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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • A really good way to do linux is to play around and break things, but to have a backup you can restore from.

    I don’t know about other distros specifically, but Mint comes shipped with Timeshift, which is easily configurable and can be set up to include your home directory. Make a backup on an external drive every now and again so that if you break everything, you only lose a bit of work instead of all of it.

    Search engines are your friend. If you want to do something, look it up first (ex/ “How do I [x] on linux”) and read some of the answers. Don’t just go with the first option you see, and if it looks decent but you don’t understand it try looking up the commands it uses to find some documentation.

    Learning linux isn’t something you can do as passively as you can with Windows, so take time to really try and learn things you’re looking to do.

    And a good rule of thumb is that if you think your system should be able to do something, it probably can.












  • Part of the time scale was how low risk the issue ended up being. We knew from the first few months that even if it was a tumor, so there was no “rush” to get me in to see people.

    One of the ‘mindsets’ of single payer is that more severe/risky issues can get fast tracked over less severe/risky ones. Ultimately, all that was happening to me was that my vision was slightly affected (because my eyelid wouldn’t open fully). But had it been a tumour, I likely would have been on the surgeons table within a month of them finding out.


  • I also live under single payer healthcare, and I have experience with a much lower stakes “hail mary” type event.

    A number of years ago, I developed a growth on my eyelid that no one was sure what it was.

    We started with the optometrist, who thought it was a duct blocked by dirt and suggested a medicated cleaning regimen where they assumed it occurred. This didn’t help.

    So I got recommended up the scale to my GP, who took one look at it and said, “Yeah, that ain’t right. Here’s a recommendation to an eye specialist at the hospital.” which took ~1 month to get an appointment.

    A month later, I have my first appointment with the eye specialist, who isn’t quite sure what it is but knows that it’s an internal problem and not a blocked duct. After the third appointment (3 months after the first) she says that she’s narrowed it down to either a benign tumour or a blood clot, but isn’t confident in her eyelid surgery capabilities and recommends me to an eyelid specialist in a neighbouring province.

    6 months after the first optometrist appointment, I have my first appointment with the specialist who identifies it during the appointment as an internal scab that will decompose itself, but the wound isn’t healing. He says that surgery is an option, but there’s a chance I go blind and a smaller chance that I straight up die. He tells me that I’ll come back in 3 months because it’s not life threatening, and if it starts getting much worse, we’ll discuss removing it.

    After an appointment with him every 3 months for almost 2 years, it finally cleared up.

    The issue itself was relatively low risk, but it wasn’t until 6 months in that it was deemed “not cancer.” At every step, the risk was evaluated, and ‘hail mary’ options were discussed. But they were always discussed as “if it gets worse, we can do this, and the decision is yours”. So (at least where I live) there are hail mary options and you can take them, but only if the risk to your health is significant enough that the rewards outweigh the risk.