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.
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.
Yes, this is a real story about something that really happened and apparently this isn’t the first time either.
The story, in brief;
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 continue to feel a little better. I’m on light duty at least through September 10, longer if I still don’t have my energy back. The complication is that on September 30 I go see the urologist for more testing and will likely start another short course of BCG. What this means is that I will likely be ready to come off light duty about the time that I will need to go back on light duty for round two. Awkward.
I felt enough better today that I made an attempt at chipping away on schoolwork. I won’t say that I accomplished much but it’s more than I’ve been able to do for the last few weeks so I’m still counting it as a win.
The basement also continues to make progress. The walls are done and (almost) all painted, as I may have mentioned previously, and the floor may be done as early as Friday which would mean that the only major project left is unpacking. Having the basement finished is going to be a huge weight off my mind and (hopefully) it won’t flood again in December.
Things could be worse.
It has been almost two weeks since my last dose of BCG. The week of the 16th (the week immediately following my last treatment) was still on the downhill slope but this week I’m starting to feel a little better.
Not well, but better. I’m going to stick on light duty for at least another week but at least I was able to do dishes and clean up around the house yesterday without feeling completely destroyed, just kind of destroyed.
This bodes well for the next few weeks, at least until I have to go back for my next three doses.
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]
For years, probably since the beginning of my nursing career, I had envisioned a time when, for whatever reason, I would no longer be doing bedside nursing. My dream “retirement job” has always been some form of telephone triage and today I have achieved that goal. The only down side is that it is temporary while I work the BCG fatigue out of my system.
My light duty is to cover the Covid symptom line for employee health. Employees that think they may have been exposed or that are having worrying symptoms call the number and I read down this whole list of questions to determine if they should get tested, if they need to quarantine and for how long, when they can go back to work, etc.
The charting is kind of a pain, but I am sitting at home in a dark, quiet room with my laptop and an algorithm/decision support tool and I don’t have to see another person or even change out of my pajamas. This is as close to a dream job as I am ever likely to get.
Edited to add; I was feeling pretty good today, like almost back to normal. Then I took the trash out (not something I usually struggle with) and am pretty seriously beat down again. When I stopped to think, I realized that probably why I felt good is that I hadn’t really done anything all day. 8 hours of “work” talking to people on the phone while I was lying in bed, leftovers for dinner so I didn’t have to cook anything, then sat around for a few hours generally being a slug.
The light duty is probably a really good idea.
Went to one of our favorite local bakeries this morning, there was no line, we walked in, got some f#$%ing amazing pastries and some really good coffee and were out in less than 15 minutes.
YES!
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.)