Blog – Page 7 – Barrelhaven

This is the best thing I’ve listened to in a while

This is another one of those musical finds that more or less randomly dropped into my lap. I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. I listen to music while I’m doing homework, I listen to music while I’m doing contract tracing, I listen to music when I’m trying to settle my brain before bed. I have pretty extensive music collection but looked at from a broad perspective there are really only five or six genres of music represented and recently it’s all been feeling a little stale.

Some time ago, and I can’t even remember where I heard about it, I downloaded the Boomplay app. For those not familiar, Boomplay is kind of Spotify for the African continent. My exposure to afro-pop is limited to the very small collection of artists that have broken in to the U.S. market to some extent so I was expecting to be able to find something new and (hopefully) interesting.

In one of those tiny sparks of serendipity, the first song that was playing when I switched it on was this

Angélique Kpasseloko Hinto Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin Kidjo is a musician, actor and activist who was born in Benin in West Africa and that is the extent of what I know about her.

In 2018 she released a cover of Remain In Light by the Talking Heads. The whole album.

It. Is. Amazing.

One of the best ways to get me hooked into a song is to take an element that is familiar and transforming it into something very different, DJ Shadow using a sample from El Condor Pasa (If I Could) in You Can’t Go Home Again, for example, or Diane Birch’s Velveteen Age EP. Remain In Light is one of my favorite Talking Heads albums (along with almost all the others if I’m honest) and it works surprisingly well as an afro-pop album. It is also unquestionably something different, even if all the songs are more than 40 years old at this point.

At some point in the near future, once I’m able to stop compulsively listening to this album, I want to dig in to some of her other material. I’m hoping more discoveries await.

Oh look!

Now that I’ve neglected this to the point that no one is reading anymore, it’s safe to post again.

The truth is there hasn’t been anything happening on the cancer treatment front, I’ve more or less settled into a routine with work, and my mental health is better overall than it’s been in quite a while. Of course that has meant I haven’t needed to whine about anything here. And I pretty much still don’t but there are definitely things on the horizon.

Looming largest in my mind right now is another covid surge. I’m sure any number of the none people reading this have heard me lamenting that I couldn’t do another year of covid and it’s looking like another year of covid is a good possibility. Having spent no small amount of time ruminating on this, right now, from a mental standpoint I think I actually could do another year of covid. I would certainly be happier to not have to but, strange as it may seem, having a couple months mostly away from the bedside may have allowed me to recharge my batteries a little bit. Well maybe not another year of covid, maybe six months. I don’t know. Anyway, the point is I could definitely do one day at a time which is more than I would have been willing to say a few weeks ago.

As an aside – there really isn’t enough information on the omicron variant to make any definitive statements about what the next year is going to look like. What is noteworthy is that in South Africa, where omicron was first identified, the delta variant was pretty much the exclusive strain being passed around and omicron is out-competing it and is on it’s way to becoming the new dominant strain. It is a deeply concerning variant and an excellent reason to get your vaccine booster ASAP if you haven’t already.

Anyway, this revelation that stopping to rest for a while can replenish one’s stores of mental and physical energy is the latest in a series of startling discoveries I have made recently now that my brain has had time to reboot.

The first of these came to me maybe two weeks ago. I believe I have lamented here before that I didn’t really know what to do with the advice to “make time for yourself”. The foundation of my difficulties was that I had more things to do than time to do them and it was impossible for me to make time for anything else. Short of actually making time (see any number of science-fiction stories to learn why that isn’t a good idea) I genuinely couldn’t comprehend how I was supposed to “make time for yourself”.

My revelation came while putting together a to-do list for the week. As was usual, I knew there wasn’t going to be time to get to everything so I was triaging and prioritizing what I really had to get done and what I could let slide and it occurred to me that I could just put myself on the to-do list and treat it the way I would any other project. And that the time-for-myself project didn’t always have to be the one that got dropped when it came down to prioritizing for time. If I had been on the road to Damascus I would have fallen to the ground. This was a revolutionary technique that I could use to try and…

…right… make time for yourself… like everyone has been telling you to…

Ahem.

Right. So I’ve been making time for myself and the world hasn’t ended yet.

Clever Title

Back to school. This is (hopefully) my penultimate term in my masters program and what happens after that is not at all certain. I had hoped to have the basement done before I had to start school again but in spite of that I think I’m at a point where I’ll be able to manage.

Work has been interesting. There is an actual sick (in the previously discussed “sick or not-sick” sense) patient on the unit right now, one of the kind that I have spent the last 5-ish years specializing to take care of. The unit at my current place of employment has some very smart, very capable nurses and doctors but very few of them have a lot of experience caring for specifically this kind of patient. This is the kind of patient I would very much like to see more of on the unit and, I think, that is a goal that is shared by the Powers-That-Be at the hospital.

