Category Archives: Health

April 7, 2014 · 20:30

No Day So Lousy That…

In Colonel Chris Hadfield’s wonderful TED talk last month (see it! see it! see it!) he says that astronauts know that in space “there is no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.”

Sounds coming from the other side of the desk are telling me that there’s no day so lousy that it can’t be made worse by…

…hearing the cat making that “gnnuuuurrchh”, “gnuuurchhaaa”, “gghhhaaaaurch”, “splat” sound.

…getting your tax returns from your accountant and seeing all of those zeros in the amount you owe in eight days.

…hearing the thirteen-year-old, arthritic, lame dog in the back yard suddenly tearing around at 100 MPH, going “OOOOWWW, WOOOOW, WOOOOW, WOOOOOOOOW” in the dark as she turns into White Fang, Dog of the North — and then you smell the skunk.

…reading the comments on any Internet news story.

…hearing your computer hard disk make that “click” sound, followed by a rhythmic “click-click-CLICK-click-pause” over and over, while on your screen you get some error message that you’re now too panicked to read.

…kidney stones.

…getting the “Thank you for applying, but after careful consideration of your resume” generic email on a job you really, really wanted.

…a phone call checking up on a deadline that you completely, 100%, totally forgot about.

…hearing “your” numbers called as the lottery winners, only to realize that after having tickets with those numbers every draw for the last ten years, you forgot to get a ticket for tonight.

…getting a call from the IRS about the aforementioned tax returns.

…NOT hearing the cat making that “gnnuuuurrchh”, “gnuuurchhaaa”, “gghhhaaaaurch”, “splat” sound, and then finding the “splat” part in your bare feet.

The good news is that the sun will rise tomorrow, and it’s got to be better than today.

Right?

Please say, “right.” Please?

(For the record, only one of these things happened today. But two others have already happened this month. I’m hoping none of the others do.)

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Filed under Cats, Computers, Dogs, Health, Job Hunt

March 24, 2014 · 23:22

There’s This Nasty Little Disease

Let me start by saying that I am not a doctor or any other kind of medical professional. I’m just a voracious reader with a lot of general scientific and technical interests and background. I’m the perfect demographic to be a Scientific American reader. The point being that what I pass on to you here is what I understand, but I could well be wrong on some points, minor or major. Check your sources.

Twenty years ago I saw a review of a new non-fiction book by Richard Preston, “The Hot Zone.” The book is beautifully written and stunningly terrifying. It is a wonderful introduction to a class of diseases which are emerging from West Africa. Outbreaks of these diseases have been seen in Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

These viral hemorrhagic diseases, such as Marburg and Ebola, are rare, which is good for the human race. It is somewhat difficult for the virus to spread. “Somewhat” is the key word. They’re not spread as easily as the common cold virus, or measles, or the flu. For the most part, you need to have direct contact with blood, bodily fluids, or tissues that are infected. You can also get infected by handling or eating infected animals (monkeys are suspected to be a key vector) or being exposed to infected guano in caves (bats are another).

They are also incredibly deadly with no known cures, which has the potential to be very bad for the human race. Ebola kills nine out of ten people it infects, and it’s not a pretty death. “Hemorrhagic” diseases are so named because they cause you to hemorrhage from just about every orifice in the body. The specifics and explicit details I’ll leave to those who want to read the book. (Highly recommended, by the way! But most definitely not for the faint of heart.)

So far, the outbreaks have been largely contained in Africa, with only a few cases of travelers coming home from Africa (for example, to Germany, the US, Netherlands) while infected. The number of deaths per outbreak has been relatively small, averaging a couple dozen each, with worst cases (so far) being about 225 deaths in one outbreak for Marburg (Angola, 2004-2005), 280 for Ebola (Zaire, 1976).

