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As to the details, that depends upon your narcissist and your particular situation.The absolute best time to leave is when the narcissist abandons you. If you are abandoned, half or more of your work is done. Don't wait for them to come back and hoover you back to decide to leave. If a narcissist leaves you, consider it a gift and make sure they can't come back for you. Don't wait, however, for your narcissist to abandon you. As soon as you realize or suspect that you are the victim of a narcissist, you already know that you've had enough abuse. It's always better to leave sooner rather than later.Planning helps, so that you leave with everything you need, papers, money and personal property that you value highly (ie. photos from your childhood instead of a TV that can be easily replaced). Don't leave your passport, ID, or a beloved pet. Assume that anything you leave will be destroyed or sold. If possible have a safe place to go, like a shelter or family in a distant state. Don't go to your best common friend who lives within walking distance. Don't tell the narcissist where you are going. Do leave a note saying the relationship is over so they don't report you as missing to the police, but be prepared that they might anyway so the police do the work of tracking you down. Most importantly, if you are married, have children, or have real estate or loans in common, see a lawyer before you leave as the rules may be different from state to state. For some, the time of day may make a difference. You want to get to a safe place undetected by your narcissist, as quickly as you can. Some people are able to move important items out over time, while others don't dare because their narcissist keeps them on such a short rein. Usually you want to get away as soon as reasonably possible, but if you feel that you are in physical danger, don't wait. Look at it like an evacuation in an emergency (which it is) and grab the most important stuff going out the door. It's better to run away barefoot and escape, than it is to go back for your favorite boots when your life is on the line. Plan if you can, but do what you must.Be very sure you don't break the law in leaving the narcissist. Don't damage property that you can't take with you, don't take children that you have with a narcissist without consulting a lawyer first to make sure you do it legally (otherwise they may get custody which is terrible for the children), don't take a vehicle unless your name is on the title and registration. Don't take actions against the narcissist to get revenge as you leave. Revenge can't be had in any case, but don't give your narcissist the ways and means to legally retaliate against you for leaving. As bad as your life has been due to a narcissist's behavior, burning their DVD collection or throwing all their clothes away may feel good in the moment, but you may end up paying a lot more than you want to pay for a feel good moment.The only way to successfully leave a narcissist is to leave them totally completely. Don't try to ease out. Go no contact immediately and stick with it. End all communication from them or to them except through a lawyer or strong third party who is capable of straining out the hurtful talk from either side, and only relaying the most basic facts. This includes your using or allowing them to use family, friends or others to relay messages between you. All you are doing by that is asking for self inflicted wounds. Don't listen to their phone messages, answer their calls, or read their emails or letters. Allowing them to get to you like that, even if you don't respond, is again inviting self inflicted wounds. Don't ask others how they are doing or feeling, and don't allow others to tell the narcissist anything about you. Block them on social media and on your phone. Don't give them your forwarding address. Cut off all non legally mandated communication either to or from them. Don't tell them how well you are doing when you start to heal. All that does is signal to them that they still have a string tied to you. Don't stalk them or try to find out what they are doing or who they are with. They don't care about you, except to keep you as an ex supply that they can reel in at any time. Don't give them the tiniest crack to get to you through or they will never let you go. You will spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.Keep in mind exactly why you are leaving. You are leaving to save yourself and protect yourself from further abuse. You are not leaving to hurt your narcissist. Don't count on your leaving to force them into changing their behaviors. It won't. Don't leave them a week's worth of meals in the fridge, with instructions about how to reheat them. They won't starve to death. From the moment you leave, you need to be sure to your very bones that you are no longer responsible for your narcissist. If they get a message to you threatening to take their life, assume they mean it and contact law enforcement immediately, but don't follow up. Let them handle it because it isn't your responsibility. Narcissists will often threaten self harm, but your only responsibility is to contact authorities. It's not up to you to save them from themselves. Don't believe them when they say they have hit rock bottom and have changed. You should never allow them to contact you in the first place, and if they truly have NPD, they are the kind of broken that can't be fixed. You can't fix them and no one else can. They don't want to be fixed because they feel entitled to behave the way they do and don't see that they have a problem.Once you get away safely, expect your life to change. You will be responsible for yourself. You may have to give up friends and family, your job, and your location. You will have to give up the idea that you love your narcissist. In reality, you don't and never did. You love the illusion your narcissist built for you the first time you met, based on your hopes and dreams and needs and vulnerabilities that the narcissist mined from you. That's why you fell so hard and fast for them. They seemed to be your perfect mate. You may still hold the belief that by leaving they will realize how much they love you and that they will revert to the person you first knew. You may believe that the illusion is real and the person who abuses you can be cured if you open their eyes. It's you who aren't seeing the truth. The narcissist doesn't and never has loved you and they have always been a narcissist (at least once they left childhood). You were in the wrong place at the wrong time when your paths crossed. Anyone could have met your narcissist's needs for supply, but you happened to be available. You don't owe them anything.Although the illusion wasn't real, your love is very real. Love doesn't just dissipate once you realize that you were tricked into it. Be prepared to grieve the loss, not of your narcissist, but of the illusion you fell in love with. Grief is a process, and you may feel as if you have lost someone to death. In a way you have. It will take time to grieve your loss and heal from the abuse. Don't expect to be in fine shape with all your problems solved after two weeks no contact. Don't beat yourself up for being tricked because narcissists are expert at it and no one is truly immune. You may have been more vulnerable to them because you are kind and empathetic. That's not a bad thing, but it can work against you when you leave because you might either blame yourself for being tricked or you may believe that anything can be overcome with love. That may be true, if it's two people in love against adversity, but it isn't true when only one loves and the other one in the relationship doesn't love the other. Until you can recognize that fact, nothing you can do will make a narcissist love you or care about you. Once you leave a narcissist your job is to protect yourself, grieve the loss of the one you love (remember that your love is real even though the illusion isn't) and to heal from the abuse. You can do it. You deserve to do it.Narcissists don't choose bad people. They choose the best, then they suck the self esteem from them and use and abuse them to fill their own needs. They thrive on