All I want for Christmas is a mental health break from cancer

How do you take a "breather" (give yourself a break) when it's mental health? 

A two and a half word answer. You don't. 

Cussing warning, there's F-bombs in this blog post.

As a few people know, my Mom is going through chemo for Christmas. As I type this she is pulling her hair out into huge piles onto the arms of her reading chair. "There's enough for three birds nests. All my life the hairdresser admired how thick my hair is..." She goes on in a creepy way that is VERY not in-line with my memories of her. My Mom is intelligent, examples: she remembers all the names in biology, can still identify many plants when out walking and all the parts of a human from nursing school. And unlike me and my Dad, she can spell. When questioned she can recall more grammar and spelling rules then I ever learned; yet understands creative prose and writer's style being valued over what is technically correct English. And my Mom’s handwriting used to be the neatest cursive I've ever seen.

 … And now? Her handwriting is jagged and scrolling all over the place, she’s crossing out words and grumbling about messing up Christmas cards. "Chemo brain is real." She says to me glancing up in frustration. “I’m not sending a reply Christmas card right now.”... Maybe she will try again later?

What surprises me (should have know better), I'm more upset about her suffering than I expected. Having gone through chemo myself, as we are a BRCA1 family, I was mistaken when I imagined I would handle it and be helpful because I could relate to what she is going through. Instead the actual helplessness of reality, watching it physically drain her, is? ... I'm having to work very hard to not be angry at cancer, and worse the health team administering the chemo. Okay, I yelled once over the phone. I’d never do that in person. Never. I don’t do well with the disconnect of voices over the phone, sorry to whomever wasn’t able to answer our questions. 

No doctor or nurse who is able to answer our questions has done so, they just let her ramble incoherently and checked a box, as if they did something. And we have not yet met this latest oncologist. There is zero survivorship care, palliative or mental health care as an option for my Mom from this care team.

Soooooo...? Mental health huh? Walking, reading, art therapy, writing therapy and playing video games, there's no mental health care professional in this story for me either. I've been attempting to get survivorship mental health care since 2018, actually before that, but that's when I knew I was losing it, and really needed help. I'm embarrassed by how crappy our access to mental health care is in America. Even guidelines for people to help deal with other folks who are not doing well mentally, is a bad joke that makes the situation worse. Don't. Just don't feed my your crap about this site or that, the latest trend or meme in mental health care. If you haven't been through 24 years and three rounds of being butchered alive by cancer starting at age 26, then shut the fuck up! I need someone who understands/works with young cancer survivors before I'm dead, thank you very much. And I know I'm a rarified demographic. So, I haven't given up, I'm just looking for the correct doctor. Also, it's too late now. 

When I really needed help, I didn't get it. I'm already turning into an old dog that refuses to learn new tricks. Huh what am I saying? When I was young I remember seeing some middle aged lady ranting, very unhappy (more than once). When I was a teenager she was an old lady. I remember wondering then, what happened in her life to make her that way. And now, I'm her, still middle aged according to my folks. My Dad says he thinks middle age is the most difficult mentally. When you are young, you are young. When you are old there’s no expectations for you. When you are middle aged, then it’s what have you done with your life, and you better hurry up and do it before you are really old and start to decline physically so much that you are no longer able to do it, whatever it is that you are going to do with your life. 

Neurotransmitters. I believe more in those chemicals and neurology than I do in psychology. Psychology is not a science. Tho, after the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; latest edition gets done “cancelling” vague and broad and wrong mental diagnosis(s), and the field stops poisoning people by throwing prescriptions without care at people. Medicines that have the opposite drug reaction bidirectional from the expected outcome, or too much of a delicate combination that needed to be prescribed in a lesser dose, for a shorter time, in combination with therapy, and appropriate physical therapy (as our minds are attaches to our bodies), and nutritional science, please. Psychology may get there, into the realm of scientific possibility, some day. 

