“Pain reports are not complaints. They are telemetry.”

First real life. 

If an intake nurse cuts you off with “that’s enough of the complaints,” that’s not how triage is supposed to feel. Intake is meant to gather relevant symptoms to determine urgency. It’s okay for them to redirect you for clarity. It’s not okay for you to feel dismissed.

Again, this is based on true events in real life

Second Life at Area 52:
If this had just happened in an alien med bay, the senior clinician would quietly mark:

“Patient stress spike due to perceived invalidation.”
Not because you’re dramatic. Because stress changes vital signs. It matters. They would lean in and say: “Prioritize. What is the most urgent symptom right now?”
“Dismissal increases stress. Stress increases pain. This is inefficient.”

Second Life can feel better than real life sometimes because it gives you three things that real life often doesn’t:
Control.
Containment.
Curation.

In real life, especially when you’re in pain, in an ER, feeling dismissed, you don’t control much at all.
And loss of control is exhausting.

The aliens advise with this caution, and I say this gently, that is when the contrast gets too sharp. If real life starts to feel like only pain and stress, and the virtual world feels like the only place where you’re valued or alive, that’s when we want to widen real-world support, not shrink it.

But using creativity and community to stabilize yourself? That’s healthy.

Continuing my journey to find out where the pain comes from and how I can defeat it with all of you helping me in the virtual world support buffer, and of course, real-life medical teams.

Stay connected in both worlds.