For comparison, the common flu is estimated by the CDC to kill on average about 36,000 people every year just in the United States. (What, Jenny McCarthy told you not to get a flu shot? And you’re freakin’ stupid enough to listen? You – out of the gene pool!) But looked at another way, about 15% or so of the population gets the flu in the average year, which makes roughly 50,000,000 Americans sick with the flu at some point or another during the year. 36,000 deaths out of 50,000,000 infections with 200,000+ hospital visits means that out of every 100,000 people who get the flu, about 725 (ballpark figures) die from it.

For Ebola, out of that hypothetical 100,000 people, more than 90,000 would die, not 725.

If that doesn’t get your attention, I don’t know what will.

This is the stuff that horror movies and books are made of, and Ebola has been a key player in several. Tom Clancy used it as a major plot point in “Executive Orders.” There have been several movies using plots involving Ebola, including 1995’s “Outbreak”, which unfortunately tried to turn Dustin Hoffman into an action/adventure movie hero. (That is an evil that does not sleep!) And I can guarantee that Seanan McGuire mixed some ebola facts and figures into her hypothetical zombie apocalypse “Newsflesh” trilogy (which you should also read because it’s excellent and some of the scariest shit I’ve ever read).

Except that Ebola and Marburg are not only the stuff of “apocalypse entertainment.” Take a look at that Ebola table I referenced about six paragraphs up. See where one of the Ebola strains is called “Reston?” Would that have anything to do with Reston, Virginia, which lies just between Dulles International Airport (ten miles to the west) and downtown Washington, DC (thirty miles to the east)? You bet it does, which is one of the stories of “The Hot Zone.” We were this close…

For now, I don’t sweat it much on a daily basis because these diseases are primarily on the far side of the world where I am highly unlikely to be, and they are hard to transmit between infected victims. I don’t know if someone could really weaponize the virus and make it highly contagious as Clancy and others have wondered. It makes for pretty good reading, but I don’t know that the CDC believes that it’s likely or even possible.

But once you’ve read the books mentioned above, I guarantee that when you are flipping through the online news, something like this headline from today’s New York Times will catch your eye every freakin’ time: “Ebola, Killing Scores In Guinea, Threatens Nearby Nations”

Don’t worry. It’s probably not that big of a deal. It never has been before. What’s the worst that could happen?

Sleep tight!

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Filed under Disasters, Freakin' Idiots!, Health

March 15, 2014 · 22:43

Why Isn’t “Big Pharma” Working On This?

Watch any television show these days, especially some of the more “minor” cable channels in the evening, and you’ll see ads for new medicines curing problems that we never even knew existed. (I’ll leave to the student speculation that the problems didn’t exist until a “cure” was discovered.) The growing number of treatments for sexual problems is a well established source of one joke after another. Before that (and still) there are drugs to make hair grow. Now there’s “low T,” with commercials for the treatments almost immediately followed with commercials from ambulance chasing lawyers who want your business to sue after you took a treatment for “low T.” On and on it goes.

Yet, I’m well aware of a fairly common and very painful malady which has no treatment or cure at all. It’s intermittent, non-lethal, and appears to get worse with age. Yet you can google it, go to sites like webmd.com or mayoclinic.org and you’ll find nothing that helps.

I’m talking about nocturnal leg cramps.

If you’ve never had them, count your blessings and I’ll see you tomorrow. If you have had them, you know exactly how bad it is to wake up in the middle of the night with one (or both) of your legs in total agony as one or more muscles has decided for some unknown reason to cramp into a knot the size of a grapefruit under your skin, resisting every effort to get it to relax.

It’s very painful for you, and “disturbing” for your partner who gets woken up by your screaming and cursing.

The “solution” once one hits is generally to force the muscle to stretch out and uncramp. I get them generally in my calf muscles, on the back side of the leg between the knee and ankle. In that case, the cramping will pull my toes down, so to stretch out I need to bring my foot back perpendicular to my leg. Sometimes (like the other night) it’s so hard to do that I have to stumble out of bed and put my weight on the leg in order to press the heel down, toes up, and calf stretched. This is a truly wonderful exercise to do at 4:07 AM in the dark when you’ve been woken from a dead sleep by sudden, intense pain, and by the time you get to the point where you have to go to this extreme measure, the pain’s been going on for several minutes. What fun!