Why, if I am so down on the entire field of psychology am I complaining about lack of access to mental health care? Deep sigh and a long pause. My life experience, the one time I was sent to a mental health specialist after several major cancer surgeries, I was prescribed one of the mildest "mood" medications on the market. And I tried it, let him convince me to try it for a recommended time, to see if it helped. And I HATED it, I had a paradoxical reaction, and quit cold turkey. Yeah great. How many of the tragedies we hear about in the news are the result of someone who is mentally troubled, being off of their meds? Or worse, being over prescribed so that they feel nothing at all, as they do horrible things. 

Luckily in my case it was only the depression/anxiety "voltmeter" reading being wrong. The what? The voltmeter is in quotes because it is not science. Many people have told me that I have depression. And the evidence, again and again, proves that the primary symptom of depression is the entire signaling system (including your immune system) shutting down, while the primary symptom for anxiety is worry, and high blood pressure, etc... at the other end of the "voltmeter". Wah la, you give someone, even a mild drug for depression, when they are actually sad about something real, (like cancer destroying their life) but they have anxiety, then you get a bidirectional reaction opposite of the expected outcome. To be fair, it's not physically possible for any drug to act on only one symptom, there are over 100 known neurotransmitters, and the actual number is unknown. All these neurochemicals work together in "chains", and in cycles day and night, with other body chemicals, like the gut mind connection. Pour that on top of my favorite self-medication that is a very mild downer with other herbal relaxants, like hops, a.k.a. beer, and you get a mess, that's the opposite of helpful. 

Yes, I am a very mild case. Like one or two good beers is my chemo "tested" liver's limit. Even my cussing is specifically directed at cancer and the American healthcare billing system 83% of the time ... and because of added suffering because of medical errors over the course of my 24 years of “surviving”, medical records upsets me 10% of the time. 

Medical records is a real trigger for me. That lack of important medical information is what is troubling me about my Mom’s situation right now. To sum up my rant, Cancer, medical records and healthcare billing earn a total of 93% of my rage. Not the care givers of any specialty, not the doctors. Not even the psychologists! And certainly not the therapists and nurses in the trenches. 

Sooooo...? No mental health breaks for any of us for Christmas. Just sit around being jolly and merry, "Ho, Ho, Ho!" while pumped full of sugar (the number one "drug" problem in the USA is sugar IMHO). Nothing makes my mood swing more than a sugar crash. But, this year? There's not much sugar in the house. Last week's peanut butter cookies are long gone. And the focus for cooking and snacking is on healthy small meals to deal with chemo. I just gotta stay sane, don’t worry (don’t spiral things all out of proportion) and remember to breathe. 

P.s. Note to self, blog post is too long again, it won’t relate to a lot of people, does the title imply this? The real mental health “break” is to forgive yourself for being human. You are you. Know yourself to learn how to respect who you are, so you are able to get to love and peace. 

And to fellow cancer survivors. It’s okay to think “Fuck gratitude and pink ribbons and all that crap”, when it’s honestly how you feel. Get it all out, and then get back to living for what’s given in each moment, one day at a time.

☮🧠s (peace brains) Uva Be 

“Happy” New Years. 

January 3rd, 2024

My Mom is in pain. She is exactly the type of patient that the pain meds would work the best for, for her body, for what is happening to her because of cancer, cancer surgeries and chemo. She is exactly who the pain meds were designed for. Yes, I repeated my point a lot there. 

BUT,... "evil" people, like the ones who messed with my medical bills, in 2019 and 2020, adding thousands of dollars of retail pharmacy where there was none. In my case, when scheduling pre-op called I requested alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen. I took zero prescription pain meds after my last major cancer surgery in 2020. 

But, the VERY messed up medical bills, the ones that required multiple reports to the state insurance commissioner to be filed. Wasting everybody's time, medical records to billing and back again, wasting more money and time, the State's money, insurance money, oh and my time. Time that IMO, should have been focused on healing or making art or writing. 

