Female Measurement Chart: Fill & Download for Free

That depends on what point in the pregnancy you mean. I can briefly explain it thusly:month 1: you don’t feel anything. you probably are wondering why you are so late on your periodmonth 2: you have a suspicion where that period has gotten off to due to the fact you have some queasinessmonth 3: you know by now you are pregnant. you are throwing up pretty frequently, probably increased urination as well. People around you start to complain you are touchy and easily upset by things.month 4: your belly is obviously growing out. Pants stop fitting. You probably are over the puking, but your mood swings are still with you. If you lay on your stomach, you feel like someone slid a grapefruit under your tummy. You suddenly feel a flutter of movement every now and again deep in parts you didn’t really know you had. That feeling of being possessed has start to really sink in.month 5: you are definitely showing that mother to be belly. Your hair is probably growing longer and thicker and wait what’s this happening in your bra? What’s this tenderness about? Those flutterings are now clearly something kicking you from the inside. It feels quaint and different and you go ‘awe…how sweet’ to yourself when it happens. People feel compelled to feel your tummy, even strangers.month 6: welcome to your new waddle. It will be with you for the next 3 months. Those gentle kicks start to feel like thuds and you go ‘awe dang that’s a good one!’. You find yourself grabbing people’s hands and putting it on your belly going ‘wait, feel this!’. Every outing includes a map and chart of bathroom locations by necessity. The idea of pickle flavored coffee and tuna fish Danish really starts to grow on you. Those little mood swings from month 3 have developed into full grown tantrums. You may find your significant other checking you out to make sure your head didn’t turn 180 degrees.month 7: Oh that back…that back…You find yourself by necessity walking with both hands nestled in your back for support. Waddle becomes a full tilt lurch. You don’t measure your trips in miles any longer but rather distance from one bathroom to the other. Those thuds now turn into your stomach doing wild calisthenics as your baby shifts position and his favorite spot is kicking your bladder. You nickname it Pele regardless of the sex. You can toss out your alarm clock because your baby will wake you up whether it’s time to or not with it’s morning exercise routine. You need more cuddling and reassuring from your S.O. that yes, you are still that hot mama you were 7 months ago. You start to wonder at every pain you have if it’s labor starting and cry out in your head that it’s too soon it’s too soon!month 8: You know the distance between every chair in your house and map out the shortest path from point A to point B. The idea of exchanging your armchair for a toilet to save some steps starts to look real appealing to you. You know it’s a bit early but you tell yourself, well…it’s not really THAT early is it? Those little pains you are having feel more and more like the broadcast of things to come and the thoughts of ‘can I really go through this?’ weigh on your head heavily. You feel like you are holding a small toddler wrapped around your middle everywhere you go and your back screams for attention. Hello Tylenol my old friend…Oh my god where did these big breasts come from? You no longer want people to touch your belly and attempts to do so are generally swatted away irritably. You find yourself staring daggers at the back of the heads of your non pregnant female friends. Everyone that has ever given birth makes a beeline to you to tell you how horrible their labor was and describe in detail the joy that is coming your way.month 9: your baby has started to settle down lower in your belly and you feel like you are smuggling a cannonball between your legs. You make trips to the bathroom where your bladder feels like it’s about to burst, but only a half a teaspoon actually comes out, every few minutes, all day, all night. There isn’t much kicking, but there is shifting about which makes you come to a complete stop if you are walking so that you can wait it out. Your baby drops and your belly shifts into the telltale ‘she’s about to blow?’ silhouette. You are very easily thrown off balance, so be prepared with a plan B