Seemed appropriate to start out with a song also entitled Toxicity...
To be honest, though, I think System of a Down could have done the word "Toxicity" more justice.

Seeds aren't that toxic, unless we're talking like a few hundred grams of raw apricot pits or apple seeds.

You know what's interesting, though? Amygdalin, the chemical we usually think of that releases cyanide upon degradation and the reason that we call these fruit seeds toxic, is actually quite healthy in small doses. It is known to some as Vitamin B17 and although it's understandably quite difficult to get a research grant when you say you want to test the health-restorative potential of a cyanogenic glycoside (a fancy word for a cyanide-sugar molecule), which even humans that don't know a lot about chemistry might immediately think of as poison, a lot of literature still exists, including this article that ranked high in my PubMed search results: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27002407/.

The abstract sums it up pretty well, but that's not really any more than what we intuitively knew about plant compounds in general: It's not the miracle cure that people with a capitalist agenda might suggest you give them money them for, but it's also not that toxic, so we should study it more and perhaps incorporate it into our diets.

Just to give you an idea of how you might incorporate a small amount of amygdalin into your diet: I am (classically) weird so I usually eat the entire apple core along with the rest of my apple. And that does the trick.

This image was screenshotted from the PubMed search results for "Amygdalin"


Anyway, that's a reasonable segue into what I had in mind for this post...

Despite what most of society might think,

A hospital is one of the worst places to be if you need to heal.

Your body is actually quite a capable machine when you feed it properly. Imagine you don't, though, and so you are sent to the hospital for something mundane like having a kidney stone removed, for example. They stick some needles in you. One of the needles is for feeding you salt water from a plastic bag. The technician has to do it twice because they messed up the first time. They break some blood vessels, no big deal. Those heal really fast. You pay something like 500-1000 USD for health insurance every month, but there's another deductible when you need to use it.

Turns out they stuck you with one too many needles and you got an infection. No one knows what it is, so they stick you with more needles and attach them to your skin with adhesive like before. One of those is for feeding you your broad-spectrum anti-life drug, maybe it's vancomycin, and the other one is to make sure you're getting your plastic salt water because you're too weak to drink now. You must be hungry, though. Does insurance cover cafeteria slop? You're in luck, it does. Great news: The plates are melamine, not even styrofoam! Classy. Wash it down with some dessert, too, you fat American.

Now you should rest. All of these beeping machines and feeding tubes are truly a modern miracle; it's no wonder so many people died of disease without them 200 years ago. Wait a minute...

(retrieved from Wikipedia)

On second thought, there's not really a clear trend here, or at least not the kind of trend you would expect given all of our great advances in healthcare over the past 200 years.

Anyway, it would be nice to sleep, but that high-pitched beeping is kind of annoying. Think positive thoughts: Tomorrow morning you can go outside and take a nice, deep breath of fresh automobile exhaust. That'll be great.

***

Hey, you! Yeah, I'm talking to you, English or Canadian complainer! Shut up!

Mainstream healthcare in general is dogshit; yours isn't any worse than ours.

Do yourself a favor and sleep it off next time. If you're lucky, maybe you'll die painlessly in your sleep.

That was meant to be funny, sorry if I triggered you.

I still think the word 'woke' is literally a symptom of mental retardation. Ask me about that sometime.

Yes, my profile image is the refracted visible light spectrum (like, a rainbow), but I am actually a heterosexual male. Not sure if I ever cleared that up, but it's been on my mind.

I'm doing some happy stuff too (see below), but this story is loosely based on an experience that someone close to me is having. It was kind of just supposed to be a social media post but then it turned into this. That person is doing okay now, but being in a hospital sucks and clearly that is one of the things that I am passionate about.

If you've gotten to here, that must mean that you're thinking about tipping me 😏

(or maybe thinking about tipping yourself, it's okay)

Anyway, that must mean you are interested in earning cryptocurrency. I probably should have made a post earlier this [Swole Torchic] month plugging my Slip-a-Swole game, but I was too busy making/maintaining it and also learning stuff at my local community college and also babysitting. You still have a little over a week to earn some banano by playing my game at https://slipaswole.win. If you want to be rewarded for playing, join the banano Discord at chat.banano.cc (for some reason that link never works correctly on publish0x but you really should be using your URL bar anyway) and read the rules in the #slip-a-swole channel.

[edit, 8/25: You can now earn banano from this game and withdraw directly to your wallet like a faucet. As of right now, you can withdraw up to 19 BAN per day.]

But yeah, thanks for reading and make sure you're maintaining your vessel properly. Until the next time that I am inspired to post something here:
✌️💚🎵