chaos and conflict and pain. They don't love or care about their supply, so keep in mind that you aren't hurting them or being unkind by leaving them. You have the right of freedom from abuse. Just because narcissistic abuse doesn't leave broken bones or blood or physical wounds, it's as bad and often worse than being beaten. People believe you are abused if you show bruises and have medical records and pictures to document the abuse. Narcissistic abuse is often hidden from others, but it leaves deep wounds and permanent scars. Even when it's public abuse, the people who observe it are often tied to the narcissist in some way and are themselves supply. A few may be scared to rock the boat. This is complicated by the inability of new supply to believe even the smallest concern that the narcissist isn't who they appear to be. Remember when you first fell for your narcissist? Did family and friends try to warn you away from them or just ask you to slow down from committing to them? Most folks run into this, which is why the first thing a narcissist does is separate the supply from their family and friends. Remember how you couldn't listen to others, because you were so convinced that your narcissist was special and deserving of your devotion? You will likely run into more people who will support your narcissist over you, than those who believe you. This is likely to be especially true if you stay in the same town and move in the same social circles. This is why no contact and getting physically far away from a narcissist is so important. It's why you may need therapy to validate that you really did suffer, and to help you develop tools to leave, grieve, heal and move on. Going and sticking to true no contact gives you a respite from the constant barage of emotional abuse and neglect. Eventually you will stop thinking about your abuser and start thinking of yourself and your own need for independence, peace, security and you will have room for genuine mutual passion in your life. You deserve no less.

What do you live for?The short version is that I live for the opportunity to do more because there is way too much that I am curious about….….too many things that I haven't tried….….so many ideas that I have had to push to the bottom of the stack, just waiting to pop up when the time is right.And then there is the long version:Despite my ambitions I had several opportunities to "shuffle off this mortal coil" in recent years and so far I have managed to hang on by willpower and fair amount of luck.I made the decision to join the US Air Force in 2009; funny enough despite having two children (2005 and 2007) I was in the best health of my life.At the time I was working an office job that I hated so much, I took a split shift schedule and ran the 1.7 mile trip from my house to work four times daily (physical exhaustion was the only way I could stay calm cool and collected sitting at a desk the rest of the day).Making it through MEPS was a challenge only because I had too many tattoos (I removed two of them, myself, but that is a story for another day) but everything else was easy.I entered the delayed entry program for precision measurement equipment lab but there weren't enough potential candidates so I was delayed again and ended up taking an open electrical spot just so I could get to basic training.I entered basic training 8 days before my 28th birthday and again, had no problems.I got assigned to work aircraft avionics and went to tech school.Electronic principles was tremendous fun; I got to take over teaching a block and taught principles of electromagnetism by modeling a tattoo machine (having built quite a few of them from scratch it was easy to throw together).I got assigned to work C130 aircraft and went to my follow on training. I graduated, got orders and joined my unit as permanent party.Six months later I was tapped to deploy to Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan and I ran through all my pre deployment requirements, including vaccines.It is important to clarify some things here before I continue.I am NOT anti vaccine.Herd immunity is IMPORTANT and there is a lot of really good research to support the safety profiles for individual vaccines. BUT like anything in life there are risk factors and especially with certain vaccines there are contraindications that must be accounted for.My great grandmother was an epidemiologist who worked for Dr. Adams at UCLA (primarily on multiple myeloma) well into the 70s.She drilled it into our heads, so much that it has become family ‘ism' NEVER GET THE SMALLPOX VACCINE.Why?There is a population of people who seem to have a genetic predisposition that increases the risk of adverse reaction to that vaccine (this is per the manufacturer of the vaccine).Genetic research was still fairly new when my great grandmother was researching but the event that took her from living as a housewife and raising two children in Muskogee OK to studying Biology at U of Ohio Kent State was mandatory smallpox inoculation.My great grandmother was half Chahta (Gardner on her Dad's side, mom was an Irish immigrant), my great grandfather was also half Chahta (his mom was a Wilson and Dad was an Irish immigrant) they went to indian school and lived in Muskogee.My great grandmother got married young (14 or so) and had my grandfather and great aunt fairly young as well.When the indian agents came around it was prudent to hide the young children because sometimes they would take them. Somehow my grandfather and great aunt were kept out of sight and they didn't get the mandatory smallpox vaccine.Over the course of the month following the vaccine many of the kids who got it grew sick and suddenly died.This so perplexed and worried my great grandmother that she got her sister to take in my grandfather and great aunt, left her husband and put herself through college. She had a burning desire to figure out exactly why those children got sick and died after having the vaccine.I found some of her old notes when I was a child, they are sadly long since gone, but I remember that she was thinking there was a genetic component long before there was any way to prove it.Fast forward back to 2011 and me getting my immunizations.I am educated, I went out of my way to research ACAM2000 (and it's predecessors just to be thorough), according to the *manufacturer* I shouldn’t have received the vaccine.I have dyshidrotic eczema, which was noted and determined to not be a disqualifying factor when I enlisted, however it is a contraindication for ACAM2000, and despite being light skinned I am sufficiently Native American (I am a registered citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma through my paternal grandfather, but my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandmother are also native, mixed).I self identified to the NCOIC on duty and was told get the vaccine or get an article 15, end of story. It is mandatory for deployment, no exception, and if you can't get it you can't deploy and if you can't deploy the Air Force doesn't want you.I had a lot invested in this, I was supporting my family, with a spotless service record and I *wanted* to deploy, I wanted to do my job!I said fuck it and cast my lot to chance.Of course it didn't help that they nailed me with the smallpox vaccine, hep B, Anthrax, live flu mist and a tetanus shot all in one go.Holy hell.Four weeks later I was still averaging about 103.5 F and despite presenting as *ill* I was cleared to go.I was told, that's normal, everybody gets the “crud". Once you get in country your body will adjust and it will be fine.I got in country but my body didn't adjust and I certainly wasn't fine.I worked the midnight to noon shift so I would come on duty while it wasn't insanely hot, if possible get all the work done before the sun came up and spend the rest of the shift odd jobbing. Because of that I generally wouldn't stop to eat until around 9 or 10 in the AM.I started to have trouble staying awake through the late morning/ early afternoon, which is understandable.With constant rocket attacks, densely populated shared living space and 24-7 activity it was hard to sleep.They gave out ambien like candy there, which led to some really odd encounters with personnel at times. Ambien