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

[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