Yes, it is misogynistic. You're defending a misogynistic stance, while calling it an imaginary person, and not noticing you're only defending it because you don't want to fall under the label that sounds like your own rhetoric
The heart of your point is there Cockycent but the framing on this statement could have been better. This kind of framing is why some get so upset.
The stance itself can come from a misogynistic line of thought. While the passionate knee-jerk reaction from many is indeed rooted in a sense of insecurity in their ability to hold onto an opinion, it shouldn't be inferred that the statement by itself is misogynistic.
I'd argue that OP characters are for the most part as strong or weak as the cool story moment needs them to be
This sentence is scarily deep inside Oda's head.
Sounds very convenient.
You've just said something very hurtful, Heart of Darkness.
In September 2018, after a tonsil-removal surgery, I began to suffer sleep-onset hypnic jerks. These are the strong twitches you may have experienced while falling onto the brink of sleep which usually wake you up. One weekend I suddenly found that every time I drifted off to sleep, I would experience these sleep-onset jerks. In short, I could not fall asleep. Only when my body and mind were physically exhausted to a point even beyond stress could I fall asleep and it was often spotty. Most days I only slept for a total of 45 minutes to 2 hours. You cannot understand the hell that this is unless you've experienced it.
The worst part is that my oral surgeon could not explain why this was happening. Not even the internet could explain it. I did find help groups but the conclusion from sufferers was that it was a condition that is largely ignored by medical science with no known treatment. Nobody knew what to do. I was completely unable to work and barely able to function on such little actual mental and physical rest from day to day. I was given medical leave by my very gracious employer and I used that time to endlessly search for a remedy to my situation.
I found a surgeon in the States who performs a soft palate ablation procedure to shrink its size. My hypothesis was that the soft palate fell quite low and was obstructing my airway upon falling to sleep as my body relaxed into sleep-onset. Apparently chemoreceptors in our throat monitor CO2 output during sleep. I believed that my body was unused to new CO2 levels on exhale while drifting into sleep because my low soft palate was obstructing my airway more than it had for 35 years. I believed that shrinking the soft palate through ablation would allow more CO2 out on exhale and allow me to sleep like a normal person. I was prepared for an out-of-pocket procedure with air fees, hotel fees, and transportation fees out-of-country and without any coverage. It was several thousand USD but the cost would be worth it if it was able to end the actual living hell I was experiencing.
My surgeon asked for regular updates of my soft palate and although I was scheduled to fly out and spend my Thanksgiving 2018 traveling for an expensive and possibly fruitless surgery, my surgeon was interested in the progress my soft palate was showing and delayed my procedure until late December. On December 7th I fell asleep for the first time without medical aids since September. As the week progressed I found I was able to sleep more and more. By the next week, the jerks had vanished.
My hypothesis was correct and the soft palate was indeed much higher than it had been at onset. I did not need an expensive out-of-country procedure and I was back to normal. That Friday was our holiday office party and for the first time since September I was able to laugh, smile, and celebrate with friends. I drank quite a lot and had an amazing time. I finally had my life back. However, I drank a bit too much and after I got home I spent half the night blacked out sitting on our toilet. The next day was miserable but around evening the hangover wore off. It was two days later when the trouble started.
I began noticing a familiar and uncomfortable sensation in my posterior. By mid-Monday I realized that I had developed a hemorrhoid from all that time on the toilet. Several years prior I got one from shoveling snow from a record-breaking snowfall that required vigorous snow shoveling for two weeks. Hemorrhoids are generally dealt with by applying medication and waiting a few weeks for the blood clot to be reabsorbed into the bloodstream. I was going to soldier through it until I found this to be a hemmorhoid unlike my previous one. The pain was what’s medically described as ‘exquisite’ and unlike my previous experience, no position I took offered relief. Even completely lying on my stomach, the pain was indescribable. I was right back to not being able to sleep for another reason.
Even that condition by itself wouldn’t have been a problem. I could have probably lived with it, especially with the upcoming winter break, but as it so happens, I was going to be riding a plane for 12 hours back to the States to see my parents for the first time in two years. It would not have been humanly possible to sit in a seat for 12 hours with that exquisite pain.