I’ve also started to get them in my shin muscles from time to time. Cramps there are generally not as severe so they’re easier to stretch out, but they’re no less painful.

Either way, I often find that the muscle in question is sore for days afterward. Plus the fact that once it has cramped and is sore, it’s that much more likely to cramp again in the next night or two.

What causes them? No one knows, no one has any good guesses. (But the Mayo Clinic site has the nerve to refer to them as “usually harmless.” Obviously whoever wrote the article never has experienced one.)

What can I do to prevent them? No one knows, no one has any good guesses. Some anecdotal scuttlebutt on the interwebs suggests that maybe some light exercise before bedtime will help. Of course, other anecdotal scuttlebutt says to avoid any exercise before bedtime…

Is there anything that I can take to prevent them? Some type of food to take? Or avoid? More hydration? Less hydration? Less salt? More salt? Hell, at this point I would give up chocolate! (Well, on second thought…) Nope, no answers.

I’ve had problems intermittently for years and I’ve asked at least two family doctors and gotten the exact same answers. No one knows, no one has guesses, no one even has any decent suggestions to try.

So where’s “Big Pharma” on this one? Can we take 1% of the impotence research budget and look into nocturnal leg cramps? How about 2% of the money spent to grow fuller, longer, natural eyelashes? (I wish I was kidding about that one, but I’ve seen the ads. Jeez!)

I have no problem with the research money spent on curing cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and so on. But I think problems which cause intense pain at random times should be higher on the priority list than limp genitals and freakishly long eyelashes.

It’s bed time for me now. Crawling into bed at the end of a long day should be a pleasant experience, to be looked forward to. Not something that makes you dread it, wondering when and how the next attack will come.

Good night!

 

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Filed under Health

February 3, 2014 · 09:00

Few Words Today, Except…

…except to repeat these.

I suspect it may be a very long day and I may have my hands full. There were 6300+ words last night about that football game — feel free to nitpick and comment over there to keep yourselves occupied.

To those of you whom I know closely and personally (i.e., kids, family, friends), I’ll be in touch later in the day with updates.

To those of you who know me and mine only through my writings here, I’ll give you some details (the big picture should be easily guessed) when it’s appropriate.

Take care of each other.

Fuck Cancer!

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Filed under Family, Health

January 14, 2014 · 21:48

The Cosmos Rolls Onward (Simple Astrophotography Part Seven)

After your blood pressure and heart rate drop back down and you get a few good nights’ sleep following this, you finally realize that the Universe has not been jolted out of alignment. Rather, your perception of the Universe and your relationship to it has been clocked upside the head. The Universe just keeps rolling on, oblivious.

This was brought to me in graphic form tonight as I walked the dog. Venus, which had been amazingly bright in the west at sundown for weeks and weeks, had seemingly gone away in just a few days. (Don’t worry, it will pop out into the morning sky before sunrise in a few more days. We didn’t lose it.) But now Jupiter, only a bit dimmer than Venus, is riding high up into the sky in the early evening, sitting next to Orion. And tonight, the almost-full moon was just a couple of fingers-width away from it. (Full moon is at 20:53 UTC on the 15th. It’s currently 05:41 UTC on the 15th or 09:41 on the 14th Pacific, so full moon is about fifteen hours away.)

In Los Angeles, the haze and clouds have been swept away by very strong (and dry) Santa Ana winds, so the brush fire danger is just about off the charts — but the stars are crystal clear.

Time to grab the tripod and the camera with the telephoto lens!

There was a problem with the picture I wanted. As bright as Jupiter appears, it’s several orders of magnitude dimmer than the full moon. The full moon is really, really stinking bright!

So class, how do we approach this problem? Bracket, bracket, bracket! Digital is dirt cheap! Take a whole metric crapload of pictures across a broad range of exposures and see what happens. What have we got to lose?

No fancy equipment, just a tripod and a Canon Rebel XT with a Tamron 70-300 mm telephoto zoom lens.