zombies were a real thing, one of my roomates was well known for wandering outside in her bra and panties.The problem is that it went beyond tired, I was blacking out (without ambien or any other medication) having dizzy spells and episodes of confusion.My supervision wasn't sure how to handle me; my work was top notch, I jobbed my ass off but by the end of the day I was delirious.They decided I wasn't drinking enough water, so my water intake was monitored. It wasn't dehydration or overhydration, I was doing well with water.So they decided it was heat susceptibility so they confined me to our morale tent (it had an ac unit) during peak heat but it didn't seem to make a difference.It continued to be a mystery (and a bone of contention) until I was eating an apple cinnamon muffin and passed out *in front of our flight surgeon * who immediately began treating me for anaphylactic shock.I almost died, on top of a picnic table in Afghanistan, because of a muffin.Holy crap, what an ignoble way to go!All the times I “blacked out" or “fell asleep” I was unconscious, in shock, but because no one knew what they were looking at (and I sure as hell didn't know what was going on) they just shrugged and made sure I was cool and my feet were elevated.Our flight surgeon was *pissed* at me, he didn't believe me when I explained to him that I had never been allergic to anything in my life, not even wasp venom (I got stung like 22 times when I was 7, it hurt but a baking soda bath took the swelling down and I was fine afterwards. Later on my aunt reminded me that I had a bad reaction to an antibiotic when I was a baby but that was it, I was always a healthy kid).He then combed my medical records and made some phone calls. He decided I was telling the truth and immediately put me on an elimination diet and started the process to get me sent home early as a medevac.By this point I had already been in country 4 1/2 months out of a six month deployment.We found out that I was reacting to nearly everything I ate. I could tolerate small amounts of rice and fresh or cooked pureed fruits (applesauce), soy milk and peanut butter. Anything dried, preserved with benzoate salts or acids, food coloring, any kind of animal product at all, wheat or similar (probably cross contaminated grain) was guaranteed 100% to knock me out. I was also reacting to cleaning agents, degreasers, fragrances, soaps, lotions, hand sanitizer, engine oil, gasoline, JP8, etc. It was hellacious.I lost a lot of weight even before the elimination diet because everything was making me sick. I lost more weight afterwards because it was a challenge to source an adequate amount of food.I was ecstatic to at least know, vaguely what was happening to me.Sometime around the beginning of month five I developed a subcutaneous growth in my low back. It increased rapidly from the size of a pea to about a silver dollar over 3 days.Our flight surgeon was concerned, with all the other weird medical crap going on he thought there was a good chance it was malignant and wanted to take it out ASAP. So he informed my supervision that he was performing surgery that afternoon.The role 3 was booked solid with trauma patients so we drove over to the role 1 clinic, which is where you go for general stuff like head colds and vaccinations. He commandeered an exam room and found a nurse with surgical experience.I have to say, tumor excision under local was a particularly bizarre, hilarious and painful experience.Especially memorable, “nurse, you have tiny fingers, stick one in there and hold this”, oh man, she did have tiny fingers but boy they felt like ten inch wide flaming hot pokers in that moment.He stitched me up, gave me some truly excellent painkillers and told me that I was to report to work because he wanted me under supervision in case there were complications (I was the only female on my deployment so there was no one that could keep an eye on me back at my MOD/living quarters, my roomates were all in an entirely different squadron).He told me that I was *not* cleared for duty and I was to tell anyone who gave me crap that I was too high to work and to fuck off.In retrospect I am sure he was joking to make a point but lo and behold that is exactly what I did the next morning.Somehow the news that I had surgery didn't get passed on and when my production supervisor, who was a senior master sergeant, told me to rally up and get on the truck I told him to fuck off, that I was too high to work.Oh man.The shit storm that caused, but I was actually really high on painkillers (I'm a lightweight) so while he was screaming in my face I suddenly found everything hilarious and couldn't stop laughing.Mind you I was the low guy on the totem pole on this deployment, the only A1C and the FNG.A tech sergeant I worked with regularly had to intervene and get our lieutenant, who did know about the surgery, to save my bacon.I am pretty sure I was seconds away from getting my ass dragged out onto the flight line, literally.I spent the next two weeks being monitored in recovery and by the time my medevac got approved I was able to hop one of our planes on early rotation home a week early so after discussing the situation with his colleague at Ramstein Air Base, our flight surgeon decided it would be better to just send me home the regular route.He was of the opinion that the turn around to get me in to see an allergist would be better at home station.Boy was he wrong.The first thing I did during medical for redeploy was ask for a referral to allergy and to have my stitches out. My doctor on base *did not believe me when I told him I had surgery *.I pulled up my shirt and showed him my healing incision and stitches. He refused to touch the stitches until he figured out “what I had done myself".I ended up getting a co worker to pull the stitches and made follow up appointment. I don't know why but it took four months, several incidents where I passed out on aircraft while working (the last of which I almost took a swan dive off a B5 stand) and my squadron commander calling the medical group commander to get me a referral to an allergist.The allergist was strangely excited despite the fact that the only allergy my blood work came back positive for was dust mite (high but not dangerous) and I reacted to the entire skin prick panel with delayed onset of anaphylaxis.He told me “I think I know what this is! I have seen this before, it is a rare disease called mastocytosis, so I am referring you to hematology/ oncology.”My oncologist was less excited, “I have never seen a case of mastocytosis with such severe presentation of spontaneous anaphylaxis. Unfortunately, I think you may have mast cell leukemia.”My spleen was huge, I was crazy symptomatic (at this point I was reacting to soy, peanuts and most fruits in addition to all the other previously eliminated stuff. I was literally living on rice and beans), I had hives and wheals, rashes, flushing, purple fingers and toes, nausea, pretty constant vomiting and GI upset……I was really ill.So we did a left iliac crest bone marrow biopsy……on my 30th birthday.We waited with baited breath for my lab results to come back……normal.WTF!?Don't get me wrong, I was insanely happy to find out that I didn't have an acute, fatal cancer.But the strange thing is according to the PCR analysis I didn't have mastocytosis either.Getting good news didn't make me any less sick, so what the hell was going on? My oncologist was confused, so he sent me out for further biopsy and ran every test he could think of.The results were inconclusive; I had slightly higher population density of mast cells, but not enough to be clinically significant on their own.My serum tryptase (generally used as a biomarker for mast cell activity because it is one of the few mast cell metabolites that is somewhat stable enough to test easily) was barely detectable but my urine methylhistamine levels were consistently elevated way above normal.My oncologist was at a loss and considering sending me to rheumatology simply because he didn't know what to do with me.I admit it, I flipped out. I yelled, I got nasty, I threw papers, kicked a chair across the room, accused him of giving up on me and punting me to someone else.I walked out of that appointment