Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

no, I know, but I only know about murders from the other side (trying to prevent accidental damage). so I'm saying: as far as I'm aware dislocation is a bigger issue than circulation, and I'm not sure loss of circulation is the default for that position, but if the rope's tied tight enough it will happen.

 

I write both, it can be useful for both! Also I want to know if a scene I'm reading in something else works or not. The character's hands almost immediately start feeling cold, which implies circulation problems from hands being above heart level too long.

 

that could just be a panic response tho, depending on context.

 

How quickly will someone in a situation where they can't move very much- not totally immobilized, but, e.g., mostly bedbound or stuck in a small prison cell without exercise breaks- lose muscle mass? How quickly are there likely to be serious physical side effects?

 

Well, from personal experience, 3 weeks basically bedbound in a hospital will cause loss of muscle mass. I was pretty weak for a while after I was released.

This article (free, I think) might be useful? This one as well.

 

For hospitalised bed bound patients notable loss of muscle mass occurs after a week. We encourage all our patients to at least sit up in a chair next to the bed if they're able.

 

(Not quite sure if this is the right place) Does anyone have suggestions for diseases that mid-20s seemingly healthy person could get, that go from 'first obvious symptoms appear' to 'dead' in 24 hours or less? I was currently thinking of this character having the bad luck to have a stroke at a weirdly young age, but I'm not sure how plausible that is, or if there are more plausible things.

 

There was that H1N1 strain of influenza in 2009-2010 that caused immune response overreaction in some younger people that caught it, and they died from it. I think the theory is that younger, more active immune systems are more prone to overreacting. Here's an article about it. Similar things happened with the 1918 flu pandemic.

Meningitis is also known to kill young people pretty fast. 24 hours or less might be too short a window, but not sure.

I do remember my mom had a co-worker in his 20s that died of a brain aneurysm. As far as she knew he was young and healthy (they worked in a factory building travel trailers, so physical fitness was a must).

 

Wrt to strokes: some people are unlucky enough to get strokes at such a young age. It usually means there's a hereditary problem with cholesterol or their vascular system. It can indeed kill you, especially if people don't recognize the symptoms as those of a stroke because a young person doesn't get strokes.

You can also have various congenital malformations that can be asymptomatic but fatal at the wrong moment. Like venous arterial malformations in the brain that erupt and cause aneurysms.

If you're specifically looking for something that kills usually instantly there's always Sudden Cardiac Death. That's where a person inexplicably drops dead.
See more here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3017912/

 

If you want something infectious, septic shock can do you in very quickly even if you're young and healthy, particularly if thd infection was encapsulated and then opened suddenly into the blood stream.

For traumatic stuff: spleen damage is good for seemjngly a lot less serious than if is because you can bleed out from those right quick should they develop into a rupture. You might develop that from an unlucky bike accident if you hit your stomach in just the wrong spot on the way down

Heartmuscle inflammation damage from infections months ago can also drop someone otherwise healthy one Moment to the next after an exertion. There's a number of cases from this where soccer pros died on the field.

 

Congestive heart failure is another one that can strike seemingly out of nowhere - had a friend whose sister died of it. She'd complained of coming down with a flu or something one evening, was in the hospital that next morning, died that evening.

 

It's not too short a window--the daughter of a couple at my parents' church died of meningitis VERY suddenly in college. She collapsed in class and was dead by the end of the day, from what I understand. So that's a pretty feasible idea for such a disease.

 

Thank you for your suggestions!

 

so
question
relevant to a thing I'm doing
if someone goes to court for a civil lawsuit
the winning end for this is generally like. a monetary settlement
is it possible/allowed in court to settle for something that isn't money

 

Not generally in the US but idk about elsewhere.

 

To settle? You can totally settle for something that's not money in the US, especially when the lawsuit is asking for non-monetary things. You could settle a divorce suit, for example, by offering the house and visitation rights to the kids. Whatever it is, it should be useful to the party getting it and concrete enough that it can't be ambiguous whether you've actually given or done it. And ideally it should be relevant to the case.

 

okay cool
thank you!

 

god I'm getting hampered by my lack of knowledge of commonplace stuff for even the smallest writing practice

this time it's roadside assistance!

character A got two tires slashed after work in the evening. he has one spare ofc but two means he's stuck. he calls his roadside assistance cause him an Responsible Adult. what assistance would that be in this scenario? would they just like, give him a second spare to put on until he gets replacements, or just have him towed to an auto place? can you even drive on more than one spare at a time o_o;

also is it reasonable to say there could theoretically be a wait time of an hour or two for the assistance to turn up if it's a busy night or somethin? so he could walk off and get a drink at the nearby bar with character B for reasons ;V

 

So, this might change depending on area, but I had a tire blow literally a month ago and got very familiar with the process. :')

In my case, roadside assistance towed me to an autoshop since I didn't have a spare (they gave me the option of picking one, which I did, or being taken to the nearest one) who replaced the tire first thing in the morning. I can assume it would have been earlier, but, the tire blew at around 5pm, the autoshop closed at 8pm, and because the tow company was getting slammed with assistance requests, they weren't able to reach my car until about 8:45pm.

In fact, the tow company practically insisted I find somewhere else to wait (in part because it was Florida Summer, in part because I was on the side of the highway) since they knew it would take a while for them to get out, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for him to get stuck with a couple hours between finding his tires slashed and getting a tow truck. Flipside being that if he's in the city, that's going to be easier for a tow to get to than on the highway, where I was.