So my mother's dog tried to kill my bird...

[attackfish]

My mother's puppy, Daisy somehow bit my cockatiel, Sully through the bars of his cage, puncturing his wing and his body, and "de-gloving" his leg, which is to say removing all of the skin and rolling it down to his foot.  He is being cared for round the clock by the local bird vet, and may well not survive the night.  If he dies, he may lose his foot.  I sat there with him in the car while my mother drove with him tucked into my chest and just...  I'm terrified for him.  He's my baby.  I'm hopeful, because he started to perk up and come out of shock on the way to the vet, and headbutted me every time I stopped scratching his neck, but I really really could use some distraction right about now.

ETA: He survived the night, and when I went to see him, he chirped at me, and looked at me like, "Wow, last night sucked, Mom, can I go home now?"  The vet thinks he'll be fine, but she's not letting me take him home yet.  Unfortunately, the reason I was at the vet was because his mate, Archie, it turns out, had also been injured.  Daisy got her leg.  In the middle of the night, it swelled up, and she started biting at it, and when we uncovered her this morning, she had gone into shock.  The vet is not optimistic about her chances.  She was much worse off than Sully was, and I was terrified she was going to die in the car.  We now think Daisy got Archie's leg, and Sully and Beni (my lovebird boy) came over to defend them, and Sully was injured in the fight.  Beni has a bruised nare, and spent last night trying to feed Archie.  Archie is drinking apple juice and is being treated for shock, and the longer she lives, the more likely she'll come out of it okay.  All we can do is hope.

ETA2: Archie passed away.  Aparently, she also had head trauma from the attack, and was having seizures.  One of them killed her a few minutes ago.  She was six years old.

Comments

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I thought of the muscular twitches because when my legs are going at it, the only way I get any sleep is to tie them together with my bathrobe. I didn't know he had pants under the bandages. This makes me more eager to say spasticity.

I got the impression his legs themselves were crushed. You're right, it's almost always a subset of spinal injuries in media representing all disability, and especially all wheelchair use, but before modern medicine got better at dealing with paralysis, people with paraplegia nearly all died of infections in the first year. Teo wouldn't have survived if he had paraplegia in the avatarverse.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to finally have an answer, because this has been bugging me since he showed up.

I suspect the writers meant for it to be paraplegia, but I will never write it that way because it's so implausible. I've wondered whether Teo's disability isn't congenital; the Mechanist says he sustained injuries, but not that those injuries were related to his current wheelchair use. That said, if we assume he does have an acquired disability, Teo fits very well with Toph and Azula: we have disability acquired by accident, congenital disability and disability that simply happened by itself. (Similarly, we have mobility, cognitive and sensory disabilities represented, which work as broad categories, even though they're not perfect.) In fact, for a canon with so few disabled characters (especially considering the war going on), the show is remarkably good at hitting all the bases. There's disability that just is; there's blatant ableist oppression; and there's disability that contributes to the downfall of the PWD. And yet, somehow, I still want Teo's to be congenital and break the pattern. :(

If it is injuries, though, I think his knees are affected. Maybe it's the flat open spaces where he lives and the lack of tiny corridors where he might get stuck trying to turn around (which is probably great for Teo, as a wheelchair user), but his legs are very straight when he's in his chair, relative to what people usually do in real life. Knees are also a delicate and important part of the legs.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I thought it was to his knees too, and as you said, his chair keeps his legs straight. It seems like he steers a fair bit by leaning, and speaking as a kayaker, you need your upper legs for that.

I love that A:tLA just had disabled people in it, no bones made. I wish there were more war wounded around, but it did so much better than most.

Actually, I think Azula has brief reactive psychosis, so it didn't just happen. When she regains her faculties, she's going to make her brother miserable.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

That would explain why his thighs look proportional.

I agree entirely with your assessment of A:TLA's treatment of disability. While watching the episode where Teo first appeared, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept waiting for Teo to be objectified, or to be someone's Very Special Lesson, or, at least, to be used as an example of something (and I suppose he is, but it's very much in the background). Instead, Teo is just Teo, and it is unremarked on that Teo is not only part of his community but a well-respected part of his community. He's cool. He has his adoring fans. No one in-universe thinks this is odd. I can appreciate this better now that the episode is over and I can breathe again.

I assumed it was the onset of a lifelong condition like schizophrenia. I can never remember the characters' ages, and she doesn't seem... fourteen? to me, anyway, but she's not unbelievably young for that... I think. That would leave the most options open for fanwriters, since it's not unheard of for something like that to get worse, to cycle between better and worse, or to go away entirely. Luckily, canon is vague enough for writers to play with it however they want. >:)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I knew a girl who had fully developed schizophrenia at fourteen, so not unbelievably young, but she was very um, off, for a good long while before she started hallucinating, which I'm told is the norm. Also, schizophenia tends to flatten the affects of the people who have it. If anything, Azula went the other way. Plus, Azula's kind of the perfect candidate for an episode of Brief Reactive Psychosis. Not that I necessarily think the writers did that on purpose.

