Category: Writing

Tight chest

mild fever last night, slept longer than I normally do. Seriously. I went to sleep at about 8:30 last night and instead of my normal 6 hours, I didn’t wake up until quarter after 5. only other symptoms are mild headache and my tinnitus is MUCH quieter than normal. Weird, hunh?

No coughing, but that ‘tightness’ in chest is definitely present. Could be hypochondria. I’m definitely one of those. who the hell knows. IS IT THE ‘RONA?

work in progress

I’m thinking of writing a hard-driving workin’ man kinda country song that starts with the line:
I was born /with Uranus/ in retrograde.
I’ve broken /hard rocks /with my head
I’m an accident that moves around
you better pray I skip your town
Cause people … around me … end up dead.
at this point I should prob’ly mention that Uranus spends forty percent of every year in retrograde and the term only exists because of its motion relative to earth rather than to the sun so it’s all horseshit
as you were!
I feel really shitty right now. Very likely it’s my allergies – everyone is complaining about them in the PNW, but lawks. It makes you question every quiver of your body, which is not good for mental health.

what I’ve learned so far and what I’m betting

re COVID-19 @ home recovery.

For your own sanity, try to recover at home if you can. If your oxygenation consistently goes under 88 and your pulse is consistently high (over 100 and staying there) and you feel chest tightness or you’re gasping, you probably need oxygen and you may need to be intubated. Intubation keeps people alive but it’s not free of risks or various kinds of cross contamination. The good thing about it is that by the time you need it you’re in no fucking shape to argue about it, so stay salty.

I’d advise you to read trip reports of people your age who’ve survived it. Read up on advice not to use ibuprofen or corticosteroids. Perform deep chest coughs – instructions earlier this week on this blog. Rest prone as much as you can (From the wikipedia article on ARDS, which along with organ failure is what’s killing people). Drink zero alcohol. Don’t drink too much water <– this is counterintuitive but is supported by science see that same article)  Don’t move except for hygiene and to turn in bed. Symptomatically relieve cough. Thump your back to bring up sputum and get rid of it, don’t swallow it.
Even a mild case will knock you on your ass for two weeks & people who’ve recovered say there’s often a marked rise in how well you feel at around the 7 day mark, during which you will overdo it, and then collapse back down with worse breathing than previously. You need to relax & release your inner sloth and do everything you can to help yourself breathe and not move. Even if you’re feeling better, don’t, you can cough yourself into a situation where your fragile lungs scar worse. So don’t move except the moving you have to do to prevent bedsores and clots and to pee.
TAKE YOUR SWEET ASS TIME RECOVERING. The recovering will need sanatoriums that help people get as much of their lung health back as possible. Post viral conditions will be real and will be spread across all age groups. If you get sick, rest and recuperate a LONG while; don’t make plans to do anything until at least two weeks after the last day you run a temperature and longer if you’re still testing positive.

today’s journey

Today’s journey starts with waking a little after 2 am (after seven hours of sleep, I’ll need nine before the day ends) and thinking to myself that I don’t know whether I’m going to get Alex today. I want to stay outside with him all day if the weather is good, but I’m probably just getting him at Katie’s place before and after school. So that’s okay. Some outdoors.

I think if anybody runs the math, keeping the daycares open and letting young parents stay home with their kids may help slow this monster’s roll somewhat. It’s still going to be dreadful, and way worse in Canada that we’re emotionally ready for.

There’s a new bird flu being detected in India and the Philippines, apparently originating in the Philippines. I don’t know too much else about it but hopefully they’ll shut down passenger traffic except for people with required skills to fight all this shit. Watching other countries handle this shit in real time is terrible and Trudeau is being reassuring which sucks ass, he should be encouraging people to do what epidemiologists and recent experience teach us will slow the spread to manageable before we squash it as a species, as we inevitably must.

Of course it will be politicized. The Chinese will start manufacturing and distributing effective vaccines first, I’d bet money on it if it wasn’t against the Quran.

a distant mirror and a current issue

So…. Coronavirus ey?

In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s forever wonderful book, there’s much description on how society changes.

For whatever reason, Coronavirus is disproportionately killing elderly people and while it sickens pretty much everyone, kids are getting much lighter versions of it. If a lot of elderly people die, there will be a wealth transfer that’s the greatest in a generation – right into the middle of what will probably be an 18 month long global recession, and assuming that we don’t have a global or large regional war to deal with at the same time which would be accurate historically except for large swathes of Indigenous territories excepting Central America which got wealthy enough (always a Bad Fucking Sign) to support standing armies.

Backing away from that rathole, this is a time to bring notaries to bedsides in hospitals all over the planet. Elderly people are about to experience a mass mortality event, just when we have need of all the good husbandry tacked into their clever brains as amassed across a lifetime. More avariciously speaking, as soon as the dust and mold and unknown fibres clear from one disaster, many mini disasters, like tornadoes in the wake of a hurricane, will be spawned as lawsuits arise over inheritances. Guess which class of human being will be disproportionately affected by COVID-19? JUDGES. So at a time when there will be a lot of disputes, there will be fewer adjudicators. You know what happens when there are a lot of unadjudicated property disputes dumped into a traumatized population? You’re not stupid, you can guess, but I see private drinking as a hobby becoming super popular in the next ten years. Breweries and distilleries for the win.