Why didn’t I cancel the trip? Because back when I was suffering the hellish sleep-onset hypnic jerks, my wife was an absolute soldier. She sacrificed all of her free time to aid me. Hours and hours of research, visiting hospitals, specialists, consoling, doing my burden of work around the house. She did it all without complaint and I wanted to thank her. So even while suffering the jerks, I began to plan a surprise ‘thank you’ family trip to Disney World. It wasn’t just a thank you for that either. We both planned to start attempting to conceive the next year and I wanted this to be our last big vacation as a couple. I also wanted to thank my parents, so the four of us would be going. This was roughly equivalent to the fee of the soft palate procedure but I requested a loan from my parents to cover the cost. They in turn used the last of my grandmother’s inheritance to cover the cost of the loan to me for our last vacation before starting a family. In order to make it a perfect surprise I even involved some people in the manga industry to help make it work and for us to arrive in Florida mid-way through our vacation due to an ‘emergency return flight to Japan’. I spent months planning the trip with no less than five separate parties and although Disney is quite forgiving with compensation, the other fees were all non-refundable including flights.
And so I went to the same hospital where I had my tonsillectomy and consulted with a specialist who understood my situation and offered to cut out the hemorrhoid that day in a late-afternoon out-patient procedure. I spent the rest of the day in the hospital in agony while waiting for the procedure. About an hour before the procedure I went to urinate (hereafter ‘void’) and while doing what I’d done tens of thousands of times before, I felt a sudden and sharp pain surge up my urethra. It felt like someone was shoving a hot knife up my urethra. The relief was almost as sudden as the onset lasting only five seconds or so. I didn’t know what it was but with everything going on, I didn’t think much of it and continued enduring my more pressing pain. I had the procedure and it went smoothly. I felt immediate relief. Finally, I could relax and just enjoy the upcoming vacation.
The next day I hit the toilet before going out to the neighborhood supermarket to get a few things for dinner. By the time I was done shopping I felt like I had to void again and the urgency was strong. I thought this was really strange since it hadn’t even been a half an hour since I last voided. I voided when I got home but felt like nothing had changed. My thoughts immediately went to it being a UTI. Great, another thing to deal with. I couldn’t see doctors the next week because I’d be abroad and that would mean paying medical fees without coverage so that late afternoon I rushed to a urologist. He suggested it could very well be a UTI so he gave me some medication and said I’d be fit in no time.
That weekend was JUMP Festa and we were leaving for the US right before then so I made the trip to Tokyo and suffered through both days with a horrible feeling of urgency and not finding any relief since the previous Thursday. It didn’t feel like the medication was doing anything.
We made the trip to the States just fine but the feeling of urgency would not quit. It felt a little better on Christmas Day so we were able to visit family but the next morning I was suffering miserably from the sensation so I went I bit the bullet and went to a local urologist. He prescribed some powerful antibiotics (hereafter: abx) and said I’d be fine in about a week. Several days later I was still feeling zero relief and it only felt stronger. Having done some more research, the day before the surprise trip I consulted another doctor and he suggested another plan that involved antifungals alongside the abx. This visit and the medication was also with zero coverage.
The day of the surprise trip came and my wife and I headed to the airport with my parents secretly following about an hour behind us. While we were waiting for the flight the urgency became stronger and stronger. I was not sure I could go through with this. There was no way I could enjoy the vacation and I needed to make a decision now. Do I drop the surprise and consult with my parents secreted away in another gate about whether to cancel the vacation, or do I ride the plane. During this our flight was delayed and I took that as a sign from the universe to reevaluate the situation before making any expensive mistakes. I ruined the months of planning and revealed to my wife that I’d been planning a surprise trip and that we might not even be able to go on that trip. This was heartbreaking for me and it’s a lost chance for a wonderful memory I will never get back. We met with my parents and consulted. We called my father’s urologist for emergency consultation and he suggested that as long as I was able to physically void, that I should go ahead with the trip. So we did. The flight was delayed 5 hours which I waited through in extreme discomfort. Upon boarding takeoff was delayed another three hours, part of which was dealing with a man who had OD’d in the bathroom preventing anyone from using the bathrooms while the police dealt with it and a line of people grew, all the while feeling like someone had my urethra in a vice. About 45 minutes before landing I was attempting to void in the bathroom when suddenly I felt faint and my mouth went dry. It felt like my body was shutting down. I didn’t know it at the time having never experienced one but it was a panic attack. I alerted a flight attendant to my condition and they performed a doctor call. My mom is a nurse and riding in the front of the plane, not knowing it was me, responded. An ambulance was called and I was taken off the flight by paramedics and rushed to a hospital via ambulance. Several years ago you might have seen a picture of me on a stretcher. That’s when that picture is from. I was given an emergency CT-scan and several diagnostic tests. Ultimately I was told to continue my current treatment, that no irregularities were found and that I should contact a urologist in the area if I wanted to look into it with more detail. All of this without medical coverage.