Now, years later, my Mom is dealing with weird alternatives (okay drugs for nausea and for her comfort that I don’t understand) because of other people, because of the opioid epidemic, and all the other pain pills I personally don't even care enough about to know the names of. 

And this is in addition to an adjusted rate the chemo is given from every week, to every three weeks. Five years ago, in 2018, my Mom's chemo was every/7 days. This time in 2023 the chemo infusion is every three weeks/21 days. They told us it was a National trend in the US. effectively tripling the dose they infuse at one time. 

And I’m angry about mental health? When as far as I have witnessed there isn’t even enough oncologists and other members of the chemo infusion teams to treat all the cancer patients at the same rate as they have been? 

Yes. That is a question. I have had no confirmation of if this is a National trend to infuse the same amount of chemo, or treat 3 times more patients with 1/3rd of the infusion team work days, or not. Because I'm a writer who looks at these things I've looked at population demographics. And hey, that's why I wrote Un-Un-Cat.  The M in HUMAN. Trying to imagine a way to start working a way out of this mess for all of us in the USA. Not that I solved it, or anything. But, just like this blog post, I figure it's better to try, even if no one reads it, then it's just catharsis for my own sanity. 

We are great! --- a sarcasm fail

This post is an antidote to answer the question asked last Friday Oct 20th – Has evil won? That post is too depressing. I’m not depressed. I have anxiety and I worry. The primary symptom of anxiety is worry. I worry about depressing depressed people. The primary symptom for depression is shutting down and tho I haven’t experienced depression on this level it’s my understanding that depression is painful. While, I don’t want to delete last Friday's blog post, I also don’t believe evil has won… completely. 

Just FYI I’m no good at sarcasm, ask anyone, even those who only know me via chatting in social media. I’m actually literal. It’s easy for me to state that evil has NOT won on the scale of the global perspective or when data from all of human history is the foundation for contrast. 

a "door" from the past, mine from 1994

Metaphor – Time is a hinge. Now is a door. It’s not a door with a window, and we don’t get to choose between door number one or door number two. Now is just here, now. We can’t see what is behind the door now, because behind the door, the hinge of time has swung, and beyond now is the future. We can only make a guess based on the past because, reality. 

To understand now we must learn from the past. In the context of human history the voice of the people has come a long, long way. Democracy is like freedom, justice, and liberty for all in that if we take these for granted, all is lost. 

After World War II, after the great depression, a significant effort was made in the US to end famine (a.k.a. The dust bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl). And the good news is they totally succeeded. They being the US government working with farmers. If you look back at both human and global history a state of abundance such that the poor are fat, has so rarely been achieved that I can’t find a record of it EVER. (Maybe in some historically remote village with a pork eating festival, but neighbors on the same continent were simultaneously starving, anyways). 

The poor being fat was a contentious joke written in Shakespeare’s play about the history of democracy. In the play ‘Julius Caesar’ quote, saying to Brutus, "Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.” 

In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar is expressing that he believes fat and happy people are less likely to be dangerous, as they are more content with their lives.

Fat and happy. We did it! Look at any grocery store in America and tell me, has there ever been a civilization in human history with this abundance of food? Please fact check, triple check, it is spreading to other countries, this phenomenon of food abundance that leads to the poor being fat. Global hunger is decreasing in all nations within the reach of our century’s brand of free market capitalism. In the USA, this abundance seems to have peaked in the 1980s, with the oil age, peak oil in the 1970s. And now we take it all for granted and complain about our diets. Yeah sure, heart disease has been the number one leading cause of death in the USA since the 1950s. It’s impossible to mentally separate the word fat from the dank shadow of the number one leading cause of death. But, it’s equally impossible to quantify the joy food brings to people, or measure the lack of suffering. If you ask any American today if they have ever gone hungry for a single day, it’s significantly tough to find anyone who has gone hungry in America for long enough to starve.... except for those who fast on purpose. — THAT is GREAT! Like really, actually, in the scope of all human history in the entire world, impressive and great.