thinking he was going to call security and I was going to be labeled as a psycho patient.Instead he called me and apologized, he said I was right. I begged him to give me a week to put together some research and if he thought it was implausible then I would let it go and we would part ways amicably.He agreed and I got cracking.Early on when I was dealing with the allergist I had been pulled off of flight line duty and given a desk job as a Unit Deployment Manager.I had institutional access to Elsevier and the first thing I did was read biomedical journals. Allergy/immunology, hematology/ oncology, molecular biology, translational research, cell biology, biochemistry, so on so forth.I already had a few ideas to fall back on once the labs came up unremarkable. I had been looking at the research of Dr. Molderings at the University of Bonn, Germany and ran into some papers that he co authored with Dr. Afrin about Mast Cell Activation Disorder that covered the weird grey zone I seemed to be occupying.I literally wrote a summarized, annotated report for my doctor, contacted Dr. Afrin (who is by far one of the kindest people I have ever had the privilege of interacting with) who offered his contact information and said he was more than happy to chat with my doctor.My oncologist looked over the report I gave him and was intrigued by the literature. He contacted Dr. Afrin and they worked out a game plan.They trialed me on hydroxyurea, an RNA inhibitor, and fantastically my spontaneous anaphylaxis stopped.I was on hydroxyurea for two weeks before I was started on Gleevec which is a targeted tyrosine kinase inhibitor.With the Gleevec I was still doing well, no anaphylaxis, for over six months but for whatever reason (there are a couple of theories) my symptoms began to escalate again.Fearing the worst, a total relapse, I began researching imatinib (Gleevec) method of action and I remembered a few curious case reports from earlier in my research.One was a case report of a Chinese man with vitiligo who was diagnosed with a gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) and treated with imatinib. During his treatment his vitiligo reversed as a side effect of the imatinib. Melanocytes are the cells that produce melanin in the skin and are affected by the presence or lack of mast cell stem cell growth factor signaling (c-KIT).A paper discussing identified c-KIT mutations in several cases of piebaldism and the possibility of those mutation being representative of a "dominant negative" expression as opposed to a recessive loss of function helped to elucidate the seemingly paradoxical response of the Chinese GIST patient with vitiligoThe other case report was a patient who had been treated with sunitinib (Sutent) and experienced a pattern of follicular depigmentation that mimicked a distinctive pattern of piebaldism (right side white forelock and eyebrow pigmentation seen with KIT mutation F584L) as opposed to the more commonly seen global depigmentation.I also found a lovely paper that predicted the effectiveness of sunitinib and imatinib for certain individual mutational conformations of c-KIT by comparing the structure of the receptor before and after exposure to the drug to wild type c-KIT with calculated degrees of deviation.I wasn't sure why the imatinib was losing efficacy but as I said before, I had some theories.I didn't have an identified c-KIT mutation but I had a clear picture of what mutations I didn't have through a combination of PCR analysis, 23andme testing (which I coincidentally joined as part of a study on malignant neoplasms) and simple process of elimination (some c-KIT mutations are fatal, carry lifetime health consequences and/or have obvious physical symptoms and there are several places where a mutation would not confer a clinical expression of disease).What happened next is a little fuzzy.Disclaimer, I was on a *LOT* of liquid diphenhydramine, which, as some of you know is an anticholinergic and can have some interesting effects on perception and memory.It was the only "antihistamine" that I didn't react conversely to with anaphylaxis or in the case of the leukotriene antagonist Singulair, third spacing directly into my lungs resulting in sterile pneumonia (the radiology tech said it literally looked like I had suffered a drowning).With the imatinib doing less and less, I was having to take more and more diphenhydramine to control my symptoms (I got it from the pharmacy in a gallon jug and went through it like water).I'm sure most of you are familiar with the phenomenon of "drunk brain" or the technical term "alcohol-induced fragmentary blackout".While on diphenhydramine (at work) I was busy bending my mind to trying to find a reasonable explanation for why the imatinib was no longer working, invent a fall back therapy for when it inevitably failed and still you know......do my job which involved a crap ton of coordination and paperwork.My life was being lived via sticky note because once the diphenhydramine wore off *I couldn't remember what I was doing earlier in the day*, and vice versa.It was maddening.I was spending a good part of my day leaving notes for myself, trying to communicate across the divide.All while running a Bayesian Statistical analysis on my genetic data.......omg.My coworkers occasionally expressed concern but chalked it up to my weird coping mechanisms and my leadership decided that as long as I was still performing well at work they would ignore the mad science vibe my desk gave off (I had notes and printouts taped *everywhere*, I had de-evolved into color coding and time stamping, it was insane).It made sense for sunitinib to be a second line therapy in the case of imatinib failure, just like in GIST (which is generally driven by c-KIT mutations) but it wasn't developed to treat my particular flavor of mast cell whatever the fuck and I had to work hard to make sure it was a logical choice.I had to justify the use of the drug and predict the possible efficacy before I could give myself permission to even think about pitching it to my oncologist.It was a matter of trust and pride (possibly a little bit of overzealous behavior shining through) but I thought to myself, yes! For science!So things continued to deteriorate until I slid into a multi-day series of reactions that eventually culminated in anaphylaxis.The worst had happened, I had relapsed.I found myself sitting in a tiny closet of an exam room at an unfamiliar clinic, as my oncologist had managed to squeeze some time out of his day doing rounds at the hospital to see me."Not good, not good" he clucked and hissed at my chart and looked at me."What do you want to do?"I nodded tiredly and handed him my research.“It's not perfect but I think I have narrowed down the possible locus of any potential KIT mutation, I don't think it is a single SNP. I think there are a number of intronic alterations that are affecting the function of the ATP binding pocket. The effect may be inversely analogous to the known pathogenic mutant F584L and based on the probable location it should be a good candidate for sunitinib."He looked over my research and tapped the pages thoughtfully."Sutent is a nasty, nasty drug, it's broadly effective. I try to not prescribe it because the side effects are very bad."I nodded in agreement. "Yes, but in a dose dependent manner. By my calculations I could potentially have a positive response to a little as 6mg daily."He flipped back though my notes. "The smallest it comes in is 12.5mg."He paused and we looked at each other for a few minutes.He then told me a story, I will do my best to give it justice here but I can only tell it they way I remember it."I had a colleague, who was a very good friend early on in my practice. His wife was diagnosed with a cancer and I became her physician. We didn't think it would be too difficult to treat, it wasn't a particularly fast moving or aggressive cancer but for some reason she was not responding well to the usual treatments. It became apparent to me that we needed to try something different and so I wanted to trial a fairly new drug that looked promising. Her insurance wouldn't authorize this new drug because they said it was too dangerous, they rationalized that the type of cancer she had usually had a good