Just to be on the safe side, I started with the fastest shutter speed my Canon Rebel XT will do, 1/4000 of a second. (I fully expected this picture to be seriously underexposed.) Then photos at steps of one speed slower every time, all the way up through 1/2 second. (I fully expected this picture to be completely washed out and overexposed.)

A very pretty sight. Gorgeous. Brilliant starlight. Moon so bright you could read a newspaper by it.

And then the Universe blew my mind tonight.

IMG_6906 (small)This is that very first picture, at 1/4000 second. In the lower right, of course, is the full moon and in the upper left is a little dot that’s Jupiter. (You should click on the images to get the full sized versions, it’s much easier to see what I’m talking about.) This is a great example of just how bright the full moon is and how big the dynamic range is between the two objects. You can actually see the big features of the moon pretty well, even with this simple setup. Even at this fast, FAST exposure, the full moon is starting to be overexposed. Yet Jupiter is just a dot, barely seen, which is not unexpected since this was a really short exposure.

I was very happily surprised to see how this image came out, especially given the seconds and seconds I had slaved over setting up and preparing to take it.

But, wait. There’s more!

Being a bit obsessive about these things (which is like saying water is a bit wet) I went flipping through the whole series of images. As expected, by 1/1250 second, the moon is completely washed out. But as we keep going and the moon more and more looks like a huge, white blob, Jupiter starts looking brighter and clearer.

IMG_6914 (small)At 1/640 second we see the last image before we start to pick up serious lens flares from the bright moon. As we keep going, these flares develop into a greenish-bluish ghost image of the moon just below Jupiter.

IMG_6928 (small)By 1/25 second this ghost image actually gets bright enough to show the same kind of detail as the primary image did in the first image. As we get beyond this, the ghost image gets brighter, the lens flares get brighter, the full moon more and more washes out almost everything. But “just because”, I flipped through the images all the way to the end.

And then…

IMG_6939 (small)Other stars starting to show up in the field in this 1/2 second exposure. In between the moon and Jupiter is Mekbuda (Zeta Geminorum, mag 3.93 average). In the far lower left corner is Wasat (Delta Geminorum, mag 3.53). In the far upper left and at the very top center are two unnamed 5th magnitude stars, while outside the glare of the moonlight I can pick out at least eight dimmer 6th magnitude stars.

photoImage from the Star Walk iPad app. It looks a bit like this. Jupiter obviously isn’t shown to scale, although the moon’s size is probably close to being the correct size.

But best of all, to my utter amazement and joy — take a look at Jupiter! It’s now an overexposed blob also, actually showing elongation to an oval or a streak, the image smeared toward the upper center as the Earth beneath me rotated 314.9574 feet to the west in that 1/25 second. But even better, the best of all, look at the two small dots in a line at the seven o’clock position right next to Jupiter.

IMG_6939 (Jupiter detail)See them? That’s got to be Io (the inner moon) and Europa (the outer one). And if you look really closely, can you kind of maybe see a spike or bump sticking out of Jupiter’s glare, right on that line between Jupiter, Io, and Europa? The map says that Ganymede should just be coming out of Jupiter’s shadow at about that time, right about at that spot. Could I possibly have captured it as well?

Two of the four Galilean moons captured, and maybe a third! All with two minutes of preparation and some common, off the shelf camera equipment.

Thanks, Universe. Thanks for the reminder that there are wonders all around us, even if there are sometimes also bad things.

Given the former we’ll find a way to deal with the latter.

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Filed under Astronomy, Health, Photography, Space

January 13, 2014 · 22:44

Joining The Chorus

I know it’s been said by many people more wise and more influential than me, but let me join in the chorus by saying,

“FUCK Cancer!”

 

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Filed under Family, Health

January 1, 2014 · 19:11

New Year’s Resolutions 2014

New Year’s Resolutions are bullshit. I won’t make them.

