The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Darn it! I tried to insert a kewl widget linking to a site called Politifact. It is great stuff! You have got to visit that thing. I’m bookmarking it among my horde of news sites.
Anyway, for some reason the widget went up cattywampus. Sorry if you dropped by and saw a weird phenomenon. Apparently either the widget code or this theme’s Sidebar 1 function is acting up. Oh well.
WhatEVER. Check out Politifact: it’s Snopes for the political sideshow.
My great-grandmother Gree and her daughter Gertrude were both devout Christian Scientists. Each lived into her mid-90s without ever seeing a doctor. They never took any kind of medication, nor did they touch alcohol. Or tobacco. They would go to dentists, but whatever procedures took place were done without anaesthetics.
We, the enlightened generations, thought they were benighted. My mother thought they were stubbornly crazy. I saw them as products of the 19th century: they grew up during a time when going to a doctor was likely to do more harm than not. And even today, sometimes I reflect that about 90 percent of what ails you will either go away on its own or kill you, and no amount of doctoring is going to change that. It’s the 10 percent that keeps me visiting docs whenever some ailment comes calling.
So I’ve been taking omeprazole for the GERD forever and a day. Young Dr. Kildare, before he exited the nearby practice where I met him, had told me to take vast quantities of it for 8 weeks, and then if the symptoms abated, to titer off the stuff. He gave me a prescription for about a half-billion milligrams per horse pill.
Backstory: one thing you should know is that if a drug (OTC or prescription) has some rare, bizarre side effect that afflicts .001% of the population, I’m the .001%. It never fails.
That notwithstanding, the bellyache tried my patience and so I followed his instructions. Yea verily, it worked. So I was slowly easing the dosage down and looking forward to stopping it.
Now out of the blue I get this weird edema around the left eye. The eyelid itches, and I think it’s a mosquito bite. Or I do, until a day or so later I discover a big, ugly swelling in the old-lady bag under the eye. It looks like a blister, the kind of thing you get from hiking in new boots.
Naturally I discover this in the wee hours of the morning, which is when I normally wake up.
Naturally I have recourse to the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest that is the Internet. And what should I learn but that omeprazole can cause facial edema. If any such thing should arise, we’re told, you should “seek medical care immediately.”
Along about 7 a.m., I call over to my doctor’s office at the Mayo, where I hope to be referred by phone to the internist on call. The phone lady refuses to put me through and tells me to go to the ER.
As usual, the last thing I want to do is go to an ER. But I’m kinda worried that this could be the start of a more serious allergic reaction. So I drive over to the Urgent Care place just up the street.
Naturally, it’s closed.
So I drive up to the Mayo’s ER, where I kill most of the morning.
The doc who sees me is an old buzzard, well past retirement age. (I learned from my old doc, who retired from the Mayo, that the Mayo often hires its retirees on a p/t basis for the ER. Hm.) He orders a blood test and goes off. Eventually he comes back into the room, and he says it’s an infection. He says he could tell this from the blood test.
I think, without comment, “That’s a little odd.”
But he insists the redness (where I’ve been scratching at the itch) and the fact that it’s not bilateral means it’s an infection. I say, “But there’s no conjunctivitis, there’s no discharge, there’s no fever, there’s no sign that this is an eye infection.” He insists it’s an infection and puts me on Keflex.
Forthwith, this product causes my tongue and lips to turn bright red and swell up.
I call and get another Rx for a different antibiotic, one that the Treasure Chest says is likely to cause a roaring case of C. difficile. But I want to be rid of the blister on my face and I’m worried that it IS an eye infection, so I start taking this stuff.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think…hmmmmmm….
Time to see a doctor who has a preternatural gift for common sense. Young Dr. Kildare is one of the two (count’em, 2) doctors I’ve met in 71 years on this earth who possess such a gift.
So I weaseled my way into YDK’s new office — fortunately, he doesn’t have many patients yet. I just got back from his precincts.
He took one long look at it and said, “That’s not an infection.”
I said, “What about the blood test?”
He said, “You can’t tell a person has an eye infection from a blood test! The most it can tell you is that maybe there’s an inflammation somewhere. Maybe not, too.
“THAT is not an eye infection. I can tell it’s not an eye infection because I’ve been to medical school.”
Hee HEEEE!
He thinks it’s an allergic reaction and recommends getting off the omeprazole (which I’d already done). His cure: Benadryl and ice packs. Come back in one week.
Can you believe that? Raving incompetence at the Mayo Clinic. That is really unusual.
Jeez. Never a dull moment.