prognosis and didn't merit the risk of the, in their opinion, more dangerous drug."He took a deep breath."She died. I don't know if the drug would have saved her or not, I didn't get the chance to find out and I know I did the best I could, but just the same....what if.""So look. We are going to try this. You have a good idea here and if you can't tolerate the Sutent we take you off it, simple. I am bringing patient advocacy in and we are going to fight for this."I left his office feeling sad and hopeful, proud and humble, afraid but optimistic, resigned but ready to fight!Two days later, to my complete and total surprise, I received a package via courier delivery from a specialty pharmacy.It contained three months worth of 12.5 mg Sutent.I immediately called my oncologist and told him I had the drug in hand, no questions asked, my insurance came through miraculously. We both laughed a bit about the randomness of the universe and he had me start the drug immediately.It worked as I predicted. I was able to recover all the foods I had been previously reacting to with anaphylaxis as well as get completely off diphenhydramine.Sunitinib isn't without side effects, but they are manageable (for me at least) and it opened up a new line of therapy for people struggling with Mast Cell Activation Disorder who were previously out of options (and possibly mastocytosis as it seems to be cytoreductive without an upswing in tumor necrosis factor).I have been on it since April of 2014 and have had zero episodes of anaphylaxis, which is a tremendous improvement!Other symptoms have been up and down; I had to have two back to back Achilles tendon reconstructions to fix a total rupture with 7cm of separation. It seems that any immune insult is like turning back the clock, symptoms flare up dramatically and it can take months for things to calm down.Unfortunately I did have some very bad asthma attacks and episodes of bronchospasm earlier this year but the good news is that I have been tolerating Xolair (in addition to the Sutent) well for about three months now and it has significantly improved my daily life.I'm under no delusions, I am not holding out for a cure or a fix but it is tremendous to be able to leave the house occasionally.My goals and aspirations have shifted in accordance with my physical condition.It's been a hell of a learning curve and there are days where I struggle more than others (today is one of those days where I am essentially stuck in bed wrapped in cold packs) but on the grand scale of things it could be so much worse.I'm still above ground despite it all, and at least there is potential in being alive even if it isn't always nice to experience.As far my drug addled brain's adventure in Bayesian probability, I had a colleague tell me "genetics don't work that way" which is fine, I'm not a geneticist and I have no interest in becoming one so I will simply defer to his judgement.*but*This is a picture of me while I was deployed. You can see by the tremendous amount of regrowth that I am a natural blond (I prefer to dye my hair red, apologies for the slightly out of focus picture, it was taken with a crappy cell phone).This is a picture of me while on Gleevec; I had to cut my hair short because I was losing it (side effect of the drug) and my hair turned a really dark brown.This is a more recent picture from about four months ago.I'm back to dying it red (I use henna) but as you can see I have the right side white forelock now because of the sunitinib (As I predicted would happen, LMAO. I don't dye the white because it turns a ridiculous brassy yellow color and why not keep it white? I earned it!).My eyebrows are also striped with white but I find that people get weird if they can't clearly see my eyebrows (as I often wear a mask in public) so I dye them for the sake of nonverbal communication.So was I right, or was it Serendipity….does it even matter?Eh, sometimes I contemplate trying to recreate the calculations that my coworkers say I chucked through the shredder (I don't have any memory of this, they said I came in one day, took down all my notes and destroyed them)….but then I think about how crazy that couple of months was and I realize I don't really want to take the trip down that particular rabbit hole again.::shudder::Anyway, just for fun this is the fortune cookie message from the first “real" meal I had in three years, when I started sunitinib.#TRUTH

The US. Easily. Now, to be clear, I love the concept of Wakanda but militarily its completely trumped. Long story short, the US has a military built for real warfare, and Wakanda has a military built for a movie. It’s just not a fair comparison but in any case let’s go to the “whys”. So, so many whys:Overrated Technology:The basic premise of Wakanda is that they look like a third-world country but are actually so advanced they actually make the US look like a third-world country.However, the MCU hasn’t exactly translated this super-well to the big screen. There are only about 3 technologies that really stand out to me that the MCU Wakanda has, all of which are ultimately overrated.Their energy shields.Their aircraftThe Black Panther suit.Firstly, the shields. The city itself has a shield and this technology is shown to be downsized with infantry shields. The shields would be a great asset infantry, but unfortunately they’re actually not.In military science there is a progressive level of protection from the enemy. The first and best defense is if the enemy doesn’t expect and even know of you’re presence.In short, if you don’t want to get killed, remain undetected. If they’re aware of your presence, at least don’t be seen. If you’re seen, at least don’t get hit. If you’re hit, at least don’t get penetrated. If you’re penetrated, at least don’t get killed.What armor and shields try to do (stop penetration) is step 4 of a 5-step process. The Wakandan shield is built for a scenario which you have already been detected, seen, and hit. I don’t care if that shield is completely impenetrable: if there’s a scenario in which those three things are happening, something has gone wrong.Getting hit and surviving is great, but situational awareness is far better than any amount of armor: see first, shoot first, hit first, penetrate first, and kill first is the ideal combat scenario, not get hit, don’t get penetrated, then fire back.Also worth considering is that modern infantry almost never use bulletproof shields in combat, and when they do it’s in very specialized roles such as the point of a building-clearing team. Even still, they’re not used to the awkwardness and bulk of a shield in modern combat, as well as the fact that it leaves only one hand for your weapon, requiring you to use either an inferior one-handed weapon (i.e pistol instead of assault rifle) or use only one hand for a weapon that’s better handled with two.While the energy shields are doubtlessly lighter than SWAT-style entry shields used by modern police and militaries, the basic threat management flaw still holds: not only are advanced shields meant for a scenario in which you’ve been detected, seen, and hit before you could do it to the enemy: the shields actually make being detected, seen, and hit more likely by virtue of lighting up in a whitish-blue light.This is like anti-camouflage.A far better approach would be to work on making soldiers invisible or having some sort of active, hologram based camouflage technology, something which Wakanda clearly has the tech for given their whole city is hidden by a hologram. If they can downsize the energy shield for personal use, why not invisibility. I’d be far more terrified fighting an army of invisible soldiers than ones with shields.Secondly, we have their aircraft, which fire lasers. All I can say is “Oh boy, another sci-fi aircraft that seems super-advanced but depends completely on Within Visual Range weaponry”. Even if we assume their shields make them invincible they don’t seem to have too many of them, given we only see a handful in the background in Infinity War and how they only seem to have one “airport” and a small one at that.In short, there will be no Independence Day style aerial massacres. Best case scenario is turns out they’re immune to our air-to-air missiles and our jets are