This is not news. There are dozens, if not hundreds of other people who have said the same thing and said it better. I’ll say it again anyway. I’ll try not to be preachy or pedantic. (Maybe that should be a resolution…)

The idea behind New Year’s resolutions is a good one. None of us is perfect. All of us have things we would like to change or improve in our life. Many of these things are health related — lose weight, stop smoking, cut down on alcohol, eat more sensibly, exercise more, and so on. Many are related to finances — save more, spend less, gamble less. Many are related to relationships — be kinder, be more patient, be more tolerant. Many are goal-based — get a better job, get a girlfriend or boyfriend, learn to play guitar, learn a new language.

These are all excellent goals and there are thousands more just like them. Each and every one of us should get up every day and try to be better that day than we were the day before. Having specific goals is a great way to do that.

But New Year’s resolutions are a lousy way of moving toward those goals. They’re externally imposed by society. They put a huge amount of pressure on you to perform and they usually don’t allow any slack for any kind of failure. While many people make their New Year’s resolutions with lots of enthusiasm and excitement, that fades within days. You slip back, you fall off the wagon, and by mid-January (early February at the latest) you’ve given up. “There’s always next year!”

Successful change of this sort is difficult and almost always takes time. For example, losing weight. If you’re thirty or fifty pounds overweight, you didn’t just wake up that way this morning after looking like a professional athlete. Assuming there isn’t a medical condition causing the problem, you almost certainly got there by eating poorly, eating too much, and exercising far too little for years and years and years. You have spent years or even decades establishing habits and a lifestyle that are deeply ingrained.

Isn’t it obvious that it’s going to take years and years to reverse all of those issues? There really isn’t any rocket science here.

This is not intended in any way to be a downer, or to discourage anyone who’s trying to improve their life, today or any other day. Quite the opposite. I’m arguing for a reality-based, common sense approach because I think this approach works where New Year’s resolutions so rarely do.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” has been a cliche for a couple thousand years. It’s also been true.

There’s nothing magical or special about January 1st. It’s an arbitrary day on an arbitrary calendar based on arbitrary events thousands of years ago which are dated inaccurately to begin with.

If you have an improvement that you want in your life, if you have a change that you need in your life, you have to start a little bit at a time. You can make that start on January 1st, March 15th, July 23rd, or December 31st. There are 365 days in the year and you can start to make these changes on any of them.

Change is painful. Rooting out deeply ingrained “bad” habits and replacing them with “better” habits is hard and painful. You have to finally get to a point where you realize that the bad habits are also painful. It might be like being nibbled to death by ducks, but you have to face the fact that you’re actually being nibbled to death. You have to finally know and accept at a cellular level that the pain of staying on the “comfortable” road you’re on is more painful than the “hard” road of making changes. You have to get it into your head that you are going to make the change because you want to or need to and nothing’s going to stop you, not because it happens to be January 1st and society and your friends say you should.

Sure, sometimes events can force people into making drastic, radical changes overnight. If you have a heart attack, you might need to start losing weight and changing your diet today or you’re going to have another one and be really, really dead for a long, long time. If you have a drinking or drug problem and you come this close to killing yourself or someone else while driving impaired, then you need to get sober now.

But those circumstances are pretty rare and have nothing to do with January 1st. For most of us, it’s a long, slow slide down that slippery slope and it’s going to be a long, slow climb back up. What most people never realize is that you get to decide where the stopping point is on that slope.

When you’re ready, really ready, then you can make those changes in your life. There aren’t any shortcuts, there aren’t any miracles, there aren’t any silver bullets. It’s just you and your support systems. Your friends and family can (and should) help. You can get organized help such as a gym membership, a personal trainer, a music teacher, AA, or you can sign up for a community college course. But you have to do those things because you are ready. No one can do it for you.

First of all, it’s critical that you realize that you’re not (for example) “dieting” or “getting into shape”. YOU ARE CHANGING YOUR LIFE FOR EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. That’s how you succeed. You can’t diet until you hit your goal weight, then go right back to the habits and lifestyle that made you overweight to begin with. (Guess what happens if you do.) You can’t get into shape until you can run that 10K, then go back to sitting on the couch. (Guess what happens if you do.)