of something to grab ahold of quickly if needs be. Oh my god where did these big breasts come from? While you are sitting up at night and your SO sleeps contently beside you, you kick him in the back and tell him you never did like his mother’s pound cake and you can’t believe how unfeeling he is because he forgot the name of your third goldfish when you were 6 years old. You may become familiar with Braxton Hicks which can happen many times or not at all.This is important. If your midwife/OB/GYN didn’t tell you, you MUST start preparing your nipples for what’s to come during breastfeeding. Those little chubby cheeks and baby lips are all cute and all, but when that mouth latches on to your nipples, it IS going to hurt at first. A lot. You have to toughen up your nipples by running a rough washcloth over them rather vigorously for a few minutes at a time for a few weeks. This is so important, you will thank me later.birth stage 1: you know this is it. Braxon Hicks are a distant memory. What starts off feeling like a menstrual cramp gone bonkers starts to turn into a bit more very quickly. Your entire tummy starts to squeeze and hold itself and it feels like someone is pressing really hard with their closed fist at the base of your back. You get that squeeze and hold as everyone around you starts telling you to be sure to breath. The pains come at regular intervals almost to the second. Between the contractions everything is at it was. Real contractions feel like a sine wave ofnothing -> what was that? -> ooh boy -> to what was that -> nothingbirth stage 2: You start to question the parentage of your SO to his face. The loving expression you turn on him he will often refer back to as ‘Regan from the Exorcist’. Your contracts feel like someone has put your tummy in a vice, is yanking your spine out through your butt and shoving a baseball up your vagina at the same time, OR, you don’t feel a thing. That’s pretty much the range of what you will experience for the next few hours or longer. Your SO will start to feel the need to apologize profusely to you, suck it all in you earned it. Hello Mr. Epidural. That should take you to generally feeling no worse than you felt at stage 1. Be honest about your pain tolerance. The staff are trying to help you and your honest answers to how you are tolerating the pain helps everyone.birth stage 3: Everything in your body is pushing. You will make a long drawn out uggghhhhhhhhh sound a lot. Each contraction feels like your body is trying to turn itself inside out from below and you have no control over it any longer. You ARE going to push whether you wish to or not, so be prepared. Your body is now on full blown autopilot. Listen very closely to your labor room staff at this point. They may need you to try NOT to push and that’s truly hard because everything in you will say PUSH. All dignity you may have had is a distant memory. You probably have peed the bed and pooped yourself a few times by now and you won’t give a tinker’s damn about it either. People you do not know will come and go looking up your gown, touching things and putting hands in you. Part of the process, don’t think about it too hard.birth stage 4: You know with every part of you this baby is coming right now. I mean now. Your feel a head in your vagina and it’s stretching parts that are letting you know they don't’ like this much at all. You are now told to push and push hard every time a contraction hits as the staff bends you like a pretzel ass over teakettle to help the push. If there is a mirror, you see your bum stretching as the head starts to crest. This repeats until the head passes out. You get a second to catch your breath then you go back to pretzel position and you give one or two more really good pushes and out comes the baby. You collapse back with exhaustion and as you catch your breath, the loud sounds of a cry bursts forth along with your tears of joy as it’s over. You did it. Someone will do put the baby on your tummy and you now get to see for the first time what all the fuss was about as you look down at your new baby.after birth: this is just a lot of messy business, stitching maybe and clean up. You probably won’t be paying any attention to what’s happening and it’s better you don’t. Just enjoy cuddling the new baby. Hopefully our SO is at your side and not on the floor in a faint still.