Art by Douglas Coupland

Speaking of taking things for granted that are impressive and great – the internet. In the previous post the first line after the title. Has evil won? then the line …Has evil won the internet? And with the "interwebs" the whole wide world? Yeah, sarcasm fail. We talk about net neutrality. That’s really boring and I’ve already typed too many words so I will let someone good at sarcasm cover the topic. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality_(Last_Week_Tonight_with_John_Oliver) 

I’m attempting to write a blog post about why we are great, and how evil hasn’t won, yet. Using my freedom of speech, and hinting at democracy has come a long way baby… in the context of world history, since the assassination of Julius Caesar by a group of Roman senators in Pompey during the Ides of March, 44 BC. 

Don’t take for granted YOUR public library. In the United States, it is estimated that libraries purchase approximately 10-15% of all books sold. Public availability of literature of edited source checked published quality is the receiving end, the quarter-back, of freedom of speech. 

According to the Association of American Publishers, total book sales in the United States in 2022 were $17.36 billion. This represents a 9.27% increase from 2021, and a 21.5% increase from 2019.

An important note, that dollar figure does not include all of the books that are purchased by libraries. Academic libraries and school libraries also purchase books, and these purchases are not included in the American Library Association's statistics.

Okay boring right? And we snooze over the news of the religious right banning books. And I complain about giant corporations sorting social media feeds by popularity, effectively silencing the voices of every day folks who only text one or two lines for public consumption into the post boxes on their platform of choice when they have some time in their busy work weeks. How laughable is that in the context of communication abundance and freedom of speech over human history or around the globe? Even today where entire nations of people are censored, via the internet we are information gluttons. And we are so great that we take our public library’s importance in our society and culture for granted, in much the same way we take for granted the food abundance of our grocery stores and restaurants.

The third way we in North America are great is another thing we take for granted – we the people value individual liberty and justice. This is a “pretty broad” statement, but you may be happily surprised to know that is it statistically measurable and that sociologist have been taking note of the actions of crowds that prove we care about and value the life and rights of other individual people. Since it’s science, they don’t prove we “care”, they measure how we gather (or not) in public spaces and if a society is individualistic or collectivistic. Sociologists measure walking pace from city to city, personal space nation by nation, greeting formality everywhere people greet one another,  etc… But, when I was reading some books on the topic of crowd mentality, one aspect where Americans stood out was trampling injuries and deaths at sporting events. In America we gather at sporting events in significant numbers, but we plan for the event to be safe and we don’t trample each other to death as frequently as similar scale events around the world. Prevention is difficult to measure, so if this statistic is only due to stadium safety planning alone. All those maxim occupancy signs and emergency exits, they don’t just happen. We took actions to protect the lives of people in crowds, and businesses, because we care. 

To be fair, the conditions of the worst trampling in recent history are tragic. Planners of large events are aware of the factors that increase crowd trampling risk. In the US guns, automobiles and alcohol have ruined an otherwise respectable level of event safety. And fear is the mind killer. When people feel safe we make better choices, even when in a hostile crowd mentality situation. When anyone falls in a sport event in America, athlete, bystander, coach or member of any production team, the action stops, because we care.

