This is interesting, in a somewhat scary-as-hell way

Seems a Russian scientist in a bio lab broke a test tube and is dead from plague, and they're having a certain amount of panic attack on this.

From what I've read of past troubles they've had with bio warfare crap, I'd be scared too.

On the subject of "Why all the peanut allergy cases?"

Interesting piece on the subject.

Just as a general thing I've never understood

treating nurses badly in general; being a doctor and pissing off- and on- people who both help keep patients alive and keep you from killing one of them through being a very educated dumbass, well, aren't you special?

Oldest friend I have, his mom was a nurse, a very good one, and I remember someone saying something along the lines of "No doctor gives her any crap."  Knew a nurse who had long experience in dealing with pregnancy cases who had the time on the job and the record to tell a doctor to go to hell when needed, and make it stick.  Pissing them off without DAMN good reason would've been stupid on multiple points, but from what I've heard it still happens, especially with newer docs.

Lady used to know worked at a hospital and said it was referred to as 'Toxic Doctor Syndrome', and apparently they'd cracked down on it a lot over time, which was good to know.

Ah, the joys of wearing a sling almost all day,

especially in summer.  

This kind of sling both holds your arm, it uses a second strap to hold a foam block between your arm and your side to help isolate it, and make it VERY obvious to you if you try to  use it when you shouldn't.

And it's hot outside.  And not fun to sleep with it on.  But the doc and the PTs insist.  Especially since there was a relatively long wait between "This is what's wrong, and you need surgery" and being able to do  it, and that meant a bit more work for the surgeon, thus longer healing time.

It is improving, and yes, I'm doing the exercises I can at home, so we're moving along.  But damn, that doesn't change that I'm tired of this.

Unrelated matter, but interesting: Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation 'Significantly' Improves Depression in Just 10 Days, Trial Finds

Yes, my first thought was 'Hey, one more plus for getting laid!', but no, that's not the stimulation they speak of.

In "My, this could be very useful", we have

the start of the stillsuit.  Doesn't process your own body water, but still could be damned handy.


I mentioned the other day the Democrat calling for murder as a standard action by Democrats; I can't find the article, but remember Van Jones?  Self-described as a 'revolutionary Marxist' when he hit the airwaves?  He's having fits about the open communists running for office- or in office- in NYeffingCity.  The question that comes to mind is, does he actually think they're going too far, or just being too open about it?  Bunch of other Democrats as well, and they're smashing the actual American Democrats.  This will not go well.


The Brit government is still working hard to destroy the country.  Multiple rapist gets out of prison early, AND can't be deported.  Wonderful.


Someone mentioned and I looked up Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration.  One part in particular I wish had remained in it, would've saved a world of trouble in generations to come.


Unconnected with the above, the physical therapy on the shoulder has moved from "Let's loosen you up some" to "Let me know when this gets to the 'almost too much' point, which caused me to laugh and refer her to the torture scene in 'The Princess Bride', which made her laugh.

Too close to the edge for comfort at times.

And now I've got crap to take care of and not enough time.

BRM has an interesting piece on hospital bills

The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes, the universal billing codes hospitals use, and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.

Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as "inpatient" even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated by 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.

The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical training. A $20 app.

Holy crap. I'd not have thought of checking all that. 

Know someone with ADHD?

This just might be of help.

On the CPAP,

it doesn't seem to bother my sleeping, and I think it's helping; I feel less tired during the day.  Which, having pulled up the doctors report from the sleep study, definitely counts as a plus.  I think I mentioned using a nose pillow headpiece, single strap that splits at back of the head, one band high and one low to keep it in place.  They had choices between a mask and these when the respiratory therapist took me through the 'how it works' stuff, and I went with this.

Have been using the vinegar with water to wash things out each week, seems to work very well.  I've got a dish tub set aside specifically for this.

So: got used to it fairly fast, and it does seem to help.  

Now if I can stop doing graceful things and hurting myself, it'd make even more of a difference.

And we'll see how this goes

Today, wound up with the CPAP.  Two weeks- barring problems with fit and such- and we'll see how I settle in with it.

It was decided that a sleep study would be good for me

Know what a sleep study is?  They have you go to the room in the evening, screwing up your sleep schedule, put leads all over your head, a few on the chest and legs, then put a cannula on your nose to blow oxygen in.  

For two hours.

Then they take that off and put one of the whatever-the-hell it's called breathing things, which means having to strap this mask to your face and have it blow air when you inhale for the remainder of the night, with you expected to sleep through it.  

Let's just say that I'm about to fall over after being up all day after that, and if they decide to tell me "You should wear one of these every night for the rest of your life" I think I'd tell them to go to hell.  

Oh yes, so much fun.