So there’s this sick patient and one of the assistant managers texted me to ask if I could come in to work tonight to help out. A couple more bits of relevant information; I worked last night, it was a pretty exhausting shift, and I didn’t get much sleep today for several different reasons. I’m really tired, is the point to all that. Even so, if this had been not that many years ago, I would have said yes without even pausing to think. I had told managers and physicians that I would live at the hospital 24/7 if that’s what was required to take care of the patient and I nearly did on more than one occasion.

I’m going to go on a little side-track here but we’ll get back to the main storyline in a moment. I have frequently thought that when I tell someone about the long hours and short sleep that I put myself through to take care of these complicated patients, they infer that this is due to some depth of character and dedication to the nursing profession that drives me to do these things. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, being a bedside nurse is kind of a shit job. All too often it is literally a shit job. Yes, it pays well, but really the only thing that makes all the, literal and figurative, shit worth it is if you’re doing something interesting. I pushed myself taking care of these patients because I wanted people to keep sending those kinds of patients to our unit. I wanted the admitting services to know that they could dump the sickest patient imaginable on us and we’d take it happily. Being a nurse is the only thing I know how to do that someone will actually pay me for so, if I need to keep working as a nurse, I need a good supply of crazy sick patients so I don’t get fed up with all the nonsense. This could potentially be a much longer tirade but I don’t want to lose focus.

The end of the story for today’s incident is that I did not go in to work. I really wanted to for all the above discussed reasons, but I also knew that it would really not be good for me and self-care won out.

Also, tomorrow we have our first D&D game in almost two months and I am not missing it.

Updates

Updates are called for;

House:
- The basement floor project is still in a holding pattern. Last word was that everything should be in place to have it done by the end of the month
- The new plumbing leak is also in a holding pattern. There is slightly better news than I expected here. Not good news, but not as bad as it could be. The leak was from the seal on the toilet in the bathroom upstairs. It was fast and (relatively) inexpensive to fix. We are waiting on hearing back from the people who are going to come and fix the floor and/or ceiling to find out exactly what is required there.
Work:
- I’m going back to work on the unit starting next week. With the most recent covid surge settling down, Employee Health isn’t as busy as they have been and don’t need as much help. There are certainly other things I could do for light duty but the fact is I’m probably recovered enough to just go back to work. I’m never going to feel ready and the only way to find out if I can do it is to do it.
Health
- Health is also in a holding pattern. No news has been good news.
- Mental health is honestly as good as it can be under the circumstances. The previous post announcing the bathroom leak is typical of how I’ve been reacting to new difficulties recently. I’ve been feeling very brittle; when something hits I kind of break into a thousand little pieces and can’t see anything but crisis and my brain does everything it can to persuade me that things are as bad as they can possibly be and they will never be fixed. This is a known issue. I haven’t had much luck moderating my initial, disproportionately negative, response but I have been getting better at pulling myself together again.

The fact is, in spite of everything I, right now, today, I feel pretty good both physically and mentally. There is still a lot on my plate and I’ve been ready for all this shit to be done for about 6 months or so, but the struggle can continue.

Yeah, this is about what I’ve come to expect

Remember, a couple of times now I think, I mentioned how everything suddenly got much worse right after I started feeling like I was getting a few things off my plate? Well the basement floor is almost done (just ignore that it is still “almost” done after two months of wrangling with the floor people), I’m on a term break from school until the end of the month, I’ve got a three month break from cancer treatment, and I’m still, for the time being, working from home. Things are settling down and maybe, just maybe, I can come out of crisis mode for a while.

Yesterday, I found this in the downstairs bathroom –

That would be a leak in the plumbing somewhere in the ceiling. The bulge was not there two days ago and as for the (what are hopefully) patches of mildew (and not black mold) I couldn’t say how long they’ve been there. I don’t routinely inspect my ceilings because I am a shit homeowner, apparently.

The plumber is supposed to arrive in about fifteen minutes and then we get to spend a few thousand dollars and FSM knows how long having at least one bathroom destroyed (maybe both bathrooms if our usual luck continues) and then we get to spend another few thousand dollars and FSM knows how long getting it put back together again.

We made a big mistake when we bought instead of just continuing to rent.

I can’t even with this

This popped up on one of the nursing forums I lurk on so I can’t absolutely vouch for its authenticity, but it seems unfortunately plausible. Someone wants to put themselves on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation at home rather than get vaccinated.