Schizophrenia isn't a chemical imbalance like a mood disorder. It's a degenerative neurological disease. It does not disappear on it's own, though other forms of psychosis can and do. Brief reactive psychosis on the other hand, comes on quickly following a situation in which someone's self image is stressed to the breaking point. Then, it resolves itself after a period of time, anywhere from days to months or more.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

That's possible.

People have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and recovered fully or partly. There's one famous case where dialysis preceded and may have caused the recovery, although further studies on other people with schizophrenia got mixed results. (See Dialysis for schizophrenia: review of clinical trials and implications for further research (http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=158199), for instance.) I remember finding a statistic, possibly on NAMI's website, saying that some single-digit percentage of people simply recovered for no known reason, but now I can't find it, and not for lack of trying. I also remember two autobiographies by people who eventually (after years of psychosis that got better and worse) recovered to the point that they could get on with their lives without worrying about it. A Google search turned up an article called Schizophrenia Prognosis (http://www.news-medical.net/health/Schizophrenia-Prognosis.aspx), but I have no idea how reputable the site is.

Somewhat relatedly, have you read terajk's post, So I wrote 1500 words on disability in Avatar: The Last Airbender (http://terajk.dreamwidth.org/104102.html)?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Single digit recovery rates to me say misdiagnosis. Hell, I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, and also with autism as a child. It happens not that uncommonly that different types of psychosis can be mixed up in a clinical setting. (I wasn't even psychotic, but the medical mismanagement of my childhood diagnoses is another story.)

I have, and I agree with parts of it. I do not like the way Azula's mental illness was treated, and I am on pins and needles to see her treatment in "The Search."

I do not feel like Toph and Zuko not having a field trip is in any way a flaw of the show. Toph was willing to welcome Zuko in, unlike, say, Sokka and Katara, never had to run from him, and had a number of adorable, touching moments with him. I also don't think Toph was there to "Teach a Very Special Lesson." I've seen a lot of those characters, and Toph doesn't fit it.

Also, you know my views on Zuko's rage and Ty Lee and Mai's reactions saying PTSD to me, and you bet your ass that's a disability.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Schizophrenia is a condition defined by psychiatry. Psychiatry is not currently able to diagnose people based on the etiology of their conditions (even those it has some ideas about the etiology of); it instead defines conditions based on signs and symptoms that tend to go together. I might be persuaded to believe that those symptoms are typically caused by a neurodegenerative disease but are sometimes caused by some other condition instead, and, if there were a way to tell which etiology it was, I would believe that schizophrenia should be split up to group patients with like etiology together. However, diagnosis being what it is, I would not agree that they were misdiagnosed. They were (presumably correctly) identified as experiencing the symptoms and exhibiting the signs that are used to define schizophrenia. When they start using brain scans for diagnosis, then we can talk about misdiagnoses of people who meet the DSM criteria.

None of this is meant to imply that people don't also misdiagnose things, or that they don't ignore illnesses or engage in any other malpractice.

I agree with you about the linked post.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This is part of what drives me so crazy about psychiatry (horrible wordplay is horrible). In the rest of the medical field, there is at least lip service paid to causes. Even when there is no known cause of a specific set of symptoms, the rest of the medical field at least makes a note that it's idiopathic (though they often don't do anything beyond that, grr). Not so with psychiatry, which in my opinion contributes to sloppy treatment. If this treatment works for someone with an illness caused this way, it could do nothing for the same symptoms caused by something else. It also contributes to the way we deal with and treat mental illness (and more broadly, the brain as an organ) as separate from illnesses of the body. Neurology comes closer to the approach I like, but neurologists are far to willing to write off a condition as psychiatric, and thus they don't have to deal with it (yeah, that happened to me a lot as a kid) when, perhaps a neurological understanding of the mechanism behind psychiatric illnesses would be beneficial to treatment.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I'd go so far as to say that "mental illness vs. illnesses of the body" is a false dichotomy, not only because the brain is part of the body, but because there are many conditions that are both. Physical illnesses can cause psychiatric symptoms, mental illnesses can cause physical symptoms, etc. I think psychiatry could be better about a lot of things.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, exactly. I'm pretty sure it comes from that old Christian dichotomy between the spirit and the flesh, that has become so much an unconscious part of Western thought. Not very scientific that. (A lot of people think when I attack different forms of modern science that I'm against science. No, I want it to be more scientific. I demand scientific rigor.)

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

I can see how it might come from that, but I think that's a misapplication of the theory.

Indeed, I often find that science fails at scientific rigor. This disappoints me.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mean to say that anybody actually sat down and said "The mind is separate from the body because of the dichotomy of spirit and flesh!" I think it was just one more cultural bias that went unexamined as scientists went about conducting science and making theories.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Definitely.

I also dislike how people use the acknowledgment of this to imply that there can't be psychological causes that aren't rooted in physical illness. People's minds react to their environments, and those environments aren't limited to the chemicals they're bathed in.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This. It's not an either/or thing. Brain chemistry, other illness, structural neurology, and emotional experiences can cause mental illness. And you know what, a combination of the above can cause a single person's mental illness together. And emotional experience, for example, something that caused PTSD, can cause neurological and neurochemical changes that can contribute to further mental illness. Or the reverse can happen. It's complicated and nuanced, and uh, a lot of people don't deal well with complicated and nuanced.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Yes, and not only can those things also cause or alter the course of physical illnesses, but physical and mental illnesses can cause or contribute to each other (for instance, terrifying experiences with physical illness can cause emotional reactions that lead eventually to PTSD).