Realize that there will be setbacks. Accept them. Don’t beat yourself up over them. Move on.

If you’re trying to lose weight, there will be days when you’ve eaten salads and fish for ten days in a row and you’re really proud of yourself but you would kill for something from In-N-Out. Okay, have that burger and fries. Maybe have that milk shake. (Maybe make it a small rather than a large.) Then, the next day, get back on the wagon.

If you’re training for that marathon, there will be days when you’re just not interested in going out to run that five miles in the rain. So, don’t! But get back out there the next day.

Should the worse case happen and you abandon your program and slip back into your old habits, you’ve got a whole year to wait and wallow in your misery if you’ve bought into the whole “New Year’s resolution” philosophy. If you don’t give a damn about January 1st, you can get back up and climb back on that horse whenever you’re ready.

Another cliche — “It’s not how many times you get knocked down that counts, it’s how many times you get back up.”

Realize that you don’t have to do it on a certain schedule, especially if that schedule was made for someone else or is completely arbitrary. Be flexible, adjust course as necessary while keeping the goal in sight. BE SMART!

You want to run that marathon, but a month into training for a 4:00 pace you’re dying and want to give up? So train for a 5:00 or 6:00 pace. When you accomplish that goal, then you can train next time for a higher goal.

You’re beating yourself up because you just can’t stop yourself from eating unhealthy five or six times a week? Okay, accept that, go with it and see where it takes you. If you were eating unhealthy twenty-one times a week before, five or six times a week is a huge improvement! Get some feedback from your body, develop your new lifestyle of only eating unhealthy five or six times a week, then later on work on getting that down to three or four times a week. Then later down to once or twice.

You can do these things. I say this as someone who ten years ago was over fifty pounds heavier. I took my kids on a 2.9 mile mountain hike that we did as a family (including my nine-year-old sister and mother who had had surgery less than a month before) when I was a teenager. I was so badly out of shape that I thought that I was going to need helicopter paramedics to rescue me from the side of the mountain. Now I’m proud that I’ve run two marathons and I want to run more to improve my times.

So, yeah, I look at my life and I need to lose a few more pounds. I need to get back into running and training for the next marathon. I want to learn that second language and playing guitar. I want to call my mother and vacuum the carpets more regularly. Blah, blah, blah.

But I won’t do any of those things by starting crash programs on this special day, based on unreasonable goals and untenable plans. I will get those things done by working on changing myself incrementally every day. I may start doing that tomorrow, or next month, or whenever I get sick and tired enough of not being the way I want to be. I hope to start sooner rather than later, but I will start when I start.

But New Year’s resolutions are bullshit.

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Filed under Health, Paul, Running

December 3, 2013 · 21:13

DIY Knee Surgery

I don’t think Rube Goldberg knew what he was starting.

1. Start with a long day at work for The Long Suffering Wife

2. This leads to a strong desire to not cook dinner

3. Add a desire for Chinese food

4. Make call for delivery

5. Settle back to relax while waiting

6. Allow cat to sit on my lap, as she does

7. Allow dog to sit on floor in front of The Long Suffering Wife, as she does

8. Wait forty-five minutes

9. Have delivery guy ring the doorbell

10. Have dog go absolutely bananas because SOMEBODY RANG THE DOORBELL, as she does

11. Have cat successfully recognize dog’s barking as the proper launch authorization code for an immediate departure for Low Earth Orbit

12. Launch cat from the preferred position (my lap)

13. Apply tourniquet to my bleeding leg

photo14. Apologize to everyone for putting a picture of my leg on the internet

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Filed under Cats, Health, Paul

November 6, 2013 · 16:23

Get A Flu Shot!

I got mine today. I probably should have gotten it a couple of weeks ago when they first started having the clinic open, but between one thing and another I’ve been putting it off. Today I was “oot & aboot” and made a point to swing by.

