Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

Ooh I hadn't considered that it being a braid might affect things too o: fwiw it's about a foot long and under an inch wide... the characters going to just be lighting it from a small oil lamp, maybe getting some of the oil on the braid would expedite it.

Basically all I need for the scene to work is to arrange it so that yes, realistically it would burn and not take forever about it so he's not just standing there forever with smoking hair in one hand :V

 

Okay so macumar is a common blood thinner, and taking too much of it can basically nix your body's ability to clot its blood, meaning that even a very small injury can be potentially lethal because the bleeding doesn't stop. How lethal it gets depends entirely on where/if you bleed and how quickly you get treatment for it (transfusion, medication etc) so you don't get estimates because there are none.

Expectancies in medicine are squishy. It's in fact not very ethical to go 'you have five months to live'. What you should get are median estimates like '5% of patients still alive 1year after diagnosis' and go based of that.
However, with your symptoms i think a life expectancy of double digit years is fairly utopic unless you have actual treatment options for the underlying cause. Something that kills your tissue and causes hemorrhages will not be that longterm survivable

 

I have thoughts about this, but I have work to do. Could someone ping me about this in 6 hours or so?

 

All depends on what she has and also what country she travels to. I have thoughts about this as well. And still work to do :P

 

For a fanfic thing I'm doing, is there any location on Earth left in the modern day where

Spoiler: cannibalism/starvation tw

the events of "A Tale They Won't Believe" could reasonably be repeated? It would need to be, specifically: far enough away from civilisation that starvation could set in for people travelling to said civilisation on foot (helped if they don't know the way and end up wandering around); without sufficient easily-accessible edible matter for a largeish group of humans untrained in woodcraft and with no equipment or weapons to survive on it; with enough water that they wouldn't die of thirst; and with a climate they wouldn't freeze to death in as the point is they escape their location with no supplies or warm clothes at all.

Temperate woodland would probably be my best bet. Maybe Canada? Though then there are bears to worry about. I'm not quite sure how big a distance that would need to cover... A human in good condition can cover twenty to thirty miles in a day, ones in poor condition and with no idea where they're going or what they're doing would probably be half that if not less? I know how long a human can live without food, but how long before people get desperate enough to resort to cannibalism? The original jailbreak the song was based on took fifteen days to get to that point.

 

Definitely lots of places that fit the bill in north America. Getting lost out in the wilderness happens all the time with inexperienced hikers, and not even that far off from well traveled trails.

 

Where: literally anywhere in temperate regions with a low population density. Canada, parts of thr US, large swathes of Russia and Eastern Europe, the more temperate (read: southern) regions of south america, Finnland/sweden/norway in the summer months, etc.

Spoiler: for spoiler

General estimate for 'how long until u die without food is weeks-ish though i'm not sure how that holds up to walking around in the wilderness and also depends on starting conditions of your people.
Generally i think cannibalism would be avoided unless there was a handy dead body available (because 'killing someone to eat thdm' is a step above 'eat someone' yet) and there often are other food sources out there and i reckon that people might eat snails and mysterious berries before they eat a Party member

 

@Misty Pond strongly depends on severity of injury, insurance and who's paying for what.

However, post intial care, i assume that the Patient would acquire their files from the local Hospital and hand them to their pcp/necessary specialist for future care. If abroad again, i assume a local doc would do it, though likely have to be arranged beforehand. Her insurance might also put up a fuss, depending on where they go/live (EU citizens for example are often covered in the entire EU)

 

in my very limited experience of spending a couple of days in a foreign hospital because of a kidney infection, the doctors got me to an okay place, then gave me discharge papers and some prescriptions. we didn’t really talk about continuing care, and when I saw my pcp a few weeks later I just had to try to summarize what the other doctors said. (Well, as far as I understood it. A friend had been translating at the time.)

also tbh, what you’re describing is such an extreme situation that I don’t think there would be, like, hospital protocol for how to deal with it. my general experience, though, is that follow ups are the responsibility of the patient.

ETA: the country I was in had socialized health care and I had fancy insurance, so I just paid them like $100 or something when I left. Bigger bills might be more complicated.

 

@TheOwlet:

Spoiler: above tw plus trafficking

the story's about a sex trafficking ring, so the lost characters would be in lousy condition and also possibly naked or nearly so, so even more desperate for food to keep up body heat.

 

Spoiler: for spoiler

in this case your characters are going to die of exposure LONG before they have to worry about starvation. Like, unless it's like 30°C outside, being rained on real good can take them to hypothermia already, and if it IS 30°C outside then they'll have to worry about dehydration/heat stroke long before starvation too. Especially dehydration. If they drink river/lake water they're somewhat liable to get diarrhea, especially if they're already in bad base condition and potentially from elsewhere (your immune system going 'new germ who dis' is BAD if you're naked in the woods), dehydrating them even faster.
plus 'being nearly naked in the woods' severely cuts down on your tool access and one there is again, a step between 'eat someone' and 'eat someone by literally tearing chunks out of their body with your bare teeth'
plus of course, they'd had to actually stay with the corpse to do that. If they're trying to find civilization, they probably walk on instead of sticking around

 

Okay, so they would definitely have to get clothing from somewhere. Could possibly grab some while escaping, if they had the chance... Eh, if I can't figure out how to make it work I can go with something else. Could do a "die off one by one from exposure" thing rather than going with the song.

 

that song is about one murderous crazy who resorted to cannibalism almost instantly, not realistic conditions for people to eat their dead. if you want that scenario, just put a murderous crazy in the escaping group.

 

True. Okay, I'll use that scenario for them dying of exposure instead and save the cannibalism for a different scenario.

Spoiler: tw imprisonment plus above

How about people locked in a basement or something and their captor gets killed and no one else knows they're there? That'd probably work better.

 

Could do. It's better to look at real life cases of well documented cannibalism than pulling from pop culture, though.

Spoiler: Cannibalism talk

The Donner Party is a good example of that sort of desperation in otherwise sane and sound individuals. Trapped by snow, some of them died of exposure, and even then they had to discuss it and came up with a system (labeling bodies so that family members wouldn't have to eat their own for instance). In nearly every recorded case usually is a) desperation and one person has already died (there is usually still a great deal of moral weight and shame in survivors) b) tactics of psychological warfare (eating the corpses of fallen enemy soldiers) c) funeral rights designed to honor the dead and d) as @hyrax said, crazy, murderous bastards.

 

Oh, I was already planning for the first person to already have died and for it to massively fuck up the survivors - that was kind of the idea, fucking characters up ^_^ Having a murderous bastard in the mix will also help.

 

For another thing, how long can someone have their hands tied above their head before circulation problems start? (I've read "Sunstone" so I know what happens, but that didn't give a time.)

 

just from what I know of kink safety: don't tie someone's hands above their head, if they put weight on them their shoulders can dislocate. the way to avoid the dislocation thing was explained to me as "tie each arm out to the side." I don't ...actually know of any circulation problems, and don't see an obvious way for them to appear, aside from if the tie was so tight that it cut off circulation to the hands, which on some people might be necessary to keep them restrained but on others pretty clearly wouldn't be -- I might be missing something though.

and probably obvious but disclaimer: I would not try any of this irl without looking further into bondage technique.