There's also the somewhat pointless attempt to draw some hard-and-fast line between "ordinary" emotional reactions and pathological ones. I think the dividing lines between Acute Stress Response, acute PTSD and chronic PTSD exemplify this. Imagine if physical illnesses and injuries were treated that way. Oh, you didn't actually rip that nail back to the quick unless it also gets infected. (I suppose some chronic illnesses do get treated this way. Subclinical hypothyroidism comes to mind as an example. I can't think of any injuries that are understood as not being real unless they're unusually bad, and injuries are more of a fair comparison with PTSD than illnesses.) It's pointless; how is someone who experiences symptoms for two months and twenty-nine days not mentally ill, but someone who experiences them for three months is?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you read my post on the "Sickly Neurotic Geek" trope: http://attackfish.livejournal.com/102382.html but I talked a little bit about the process by which I developed some of my mental illnesses and how my seizures and immune disorder played a big part of that:

To make this trope especially painful to me, my geekiness, mental health issues, and illness are related, and part of the reason they are is ableism itself. First society made me fit a stereotype, and they it derided me for it. The idea behind the trope is that the geeky neurosis causes the “sickliness”, whereas for me, it was the other way around. There are two ways my illness led to my mental health issues, directly, and indirectly through the responses of people around me. By far the less important of these is the direct version. For a person with an illness like mine, where exposure to ordinary innocuous, common substances can cause severe injury or death, avoiding those substances is critical, and the mental effort spent avoiding such substances becomes habitual, and lends itself to developing OCD. Also, being at risk and unable to fully control that risk, leads to a certain level of perfectly reasonable anxiety, but our bodies and brains become used to that, and the anxiety can bleed over into non-illness related areas.

It's pointless; how is someone who experiences symptoms for two months and twenty-nine days not mentally ill, but someone who experiences them for three months is?

Our current psychiatric model doesn't seem to regard anything as a mental illness unless it's chronic. We're used to people getting ill and healing, but you're not mentally ill unless you don't heal or unless you take a long time to heal? Really?

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I do recall reading that, and it's a good post.

Yes, that and the way mental illness is seen as something only certain deficient people have. Maybe that's arguably true of The Permanent Crazy, but understanding mental illness like that is like not having a concept of catching a cold. Yes, most people catch colds at some point, but I was under the impression that psychiatry was supposed to be about mental well-being rather than conformity. (Why I would be under that impression when it's so obviously false, I do not know.) We may tell people to stop whining and keep working because everyone gets colds, but we don't deny that they're sick! And further, why is the idea that something is a natural reaction to circumstance opposed to the idea that something is a mental illness? A broken leg is a natural reaction to falling off a cliff, but that doesn't make it healthy.

You may wish to get me off of this topic. I'll be less ranty if we go back to discussing Avatar.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that psychiatry was supposed to be about mental well-being rather than conformity.

Where did you get an idea like that? Though, it depends a lot on the doctor. The establishment may be about conformity, but a lot of individual doctors are all about well being. Unfortunately, you got to hunt for them, and by definition, when you're mentally ill, your mental reserves to do the hunting are a little short.

And further, why is the idea that something is a natural reaction to circumstance opposed to the idea that something is a mental illness? A broken leg is a natural reaction to falling off a cliff, but that doesn't make it healthy.

My doctor had to spell this out for me. He told me flat out that after what I went through, of course I have PTSD, and he would have been worried about the way my brain worked if I didn't.

Side note, when anybody tries to force people to come in to work or class where I have to be with a cold, they get a nasty lecture about potentially infecting me. Colds and an immune disease are a bad combination.

Yes, Avatar! Weren't we talking about that earlier?

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

I should do a better job of staying home when sick.

I think this is relevant to Avatar, in some ways. For instance, Azula's doctors are going to be trying to enforce compliance and manageability rather than trying to help her get better. What do you suppose psychiatry in general looks like in the Avatarverse?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I don't know, and I'm terrified to find out. The problem with Azula is that when she's not hallucinating, she's still a sociopath, so if they want compliance and manageability, re-grounding her in reality would be, uh, counterproductive. They also probably have a hard time applying any sort of treatment to her without her making highly effective attempts to murder them.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Very likely. You know my ideas already from the fic I wrote about it. I don't know how they could possibly keep from being killed long enough to do anything useful, but apparently they do, canonically, manage just that. I think going on a quest with Zuko will do more for Azula's sanity than anything her doctors could or would do.

Azula is a good opportunity to write an evil character who is coincidentally also mentally ill, and would be able to do more evil things if she were sane.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I think going on a quest with Zuko will do more for Azula's sanity than anything her doctors could or would do.

Me too.

Yes! One of the few things I like about Azula's psychosis is that it makes her less dangerous instead of more, as is usual with villains in stories.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

Mental illness is represented amazingly badly in fiction. I hope that changes soon.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Ditto