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Hey There!

@oreozfox / oreozfox.tumblr.com

My name is OreozFox (she/her, 20). You can call me Oreo for short! I write some fanfiction that you can find on Ao3 under the same name. I draw, too, but mostly just traditional sketches. I'm working on it! If you ever have a question or just wanna talk, just know that I love talking to people!
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sidras-tak

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

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crimeronan

people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands....

my favorite thing about this post is that a handful of people have gone "oh wait! this is tangible proof that i don't need to be embarrassed about leaving a lot of comments!! i'll stop being so ashamed!" YES!! ao3 authors basically universally will die for people who comment spam. we love to see it and we do not find you weird or annoying At All.

think about it this way: we ourselves are weird enough to have spent several hours, days, or Months writing down this story. we are weird enough about the content to do that! why on Earth would we be mean and judgmental toward people who care enough to get excited about reading it?? we shared it Specifically For You To Get Excited About!

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atlinmerrick

WE WILL WRITE FOR YOU WHEN YOU DO THIS, TOO.

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As a writer, I love going back through the comments I've gotten on AO3. I promise that the minute you take of your time has been appreciated for hours/months/years

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if you’re reading this, it’s a sign that the thing you’re anxious about will go well. take a deep breath and trust yourself.

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“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.

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onewordtest

“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement. 

“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”

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tenoko1

“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”

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cj-amused

Things I didn’t know

“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”

You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.

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notesoftruth

Okay, but someone please explain question marks when followed by a dialogue tag. How do?

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flootzavut

“The speech tag is still part of the previous sentence,” she explained, ‘so it isn’t capitalised.“

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

She reblogged the post again, because she had recently read far too many potentially enjoyable stories marred by poor dialogue punctuation.

I’ve only seen this post in screenshots till now..

NOICE. Can’t wait to use this

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magpiefngrl

“There are two more ways"—she pointed to the blackboard—“to punctuate interruptions. One is with the em dashes outside the quotations marks to indicate continuous speech. The action occurs at the same time as speech. The other—” she sipped from a glass of water “—is em dashes within the quotation marks to indicate interrupted speech.”

“Neato,” she said, impressed by the easy-to-follow formatting.

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