You want to know how horrible and trying it was? You want to know what the worst part was? It was chilly (mid 50’s) when I went out this morning so I had on my usual chilly+casual garb, a flannel shirt over a turtleneck. (Are the New York fashion designers paying attention? When that’s the next hot thing, I want credit!) When I got to the clinic, in order to get the shot I had to take off the flannel shirt and then roll the sleeve on the turtleneck up far enough to expose my upper arm.

That’s it! That’s as hard as it gets! Mind you, this comes from someone who, as a kid, would cry like I was being dragged off  to be tortured to death every time I got a shot.

As for those who think that you shouldn’t get a flu shot because you’ve been told by an actor or pop star that it’s in some way bad for you (freakin’ idiots!) or your third cousin twice removed heard something that was relayed fourth hand from a guy he knows in his bowling league — well, first of all, BULLSHIT (because, like, “science” and “facts” and all of that), but secondly, here‘s an excellent site that keeps track of all of the urban myths and fallacies that are going around and the medical and scientific facts that refute them.

The tl;dr version is that the flu kills people (far more than you think), you can get it, the flu vaccine is about 99.999999999999999% safe, the flu vaccine will not do any of the BS things that the urban myths say it will, and the more folks who get vaccinated, the fewer people we’ll have spreading it in the first place.

Since it’s cheap (maybe free) and easy (took me longer to walk in from the parking lot than it did to fill out the paper and get the shot) and pretty painless (even a wussy boy like me can handle it), you would have to be a moron to not get one.

You’re reading my blog, so you’re obviously not a moron.

QED, you either already have your flu shot or you’ll be getting one in the next couple of days. Maybe tomorrow.

Right?

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Health

September 28, 2013 · 20:14

Odds & Sods For Saturday, September 28th

Item The First: On Friday I tried to donate platelets at the local Red Cross Donation Center. To say the least, it didn’t go well. On Wednesday and Thursday I got e-mails and reminder calls, all of which instructed me to make sure I was well hydrated, drink extra, and so on. OK, no problem. Then when I get there they put in the needles (one in each arm) and tell me to sit tight for two hours. This raises some concerns. THEN they add this anti-coagulant to the return stream so that I can make it through the whole procedure. (This is normal operating procedure.) The problem is that this anti-coagulant is also an excellent diuretic. Lots of fluids + lots of diuretic = I’m not sitting anywhere for two hours without a catheter or adult diapers, neither of which was provided. Epic fail.

Item The Second: Make note of the name Nick Sloane. Mr. Sloane is the salvage master who lead the team of over five hundred experts to lift the Costa Concordia off of the rocks and slowly flip it back upright off the coast of Giglio, Italy. (Stories here and here, with a great time-lapse video here.)

Item The Third: I really liked the story I wrote this week for the Flash Fiction Challenge. I was on the fourth edit and getting really, really close to being done with it Thursday night when I realized that it was already 11:55 PM. I posted the story quickly with no further edits. Thinking about it more on Friday, I think the one thing that I would change is the last line. Instead of “That’s when I saw it.”, I would have it be, “That’s when I saw it – now I was in trouble.” More cliffery and hangery.

Item The Fourth: When I left for that appointment at the Red Cross on Friday morning, I was about two blocks from home when I realized that I had not double checked the gate to the back yard after the gardeners were there on Thursday afternoon. I did a quick trip around the block and got back just in time to see Jessie pushing the gate open, seeing me pulling up, and trying to go to full reverse to get back inside the gate before it closed behind her. She’s had another taste of freedom, and the road calls to her.

Item The Fifth: Three weeks into the NFL season, no one is particularly surprised to see the Patriots, Broncos, Saints, or Seahawks undefeated at 3-0. And no one’s too surprised to see the Jaguars at 0-3. BUT…

I’d like a show of hands of those who thought that in addition to those teams, the Bears, Dolphins, and my beloved KC Chiefs would be undefeated, and the Steelers, Redskins, Vikings, and Giants would all be winless at 0-3. In addition, the Chiefs are four point favorites for tomorrow morning’s game against the New York Giants. I like this. I could get used to this. Especially when by this time tomorrow we’ll be 4-0.

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