Category: Blog

This is absolutely horrifying

Yes, this is a real story about something that really happened and apparently this isn’t the first time either.

The story, in brief;

  • Unvaccinated knobstick gets Covid and ends up in the hospital
    • to be completely honest, neither side in this drama has commented on the knobstick’s vaccine status but, given the circumstances, I think it’s a safe bet
  • Knobstick’s condition deteriorates and he ends up in the ICU on a ventilator
  • Mrs. Knobstick demands that the hospital give him ivermectin
  • Everyone from the nursing assistants to the Chief Medical Officer at the hospital thank Mrs. Knobstick for the suggestion but inform her that Mr.Knobstick will continue to receive treatments that have actual evidence supporting their use and not something someone on Facebook said was a miracle cure.
  • Mrs. Knobstick goes doctor shopping and finds some quack who prescribes Mr. Knobstick ivermectin without ever having examined, or even seen him.
  • Mrs. Knobstick triumphantly presents Dr. Quack’s ivermectin prescription to the hospital. The hospital informs her that Dr. Quack doesn’t have privileges at their facility and, therefore, isn’t allowed to admit or treat patients there.
  • Mrs. Knobstick SUES THE HOSPITAL AND WINS. The judge orders the hospital to grant temporary privileges to Dr. Quack and to begin treatment with ivermectin

So here you have a judge, someone trained in law and not medicine, overruling the entire medical staff of a hospital in favor of a single doctor who is promoting a treatment that THE FDA HAS SPECIFICALLY WARNED AGAINST USING

A little more detail on Dr. Quack; he is a member, or maybe the founder, of an organization with some Orwellian Newspeak name like “Front Line Covid Treatment Action Alliance” that actively promotes the use of ivermectin for covid. He also has said that ivermectin is more effective than any of the vaccines at preventing covid (it isn’t) and that the FDA not authorizing its use is comparable to the Holocaust (WTF?!)

The hospital, of course, complied with the court order but the ICU staff did exactly what they should have under the circumstances and refused to administer the ivermectin. No one in the facility had ever given ivermectin before, it wasn’t in the hospital formulary and it hadn’t been verified by their pharmacy. Mr. Knobstick still got the ivermectin but Dr. Quack had to come do it himself.

Neither side has commented in detail about Mr. Knobstick’s condition since starting ivermectin. The most a spokesman would say is that he “hasn’t gotten worse”.

Edited to add; and when Mr. Knobstick inevitability dies from complications of Covid-19, do you think Mrs. Knobstick will change her thinking about vaccines and the validity of FDA approved or authorized treatments? Of course she won’t. She’ll go on Facebook and every mommy blog or fitness blog in existence and lament how her poor husband would still be alive if only the Pharmaceutical-Hospital-Reverse Vampire axis of evil had given Mr. Knobstick ivermectin before it was too late, oh and, by the way, don’t forget to follow the link to the Knobstick Memorial GoFundMe page.

I’d like to see more of this

I tried to find a copy of this clip that isn’t embedded in someone’s tweet but I couldn’t so here it is. This is Illinois Governor Pritzker dealing with a right-wing nutbag reporter at a press briefing about the state’s Covid response.

Semi-accurate transcript:

Right-Wing Nutbag Reporter (RWNBR): [recording starts mid-sentence] …protests out here this morning and parents were crying, as governor you should try and calm people’s nerves, maybe, or can you? Because there are low risk groups too…

Unidentified Woman (UW) (off screen): Amy, as a supposed reporter, you should probably stop the misinformation. We are done here. Thank you.

Gov. Pritzker: Thank you. [starts to walk away from podium]

UW (still off screen): You know how you stop schools from being closed? You stop complaining about mask wearing.

[inaudible cross-talk, RWNBR appears to say something like “…read some of those studies”]

Gov. Pritzker: [walks back to podium] I’m going to take the podium again and just respond to that. Let me just say this; you are spreading misinformation. I wish you would stop spreading misinformation. You come in here with a political agenda and you spread misinformation and I just think you should stop. We now need to protect our children, we need to protect the people in our communities, parents, grandparents, teachers; you are working against that. And it is extremely upsetting for all of us who are trying to keep the rest of the state safe. [Walks away from podium]

Follow up

Taking the CES-A exam started out a little rough. The deal is that they email you a personalized link and password to log in to the test, then you just log in from a computer and away you go. It is a proctored exam but fortunately the proctor was someone I had worked closely with for years at a previous job so he was tolerant of the shenanigans that I went through before the test.