As a point of information, this is what someone on ECMO looks like:

I assure you there is a patient under all that equipment

And just for further fun, this is what happens when a component on the ECMO circuit fails and you have to swap it out for a new one:

That was a real patient (I was filming) and once my two colleagues there put the clamps on the circuit the patient was, by some quite reasonable definitions, dead and wasn’t really alive again until they took the clamps off.

So yeah, go ahead and do this at home. Good plan. WAY better than getting vaccinated.

Edited to add – Looking at the picture and video above, I am almost positive they are the same patient. I remember when we were getting set up to change the oxygenator there was a great deal of unease because the patient was entirely dependent on the pump to keep his blood circulating. His heart was not actually beating at all.

A normal person with even a minimally functioning heart will produce a tracing on an arterial blood pressure line that looks similar to this;

The red line there measures the pressure changes in an artery (usually the radial artery in the wrist, the same place you feel for someone’s pulse) with every beat of the heart.

If you look closely at the two monitors in the picture above that have an art-line tracing on them, you will see this;

Those lines are, in fact, flat. This is not all that unusual for people with bad hearts that have a pump doing all the work for them but what it does mean is that if something stops the pump, like someone clamping the circuit so they can change the oxygenator, all the patient’s blood pressure goes away. Not “low blood pressure” but “no blood pressure”.

So again, go ahead. Do this at home. What could possibly go wrong?

If you want to learn more about extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, check your local library!

Or just ask and I’ll talk about it for as long as you’ll let me.

Two days until round 2

Time for some brief updates on everything.

I had previously decided that I was going to take a short break from school during the month of October and that has gone through, been approved and is all taken care of. I’ll be back to working on my degree in November. I’m not terribly excited about the delay, but I think it will allow me to get enough other fires put out that when I do go back I will have a much easier time focusing on schoolwork, so I think this will be a good thing.

The basement is frustratingly close to being done. We have been wrestling with the people who are going to replace the bits of the floor that are missing since the second week of August with almost nothing to show for it. Supposedly they’ll have all the flooring tiles, adhesive, baseboards, etc. this week and the installers are tentatively scheduled for Thursday. If everything goes well. Maybe. It’s not certain.

I’m trying to remain optimistic that the floor will be done by the second week of October and then The Great Unpacking will commence. The Great Unpacking should only take a few days, a week at most, and then the basement will be done.

Side effects; the fatigue is way better. I’m still not 100%, maybe more like 75-80%. Just in time to get scoped in two days and start round two of treatment. Round two will not necessarily kick off right away, but this is what is going to set the schedule. I am hoping that with only three treatments instead of six, maybe I’ll only be half as fatigued afterwards. Time will tell.

Work; I will confess to being somewhat anxious about work, likely for no good reason at all. As previously mentioned, My doctor wrote me a note authorizing essentially indefinite light duty and I plan to take advantage of that. I don’t think there is anything that my employer can legally do to pressure me to return to my usual job but I also have to wonder what kind of reception I’m going to get after slacking off for 2-3 months. Time will tell.

Events may be aligning such that I will only have to deal with work and treatment during the month of October which will almost be like a vacation compared to the last six months. Of course the last time I said something like that we ended up having a global pandemic, the country elected one of the top three worst presidents in the history of the United States, the basement flooded (again) and I changed jobs three times.

I’m keeping my mouth shut this time.

The List of Medications

One of the more common objections to the covid vaccine is that no one who claims to be a Good Christian™ (and it’s always Christians) can get the vaccine because it was made using “aborted fetuses”.

As anyone with more than two functioning neurons could guess, reality is a bit more complicated. The Oxford-AstraZenica vaccine was, in fact, developed using Human Embryonic Kidney 293 (HEK-293) cells. These cells are commonly used to replicate viral proteins which are then used to deliver mRNA sequences. The HEK-293 cells themselves are not a part of the finished products.

“But wait,” you might say, “If the AstraZenica vaccine is the only one that is manufactured using HEK-293 cells, why don’t they just take one of the other ones?” Well here’s the thing, HEK-293 cells are also frequently used in the early stages of development to test the function and potential toxicity of a new drug, and every single one of the covid vaccines was tested on HEK-293 cells. What can a Good Christian™ do but decline to take these vaccines that were tested on ~~the cloned cells of an immortalized cell line originally derived from the kidneys of a fetus that was either aborted or miscarried, no one is quite sure which, in 1973~~ poor innocent murdered babies.

The problem is that there are a METRIC CRAPTON (2.2 imperial craptons) of drugs that are tested for safety using HEK-293 cells.

(Blatantly stolen from https://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughcatholiclenses/2021/01/if-any-drug-tested-on-hek-293-is-immoral-goodbye-modern-medicine/)

Common over the counter medicines tested on HEK-293 cells or derivative cell lines.