One of the wonders of modern medicine

is cataract surgery.  Well, there's a thing that can happen in the years after that that causes a film to develop on the inside of the eye(no, can't remember the name).  It makes things blurry.  Which happened, it seems, right about the same time the stroke happened.

Which caused the weirdness in my eye to be attributed to the stroke.  Happily it wasn't, and there's a fairly simple fix: there's a laser they use to clean it up and clear your vision.  Which, at the last moment, as I was sitting solidly in place, having a nurse say "Sorry, my hands are cold" and put both on the back of my head.

Speaking of lost opportunities, I thought of saying "Not the usual reason I want a woman holding my head", but I didn't.

Couple of minutes later it was done.

Vision came back to normal in that eye.  But there are some tiny bits of the film that float around at times, just right to make you think a fly or something is buzzing around over there.  Which is distracting, but beats the alternative.

Holy crap, the paperwork...

other day got a big bunch of "This is not a bill, it's a summary of what happened" from my insurance.  

I can't yell about the insurance itself, it's pretty good.  And it's why I'm not currently broke.  But the paperwork that comes through...  And every one has about 2-3 pages of "Here are your rights to appeal" stuff in two languages.

But they've done the coverage they're supposed to, so not going ton complain too much.

I hadn't heard of multi-focal lens implants

for cataract surgery, so I hadn't heard about the cost.  Give this a few more years of development and who knows how good they'll be?  

We're going to find out.  And how much they'll cost then.

It' being the start of the weekend, and me being tired(more so than usual), I'm going to talk a bit

about my recent experience with the medical profession.

I haven't said a lot because it's personal, and I tend to keep that quiet, then I remembered Kevin talking about his liver transplant, and thought "so, may be this can help someone."

Short version is, I had a stroke.

Longer version, one night I was drying off after a shower and suddenly had to puke.  As in 'Barely made it to the toilet and puked up everything for at least 24 hours, it felt like.'  And when that was done, I had a headache.  Which hung around all the next day(some gratuitous 'Man, this sucks' left out).  And I was still throwing up, not always but some.  Including 'drink some water, ten seconds later head for the trash can because it's closer.'  That covered the next day.

Day after it was suggested I go to a emergency clinic if nothing else, with this still holding on.  Which I did, and the doc there said "You need to go to an ER, you need scans that we can't do here."  He did not say "I think it's this", just 'Go to a place that can do scans,' I decided that was a good idea and went.

The ER wasn't real busy so was seen pretty quickly, and the doc looked things over as he listened to the story, asked "Ever had a CAT scan?"  Why yes, I have.  "Well, you're going to have another."  And when it was done he announced "You had a stroke(Hemorrhagic, to be specific) and you're going to a room."  So they stuck me in, I think, critical care while I called the family.

And that led to more scans, both CAT and MRI, than I'd ever had before, and a total of a week in the hospital, though about halfway through they moved me to a regular room.  That was right after an odd episode I don't remember but daughter says scared hell out of her.  At some point in all this one of the doctors said "The stroke caused the headache and also caused the nausea that brought you here."  Which gave me a wonderfully expanded list of 'This can mean you had a stroke".   And almost all-new meds instead of the usuals I'd been taking for quite a while.  When I left the hospital I spent a week with family just to be on the safe side(be it noted I think daughter and some might well have tied me to a bed if I'd insisted on going home), which gave me critters for company, too.

So here I am: recovering, which is taking a while, somewhat nervously wondering if anything out of the usual is just life or "Should I worry?" and making sure the will is made out properly and so forth.

And that's most of the story.  So if you ever suddenly get sick and have a headache after, or vice versa, and it won't go away, go get checked.  You might just be sick with something, or you might have a problem.

Probably the only post for a few days(with one exception), so

start with that horse dewormer seems to be awfully useful.


Israel whacked a big-name terrorist the other day.  Look at his bodyguard's ID:

Need to go ahead and declare the UN a terrorist organization.


A MILITARY whistleblower has released a series of documents revealing 601 deaths of service personnel and a high rate of serious adverse events in clinical trials involving remdesivir, an antiviral commonly administered to Covid-19 patients.
And which, you may recall, a lot of doctors/hospitals were forcing on people who had Wuhan.
If this is indeed correct, a bunch of people belong in prison.


If you haven't seen the video of the tower catching the Starship booster, holy crap!




A very disgusting thing:
Approximately a quarter of the soldiers were just miles from Gaza in off-base housing near the IDF’s Tze’elim base when the attack began. A group of local Israelis – IDF reservists, police officers, and ordinary citizens – got them to the base, which Hamas terrorists were quickly heading toward. With his men in mortal danger, the U.S. team leader requested permission to open the arms locker so they could retrieve their firearms but was denied at the US Central Command level and “denied and/or ignored” at a level above that, according to a military intelligence analyst with knowledge of the mission and exfiltration.
Looks like lots of our troops are fine, but the upper leadership...


