In the US, about $7-10 billion is spent annually on cancer research, and about $100 billion is spent on cancer treatment. Why would the government put so much money into something "that they don't want to spend the resources on?"

And FYI the cure rate for prostate cancer if detected before its in the advanced stages is 100%

Hey I do tobacco counseling almost daily at work for patients (3rd year med student) so I'm hoping I can give you a little info. You got a lot of good advice in this thread already, but to add to this, but if you really want some extra support in kicking this, make an appointment with your doctor. Chantix (generic name: varenicline) is a medication that can be prescribed that is extremely effective. Research has shown that the rates of staying smoke free is about 3 times greater just quitting cold turkey. The medication itself reduces your cravings and actually reduces the pleasure you get from having a cigarette. All you have to do is take it for 12 weeks, and you're smoke free. I'd HIGHLY recommend trying this out if you're serious, it is a great medication.

If you don't want to go that route, there's always the nicotine patches or the nicotine gum you can use for breakthrough cravings if you want to continue the way you're trying. Personally I'd recommend the gum, as people seem to do better with it and it's easier to carry around, etc... And above all, as a few people said, you have to have a good support system, whether it's family, friends or co-workers. If they want to help, it completely changes the odds of quitting in your favor.

Good luck with this, and if you have any questions, I'd be glad to help.
-Mike

ant123ant :

I haven't worked much in ophthalmology, but I can take an educated guess from what I know from general medicine. When you're tired/run down/sick, it'll cause a lot of things in your body to work less than 100% and shift toward other things (building up your immune system, etc...). Meaning, less control is being placed over the eyelid muscles and nerves, so they won't be able to override the bad nerve as strongly as normal. (There's basis for this in a few neuromuscular diseases, that probably isn't necessary to go into here) It doesn't sound like it is anything unexpected, especially if things are improving when you're well. Of course, if all of this is bothering you, a routine check up and physical is ALWAYS a good idea and appropriate step to take.

ant123ant :
Sure I can do my best. Are you saying the reflex doesn't happen as often anymore? Essentially there are multiple nerves and muscles that control the eyelid as a whole, not just the Oculomotor nerve I talked about before. The belief is that over time, all these other muscles and nerves learn to compensate for the bad nerve an gradually become less of an issue.  Hope that helps.

Just FYI, the Marcus Gunn pupil that was described above is completely different from what you have. Marcus Gunn pupil is most commonly due to a type of an infection or a brain injury.

For difficult games, I always think back to NES. The term "NES hard" was created for a reason.

The original Ghosts and Goblins was extremely difficult. Ninja Gaiden was pure madness. And if you'd like a fairly obscure game that's extremely difficult, check out Milon's Secret Castle. I grew up on that game and got nowhere close to ever beating it, even when I tried to revisit it recently.

Eirinn :

Everything in this post is 100% correct but as long as it isn't rude I'd like to add a piece of advice/quick tip. As Eirinn said, you can use the pepper to stun enemies. If you can stun them while they are standing on a piece of the burger, bun, etc...it'll cause that piece to fall multiple levels instead of just one. You can accomplish this also by running across the piece of the burger and the enemy is running across it close to you.

If all else fails, you can have a piece of the burger fall onto the bad guy underneath it to kill it and get extra points. Have fun, it's a pretty good game that I happened to grow up playing.

dekker101 :

It's a simple website that you can stream their whole library right from their website, as long as you have the Windows media player browser add-on installed. You'll be prompted if you don't have it but odds are you already do. Everything is free. The only thing is to use the search engine to make your own playlists (ex: castlevania + megaman, Mario only, etc...) you have to like them on facebook.

http://8bit-radio.com/

It's a fun way to pass the time. Plus it could give the admins an idea of how to implement a song system.

Enjoy!

ant123ant :

I did see that it's been a while since you've posted this question, but if you're still interested I thought I'd try to give you a little bit of an idea what's going on. I'll do my best to minimize the medical jargon, but not too much so to oversimplify it. If you'd like me to clarify something afterwards, please feel free to ask.