far away enough to retreat safely to base (seeing as we can engage them from dozens of miles away with missiles but they can’t). Worst case we get cocky and lose a few dozen aircraft in close-range dogfights before adjusting our tactics and mission loadouts i.e we’d focus more on missiles than bombs, or use cheaper aircraft and drones piloted by AI we’re not afraid to lose.Lastly, we have the BP suit. The BP suit is an infantryman’s dream, making the wearer almost invincible. Unfortunately, it’s main weapons are claws and I don’t think it can be mass-produced. I don’t think there’d be more than enough for a platoon of soldiers. That’s certainly enough to cause trouble on the ground for maybe a few hundred or a few thousand US soldiers, or strike at a key unit or facility, but ultimately any special forces equipped with the BP suit are going to be a force multiplier, not a force (i.e. they can’t win the war on their own, just make it easier for others) and as we’ll explore, they don’t have much of that either.Organization:Here’s what a modern infnatry division looks like.Google Image Result for http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/24th_US_Infantry_Division_1989.pngWe also have an experienced and large corps of NCOs and other kinds of officers to streamline command and control, or take intiative on their own.Wakandan organization, on the other hand, is basically just a medieval levy system where each tribe contributes some troops to supplement the king and his bodyguards. It’s literally a centuries-outdated method of raising an army, and there’s a reason why professional armies have replaced them: they’re unstandardized.Levies aren’t just simply your vassal giving you a few hundred guys to do whatever you want with. You’re basically building your army from a bunch of other armies, leaving you with a mixed force where weapons, training, unit size, tactics and doctrine can vary wildly.This can be seen in the Jabari Tribe, who brought sticks to the battle for the universe. While their dedication to low-tech tradition is an understandable trademark of their particular culture (I have no problem with off-grid living in and of itself), it seems that no one bothered thinking that maybe the trillions of sentient lifeforms at stake merited a break from their cultural norms. If this kind of nonsense is allowed when the universe is at stake, it seems clear that in no circumstances will Wakanda ever force its soldiers to equip, train, or fight a certain way.Lack of layered defenses:Wakanda has very little strategic depth. It’s just one city with one contingent of soldiers. There are no strategic-level fallback positions and no reserve if they fail. It’s greatest asset is the energy shield, but once you get through that they’re basically screwed since it’s their best and pretty much only line of defense.Total lack of CRBN defenses:The Black Panther suit probably comes with a filtration system and the shield may be able to protect Wakanda from disease, poison, and radiation, but what about the soldiers themselves?Once you get past that shield a single chemical or biological warhead could wipe their entire army out. I’m sure they have some magic cure-all antidote, but having thousands of dying troops that are revived easily is not as good as having them all be fine because they had gas masks.Meanwhile, modern soldiers have been trained and equipped to deal with chemical weapons since the First World War.Lack of WMDs:I’m pretty sure Shuri could create a Vibranium Nuke that’d make Tsar Bomba look like a firecracker, and of course the comics version of Wakanda has things that make nukes look like conventional weapons, but ultimately any idea that MCU Wakanda has WMDs is speculation.In fact, I’d almost say we can guarantee they don’t have them. The stakes in Infinity War were so high that it means that everyone is not holding back. If there was a time to reveal or use a skill/ability/weapon/whatever, IW would be the event to use it for.Seeing as a battle for the fate of the universe would more than justify a nuke or chemical weapon, we can safely say MCU Wakanda does not have them. The country is isolated so it’s not like collateral damage would be a problem.This lack of WMDs means not only does Wakanda have limited ability to wage war on a strategic scale, but also that the US is completely undeterred in using their nukes, chemicals, and pathogens.No logistical or medical support:Wakanda has great medical care, but the military apparently has no medics to administer treatments on the field, and the hovercraft that carried troops to the battlefield wasnt seem carrying any wounded back.Also, soldiers carry extra of everything. Extra weapons, extra parts, food, ammo, a sidearm entrneching tools, bandages. EVERYTHING.As far as I’mconcerned each Wakandan soldier only carries one spear and one shield. If either fails to operate 100% as expected you’re screwed.No body armor or helmets:I’ve already explained why shields are a bad idea in the overrated technology section, but that being said if you’re trying to not be penetrated, you might as well have armor if you’re also going to have a shield. It makes sense to wear armor but no shield (i.e. to free both hands) but not the other way around.Wakanda by all rights should be able to outfit everyone with at least some sort of full-body suit of some kind. Maybe the Black Panther suit can’t be mass-produced, but at a bare minimum every Wakandan soldier should have something like the Mark I Iron Man Suit.In fact, it doesn’t even have to be power armor. A modern-style vest but with Vibranium instead of Kevlar and ceramic would be more than acceptable. Or how about medieval plate armor or the kind of scale patterns used by Roman Legionaries or samurai? Some sort of modernized chain-mail would be far more practical (and cooler) than what we saw.This isn’t even a tactical concern: it’s a missed opportunity from a thematic and storytelling standpoint. Given how Black Panther is inspired by African culture, are you going to tell me that there isn’t a single noteworthy armor pattern of African origin? In fact, this has already been answered: Did ancient Africans wear armor if so pictures?The costume department could have had a killer day crafting some badass Vibranium armor designs that would pay homage to Africa’s military history, and yet we just get somewhat generic tribal garb that as far as I can tell doesn’t incorporate the material that Wakanda A. has a lot of and B. can refine and use pretty much any way they want. The failure to use any kind of body armor (or indeed, any kind of uniform for that matter) is a failure of fashion, worldbuilding, tactics, resource management, and common sense on all levels.If nothing else, go grab a bowl from your kitchen and duct tape it to your head. Everyone from athletes to soldiers and cops know the value of head protection. It contains 4 of your 5 sensory organs and your brain, the absolute most vital organ. If for some reason you must wear no armor (stealth, flexibility, weight, mobility, etc) at least wear a helmet.If nothing else Captain America of all people would know the value of having helmet on during combat. You know, from fighting WWII and being a supposed tactical genius, he probably saw a lot of this happen:Extremely Low Manpower:Wakanda, in its most desperate hour, with the entire fate of all life in the universe at stake, can barely muster a few thousand combat troops. High school reunions have mobilized more people.On the other hand, the US maintains a military of around 2,000,000 with only volunteers. If it ever came to it, conscription could push this number an entire order of magnitude higher, considering the US military had over 10,000,000 soldiers by the end of WWII with a total population of about half what we have today.Even if they inflict a 1,000:1 casualty ratio the US if nothing else will destroy them through sheer attrition.Little Heavy Ordnance and Almost No Weapon Variety:The Wakandans have energy spears than can supposedly take out a main battle tank. Even if this is true, so? Even the first anti-rank rockets had ranges several times that of a thrown spear (let alone modern anti-tank missiles with ranges of several miles) but this is barely scratching