In another country (I have mentally blocked out where), a group of people were beating other people to death inside of a food shop, a fast food cafe. And no one helped them. People took out their cell phones and took video and just stood there. This happened more than once, I don’t know how many people they beat to death, or how many terror events with groups of passive observer bystanders there were. I don’t know if this was happening before cell phones or not. In America there are many examples of strangers standing up to and fighting off attackers, people they never met, people who just happened to be in the same place at the same time, defended and saved lives. People proved they cared with their actions, in many ways, from following maxim occupancy guidelines, or by helping others to an exit, to the extreme case of removing a gun from a shooter while other people tackled him. To the best of my understanding, if there are examples of people standing there taking video but otherwise doing nothing to help, in America it is because of a fear/power imbalance. Most commonly, this imbalance was caused because the attackers were police in uniform. And even in these cases, the bystanders are often yelling, some try to stop the police or they tell them, at the risk of harm to themselves, that they are taking a video of the attack. I believe we “care” about the lives of strangers and these actions of helping one another is part of what make us great. Fact check what I just type out in the above paragraphs. Even a chart with guns per capita (we have a lot of guns) and murders per capita, in nations all around the world, the statistics prove what I am trying to express. According to the UN report on crime. The US Homicide rate is 6.4 to 6.38 per 100,000 people, per year. To 120.5 guns per 100 Americans. Homicide rank in the world 55th/gun ownership #1. Those numbers are not great, but we are surviving, beating the odds in spite of them, in my opinion, because we care.

We are great. We just need to use what we do best to work together to save ourselves from those who seek to divide us, -- for. their. profit. What do we do best? Free market capitalism, see our food abundance and the carbon debt and health risk, and national surpluses, that we can only mitigate at the production level.  Freedom of speech, we are communication gluttons, what repercussion to history will happen if we figure out via our great experiment with democracy how to hear everyone, not just the loudest voices. And we value human rights, life and liberty for every individual. It’s not a contradiction, it is a balance of power and an awareness of what we have to be thankful for, and what we have to lose.

P.s I made this graphic in response to another graphic I didn't like. I thought, I don't like that graphic or quite a few of the concepts expressed by it, so make one that I do agree with/like and here is it. 

Has Evil Won?

Has evil won the internet? And with the "interwebs" the whole wide world? Seriously, this is the debate all things I care about are unhinged by. I don't even know where to start.

Email maybe? Personal meta-data? Art being ripped off for NFTs? Writing being ripped off for e-books sold by who knows? I don't know who these "people" are. The voice of actual humans drowned by bots, because other bots are sorting out "what's popular" -- hiding singular voices from other individual's timelines across all social media. The battle of the search engines serving up what you searched for previously NOT what you are searching for NOW, or "popular" strikes again search results instead of valid verbatim searches. I.e. verbatim also known as -- exactly what we are searching for and WHY we are searching for it. Mercy please! 

Then there's autocorrect, and worse IMO smart replies. I've already written a lot about the topic of the screen space filled with that evil "help me write" plague.

All the above is screen related. I haven't gotten to climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, tax cuts for the wealthy while homelessness is beyond anything we have seen in America since 1870 before and after the civil war. The medical industry's profits rise in parallel with the decline in life expectancy ( the decline in life expectancy is caused by deaths of YOUNG people). These deaths happened in measurable numbers seen in 2018 BEFORE the pandemic.

When I was young I recall seeing an older lady (middle aged) ranting, upset about something and I'd wonder what had happened to her. Now, I am that crazy lady. Maybe, evil hasn't won over everybody/everywhere, but it seems to have won over me, ... for now. 

It seems I've lost the battle with evil. But, how does one even complain about it without being evil? Making it worse, riling up the snakes and pissing off the good folks who are also just getting by while being attacked by the snakes? 

Can't express how much I miss that coward of a girl who I was and the world that was scary to her "then". Yeah, drugs in Portland Oregon was pretty damn bad in the 90s. But, it's nothing in contrast with the new drugs plus homelessness in Portland Oregon now. 

etching 1994

I'm not brave now, I'm still "hiding from Fate's teeth" as I put it, in my art then. 

But, my loss isn't everybody's loss, right? What's one little voice being silenced in the scheme of things? 