Images
Crucifix: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=439493
Caduceus: By Rama and Eliot Lash – Drawing by Rama. Vectorized with Inkscape by Eliot Lash., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=662346
Gotta quit working for awhile! Loafing time…
Just finished indexing another chapter of the textual study of the Semiramis narrative, followed from the first century down through the ages. 🙂 I suppose that’s progress. It’s going very slowly.
But at least it’s going. Whenever I get off my duff this afternoon, I’ve gotta move on to the next project: organizing the images and creating a cover for another client’s magnum opus.
Bidness networking meeting this a.m. — 7:15 a.m., a half an hour from the Funny Farm. The snowbirds have gone home now that the weather’s heating up, so the traffic’s not too bad.
Almost out of gas by the time I got back into town, so diddled away some more time traipsing to Costco for a fill-up. Then over to the Favorite Overpriced Gourmet Store to pick up a few edibles, now that I’m finally beginning to feel like eating normal food again. Would like to feed the ailing belly some probiotic microbes and am told you can get many, many more of those from yogurt and from raw sauerkraut, the latter (notably) in a brand called Bubbie’s, than you can from those pricey OTC pills.
Happen to have the Bubbie’s on hand but wanted something good to eat with it: sweet Italian sausage.
Also craved to make some risotto, so wanted to buy some arborio rice and some chicken broth.
None of the broths that come in those cardboard boxes taste like anything other than cardboard to me, so hoped to pick up a can of Campbell’s Soup broth.
Uhm… Not so much. Checking the sodium content…Campbell’s doesn’t even dare tell you what percentage of sodium RDA their elixir contains. No. It’s expressed as “less than 2400 milligrams.”
LOL!!! Would that be “2399 mg”? Holy mackerel.
Another brand listed its content as 300 mg.
Granted, Campbell’s is a concentrate; you dilute it by adding as much water as product. But still: that’s “less than” 1200 mg per serving.
Yech!
So picked up a box of allegedly Italian-made alleged organic chicken broth.
Too lazy today to make risotto: tomorrow, maybe. Meanwhile, grilled a half a sausage (they’re huge) and served it up with some of that lovely sauerkraut and a handful of salad greens. Acceptable enough.
First hot day of the year: 104 degrees. Needed to get a basil plant I’d bought out of its plastic container and into some serious dirt, preferably in a new Talevera pot I snared the other day. And transplant a parched, overgrown spider plant into the other pot snared on the same day. And soften up the soil around the olive tree so as to hammer in a new stake and rope the tree’s trunk into an upright position. And rescue a bunch of other plants that were beginning to fry in the heat.
Jumped in the pool to cool off. Barely got my hair wet before I heard the damn garbage truck roaring up the alley.
Leap out, grab a towel, race back in the house, dripping all over the brand, spanking clean kitchen floor. Not pleased.
After the gardening frenzy, popped a can of exotic red corn (it comes out white, like any other popcorn), poured a bourbon and water, updated the new SBA website, thought about working, didn’t…
Finally got around to keyboarding about 60 index entries on the subject of Simiramis.
Now only two other projects remain to work on today. Maybe.
Oh. My. God. Have I held forth on the manifold ways various operators take advantage of the ever-craving, ever-hopeful, endlessly yearning wannabe writers of the world? Yes. I believe I have.
There’s no end to this stuff. Nor is there any honor among thieves. Check out the local university’s contribution, brought to you by a graduate program guaranteed to render you unemployable. Presto-digito! It’s an MFA Lite in genre writing!
And how much will this endeavor set you back? Almost 10 grand!
Holy crap.
Y’know, there’s an easy way to learn to write genre novels: sit down and start writing. Write until you’re blue in the face. Impose on some readers who like the kind of nonsense you’re churning out (one of the honored faculty in this program writes fan-fiction, no less! 🙄 ). Extract honest responses from them. Listen. Revise. Get them (or someone) to read the revisions. Listen. Revise. Repeat until you can’t do it any more.
Then either find a publisher (good luck with that) or publish the thing yourself. Then learn to be a marketing exec.
You could buy one whole helluva lot of editorial review and commentary from first-rate genre editors for ten grand. Matter of fact, you could probably fund reviews and coaching for ten novels with that.
{sigh} On that note, I must get back to work for my own wannabe (and real) writers. 😮
Did you read about the guy who was arrested for using a cell phone jammer on a commuter train?
LOL! Good for him. What a nuisance cell phone yappers are!
Places where people have to be crammed together in public — like trains and theaters and churches and shopping malls — should be equipped with cell phone jammers as a matter of course. They could be set to turn off in an emergency, but during business as usual, it shouldn’t be a matter of politely asking people to turn the damn things off: it should be a matter of course that the things don’t work in those places.