the surface. Where’s their mortars? Artillery guns? Rockets, missiles, close air support aircraft and strategic bombers? The heavy machineguns? The armored personnel carriers, the tanks? Their drones and smart bombs? Cruise missiles? Gatling guns?It doesn’t matter how powerful your small arms are. Even if they can take out a tank (something we never see), a military still needs a wide variety of capabilities to cope with all kinds of battlefield needs and situations. Even something as simple as “a gun” can still have plenty of variety: shotguns, pistols, submachine guns and carbines for tight CQC, sniper rifles for long range shots, assault rifles for general usage, machineguns for laying down suppressive fire, and so on.Even if we were to assume that the Wakandan spear was the ultimate ground combat weapon (it’s actually so bad it gets its own separate bolded point below), let me just ask one question: if Wakandan infantry weapons can take out a tank, what about a jet aircraft miles above you traveling several times the speed of sound? Can they shoot down a missile? Certainly those laser bolts, however powerful, have no guidance capabilities, not that the soldiers would be able to see let alone aim at a target so fast and far away with their bare eyes anyway. They also seem to fly pretty straight: what if a target is over the horizon or not in direct line of sight? All these concerns can be addressed by surface-to-air missiles and artillery respectively, nothing we see the Wakandans have. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a weapon in order to be necessary on the battlefield. Sometimes you need to use smoke to conceal your movements, mark targets or medivac locations, or confuse the enemy. This is where smoke grenades and smoke rounds come in.The Wakandan army is nothing more than a few thousand infantry with no protection except for a location-signaling shield and armed with a single type of a firearm, transported to the battlefield by unarmed, open-top hovercraft that leave everyone exposed. That’s just atrocious, with the rest of their inventory consisting of a small number of jet aircraft restricted to line-of-sight targeting (a limitation which was lifted in the 60s; while plenty of close-range dogfights have happened since then, this is no longer technologically required) and a small number of supersuits so that their head of state can run around the battlefield and claw enemies to death instead of…you know, shooting them at a safe distance, and maybe having someone else do it while they’re at it.Infantry are the backbone of the military but not the punching arm. Most casualties in warfare are inflicted by artillery and airstrikes, and having only footsoldiers essentially limits the Wakandans to small arms, and as we’ve seen only one small arm at that. Needless to say this puts their overall flexibility and firepower at several orders of magnitude below a real-life military. Even guerillas or third-world militaries at least have some kind of light artillery.Viet Cong with 81mm mortar. It’s also worth noting that the Battle of Khe Sanh, one of the most infamous battles of the Vietnam War, involved a months-long artillery duel between American artillery and aircraft vs. the NVA and Viet-Cong mortars and howitzers.Atrocious Small Arm (singular because of no weapon variety):TL;DR you can turn a gun into a spear, but not the other way around.See this?This is a socket bayonet, the invention that spelled the end of melee weapons as a primary tool in battle. Before the socket bayonet, soldiers with firearms either had to rely on melee infantry for protection or affix “plug bayonets” whose base went into the barrel, preventing them from firing.Melee combat would of course persist for centuries, but with every gunman now a spearman pure spearmen were outdated. Despite being originally a gun, the basic principle of “long shaft with pointy end” still applied, and thus guns were now just as effective as the spears of old were with nothing more than a simple attachment.See this?This is a Wakandan energy spear. It fires energy bolts that, so we are told, can take out a tank. However, there are no sights on that spear, making the aiming difficult. There is no butt or padding to make the spear easy to mount against your shoulder, hindering accuracy. The spear itself shoots bolts of energy that seem slow compared to bullets, light up the battlefield making them easily traceable to your location (as if your blue flashlight shields weren’t enough), and don’t fire as fast as a regular assault rifle even under the assumption they have infinite ammunition, which limits their ability to suppress the enemy with continuous fire like a machinegun can. There is no strap or sling to make it easier to carry for long journeys or if you need to free up both your hands (i.e. carrying something around your base), and the length of the spear itself compromises the user in some situations like urban combat where space is tight. There don’t seem to be any rails or any spaces for attachments, meaning that thermal sights, scopes, night vision lenses, etc or even just a simple flashlight are impossible to utilize. Presumably Wakanda knows the secrets of duct tape, but that is no excuse for lacking what is a standard feature on the vast majority of modern firearms from all us “less advanced” real-life people.Little (that is to say no) Support Equipment:This is what your average modern soldier looks like:This is what a couple average Wakandan soldiers look like:Wakanda is the world’s most technologically advanced civilization, but they make very poor utilization of that technology. Sure, their warriors have energy spears that aren’t as good as a JAVELIN anti-tank missile (or even just a regular M-16) and shields that reveal their location, but none of this compares to the utter travesty of what’s not there.I could honestly go on and on and on and on and on about the literally dozens of items the no Wakandan soldier has that pretty much every American one does, going in length about how they don’t have everything from proper camouflage uniforms (a basic concept universally implemented since the early 1900s) to first aid kids, or even just shovels (which have been standard kit for soldiers since the ancient Romans) , but I’m just going to focus on just one thing, one word.Radio.Every modern soldier should have a radio. No excuses. I don’t care if it’s a child’s walkie-talkie that has only 2 channels and a distance of only a few miles. I do not care if it’s a literal toy radio. Coordination is key in military operations, and the base of this is good communication. In modern times, every soldier who can’t transmit and receive information at literal lightspeed is at a significant, even crippling disadvantage.Granted, Black Panther apparently has some sort of earpiece comms system with fellow superheroes and Shuri, and yes, I suppose the Wakandan army was small enough and packed close enough that one person could be heard clearly by all of them, but two wrongs don’t make a right.