The sex slavery problem has gotten a lot worse, thanks to Biden/Harris & Co.

And that's almost all I've got time for

Some things before I go outside to take care of a couple of things

Of course the socialists want to give more money to the UN, especially to an agency that will harm Jews for them.


Yes, Biden is still a screaming asshole lying hoplophobe.



Being vaccinated against Covid sharply increased the risk heart attack patients would die or suffer heart failure after heart attacks, a major new peer-reviewed study in leading journal Vaccine shows. Alex Berenson has written about the study on his Substack, Unreported Truths.


Speaking of the NIH, more on how Fauci helps screw the world.


Oh, holy shit...

The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center are suing the LAPD, the city of Los Angeles and multiple police officers, alleging they violated the business owners’ constitutional rights and demanding an unspecified amount in damages. Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit. 

Officers raided the facility on Oct. 18, 2023, and detained the lone female employee while they searched the business, the lawsuit said. However, they didn’t find a single cannabis plant and only saw a typical medical facility with rooms used for conducting x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans and MRIs, the owners said. 
...

At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine. MRI machines are tube-shaped scanners that use incredibly strong magnetic fields to create images of the brain, bones, joints and other internal organs.

An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.
I am informed that, besides any damage done by the rifle impacting the machine, dumping the helium that way can cause very expensive and permanent damage.  I'd hope at least some of it comes out of the pockets of these idiot Drug Warriors.
'Higher than usual energy use'...

A study may have been pulled because of political pressure?

Considering all the crap that's happened, why would that be a surprise?
"The study generated a lot of publicity due to its implications for immune suppression and cancers arising from repeat exposure to Covid infections and vaccination. The authors’ findings have since been confirmed in other peer-reviewed scientific studies, but in the highly-politicised environment at the time, they were new and controversial.

The study was then swiftly retracted under strange circumstances, with the lead author requesting the retraction of his own paper. Stranger still, the same editor who approved the paper for publication then did a 180 and approved its retraction. Some speculated that Jiang had been pressured to request the retraction in a politically-motivated effort to bury evidence of Covid vaccine harms.

Now, one of the authors of the study alleges that this was indeed the case."
I don't have time to read the entire piece right now, but the start is real interesting, and I don't want to lose it, so there's the link.

A: I very much hope this holds to be true

And B: Faster, please.
Results from phase two clinical trials at UT Southwestern Medical Center showed that a suspension of gold nanocrystals taken daily by patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson's disease (PD) significantly reversed deficits of metabolites linked to energy activity in the brain and resulted in functional improvements. The findings, published in the Journal of Nanobiotechnology, could eventually help bring this treatment to patients with these and other neurodegenerative diseases, according to the authors.

Social media connection to childhood depression

They seem to fit together nicely.  Or very badly, if you prefer.

I've just skimmed this so far, but it fits with what a lot of people have observed.

Few years back I said if I had a kid now, they'd have a phone on which they could make calls and send text messages, with Fecesbook and all the others locked out.  That's way too much crap and distraction and pressure for kids to deal with.

Also, what I consider a mental health problem: news about Taylor Swift went from music news to "THIS IS WHO SHE'S DATING NOW!!" as top of the page on a lot of news sites.  Along with "She's an enemy of the republic!" thrown in with some.  Talk about mental illness...

Yes, they're trying to scare everyone into getting the newest Wuhan shot;

yes, they have certain problems in pushing it.  One is the massive distrust- to say the least- from the truth leaking out about the start of all this, the other is all the medical types saying 'Screw that'.
And yet Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the one COVID-related story that sums up the threat currently posed by the Wuhan Flu: "Health care workers skip COVID-19 shots." According to the report, a survey of millions of healthcare workers at over 18,000 facilities shows a total lack of concern. The CDC found that "just 17.2% of hospital workers overall were up to date with COVID-19 shots" and only slightly higher for nursing home workers at 22.8%.

Speaking of, Insty linked to this:
A carefully done paper presented at the recent AHA meeting and published in Circulation found no increase in sudden cardiac death in NCAA athletes. In fact, the authors reported a decline in sudden cardiac death during the years 2021-2022.
They do note
The authors acknowledge limitations. The main one I think is the absence of data on resuscitated arrests. This is important because of the positive trend of increased availability of automatic external defibrillators or AEDs. Namely, it’s possible that there was an increase in cardiac arrests, but not cardiac death—due to better interventions. (In fact, the lower incidence of sudden death in recent years is likely to be due to AEDs).
Which leaves real worry as to the side effects- some known, some suspected- of that vaccine.  Especially when the asshats in charge wanted to- and STILL want- to force it on kids.