 

Grocery and holy shit

Grocery shopping done. Toilet paper continues to be available in serried rows in New Westminster; frozen vegetable section looks like bears been at it.

have you ever SEEN such wanton nonchalance!!!? imagine not going buck wild over asswipe

Image

Okay, let’s explain the chart

 

In KOR they test, test, test, in Italy they only test the symptomatic

so in IT they weren’t quarantining the 1/4 of 20-29 year old people who have it but are asymptomatic. See that big tall spike? it’s the same illness, there’s not enough mutation yet not to be…. so four percent of all of the people in Italy aged 20-19 get coronovirus with symptoms bad enough to warrant testing, but a quarter of them are positive…. fuck sticks!!! we should be telling Millennials not to participate in mixed age events……..

Staying home, minding business

Right now it’s my allergies that are driving me crazy. They normally give me a headache and sore sinuses and a headache is one of the first symptoms of you know what, so I’m on edge even though my dry itchy eyes are because of tree sex.

Jeff has provided me with some lotion; the handwashing has given me eczema on the backs of my hands.

252 cases in Canada, 156,400 confirmed globally as of the CSSE map at 5 am PST, which map I’ve been watching since it was around 18000, from my room at the Conflikt 13 hotel. Worrying. Knowing that this was coming.

Not knowing that the Chinese knew what the fuck they were doing, and were dealing with it with science, politics and the eagerness of the Chinese populace to do what the hell they were told. With some exceptions.

I may go out and get food today. Jeff doesn’t mind my baked goods, but I don’t make candy bars and Cheetos.

plague year

One of the romancelandia writers I follow is Isobel Carr and she has provided us with a Paper Doll to keep us busy.

People on twitter are begging for cute pictures of pets.

Me, I’m just staying still and trying not to worry.

150k people have been infected that we know of for sure, half of those recovered.

It’s a virus so we may get post viral health problems, it hasn’t been around long enough for us to know.

Laura Smith, a great Canadian singer songwriter is dead in Halifax of cancer. She was beautiful like few people I’ve met in person. She grew eight inches in one year when she was a teenager (spent the summer in bed). She performed a version of All of Me at a house party with a jazz duo while high on cocaine (I found that out later…) that was the best version of it I ever heard. We went to see her at the Yellow Door in Montréal.

She will be missed. I just emailed Paul to tell him as he likely doesn’t know.

China’s going to finish by running the world because Russia and the US and the UK and France will whiff the pandemic. Probably already has plans to secure the nukes. They’ll get enormous populations of white people to get on board by exterminating Muslims. It will take 15 years. They’ll allow hundreds of millions of people to migrate into the Muslim-occupied countries and then they’ll start work on exterminating Black Africans and move Chinese there instead.

apparently you’re supposed to keep a paper diary in a plague year

who knew

 

mOm knew, it’s a family archive fact.

 

So one of the folks I follow on twitter (@northernSprw ) says:

I highly recommend bookmarking both The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, peer-reviewed weekly med journals. Both have dropped their paywalls & have new research articles almost daily on covid-19 now: thelancet.com

nejm.org

I checked it out, there’s lots of info there.

cancellations

Saw Keith, Paul, Katie and Alex yesterday when I went to pick Alex up from the school. I walked to but Katie gave me a lift back from Planet Bachelor. Alex is doing well and we had a lovely walk. I didn’t bug him or try to talk to him. I let him be. I walked next to him, and at every intersection, his little cold hand slid into mine, and then he let go as soon as we crossed the street.

Keith enjoys living with Alex. He says some days are better than others.

I burst into tears when Paul said he’s staying on this side of the border until things settle down, which, candidly, who can say?

And it all happens again two Wednesdays from now, if we aren’t in lockdown. Seven new cases in BC yesterday.

Started reading the Newsflesh Trilogy yesterday. It’s entertaining as hell; but describing the zombie apocalypse like that and then saying ‘look how much infrastructure survived’ makes me hope that she will at least provide an explanation of how the power grid and cell towers survived well enough to make an instant news economy work, and where all that bleach gets manufactured, is not really explained well enough to keep me happy.

I have a sudden mental image of people driving up to crematoria with loved ones in garbage bags sealed with duct tape and leaving them outside with the phone number of whoever’s got the credit card number to get them cremated.

70 million years ago days were 23.5 hours long. Longer days were God’s answer to critters saying ‘THERE’S JUST NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY”.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are in COVID-19 isolation in Australia. Lucky them.

Guess who has diplomatic relations with Cuba, which manufactures the most powerful antiviral in the world right now? Canada. Guess who doesn’t? Trumplandia.

Dinosaur the size of a hummingbird.