“My army is small enough for me to talk to every soldier at once!” is not any sort of excuse the most technologically advanced country should have for not having every single soldier equipped with radios.It’s honestly embarrassing that a nation of Wakanda’s advancement is reduced to yelling verbal commands to the entire army at once like they’re Romans or something.Oh, and even the Romans have them beat, because at least the Romans would have things like horns that can carry an auditory signal farther and more clearly than a single unamplified human voice that’s just going to get lost in the chaos, not to mention standard-bearers which would allow commanders to readily find and distinguish different units on the battlefield.While the Wakandans are unable to fortify their positions for want of shovels, American soldiers’ biggest concerns will be about whether or not the government will help them with their chronic back pain after deployment from lugging around too many useful things.Horrible Doctrine:Wakanda has survived human history by trying to not be noticed. This in itself it not bad since you can observe and learn from others, but we can figure out how Wakanda wants to wage war by focusing on how they do it.When Killmonger aims to make the whole world burn, his plan is essentially this:Use cadres of “War Dogs” that are apparently in every world government to assassinate key military and political officials.Send out shipments of Wakandan weapons to arm black people to rise up.Granted, one could say that this is just Killmonger’s plan, and one could also make the argument that his ideas have no bearing on what Wakanda “would” do. That being said, the infrastructure for his style of warfare was already in place, implying that Wakandan “military” doctrine is based upon spec-ops and espionage instead of conventional forces.Having assassins ready to kill every head of state at a moment’s notice but not more than a few thousand actual soldiers in your actual army seems like a strategic choice and not a limitation. If you can destabilize the globe on a whim, you can field a military larger than your average high school. That just makes sense.This emphasis on special operations is confirmed in the movie’s opening scene wherein a Wakandan hovercraft infiltrates an American neighborhood as well as the Black Panther himself, a highly-capable soldier who takes part in at least two special ops missions in the film (ambushing the convoy and trying to get the guy who stole vibranium).Having expertise in espionage and SF is nice, but they’re the icing on the cake. If 10,000 soldiers attack a village and a covert team manages to assassinate the defending commander in the midst of battle, then victory is more likely. If a SF team just assassinates a commander with no concurrent operations or follow-up, they just ensure someone else gets a promotion.Seal Team Six took out Bin Laden in a historic raid, but the War on Terror also needs Marines and Army soldiers to do the everyday patrols, garrison duties, and humanitarian work.Ideally you should have both, but at the end of the day countries can win with conventional forces without SF, but not the other way around.Little history of combat:As said before Wakanda’s basic survival strategy is to hide from the world. This again is not automatically bad, given that you can observe and study the wars and conflict in other countries.That being said, there is no replacement for the real thing. Outside of minor infighting and a few skirmishes, it seems Wakanda has pretty much never faced a single major war against an outside power in its entire history. It’s people, leaders, weapons, and ideas on waging war have never been tested on a large scale. Even the battle in Infinity War was just a melee involving a few thousand people and lasted about an hour. Objectively speaking, there have been real-life riots larger and more destructive than that “battle”.The US, on the other hand…List of wars involving the United StatesWhile some people may gripe about the win rate of the United States, bringing up Vietnam and the War on Terror, those are terrible arguments. Firstly, the nature of these wars is entirely different. These are guerilla wars fought in vast expanses of rough terrain. Fighting Wakanda is mostly a conventional war over one city. Yes, I know cities are a nightmare to fight over, but as said before attrition favors the US by several orders of magnitude, and there aren’t hundreds of thousands of square miles to worry about.Secondly, they ignore political considerations that make these wars “unwinnable” and thus not really a point against the US’s win record. The United States didn’t pull out of Vietnam because of some horrible military disaster that no amount of technology or manpower could ever fix. We pulled out of Vietnam because of the antiwar movement and because the war could only ever be won by invading North Vietnam, which wouldn’t happen because it could have brought China and USSR into direct conflict with us. In the War on Terror, the US military needs to exercise extreme caution and care due to fear of civilian casualties since terrorists blend into the population. We also have to consider that terrorism is an idea, not a country, and terrorists are transnational networks of extremists who can flee across borders where the US is not legally allowed to strike at them. Wakanda is a country with a fixed location, and this is a conventional war, something which the US has traditionally always succeeded in.One last thing is that regardless of how you think the US is doing in current or past wars, the important thing is that we’ve fought them. We can argue about this or that war, but the fact is that the US has the most experienced military in the world, with everyone from the politicians and generals to privates having seen action. While of course not every soldier gets deployed or every commander get a commission in a combat zone, as an institution the US knows what war is like while the Wakanda doesn’t. Even if you think the US is terrible at wars, at the very least failures are things you can learn from, whereas the Wakandans have no frame of reference whatsoever.Horrible Tactics:Nobody ever claimed the Wakandans had better tactics, only better technology. Unfortunately, without the knowledge and experience to use it properly you’ll fail. Let’s take the performance of their leader during the Battle of Wakanda as an example:You are fighting a defensive operation on a hill. Your forces are equipped with spears that fire lasers, in tight formation behind a wall of energy shields held by the front ranks. The enemy is a far larger force of superstrong monsters, but they have no weapons and are mindlessly charging in a dense, unorganized mob. In addition, a huge energy field surrounding your whole position is killing the monsters as they try to come through, though a few slip inside. As your troops manage to hold them off at a distance you notice a few dozen of the creatures (out of thousands upon thousands) going around your flank, though still on the other side of your energy shield. What do you do?A. Redirect a small portion of your force to match the diversion.B. Redirect a larger portion of your forces to overwhelm and destroy the diversion.C. Carefully but quickly withdraw so your enemy can’t get behind you.D. Reorient your battle line so both threats are on the same side. (i.e. if someone is in front of you and another to your side, turning 45 degrees means you can see both of them in “front”).E. Shut down your shield, break formation, and charge down from the high ground so that your outnumbered human soldiers with ranged weapons can engage the swarm of superstrong monsters in hand-to-hand combat.If you picked E, you are not only the leader of the world’s most technologically advanced nation, but also a colossal moron.I respect Black Panther as a superhero, but as a general, he made literally one of the worst tactical decisions I’ve ever seen made by a military commander, either real life or fictional. Throwing away all of his advantages and playing to all of his enemy’s strengths is…I almost have to call it a work of anti-genius.In fact, he’s so bad of a commander here’s a writing exercise I want everyone to try: if you wrote Black Panther as being secretly on Thanos’ side and actively trying to lose, what more would you do than what he already did? His mission was to protect Vision, and his tactics involved tying up the entirety of his military in a pointless, risky battle in the open field far away, leaving his own family to be almost killed when enemy spec-ops effortlessly infiltrate their position. It really is that bad.With that kind of leadership, all arguments become invalid. Any potential tech advantage the Wakandans have would be immediately squandered by their commander. We all saw it onscreen for ourselves.You asked about the US but you know what could defeat Wakanda?A single artillery battery.No, not even that. A single Soviet rocket truck could conquer all of Wakanda. They’d line up in their Greek-style shield wall and Stalin’s Organ would just play away, destroying all of Wakanda’s 2,000 soldiers with just a few dozen rockets.In fact, you know who could conquer Wakanda? Pretty much any real-life African country.Rocket launchers, or spears? You decide.Fun fact: the world record for a javelin throw is about 105 meters. The JAVELIN anti-tank missile, for contrast, can take out targets at 4,750 meters.