We arrived at our hotel and the next day was miserable, as was the next, however, on December 31st, I took a nap and woke up in the late evening feeling completely normal. This continued throughout the evening and into the New Year. Things were fine and even ending the vacation on food poisoning that I suffered with on the plane trip back to Japan was better than enduring the endless urgency.
On January 11th, the sensation came back. Since that day, the sensation has never truly left. There have been periods where I feel slight relief and every few months there are a few days, maybe as much as a week where I’ll feel like 80% my old self, but other than that I feel constant immediate void urgency and urethral pressure. If you’re wondering what it feels like, the next time you have to void, don’t. An hour later, drink some water and continue waiting. Another hour later continue waiting and drink some more water. When you feel an urgent need to use void immediately, go void. And now imagine that after you void, nothing has changed and you do not feel relief. Ever.
That has been the past 2.5 years of my life.
I began looking for a urologist and found a local one highly recommended working with him and a number of other doctors I underwent MRI’s, CT-scans, blood tests, countless urine tests, rectal examinations, prostate massages and a male cystoscopy with distention. A male cystoscopy with distention is when a camera is inserted into a male’s urethra and passed through the prostate into the bladder. The bladder is then filled with fluid until it can no longer hold fluid and you must continue to hold the fluid with the camera running through your urethra.
This was performed in order to rule out interstitial cystitis, a condition where the inside of the bladder creates sores similar to cold sores. My bladder was fine and the doctor noticed no other points of interested and so they believed I had chronic pelvic pain syndrome (hereafter: CPPS) CPPS is a name that means nothing. It is a placeholder because nothing is really known about the condition, those suffering from it have a wide variety of sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting symptoms, and most unfortunately, nothing is known to definitively cure/aid the condition.
But before I began looking down the road of CPPS, I had to rule out another origin.
I didn’t mention a simultaneous issue that arose the previous Fall while I was battling the sleep-onset hypnic jerks. In late November, one day, while waiting in a parking lot for a friend, I noticed my right pinkie was uncontrollably dancing/twitching on its own. Although this was troublesome, I initially passed it off as just a product of the extreme stress I was undergoing due to lack of healthy sleep. However, as the weeks went on, the twitching spread to my right index finger. Sometime later it spread to my left index finger and thumb. Eventually my neck, tongue, jaw, toes, hands, and arms were twitching even when my body was at rest.
Having experience in the family, along with the urinary issues, I knew this could mean a possible case of young-onset Parkinson’s. So while battling the sleep-onset hypnic jerks, I was also seeing a neurologist in the same hospital to deal with my twitches. Standard medicinal approaches did not alter them and ultimately I was handed the possible diagnosis of essential tremor (hereafter: ET. ET is said to be a harmless condition that progresses with age and has no cure. It suggests that eventually I will not be able to hold a fork straight to feed myself. There’s no known way to slow the progress and although some new techniques for combating it such as focused ultrasound treatment but the long-term results of it are still being researched and it only works on one side of the body under currently accepted procedures. The other ‘solution’ is deep brain stimulation which would see wires inserted into my nerves along with a device. Said device will need to have its battery changed every decade or so via invasive surgery.
So while all of the previous holiday nightmare was occurring, I was also dealing with uncontrollable twitching slowly spreading through my body.
As Parkinson’s is known for causing bladder trouble, it was important that I attempt to remove it from the list of remaining potential candidates so I sought several experts in the field and went in for three separate day-long tests at three different medical institutions. All of them with inconclusive results that pointed to possible ET and while Parkinson’s couldn’t be eliminated due to the nature of the tremors, by April 2019 they ultimately considered it unlikely.
This left me with facing CPPS as a nameless and poorly understood condition with a miserable long-term outlook on quality of life. Thus began what the past two years of my life have been, a constant stream of consulting urologists, specialists, nutritionists, mental health therapists, proctologists, physical therapists, chiropractors, and dozens upon dozens of snake-oils salespeople in order to find some way to somehow control my condition if not cure it.