Thanks for listening,  + 's 

P.s. via Bard ai: ... on the topic of the decline in individual activity, there is also evidence that social media feeds are becoming increasingly dominated by popular and advertising content. This is likely due to the fact that social media companies are using algorithms to promote content that is more likely to keep users engaged. This means that individual posts from users are often buried at the bottom of the feed, while popular and advertising content is featured more prominently.

This trend can be seen on all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For example, a study by the Pew Research Center found that in 2021, the average Facebook user saw 174 pieces of content per day, of which only 38 were from friends and family. The rest of the content was from pages, groups, and businesses....

There is some data on the decline in individual activity on social media, but it is not as comprehensive as the data on the rise of popular and advertising content. This is likely because social media companies are more interested in tracking and reporting metrics that are relevant to advertisers, such as engagement with branded content and reach.

Now what? That is the question

 The inevitable break-up with social media, the classic phrase fits "it's not you, it's me". 

Weary of talking about my "feelings", I just quit. Stare at plants with a wordless mind, admire the beauty of all the details of a quietly growing life. Life is good.

Carbon debt paid for all of us by Plant Blindness, plant blindness, how something breathing for you gets called a weed. 

P.s. Monday October 2nd, 2023 -- I've started drafting the next project. I may do NaNoWriMo again just to "pick-up-the-pace" force me to "word-vomit" a lot of thoughts out all at once.

P.s. #2 -- meanwhile it's October and I remembered I forgot #inktober, again. So? I'll do a bit of that. 

P.s. #3 -- A few weeks, what felt like days, October 4th, today is the 16th. I remembered that I forgot #inktober again, and thought. I can do that. That’s how I’ll “deal” with social media. But, after one day, it’s clear to me that is not what I want to do. Someone in the room said. Busy people don’t have the “bandwidth” to post, and reply to thousands of people. Unless that is your career or entertainment time, then don’t. And, they were correct. If you want to focus, sharpen a grove in mind to work like a good tool, it’s enough of a challenge just to process the day to day people around the actual space one is living in. 

A painter I admire, in Portland OR, Lucinda Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucinda_Parker 

I have a memory from the 90s, when I was trying to accept a life as an artist, I hear her saying, you have to be “selfish” to make it as an artist, ignore other people to get work done. 

We are all living in an endless river of questions, a mind is a filter, grey water and laundry, catch the “lint” of noise. Let the dust bunnies grow into dust bears, just know where their claws are.

Everyone has their own opinion. It’s endless. Level three riff raff, … until it isn’t. 

What are you going to be? 

Now, distill that thought down into a haiku? 

#haiku title: ponder alone

being together

endless river of questions

clouds carry answer

Photo from 2017, before Oregon burnt all the way to the coast in 2020.

Social Media has changed the paths in my mind

To be clear, after years of use, social media has changed my daily thought habits, therefore changed what I think about as well as the emotional content of my day. This is what the paths of our minds are made up of, our daily thought habits, plus our emotional moods, both body chemicals with their related feelings (are you hungry? etc...), and mental narratives based on events* (i.e. are you paying attention to events in the day to day around you, or to things happening all over the world?). It's not a I-kinda-think-therefore-it-is type of deal. And if I am one unit, one person who is part of the collective consciousness and social consciousness*, therefore social media exposure has done this to all who have partaken, to the degree that they were "exposed", according to what content people were exposed to, . ( *For more see collective consciousness  , or Social_consciousness. Yes, I 💖Wikipedia ). 

For me personally the reason I got into social media, and what I search for when there, was and is still about finding contemporary art and fiction writing. 

But, there is no escape from politics today, esp. American politics if you are an American Voter, like me. There's also a great sad heaps of religious crap tangled in the "spaghetti" of our lack of separation of religion and state. It's gotten so bad with The Supreme Court of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and other like minded founding fathers must be rolling in projectile vomit in their graves. 

Oh and money, is that the other one we are told not to talk about? The divide is pre-Apocalyptically bad in our current economic state. The working poor who were the middle class in the 70s - 80s are now as I understand it debt slaves to such a degree the wealthy can't even make money directly off of them anymore, instead they are selling all their personal meta-data and worse bio-meta-data to who knows who is buying. 

