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   Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

   I have been going back through the last two years of my experience here and trying to write something out of it. A few large points are resolving

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

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     In order to achieve the maximal efficacy of medical intervention, you absolutely need to solve diagnostic delays. Diagnostic delays are increasingly costly the more efficacious our early interventions are. If you miss the boat, and the boat could take you to an entirely different universe of outcomes, that miss matters tremendously.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

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     The price to get care is not just money. It is the energy and ability to fight with evidence. Who is capable of being as much of a pitbull as I am about things? It shouldn't take relentlessly going back again and again and again to finally get into a room with a basic diagnostic inventory. And it wasn't a failure of information: *I* knew the diagnostic inventory eight months before someone was finally willing to note two things together in my chart.

     Come. the fuck. on.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

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     This is ONE example. I feel some I dunno, hesitation saying this because I have that gaslighting bullshit residue in the back of my throat, but we have spent thousands of dollars on my health appointments and you know what, we *needed to* for me to achieve an actual quality standard of care.

     My wife is a TENURED BIOLOGY PROFESSOR who TEACHES EVERY PREMED student in one of the best medical systems in the country and that's what we get.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     and you know, I did it.

     There is a window of intervention for what I'm going through, and I got started on treatment during that window.

     Past that window, patients' chances of changing the long-term course of their condition ARE. CUT. IN. HALF.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

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     The length of time of that window? We don't know for certain, but the range looks roughly similar to the length of time THESE things take:

     - how long it takes most women with these symptoms to get referred to a specialist in the first place
     - around the length of time you might spend battling two denials + appeals of a medication (based on my personal experience)
     - the time it takes your favorite local psychologist to pitch, draft and publish a book

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     But I guess, you know, so many impossible things have happened in my life it's made me believe that change will always happen. Odds are constructed out of the way things currently are and we can change that.

     Another form of conditional probability we have to solve: we cannot make it necessary to be a goddamn PhD rearranging her entire life to get to be someone who gets an answer and an intervention and gets to have that life back.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 05:34:21 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Anyway I'm having Thai takeout and a snickers ice cream bar. You do not choose what happens to you but you choose what you do with it.