Tylenol / Acetaminophen (1, 2)
Advil / Motrin / Ibuprofen (1, 2)
Aspirin / Acetylsalicylic Acid (ASA) (1, 2)
Aleve / Naproxen (1, 2)
Pseudoephedrine / Sudafed / / SudoGest, Suphedrine (1, 2)
Diphenhydramine / Benadryl (it is used so much with HEK293 that it has a page for using it and HEK293 together for further studies on the FDA site, 2)
Loratadine / Claritin (1, 2)
Dextromethorphan / Delsym / Robafen Cough / Robitussin (1, 2)
Guaifenesin / Mucinex (1)
Tums / Calcium Carbonate (1, 2)
Maalox / Aluminum Hydroxide and Magnesium Hydroxide (1)
Docusate / Colace / Ex-Lax Stool Softener (1, 2)
Senna Glycoside / Sennoside / Senna / Ex-Lax / Senokot (1)
Pepto-Bismol / Bismuth Subsalicylate (1)
Phenylephrine / Preparation H / Vazculep / Suphedrine PE (1, 2)
Mepyramine / Pyrilamine (1, 2)
Lidocaine / Lidoderm / Recticare (1, 2)

Common prescription drugs tested on HEK-293 cells or derivative cell lines.

Levothyroxine / Synthroid / Tirosint / Levoxyl (1, 2)
Atorvastatin / Lipitor (1, 2)
Amlodipine / Norvasc (1, 2)
Metoprolol / Toprol XL / Lopressor (1, 2)
Omeprazole / Prilosec OTC / Zegerid OTC / OmePPi (1, 2)
Losartan / Cozaar (1, it is used so much in testing the FDA has a page on using it with HEK293)
Albuterol / Salbutamol / ProAir / Ventolin (1, 2)
Sacubitril / Valsartan / Entresto (2 studies mentioned in FDA application)
Tenapanor / Ibsrela (1 study mentioned in FDA application, 2)
Enbrel / Etanercept (1, 2)
Azithromycin / Zithromax (1, 2)
Hydroxychloroquine / Plaquenil (1, 2)
Remdesivir / Veklury (1, 2)
Dapagliflozin / Farxiga / Ipragliflozin / Suglat / Enavogliflozin / Jardiance (1)
Ivermectin / Stromectol (1, 2)
Canagliflozin / Invokana / Sulisent / Prominad (1 study mentioned in FDA application)
Metformin / Glucophage / Riomet / Glumetza (1, 2)
Cerivastatin / Baycol / Lipobay / Fluvastatin / Lescol / Pitavastatin / Livalo / Pravastatin / Pravachol / Rosuvastatin / Crestor (1)
Simvastatin / FloLipid / Zocor (1)
Oxbryta / Voxelotor (1 study mentioned in FDA application)
Lisinopril / Qbrelis / Zestril / Prinivil (1, 2)

Take particular note, if you will, of numbers 12 and 15 on the list of prescription medications and you may spot some familiar names if you’ve been following the trends in quack covid treatments.

Essentially, if Good Christians™ are going to take a moral stand against being vaccinated because of their opposition to abortion, they’re pretty much going to have to give up on modern medicine. Fortunately, at least one employer is asking anyone requesting a religious exemption from the vaccine to do just that.

If it’s a sincerely held belief, you have to be consistent, right?

I think pretty much everyone saw this coming

Two separate incidents, one anecdote from a nursing forum I lurk on and the other a story from NPR.

keep in mind, this isn’t happening at the start of the pandemic, this is nine months after the development of not one, but several safe and effective vaccines. This is something that shouldn’t happen in any, even semi-functional society.

I’m not sure where we go from here.

Follow up

In an 11-page decision, Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Michael Oster Jr. wrote that there “was no doubt that the medical and scientific communities do not support the use of ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19.”
“While this court is sympathetic to the plaintiff and understands the idea of wanting to do anything to help her loved one, public policy should not and does not support allowing physicians to try ‘any’ type of treatment on human beings,” he wrote.

Unfortunately, and I really hate that I think like this after close to two years of this nonsense, Mr. Knobstick looks like he might actually survive. I say “unfortunately” because if he does survive he will be held up as the poster-child for the use of ivermectin. Instead of going on every mommy blog and fitness blog on the internet lamenting how Mr. Knobstick would still be alive if only they had given him ivermectin before it was too late, and please follow the link to the Knobstick Memorial GoFundMe page, they will both go on every mommy blog and fitness blog on the internet crowing about how Mr. Knobstick was saved at the last minute when the evil doctors and nurses at the hospital were forced to give him life saving ivermectin, and please follow the link to the Knobstick Legal Defense GoFundMe page.

Oh well. At least this judge knows enough to keep out of the business of practicing medicine.