Since this condition is only treated with a kitchen sink approach I’ve tried well over 40 different kinds of medications including abx, sedatives, anti-psychotics, supplements, low-cal diets, high-cal diets, no fat diets, high-fat diets, carb-only diets, no-carb diets, veggies only diets, candida cleanse, gluten-free, smoothie diet, red meat only, white meat only, fish only.
I have spent hundreds of hours contacting individuals with similar symptoms and trying to sleuth out some kind of working solution. Thanks to our collaborative efforts I’ve tried months upon months of daily stretching for several hours, yoga, deep muscle massages, electrical conduction therapy, physical therapy, staying sedative, staying active and walking up to 14 kilometers daily for weeks, online courses for pelvic pain sufferers, and the therawand which is a wand for males to insert up their anus and manipulate/massage the hard-to-reach hammock-like pelvic floor muscles.
I’ve been thrown out of doctor’s offices because they didn’t like me getting second opinions. Before even consulting, some doctors they suggested that I was an alcoholic. I was yelled at by a doctor who said my head wasn’t working right and that the only prescription he’d write me was a doctor’s intro to a mental health clinic. I held him to his word and willingly attended the clinic to see if the problem was indeed one rooted in mental health. The verdict, despite what Twitter likes to intimate, mentally sound if not ‘remarkably so’ for being able to manage this as well as I have.
I neglected to mention how during the start of the CPPS journey in January 2019, I was being followed by a Japanese male stalker who lived (and still lives) near us.
In January, after returning to Japan and recovering from food poisoning, I kept up by visiting my gym despite my discomfort in early attempts to ‘work out’ the discomfort. After a session at the gym I went to a local supermarket to get some dinner when the man behind me asked if I was the One Piece fan from Fukui. I told him I was and apologized for my raggedy appearance since I just came from a gym. He asked which one and I’d said literally only those sentences to the man so I didn’t think anything was off and I stupidly offered up the ‘new one down the street’. As I continued to talk to the man I could tell something was off. He seemed very interested in talking with me and repeatedly asked where I worked or how to contact me. I politely danced my way out of offering any of that information and said farewell.
Several days later, the owner of my gym came to me and passed me a postcard that was dropped off at the gym ‘for me’. On it was the man’s name and number and a request for me to call him.
I sealed the card in a plastic bag and hid it in case it needed to be used for anything legal in the future. This made my time at the gym very uncomfortable since it’s a first-floor gym with sidewalk-facing windows which I used the treadmill directly in front of.
Another week passed and the owner told me that the man joined the gym.
Another week passed and the owner told me that the man would enter the gym, change clothes, sit in a corner, read a book, wait for an hour or two, then change and leave.
My one source of physical stress-relief was removed from me as I quit the gym.
I was later told via LINE that the man lives in the neighborhood next to mine. The owner of the gym told him that I quite the gym because I moved. I have not been back since or felt entirely safe since then.
What little I understand about my condition due to its randomness that occurs in what they like to call ‘flares’, is that stress does not help my condition at all. Experiences or events that cause me stress or make me feel hurt carry the potential of worsening not only my urethral discomfort, but also exacerbating my now body-wide tremors that I still have and that still continue to grow stronger over time.
Our plan to start a family has been shattered and we’re still picking up the pieces seeing what we can make of it.
The financial burden has been immense and I’ve taken on extra work to cover the expenses, all while dealing with the condition.
I have twice considered ending my life due to the constant urgency and occasional agony during flare-ups that I can only endure with no answers, no relief, no support, and a shrug from the only people who could seriously research this in the medical world.
So, Heart of Darkness, when I asked whether you would deny me a request for my mental health, you thought it was a good idea to reply with:
Sounds very convenient.
With this context, I hope you find it interesting that it sounds convenient.
Do you find this interesting, HoD?
Are you interested in seeing my medical paperwork, HoD?
Since it sounds so convenient to you, perhaps you’d be interested in helping cover what we’ve lost on medical expenses and life plans?
Are you interested in experiencing the medical tests and procedures I’ve been subjected to that have offered no relief or sign of answers?
Are you interested in experiencing what it's like to deal with a stalker who lives near you?
Are you interested in opening your mind to the idea that maybe someone isn't lying and really wants to avoid a dangerous situation?
If your goal was to aim an intentionally pugilistic, insidious, mistrusting, and hurtful narrative at me, you have succeeded.
Congratulations.