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

I know this is more detailed than usual, but I am fascinated in the continued mystery of this artifact. Almost 400 years after it's creation, no one truly knows how to decipher its text and illustrations. What follows is based on my research into the origins, authorship, hypotheses about the code/cipher, and what exactly the cider (cypher?) attempted to discuss. I've included either online links to published works and images or citations and added links to further explain terminology for those interested.For those interested in the details read on. For those who just want to know the generalizations, read the introduction and the last 5 paragraphs.CITATION OF IMAGE : WIKIMEDIA COMMONSSince its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. The script is comprised of roughly 25 to 30 individual characters (interpretations vary) written from left to right in a single, elegant hand. Scattered throughout are illustrations of unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams, doodles of castles and dragons, and a particularly odd section that shows naked women bathing in pools connected by flowing tubes. It looks like the map of an ancient water park, but scholars suggest it might be medical or alchemical in intent.The manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and it may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The earliest information about the existence comes from a letter that was found inside the covers of the manuscript, and it was written in either 1665 or 1666.No one has yet demonstrably deciphered the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of the cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.The first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist from Prague. Baresch was apparently just as puzzled as modern scientists about this " Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. (For the history of ownership of the manuscript please refer to History of the MS and Voynich manuscript - Wikipedia ).A letter written on August 19, 1665 or 1666 was found inside the cover and accompanied the manuscript when Johannes Marcus sent it to Kircher (Zandbergen, René (May 19, 2016)."Voynich MS - 17th Century letters related to the MS". The Voynich Manuscript). It claims that the book once belonged to Emperor Rudolph II, who paid 600 gold ducats (about 2.07 kg of gold) for it. The letter was written in Latin and has been translated to English. The book was then given or lent to Jacobus Horcicky do Tepenecz, the head of Rudolph's botanical gardens in Prague, probably as part of the debt that Rudolph II owed upon his death.He learned that Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher from the Collegio Romano had published a Coptic ( Egyptian) dictionary an claimed that have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs; Baresch twice sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher is the earliest confirmed mention of the manuscript that has been found to date (Schuster, John (April 27, 2009). Haunting Museums. Tom Doherty Associates. pp. 175–272. ISBN 978-1-4299-5919-3).The manuscript then disappeared for 250 years, only to resurface when it was purchased by Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Voynich refused to divulge the manuscript’s previous owner, leading many to believe that he had authored the text himself. But after Voynich’s death, his wife claimed that he had purchased the book from the Jesuit College at Frascati near Rome.In 1903, the Society of Jesus (Collegio Romano) was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly to the Vatican Library. The sale took place in 1912, but not all of the manuscripts listed for sale ended up going to the Vatican. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 of these manuscripts, among them the one which now bears his name.For the next section describing the physical and scientific characteristics of the manuscript, please refer to Voynich manuscript - Wikipedia and Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library).The codicology, or physical characteristics of the manuscript, has been studied by numerous researchers and institutions. The manuscript measures 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), with hundreds of vellum pages collected into 18 quires. The total number of pages is around 240, but the exact number depends on how the manuscript's unusual foldouts are counted.The quires have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations, using numerals consistent with the 1400s, and the top righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, using numerals of a later date. From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems likely that in the past the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what it is today.Radiocarbon dating of samples from various parts of the manuscript was performed at the University of Arizona in 2009 (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.voynich.nu/extra/carbon.html&ved=2ahUKEwjVnfiUoJXeAhVH64MKHQ_-CDMQFjAAegQIBBAB&usg=AOvVaw2ZfVBKgSiZY_BColPi-ACB) results were consistent for all samples tested and indicated a date for the parchment between 1404 and 1438.Protein testing in 2014 (Strong Notes http://PDFApprendre-en-ligne.net) that the parchment was made from calf skin, and multispectral analysis showed that it was unwritten on before the manuscript was created. The parchment was created with care, but deficiencies exist and the quality is assessed as average, at best. The goat skin binding and covers are not original to the book, but date to its possession by the Collegio Romano (Zandbergen, René (May 27, 2016."About the binding of the MS". The Voynich Manuscript).Insect holes are present on the first and last folios of the manuscript in the current order and suggest that a wooden cover was present before the later covers, and discolouring on the edges points to a tanned-leather inside cover.Many pages contain substantial drawings or charts which are colored with paint. Based on modern analysis using polarized light microscopy (PLM), it has been determined that a question pen and iron gall ink were used for the text and figure outlines; the colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. The ink of the drawings, text and page and quire numbers had similar microscopic characteristics. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) performed in 2009 revealed that the inks contained major(http://PDFApprendre-en-ligne.net ›) of iron, sulfur, potassium, calcium and carbon and the amounts of copper and occasionally zinc. EDS did not show the presence of lead, while X-ray diffraction (XRD) identified potassium levels oxide, potassium hydrogen sulphate and syngenite in one of the samples tested. The similarity between the drawing inks and text inks suggested a contemporaneous origin.The blue, clear (or white), red-brown, and green paints of the manuscript have been analyzed using PLM, XRD, EDS, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The blue paint proved to be ground azurite with minor traces of the copper oxide cuprite. The clear paint is likely a mixture of eggwhite and calcium carbonate, while the green paint is tentatively characterized by copper and copper chlorineresinate; the crystalline material might be atacamite or another copper-chlorine compound. Analysis of the red-brown paint indicated a red ochre with the crystal phases hematite and iron sulfide. Minor amounts of lead sulfide and palmierite were possibly present in the red-brown paint. The pigments were considered inexpensive.CITATION OF IMAGE : WIKIMEDIA COMMONSThe first half of the book is filled with drawings of plants; scholars call this the “herbal” section. None of the plants appear to be real, although they are made from the usual stuff (green leaves, roots, and so on; search a word like “botanical” in the British Library’s illuminated-manuscript catalogue and you’ll find several texts that are similar to this part). The next section contains circular diagrams of the kind often found in medieval zodiacal texts; scholars call this part “astrological,” which is generous. Next, the so-called “balneological” section shows “nude ladies,” in Clemens’s words, in pools of liquid, which are connected to one another via a strange system of tubular plumbing that often snakes around whole pages of text. These scenes resemble drawings in the alchemical tradition, which gave rise to a now debunked theory that the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Roger Bacon wrote the book. Then we get what appear to be instructions in the practical use of those plants from the beginning of the book, followed by pages that look roughly like recipes.The drawings of different herbal plants are the most interesting thing that found on Vacation manuscript. Unfortunately, none of the 126 plant illustrations can be definitively identified. However, the plant pictures at least enabled certain conclusions regarding the date of origin, before the radiocarbon dating was performed. Until now no one can match these drawings to any known plant species. It is believed to be Voynich manuscript was written in 15th century. Apart from the herbal section, this mysterious manuscript also contains astronomical, biological, cosmological and pharmaceutical section.Every page in the manuscript contains text, mostly in an unidentified language, but some have extraneous writing in Latin script. The bulk of the text in the 240-page manuscript is written in an unknown script, running left to right. Most of the characters are composed of one or two simple pen strokes. Some dispute exists as to whether certain characters are distinct, but a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.The illustrations are conventionally used to divide most of the manuscript into six different sections, since the text itself cannot be read. Each section is typified by illustrations with different styles and supposed subject matter except for the last section, in which the only drawings are small stars in the margin. The following are the sections and their conventional names (Shailor, Barbara A. "Beinecke MS 408; Beinecke Rare Book And Manuscript Library, General Collection Of Rare Books And Manuscripts, Medieval And Renaissance Manuscripts):Herbal, 112 folios: Each page displays one or two plants and a few paragraphs of text, a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.Astronomical, 21 folios: Contains circular diagrams suggestive of astronomy or astrology, some of them with suns, moons, and stars. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly nude, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached to either arm by what could be a tether or cord of some kind. The last two pages of this section were lost (Aquariusand Capricornus, roughly January and February), while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages. Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting, and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, interpretation remains speculative, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets.Pages from the astrological section of the Voynich manuscript (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)Biological, 20 folios: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small nude women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes. The bifolio consists of folios 78 (verso) and 81 (recto); it forms an integrated design, with water flowing from one folio to the other. The basins and tubes in the "biological" section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy, yet they bear little obvious resemblance to the alchemical equipment of the period.Cosmological, 13 folios: More circular diagrams, but they are of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages, commonly called the Rosettes folio, and contains a map or diagram with nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by “causeways" and containing castles, as well as what might be a volcanoes.Pharmaceutical, 34 folios: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.), objects resembling apothecary jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical, and a few text paragraphs.Recipes, 22 folios: Full pages of text broken into many short paragraphs, each marked with a star in the left margin.The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origin, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts have failed to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporaneous herbals. Only a few of the plant drawings can be identified with reasonable certainty, such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern. The herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of them, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.In 2014, Arthur O. Tucker and Rexford H. Talbert published a paper claiming a positive identification of 37 plants, six animals, and one mineral referenced in the manuscript to plant drawings in the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis or Badianus manuscript, a fifteenth century Aztec herbal.