(via lgbtlaughs)
(via lgbtlaughs)
(Source: amanda-says-x, via lgbtlaughs)
Medicinal marijuana stops seizures, brings hope to a little Black Forest girl
(TheGazette) Six-year-old Charlotte Figi, a picture of precious in her “Gatsby”-style bob and blue toenails, stands patiently as her mother reaches up her dress to change her out of her soiled Pull-Ups. - Charlotte never says a word. She hasn’t in the past hour, and won’t for at least another 30 minutes, when she finally whispers the name of a visitor who is about to leave….
They’d done all they could to control the seemingly endless, violent seizures that hit Charlotte 20, 40, 60 times a day. They put her on an extreme diet. They tried at least a dozen medications, many with harmful side effects. Despite some promising starts, nothing worked. And the rescue medications they were giving her to stop the seizures in fact stopped her breathing. CPR brought her back to life more than once.
After years of watching a cruel, incurable genetic disorder called Dravet Syndome rob their daughter of her basic bodily functions and send her into convulsions that caused head injuries and broken teeth, they had reached the end.
“We really thought, this is a horrible existence; she’s not going to live much longer.” Paige says. “This is not a life for her. This is torture. She is suffering all day. I’m not OK with this. She wasn’t even human anymore. She’d lie in my arms drooling, seizing, screaming and crying.”
Then, in an act of desperation, or inspiration - or maybe both - Matt called Paige from overseas, where he was working, and suggested a radical approach to Charlotte’s treatment.
“We need to try cannabis for Charlotte,” he told Paige. “We live in a compassionate state.”
Fifteen months later, the little girl with the DNR order is standing in the kitchen of their Black Forest home with her mother getting her Pull-Ups changed, cuddling in the arms of a visitor, playing with toys and strategically pushing the buttons on her “talker,” an electronic device that communicates when Charlotte can’t.
(via lgbtlaughs)
“Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.
The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
We Originated in the Belly of a Star, NASA Lunar Science Institute, 2012. (via we-are-star-stuff)(Source: thinksquad, via we-are-star-stuff)
(Source: starbuckara, via lgbtlaughs)
Happy 50th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act! (sort of). Here are some sobering visuals: For every dollar earned by a white man in America, a white woman earns, on average, 77 cents, a black woman earns 69 cents, and a Latina woman earns 57 cents. (Infographic by the lovely Emily Nemens for LeanIn.Org.)
Something to think about: The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let’s scale that to 46 years. We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began 1 minute ago. In that time, we have destroyed more than 50% of the world’s forests.
(Source: infinitylooper, via another-buddhist-child)
excuse me. in honor of heterosexual awareness month i would like to tell you that there are Heterosexuals. theyre out there. did you know that. there are hetero sexual people living in this world, some people pursue relationships with the opposite sex. were you aware of that. theres probably like 3 heterosexuals out there right now. bless their brave little hearts
(via lgbtlaughs)
(Source: goodreads.com, via we-are-star-stuff)