Did I mention how I got into social media to find art and fiction writing and to promote my own art and fiction writing? 

And how did that go? I wrote 5/6th of a political parody, something I never, never, in a trillion years ever imagined myself, ever doing. 

Sooooooooo...?* (my favorite word since 2019 is so with too many o's, as a question). 

I'm attempting to wean myself off of social media in 2023 and the ironic and pathetic part is that I still need the internet and/or a community of people to not be a lone artist with piles of art in a shack that no one will ever see until I die and someone buys our lot (including the shack) and finds this art pile. And to finished, to be, one must be read, before the piles of drafts on the top shelf of my closet meet the same fate. Tho, unlike the pottery, the paper can be burnt and the digits of computer memory can be deleted. 

Now what? That is the question! *blerg* (thanks, very much for that perfect word Tina Fey).

☮+💚🧠s @Uva_Be 

P.s. now is currently August 22nd, I posted this on July 13th, 2023. And I've been avoiding the social media except to post to unfired clay on my Unfired Clay tumblr. And a few check-ins at IG. For me this = pretty sparce to absent from social media activity. 

Sept 6th, just need a bit more time, and looking at time-lines, and motivation, reasons, explanations, and finally that "click",... maybe? Tho, the one that says "this is it!" not waiting forever for that one. 

Got happily lost reading a bit about chiliasm.

 What interested me most wasn't the turn of the millennium exactly as I got lost reading a bit about chiliasm.This pigeon language PIE from trade routes and massive movements of people that all the other Latinized languages the Indo-European people of the world were using. It was that feeling we get in the fictional worlds of The Hobbit or Game of Thrones or even the Naruto world. Where it's not Asia or Europe or the Americas. 

There's a very nicely done animated svg gif graphic on the PIE wiki page. 

chiliasm (n.)

1600, from Latinized form of Greek khiliasmos, from khilias, from khilioi "a thousand, the number 1,000," which is probably from a PIE *gheslo-, source also of Sanskrit sahasra- "thousand" and perhaps also Latin mille, but the exact original sense of the root is unclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language 

PIE "PIE" and "Proto-Indo-European" redirect here. For the people, see Proto-Indo-Europeans. For other uses, see PIE (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Pre-Indo-European languages or Paleo-European languages.

and

*gheslo- / Indo-European roots

Examples of words with the root gheslo-: chiliad, Hazara, kilo-, mil, mile, milfoil, millefiori glass, millefleur, millenary, millennium, millepore, millesimal, milli-, milliary, millime, million, millipede, per mil.

gheslo-

Seen by some as a base for words meaning "thousand"

Oldest form *g̑heslo-, becoming *gheslo- in centum languages.

1. Suffixed form *ghesl-yo-. chiliad, kilo- from Greek khīlioi, thousand.

2. Compound *sm̥-gheslo- (*sm̥-, one; see sem-¹) Hazara from Old Iranian *hazahram, thousand.

3. mil¹, mile, millenary, millesimal, milli-, milliary, millime, million; milfoil, millefiori glass, millefleur, millennium, millepore, millipede, per mil from Latin mīlle, thousand, which has been analyzed as *smī-, "one" + a form *ghslī-, but is of obscure origin.

Note to self. millepore is a coral. and millipore is a filter, made from cellulose acetate membranes, capable of removing very small particles. Related to nanopore A pore, of nanometre dimensions, in a membrane. 

Milliary related to latin for mile and milestones.

Miliary for Millet the seed, used to describe millet sized symptoms of a disease, example lesions of tuberculosis.

THIS and actual thousands of other word examples is why I fight with Grammarly and Autocorrect. I choose the words, trying to express or understand a specific meaning, NOT what is the current most popular word with a similar spelling.