The difficulty started when I couldn’t find the email with the link and password to take the test. I dug through all my email accounts, all my trash folders and all my spam folders with no luck. I knew I had received the email because I remembered looking at it and specifically thinking that I needed to save it and not throw it away but I could not find it anywhere. Looked in all my personal accounts and my work account and nothing. Fortunately there is a help line number to call, which I did and left a message. To the testing organization’s credit, they called back pretty quickly and the problem was identified easily. Somehow I had managed to give them the email address that I use exclusively for paying utility bills; gas, electric, internet, all that. The only explanation that I have is that my browser must have auto-filled that address when I was filling out the testing application and I just didn’t notice. I hadn’t checked that email account because it never occurred to me that I would have used it but once I checked it, there was the link and the password. Phew.

As happens most times when I take multiple choice tests, I managed to zip through the questions pretty quickly and, also like most times when I take multiple choice tests, I was absolutely sure that I was getting every single one wrong.

At the end, I did manage to pass with 88% which I feel pretty good about having gone in cold with absolutely no preparation. I could have done better if I had studied since there were a good handful of questions about things that we had consciously decided to not do when we were putting together the protocols and procedures for our ECMO program. Getting into the details on that would take a lot of arm waving and a lot of pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, which I’m happy to do but I can’t imagine it would be particularly interesting to anyone who isn’t a total nerd about mechanical circulatory support. I will say, though, that the questions did reinforce, in my mind, that we had made the correct decision when we chose to not monitor the parameters that they were asking about on the test. It’s kind of neat but it doesn’t really contribute anything to the safety or efficacy of the treatment and it is very likely to just cause angst and confusion on a day-to-day or hour-to-hour basis so we really felt it was better to skip it in our program.

So the final outcome is that I get a $1 raise as a certification bonus and I can now add CES-A after my name and, as anyone who works in healthcare knows, the only really important thing is how many letters you have after your name.

(Not really though. In fact I find it uniquely annoying when people add every degree and credential they have after their names. it makes them look like they’re trying to compensate for something. I’ll just stick with plain and simple RN, thanks.)

Treatment #4; Basement Demolition days 1 & 2

This is something of a theme already but I feel moved to observe once again that the fatigue is real. I had planned to post most of this yesterday but the act of sitting down in front of a computer and trying to come up with words was going to take more energy than I had left at the end of the day. I messaged my sleep medicine doc regarding this whole fatigue thing and he said there were some things we could try but first he wants to check me for narcolepsy.

Now I’m all in favor of due diligence but I’m pretty sure there is a better explanation for my excessive daytime sleepiness than narcolepsy.

Anyway, the treatment schedule, as I understand it, is for two more weekly doses of BCG and then take 4-ish weeks off, do another scope and see what happens. This is good news in that it means I only have two more doses before I get some time off which will allow, hopefully, my energy levels to recover a bit.

Simultaneous to all this has been the demolition of the basement. I had more to blather on about with this but I’m kind of running down again so I’ll pick this up later.

Life’s little annoyances

Why does Windows not tell me when my graphics drivers are out of date? I get notifications that I can link my Android phone, which I don’t have, to my computer, which I don’t really want connected to my Android phone, which I don’t have, or any other phone that I do have for that matter but there isn’t anything that will tell me that my drivers are two patches out of date.

Apparently this is what I worry about when I stop watching the news.

I really need to stop paying attention to the news

We are so, so, SO fucked.

The new Republican talking point is that it’s the CDC recommending for people to start wearing masks again that is causing all the vaccine hesitancy in red states. The Governor of Missouri was on Fox this morning and said the following;

The recently updated CDC guidance regarding mask wearing for fully vaccinated individuals is disappointing and concerning. It’s disappointing because it is inconsistent with the overwhelming evidence surrounding the efficacy of the vaccines and their proven results, and it only serves to disrupt the increases we are seeing in vaccine uptake. This self-inflicted setback encourages skepticism and vaccine hesitancy at a time when the goal is to prevent serious illnesses and deaths from COVID-19 through vaccination. It’s concerning because the nation’s top public health agency appears to be cowering to the political pressures of those who only want to force mandates and shutdowns, which only further prolong the recovery we as a nation are working towards. This decision only promotes fear and further division among our citizens.

How is Missouri fairing with the latest surge in cases? I’m glad you asked!


This pandemic is never ever EVER going to end and all it’s going to take is one unlucky mutation incubated in some ignorant-ass yokel and The Stand will no longer be a work of fiction.

