition that is estimated to affect only 1 in 100,000 people.

I am one of the faces of IH (Intracranial Hypertension). 

Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension means that for unknown reasons a persons body has too much cerebrospinal fluid, creating a massive amount pressure in the body, especially in the head. I've only been diagnosed for the past few years, but now that I know more about this condition I know that the symptoms started a long time ago, as early as middle school.

Some things that people with IH experience is unending headaches, tinnitus where you hear your heartbeat in your ears - often accompanied with a 'wooshing' sound, nausea, vision distortions sometimes to the point of blindness, among other things. Everyone's experience with this condition is different. Many people experience other conditions such as anxiety and depression in conjunction or as caused by IH.

There is no known cause for this condition and there is no cure. There are some surgeries and medicines that people can use to hopefully bring the condition into remission, especially if they experience sudden vision loss. I currently am untreated and work to just manage my symptoms as best I can because at this point in my life I do not want to face the risks or side effects of those treatment options. IHope for the day when a treatment specifically for this condition is developed.

Sometimes the noises in my head keep me up at night, sometimes if I take a while to respond I'm waiting for the ringing in my ear to stop. Sometimes I can be dizzy just by sitting still, I feel as though the earth has dropped out beneath me. Sometimes if I'm "spacing out" I am under the effects of the brain frog and fatigue. I worry about participating in any activity that will raise my heart rate because I know it will also increase the pressure in my head. I know I will need to plan days of recovery just for the joy of something as simple as riding a bike or swimming. I literally feel the weather, the change in pressure before a storm just about floors me.

I don't know what it's like to not live with a headache. I started counting the days once for a headache that started in 2008. I'd had chronic headaches for years and was curious how long this one would last. I stopped counting after 79 days, and it has never stopped since. Pain medications do not help the pain because it is pressure based. Some days it's bearable, like background noise, some days it's not.

You maybe would never have guessed any of this just looking at me. Like many chronic illnesses Intracranial Hypertension is an "invisible illness." People who suffer from invisible illnesses get by because they "do not look sick," but may be suffering greatly on the inside. Doctors tend to misdiagnose or downplay this disease, some will refuse to believe it exists or give you mis-information. My number one source for information is the number of support groups on Facebook where I can talk to the real people who deal with this every day, as well as the IHR foundation:ihrfoundation.com/ .

My name is Rebekah. I am a wife, worker, writer, blogger and artist. I have hopes and dreams for the future. I have a weirdly dark sense of humor and I love puns. I love guacamole and I hate losing at board games. I bear the Blue and Green ribbon, and IHope for a cure, because my name is Rebekah and I am the face of Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension.

For more information and to donate to research please visit the IH Research page:ihrfoundation.com/ . It is one of the few foundations, at least in America, that's researching this condition.

I also invite you to watch this video that someone made that goes into greater detail regarding IH (warning - pictures of surgery scars):

 

If you have questions I would love to talk with you. A lot of people have never heard of this condition I would love to open up a dialogue about it.