One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to.
It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.
Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.
So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.
You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.
It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.
Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.
So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).
The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.
The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.
I'm all in, anyway.
Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)
One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.
Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.
But this is where the GQP is now.
What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.
Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.
Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.
You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."
No.
The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.
Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.
That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.
And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.
Well...shit.
Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble.
I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.
10 comments:
You are simply wrong to say that there is no way that Ivermectin could be a possible treatment. That being said, the jury is still out on whether it is effective or not.
Nope. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02081-w
Aspirin may be a "possible treatment". So could voodoo. The point is that the CONVICTION that this horse dewormer IS a treatment is just stupid, braind-dead woo. It takes a tiny handful of in vitro studies as well as some poorly documented or small sample-size in vivo studies and infers a ridiculously impossible conclusion.
I know you hate to admit that these people are hopeless...but to go from the thin thread of "possible treatment" to insisting that people shun vaccination for a vermicide?
That's hopeless.
Ael, you need to spend some time at blogs run by actual bioscience researchers, who spend a decent chunk of each working day sifting credible work from bullshit. "Mike the Mad Biologist" is a good one, and the fellow who runs "Respectful Insolence" has made a project out of scams like "Ivermectin as a COVID treatment".
The Ivermectin business is even more transparent a scam than cryptocurrency, which is really saying something.
"Mike the Mad Biologist" is worth following just for his link farm. This gem popped up in his "Science" links just today: Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like receptor-binding domain allowing ACE2-mediated entry into human cells isolated from bats of Indochinese peninsula. Right now, this is in the "review" stage for possible publication in Nature. Bottom line is in the Abstract but it takes a little digging. The Laotian coronavirus these people turned up have (i) RBDs which differ from that of SARS-CoV-2 by only one or two residues, (ii) bind as efficiently to the hACE2 protein as the SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain does, and (iii) mediate hACE2-dependent entry into human cells, which is inhibited by antibodies neutralizing SARS-CoV-2.
That, gentlemen, is the trifecta. And another rather large nail in the coffin of the "lab leak" line of propaganda. What additional "function" could "gain of function" experiments possibly confer, that this Laotian bug does not already have?
Sorry, the article you pointed to was debunking a completely different article. And your article *itself* says that "the jury is still out on ivermectin". Presumably they would not have said that if there is no possible way that it could be a useful treatment.
Furthermore, public health authorities in many parts of the world have administered ivermectin as part of covid treatment. Take Uttar Pradesh for an example. It may be that Ivermectin has no clinical value against covid, but it isn't a ridiculously impossible conclusion.
Presumably it is important to stick to the science, especially if you accuse others of going all "faith based" in their medical practices.
Literally ANYTHING can be a "possible" treatment for a medical condition. There's no certainty whether the thing has efficacy until a peer-reviewed series of iin vitro and in vivo trials are completed.
The paper you linked to has no paper trail for me to follow to be sure that the study has, in fact, undergone such a process - as the paper I linked to points out, there is a lot of shady "research" out there, as well as some cherry-picked work that's designed to produce the desired conclusion. Simply put, you cite a paper, I cite a paper...what does that settle.
But the nitwits that are gobbling this dewormer ARE convinced it's settled. Rather than take advantage of a proven safe and effective vaccine they want this shit INSTEAD - that's why I posted the idiotic Garrison cartoon. Seabiscuit kicks Fauci's ass, hurr hurr! It's not that some desperate localities - Uttar Pradesh, seriously? - aren't trying anything they have to throw at this thing to see if it sticks. It's being so fucking stupid as to PREFER that to a known, effective, safe alternative because your head is up Trump's ass.
That's just fucking irretrievably stupid. Just like these people.
That's my point here.
I would never take ivermectin. Especially the veterinary version, people must by bonkers to do that. Plus it has adverse effects when a statin for my cholesterol and for lidocaine which i use for my sore sacroiliac and my torn meniscus. There are also adverse effects for several other meds when taken with ivermectin.
Although I am intrigued that Wikipedia says ivermectin has some antiviral effects in addition to its antiparasitic ones. Only proven so far in petri dishes though and not in testing on mammals other than in poor-quality studies. The word is that the dosages needed for the antiviral effect in humans would be toxic. But the NIH has been sponsoring a large scale trial since at least June of this year. Not only of ivermectin but also of fluticasone.
I wonder if anyone is looking at repurposing another old drug, gammaglobulin. They gave those shots to us about 60 years ago before deployment to SE Asia. Supposedly built up the immune system. And strengthening the immune system should be a major effort against Covid IMHO.
https://xkcd.com/1217/
Here's some news for you about that idiot Garrison:
https://gizmodo.com/anti-vaccine-cartoonist-ben-garrison-says-hes-got-covid-1847749901
Treating it with Ivermectin, vitamins, Zinc, and beet juice... won't go to hospital because Robert David Steele (another conspiracy guy) went into one and never came out.
Yeesh.
The most frustrating thing is that Garrison is going to get off with a mild reaction and then go around waving his big Republican dick about how he's badder than the 'rona and they were all lying to you, see, sheeple? Trump Rulz!
I'd say that the goddamn pathogen has ONE job to do right now, and it's to do it on Garrison and do it good and hard.
I'm hoping that bastard ends up in an ICU.
I've seen a couple of posts by nurses who work in Covid ICUs. Grim. Delta really does a number on you, if it gets you sick enough to need that sort of care.
One lady whose post at Something Awful was reposted to HCA earlier today reportedly worked both waves. The way she tells it, Delta pushes people in that group off the edge much more efficiently than Alpha ever did.
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