Recently one of the professional-grade singers in the Chamber Choir remarked on some nitwit’s phone having gone off in the middle of a complex, difficult piece. She said it messed up the rest of the performance of that piece: the phone’s ringer was a “song” and the jingly notes distracted the choir enough to cause them to lose track of the musical line. They felt the performance was spoiled — meaning it was also spoiled for everyone in the audience. But by golly, that phone subscriber didn’t miss a single hail from friends and merchandisers!
The other day, the weather was astonishingly beautiful, so I went out for a one-mile walk around the park. As I’m trotting along, what should I encounter but a woman with two adorable children, one in a stroller and one, about four or five, prancing along the sidewalk….and what’s she doing?
Yakking on the phone!
She didn’t even seem to be aware of the kids’ presence, so engrossed was she in her chatfest.
Damn! Lady, have you no clue that your kids need your attention? And will you be surprised when they get into trouble as teenagers? Or fail in school because you’ve been too distracted all their lives to teach them anything?
Out of curiosity, I decided to keep track of the number of people who were yapping on the phone while walking vis-à-vis the total number of people I encountered.
And the number? Four out of ten.
That’s right. Forty percent of walkers were distracting themselves from a spectacular day in a beautiful park where children were playing and birds were singing and leaves were whispering…by yammering on the goddamn phone.
Their loss. Ours, too: they’re distracting everyone else as they anaesthetize themselves to the world around them.
Does it not occur to the phone-yackers that the details of their personal lives or the sound of their babbling voices is not what other people want to focus on? Or even that they are NOT the focus of the universe? Honest to God.
Another time I turned onto a neighborhood street from Feeder Street NS about 50 or 100 feet ahead of another woman who was coming up Feeder from the south. She wasn’t talking into the phone. She was yelling into the phone. The sound of her noise was just flat grating: she overrode everything around her.
What is it about a cell phone that makes some people feel they have to shout into it to be heard?
This broad was hollering into the phone at the top of her already unpleasantly sharp voice. And she walked fast enough to keep up with me — yakking didn’t distract her from moving her legs and feet. I stepped it up to get out of hearing, to no avail. Finally I broke into a run, trying to put some distance between us: didn’t help.
Didn’t get rid of her annoying voice until I ran around the corner and up another neighborhood street.
No wonder the less stable among us pick up guns and start shooting. Criminey!
It gets better.
Yesterday, in comes a report from reader Roguewrld that, contrary to Funny’s report, students at Emory University did NOT fall into a terrified faint at the mere glimpse pro-Trump graffiti scribbled on sidewalks and stair risers. Hilariously, Roguewrld found confirmation of this claim at Snopes.com, the bottomless well of de-hoaxification.
Pretty amazing: that tale was found in the good gray pages of the Washington Post, a national publication of record whose seriousness verges on the staid.
Nice catch, Roguewrld!
Traveling deeper into Monty Python territory, we explore the current state of Snopes.com. As it develops, Alabama legislators have NOT proposed to bar people who own cars from receiving public assistance. FALSE. But that one actually was floated, with a straight face, in my august state.
The image of the four Trump-loving women displaying T-shirts that spelled out, a word at a time, MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN turns out to have been Photoshopped. Drat! It was so believable!
Walnuts are not drugs. Even the FDA has not declared walnuts to be drugs.
Mason Wells, the young Mormon missionary injured in the recent Brussels attacks, is not a “survivor” of two prior attacks. He was among 500,000 other people present at the Boston Marathon, nowhere near the bombings, and was two hours out of Paris at the time of the Bataclan attacks.
Even in Mississippi, you can’t drown in a carwash.
Nutella, with sugar its lead ingredient, is probably not very good for you. On the other hand, it’s not immediately toxic.
Cadbury has not, in a superfluity of political correctness, banned the word “Easter” from its packaging for chocolate eggs.
Well, darn. You just can’t have any fun anymore…
Oh god. I think I’m having an allergic reaction to stupidity. Did you see THIS news item? Four-year-old shoots Mom in the back as she’s tooling down the road in her vehicle with a horse trailer in tow.
The moron…sorry: the mom (I’m trying not to be judgmental…it ain’t easy)… The mom leaves a .45 pistol on the floor of the truck. (Oh, wait! Maybe it was her loving husband who did that. So we would still have a moron, but a different moron.) Then she evidently lets the kid bounce around loose inside the truck. If he were strapped into a seat belt, obviously, he wouldn’t have been able to reach the truck’s floor.
Well. It all turned out for the best, eh? The kid didn’t shoot himself in the head. What more could we hope for?
The gun-control vs gun-nut hysteria has already started. Again.