There is nothing that I, personally, can do about any of this and when I think about the fact that I am likely looking at ANOTHER year of wearing isolation gear and shoveling corpses in the ICU it just makes my dissatisfaction with current circumstances in general that much worse.

So this is it. I’m swearing off news media for at least a week. Maybe a couple months. FSM knows I’m not going to have to follow anything too closely to know when the surge hits the Trump-Humper counties in Washington because I’ll be neck deep in it at work.

I’m counting on my friends and family to keep me up to date in anything interesting and non-covid related that happens. Also, if anyone has any suggestions for podcasts with episodes of around 20-30 minutes that I can listen to on my commute I would welcome them.


Remarkable self-awareness

Again stepping away from the cancer doom-and-gloom for a moment, I ran across the above comment in a libertarian discussion forum. I thought it perfectly encapsulated the thought process of the overwhelming majority of self-identified “libertarians”, especially the mental gymnastics required to somehow be wrong about everything all the time.

For those who can’t effectively see the tiny text, it reads as follows;

We’ve spent years with the position that we didn’t need the state to force us to behave. That we could be smart and responsible without having our hands held.

And then in the span of a year, a bunch of you idiots who are definitely reading this right now went ahead and did everything you could to prove that no, we definitely are NOT smart enough to do anything intelligent on our own, and that we apparently DO need the government to force us to not be stupid.

All you had to do was either get a shot OR put a fucking mask on and stop getting sick for freedom. But no, that was apparently too much to ask. So now the state has all the evidence they’ll ever need that, without being forced to do something, we’re too stupid to do it.

So thanks for setting us back, you dumb fucks.

Edit: I’m getting called an authoritarian bootlicker for advocating that people be responsible voluntarily. Awesome, guys.

Some Rando on the Internet

Several people, myself included, have mentioned that movies like Jaws have to be re-evaluated in the light of the pubic and especially political response to the pandemic. I have never had much faith that the general public will behave responsibly, even under the most extreme circumstances, but I always raged about how unrealistic Jaws was because the mayor of the town refused to close public beaches in spite of the fact that it was nearly certain that more people would be killed by the shark. I couldn’t imagine anyone being that stupid and shortsighted. I think it’s pretty clear now that many (most?) politicians would opt for the easy, expedient solution that is beneficial in the very short term even if it means worse political fallout in the medium- to long term. Like keeping businesses open because “ERMAHGHERD TEH ECONOMIES!” even though that means thousands of people will die a few weeks from now.

All this goes to explain why we’re looking at yet another Covid surge and could potentially be seeing 200,000 new cases per day nationwide again by October.

Keep wearing your masks.

Edited to add;

Or, and stay with me here, it is just possible that some of us don’t wish death on people with whom we disagree politically. Crazy to think, huh?

This pandemic is never going to end.

edited further to add;

More thoughts on jumping out of an airplane

I’ve done this twice now and, again, cannot recommend it highly enough. There is no way to adequately convey what it’s like. Which is why I’m going to half-ass trying to explain exactly that.

Your cerebral cortex, what us medical professionals refer to as “the wrinkly part of your brain” understands parachutes, at least on a general level. Not in any exact detail necessarily but in broad strokes. It also has at least some impression of their record for safety and reliability. It understands that humans are tool-using animals and that we can greatly extend our capabilities through technology.

Your cerebellum, known to medical professionals as “the lumpy bit near the base of the skull”, doesn’t understand any of that. The cerebellum hasn’t had a major update to its operating system in probably 100,000 years. The cerebellum is mostly in charge of your autonomic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that controls things like the fight-or-flight response. It’s still on the lookout for sabre-tooth tigers and hasn’t really figured out any other way to see the world.

So there you are up in an airplane, which is kind of throwing the cerebellum off a little already, and then you’re going to do something that, as far as your cerebellum is concerned, will be absolutely, 100% assured fatal. This tends to cause a certain amount of unease.

Then, of course, the parachute opens and you float safely back down to earth.

Now remember, as far as your cerebellum was concerned, ten minutes ago you did something that should have, without any doubt or question, caused your demise. It was as certain as night following day that you were going to die. No avoiding it, no other possible outcome.

And then you don’t die. And not only that, you’re not even hurt!

Just imagine how confused that must make your cerebellum. Here is this thing that hasn’t learned much of anything new for the last 100 centuries and something just happened that it has absolutely no way of explaining.

Anyway, it’s kind of like that.