The brain has a ton of nerves that come off of it to send and receive signals all over the body. A specific grouping of those that send and receive signals are the 12 cranial nerves, all of which are named but are abbreviated by counting by Roman numerals I-XII. The Oculomotor nerve, or cranial nerve III, controls eye movements and some movements of your eyelids. The Trigeminal nerve, or cranial nerve V (five), has 3 major branches to the face, essentially one to the forehead area, one from the lower eyes to the upper lip, and then lower lip to the base of your jaw.

Now it's not entirely known what the cause or mechanism of Marcus Gunn syndrome is, but it's believed that some reflexes and muscle movements kinda get criss-crossed, possibly due to nerve damage. The trigeminal nerve and oculomotor nerve signals get crossed, so whenever the jaw muscle is used, the eyelid opens as well. So as a general picture for other people reading this (and let me know if this is applies to you), this will commonly present as somebody sucking on a straw and all of a sudden one eyelid will open wide. The side of the eyelid opening is the side of the nerve injury.

Sorry if that's too difficult to read or understand, but I'd be glad to explain in more detail if you'd like, or to clarify anything I wrote. Good luck with everything. Luckily it won't cause you any major problems and won't get worse so you should hopefully be great.

For all you that love the Let's Play videos that seem pretty prevalent in this list, you should really check out Game Grumps. It's two guys (Egoraptor and JonTron, who have some great video game-based channels themselves) essentially mocking LP channels. Language is pretty vulgar though, so be careful if you don't like that sort of thing.

For those of you that like video game music compositions, I'd highly recommend ViolinTay, which is exactly what it sounds like, a girl playing video game songs on her violin. VERY well done, and she does have a few collaborations as well. I haven't seen her mentioned yet, so I definitely wanted to point her out to everyone.

The other video game-related channel you have to watch if you've never seen it is the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN). His video on Castlevania II is what made him famous. If you don't know what I'm talking about, stop everything in your life and watch it now. Do it. Go.

Enjoy everyone, if those don't provide some entertainment and/or laughs, I don't know what will.

On a long distance trip with some of my buddies we played a game where we'd try to name a food that couldn't be improved by either adding bacon/bacon bits or chocolate. We could only name a couple, so I'd go with either of those by far over anything else.

Wow I'm glad I found this thread, really cool idea.

The answer's Electra, the maid that made that horrible-sounding Trout yogurt in the previous Earthbound.

If possible, I'd also like a clarification on if we should now make videos during our high score runs as well. I posted a score only after reading through this thread. Granted, it's 4th place as I'm posting this now, but I wanted to call attention to it just in case you'd prefer to remove it since there is no accompanying video. Thanks.

EDIT: Sorry, I misread the first post indicating for us to definitely record sessions. Would you like me to manually put a 0 for the score I currently have up?

(May be a tad off topic.) I won't post the link outright because I'm not sure of the posting rules, or if it's considered advertising or if you're allowed to link to outside sites...but I do have a question.

There's a website that I found that has a bunch of old NES music, and some remixes all in the same 8 bit sound, that I use for my personal enjoyment. Am I allowed to post the link here or is that against the rules? (Or if this post is too off-topic, feel free to ignore/delete it) If not, I'd be glad to provide it.

Thanks.

aeonarial :

rcarter2 has nailed a big part of this. Without going into too much of what I do, all I'll say is in my training, you would be re-emerging yourself in the same environment that was unhealthy in the past. All this does is exponentially increase the odds of relapsing toward prior behaviors. Honestly, the best thing you can do for yourself is to continue talking about it, especially with a third party. And this is something you should definitely be bringing up in therapy. Somebody without an interest in either side often helps identify things you wouldn't have noticed yourself otherwise, and we have great results with this. That said, you have to be committed and willing to discuss and divulge everything. Stuff of this nature never is repaired after an hour of two of talking, but will possibly takes weeks/months, but will ONLY be successful if you want it to be.

When I was in high school, I used to think similarly and felt like things couldn't get better. Now I'm almost 10 years older than you at this time, and even though I feel more "mature" I realize there are plenty of things I still need to learn and experience, and even more that I'll probably never will. You'll never know what great things lie ahead until you finally stop looking behind.