(https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/tucker-and-talbert-and-the-voynich-manuscript/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwj0yOyeoZXeAhUMyoMKHcbYC0AQFjABegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw02Tn96aBEZ7MZzUTgdk5h7&ampcf=1) They argue that the plants were from Colonial New Spain and represented the Nahuatl language, and date the manuscript to between 1521 (the date of the Conquest) and circa 1576, in contradiction of radiocarbon dating evidence of the vellum and many other elements of the manuscript. However, the vellum, while creation of it was dated earlier, could just have been stored and used at a later date for manuscript making. The analysis has been criticized by other Voynich manuscript researchers, pointing out that—among other things—a skilled forger could construct plants that have a passing resemblance to theretofore undiscovered existing plants.Exhaustive scientific and conservational analysis of the parchment on which the manuscript is written, the stitching of the binding in which it is contained, and the inks and paints with which it was written and illuminated have disposed of the notion that the manuscript dates from the thirteenth century or that it is the work of Roger Bacon. Radio carbon dating of slivers from a range of pages has firmly dated the book’s materials to the years around 1430. The vellum pages are made of good-quality (and therefore expensive) calfskin, commonly used in book production all over medieval Europe. (Goatskin vellum, by contrast, would have strengthened the case for a southern German or Italian origin, a provenance favored by many students of the manuscript.)Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them, Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, or Voynich himself. Please refer to The Voynich Manuscript, edited by Raymond Clemens Yale University Press 2016 and to Voynich manuscript - Wikipedia for summations of the proposed authorship of the manuscript.Marci's 1665/1666 (Jackson, David (January 23, 2015). "The Marci letter found inside the VM") cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend the late Raphael Mnishovsky, “the book had once been bought by Rudolf II How Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia for 600 ducats” (66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, or 2.07 kg). (Mnishovsky had died in 1644, more than 20 years earlier, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611, at least 55 years before Marci's letter. However, Karl Widemann sold books to Rudolf II in March 1599.)According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was 13th century Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon. Marci said that he was suspending judgment about this claim, but it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich who did his best to confirm it. Voynich (Here's What You Need to Know About the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript) contemplated the possibility that the author was Albertus Magnus if not Roger Bacon. The assumption that Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that John Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolf. Dee was a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I of Englandwho was known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts.Some suspect Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a lost book by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter and Marci's letter only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one mentioned. These letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript, assuming that he was aware of them. However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the June 1999 discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.It has been suggested that some illustrations in the books оf an Italian engineer, Giovanni Fontana, slightly resemble Voynich illustrations (Has the Enigmatic Voynich Manuscript Code Finally Been Cracked?). Fontana was familiar with cryptography and used it in his books, although he didn't use the Voynich script but a simple substitution cipher. In the book Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum (Secret of the treasure-room of experiments in man's imagination), written c. 1430, Fontana described mnemonic machines, written in his cypher. At least Bellicorum instrumentorum liber and this book used a cryptographic system, described as a simple, rational cipher, based on signs without letters or numbers.Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher (Athanasius Kircher, Victim of Pranks). Mueller sent some unintelligible text to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt, and asking him for a translation. Kircher reportedly solved it. It has been speculated that these were both cryptographic tricks played on Kircher to make him look foolish.Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (c. 1618). This has led to the speculation that Mnishovsky might have produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made Baresch his unwitting test subject (No, the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Is Not Written in Hebrew). Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected some kind of deception.In 2006, Nick Pelling (Pelling, Nicholas John (2006). The Curse of the Voynich: The Secret History of the World's Most Mysterious Manuscript. Compelling Press), proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by 15th century North Italian architect Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), a theory broadly consistent with the radiocarbon dating.The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World Wars I and II. Most assume that the manuscript is written in what’s called a substitution cipher (Substitution cipher - Wikipedia). This is one of the simplest and most ancient types of codes, in which letters of an established alphabet are swapped for invented ones. The problem is that hundreds of years of study have been unable to work out which language the Voynich manuscript was originally written in.According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This was the working hypothesis for most 20th-century deciphering attempts, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. (Reeds, Jim (September 7, 1994). "William F. Friedman's Transcription of the Voynich Manuscript" (PDF). AT&T Bell Laboratories. pp. 1–23). The main argument for this theory is that it is difficult to explain a European author using a strange alphabet—except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, even Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography in Europe as a relatively systematic discipline.The counterargument is that almost all cipher systems consistent with that era fail to match what is seen in the Voynich manuscript. For example, simple substitution ciphers would be excluded because the distribution of letter frequencies does not resemble that of any known language; while the small number of different letter shapes used implies that nomenclator and homophonic ciphers would be ruled out, because these typically employ larger cipher alphabets. Please ciphers (Alberti cipher - Wikipedia) were invented by Alberti in the 1460s and included the later Vigenère cipher, but they usually yield ciphertexts where all cipher shapes occur with roughly equal probability, quite unlike the language-like letter distribution which the Voynich manuscript appears to have.According to the "codebook cipher" theory (Languedoc Mysteries), the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be codes to be looked up in a "dictionary" or codebook. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of many words are similar to those of Roman numerals, which at the time would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers would be viable for only short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.That the encryption system started from a fundamentally simple cipher and then augmented it by adding nulls (meaningless symbols), homophones (duplicate symbols), transposition cipher (letter rearrangement), false word breaks, and more is also entirely possible.Steganography (Steganography - Wikipedia) that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g., the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, is very old and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Though the plain text was speculated to have been extracted by a Cardan grille (an overlay with cut-outs for the meaningful text Cardan grille - Wikipedia) of some sort, this seems somewhat unlikely because the words and letters are not arranged on anything like a regular grid. Still, steganographic claims are hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to find.It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.Linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written in the the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai ( Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the words have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including the patterns. (Lev Grossman, "When Words Fail: The Struggle to Decipher the World's Most Difficult Book", Lingua franca, April 1999).This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors. This difficulty motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Local letters, but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo's 13th-century journey, but especially after Visiting do Gama sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499.The first page includes two large red symbols, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title. (Chinese Sinograms in the Voynich THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT)The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript) (Voynich: the evidence).It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint is two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 days (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar(jie qi, 節氣). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing) has been able to find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.In 1976, James R Child, a linguist of Indo-European languages, proposed that the manuscript was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect" (The Voynich Manuscript Revisited'). He identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content itself is expressed using "a great deal of obscurity".Leo Levitov proposed in his 1987 book, (Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A Liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis), that the manuscript is a handbook for the Cathar rite of Endura written in a Flemish based creole. He further claimed that Catharism was descended from the cult of Isis. However, Levitov's decipherment has been refuted on several grounds, not least of which is its being unhistorical. Levitov had a poor grasp on the history of the Cathars, and his depiction of Endura as an elaborate suicide ritual is at odds with surviving documents describing it as a fast. Likewise there is no known link between Catharism and Isis.In February 2014, Professor Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire made public his research into using "bottom up" methodology to understand the manuscript (Voynich: the evidence). His method involves looking for and translating proper nouns, in association with relevant illustrations, in the context of other languages of the same time period. A paper he posted online offers tentative translation of 14 characters and 10 words. He suggests the text is a treatise on nature written in a natural language, rather than a code.In 2014, a team led by Dr. Diego Amancio of the University of São Paulo's Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences published a paper detailing a study using statistical methods to analyse the relationships of the words in the text (Probing the statistical properties of unknown texts: application to the Voynich Manuscript. Amancio DR, et al. PLoS One. 2013).Instead of trying to find the meaning, Amancio's team used complex network modelling to look for connections and clusters of words. By employing concepts such as frequency and intermittence, which measure occurrence and concentration of a term in the text, Amancio was able to discover the manuscript's keywords and create three-dimensional models of the text's structure and word frequencies. Their conclusion was that in 90% of cases, the Voynich systems are similar to those of other known books such as the Bible, indicating that the book is an actual piece of text in an actual language, and not well-planned gibberish.The unusual features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), and the suspicious contents of its illustrations support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, then perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place. Various hoax theories have been proposed over time.In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay (https://doi.org/10.1080/0161-110491892755).The latter device, known as a Cardan grille (Cardan grille - Wikipedia) was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis (https://doi.org/10.1080/01611190601133539). Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi stochastic method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts.Some scholars have claimed that the manuscript's text appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. In 2013 Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, (Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis), published findings claiming that semantic networks exist in the text of the manuscript, such as content-bearing words occurring in a clustered pattern, or new words being used when there was a shift in topic.With this evidence, he believes it unlikely that these features were intentionally "incorporated" into the text to make a hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich manuscript would have been written.(Alphabet by Hildegard von Bingen, Litterae ignotae, which she used for her language Lingua Ignota)Detail of the "nymphs" on page 141; f78r CITATION OF IMAGE : WIKIMEDIA COMMONSIn their 2004 book, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill suggest the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), channeling, or outsider art. If so, the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which resembles stream of consciousness, either because of voices heard or because of an urge. This often takes place in an invented language in glossolalia, usually made up of fragments of the author's own language, although invented scripts for this purpose are rare.Kennedy and Churchill (The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries 2004) use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the Voynich manuscript and the illustrations that she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the nymphs in the biological section.This theory has been found unlikely by other researchers. The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text. Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery. Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman) or a forgery as preeminent theories. However, he concludes that, if the manuscript is genuine, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.In 2014, expert in applied linguistics Professor Stephen Bax published an article in which he claimed to have translated ten words from the manuscript using techniques similar to those used to successfully translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. He claimed the manuscript to be a treatise on nature, in a Near Eastern or Asian language, but no full translation was made before his death in 2017.Recently, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs (Voynich manuscript: the solution) have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.The mysterious medieval Voynich Manuscript is probably a women's health manual, according to history researcher Nicholas Gibbs.Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image—copied, of course, from another manuscript—of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets.As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media, arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.So where does that leave us with our understanding of the Voynich Manuscript? Exhaustive scientific and conservational analysis of the parchment on which the manuscript is written, the stitching of the binding in which it is contained, and the inks and paints with which it was written and illuminated have disposed of the notion that the manuscript dates from the thirteenth century or that it is the work of Roger Bacon. Radio carbon dating of slivers from a range of pages has firmly dated the book’s materials to the years around 1430. The vellum pages are made of good-quality (and therefore expensive) calfskin, commonly used in book production all over medieval Europe. (Goatskin vellum, by contrast, would have strengthened the case for a southern German or Italian origin, a provenance favored by many students of the manuscript.)Equally, all this effectively rules out any possibility that the manuscript is a post-medieval forgery—it is inconceivable that the huge quantities of blank parchment needed for such a forgery could have survived from the early fifteenth century. The book’s pages, whose consistency suggests that they derived from a single source, would have required at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins. It is therefore overwhelmingly likely that the manuscript was written and illustrated soon after the parchment was prepared, in the first third of the fifteenth century. Its fluent cursive handwriting, without emendation of any kind, seems incompatible with the notion that it might nevertheless be a careful scribal copy of an earlier medieval text. The dating of its materials to the early fifteenth century rules out the suggestion, credited by art historians like Erwin Panofsky, but never very convincing, that the manuscript contains illustrations of plants such as capsicum or the sunflower, unknown before the discovery of the New World.The manuscript was probably composed of 100s of texts, notes, observations and illustrations related to aspects of women's health during the Midieval and Rennassance periods, along with a little alchemical knowledge. In all likelihood, women did not constitute the intended audience, rather it would have been directed towards herbalists, alchemists, philosphers and pharmicists. But from the start, the known evidence suggests that the manuscript was only known by a select group of scholars and royality, experiencing a cyclical pattern of a few years in the spotlight, followed by centuries of relative anonmyity in secret collections and libraries.