The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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I went in for an ultrasound, and baby #3 is looking good as far as they can tell, and is a boy.
People keep asking if I'm excited, and I just look awkward, because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope. Nurses keep having me take depression questionnaires as a matter of course (I am not and have never been clinically depressed, but half the symptoms overlap with pregnancy, they also strongly overlap with sleep deprivation such as just after giving birth, and they like to give it to pregnant and postpartum women multiple times. I give some credence to Abigail Shrier's observation that the medical establishment likes to give depression screenings out too much, and get people who are just feeling neutral but going through physical changes to second guess that). There are no parenting questionnaires, but I can sign up to enroll in a baby brain study if I want. I feel like some of this is related to the current fertility problem.
Congratulations! I'll be looking in the news for the latest disaster related to a gender reveal party haha
Thankfully that's not a problem here, because pre-natal sex determination is illegal. Or at least it is unless you know people who know people.
Differentiating between baby blues, postnatal depression and postnatal psychosis hurts enough that I want to crawl back into the womb, sadly my mother had a hysterectomy and I wouldn't fit in the first place. Barely did at all, the doctors scanning her diagnosed me with IUGR, but it turned out I was just a long boi.
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Did you want a daughter instead?
I'm ambivalent, I just tend not to feel excitement over babies in general. I want the children in the long run, but many of the parts I don't like are front loaded.
You should be proud of how forward thinking you are.
Also:
Do not circumcise. It is a horrific abuse of the rights of a person who is, at the end of the day, not your property, and whose body belongs to himself. Think critically about the arguments proponents give in favor of the practice. Remember that most of the world considers it to be a bizarre and gruesome thing to do. Obviously I could share my full set of arguments for why I believe what I believe, if for some reason you wanted to discuss it.
There is a documentary called American Circumcision which I think is good, and which is available on Kanopy, a free streaming service that comes with any US library card.
My parents say that they mutilated me because no one ever suggested that they might not do that. It supposedly never occurred to them not to do it. You won't have that excuse.
Interesting, I hadn't really thought about it. I asked my husband, and he is but doesn't mind it. Our religious tradition goes both ways, with no particular opinion on the matter. We'll consider.
Quick list of bullet points. You don't have to read them. I realize you didn't ask me to give you a summary. I understand this is perhaps a strange or unpleasant subject, but silence has historically been how a variety of horrible things have gone on for as long as they did.
The foreskin has densely packed nerve endings.
The foreskin prevents the penis from being desensitized (keratinized) by continuous contact with fabric.
The foreskin's gliding motion functions as a physical lubricant which is beneficial to both partners.
In most circumcised men, the most sensitive part of the penis is the circumcision scar. Most circumcised men do not realize they have a circumcision scar or what it is.
I could go on about sensitivity but you get the idea.
A lot of doctors and religious functionaries don't use adequate anesthetic, or any anesthetic at all. In my case, no anesthetic was used. If Wikipedia is to be believed on this subject, "It is now accepted that the neonate responds more extensively to pain than the adult does, and that exposure to severe pain, without adequate treatment, can have long-term consequences."
Here's a man talking about his botched circumcision: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n-N5XlH3DyU
(He is on the autism spectrum.)
Although circumcision proponents claim the odds of a botched circumcision are very low, there is some evidence to suggest that the risks may not be as low as suggested. A United States anti-AIDs program in Africa called PEPFAR ceased circumcising children below the age of 15 because the rate of botched circumcisions was higher than they could tolerate, and higher the younger the child was.
In the documentary American Circumcision, the suggestion is made that an infant's penis which the doctors claim was always malformed was actually disfigured by circumcision. It's been a while since I've seen it and I forget the evidence presented, but it's conceivable to me that lies of that nature exist and contribute to the supposed rate of botched circumcisions being less than actuality.
A lot of doctors in the US are sort of clueless about intact penises and give erroneous suggestions. Please be skeptical about what they tell you, and about what they don't tell you.
This is amazing because I was just trying to find a non-weird way to ask guys here if they had a very sensitive spot at the top of the shaft right behind the head, where the foreskin folds back to.
(There isn't really a non-weird way of asking that, is there?)
That's what the internet's for.
Yes, there are specific points around the 'ring' that are more sensitive than others.
No, it's not a surprise that the remnants of the cover will retain some of the cover's effects when that cover is amputated since that's where the nerves would normally pass through.
Honestly, cutting that piece off is as stupid as the routine tonsillectomies were, for the same reasons (apathy, anger). Penises are supposed to have that ferrule installed for the same sorts of reasons they're on fiber optic cables (so that the thing covered by that ferrule remains as sensitive [to light] as possible). Of course, since this ferrule is biological in nature, it requires maintenance (and can malfunction) for reasons and in ways similar to the female end of quick-disconnect air hoses.
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Well if it's a question worth asking then it might be worth the weirdness.
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@Gaashk, I wanted to, uh, toss my foreskin into the ring from the other direction and agree with Campire. I'm uncircumcised and it would take at least six figures to buy it off me.
You hear a lot more from people who wish they weren't circumcized than are glad they aren't, so hopefully it counts for something
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Congratulations in any case, to the mother down the road (years, perhaps). As a dad I could never share my wife's physical upheaval during those years. Even now (when our sons are teens) I suspect in moments of the inevitable subterfuge and insolence that she feels differently than I do. "Your mother carried you in her womb for nine months, is it too much to ask that you take the goddam plates to the sink?" (I do not say this, certainly not in this way.)
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