My worries about my potential heart problems caused me to walk myself over to the ER after my IV antibiotic session today.
Spoiler : I am fine. You can relax.
I talked it over with one of the nurses at the IV antibiotics ward first. She thought I had more than enough cause for worry to warrant the trip.
So I willingly subjected myself to the loooong and tedious trip through the ER system. Lots and lots of waiting,
Although at least once you’re admitted, you’re waiting lying down in bed. And I had a book to read, which helps.
I always bring my current book to the IV antibiotic sessions. You end up just sitting there for 20-30 minutes and there isn’t always something interesting like a dressing change, a visit from the wound care nurse, or a chat with Doctor Vortel going on.
So I have been working my way through Dragon Tales, a compilation of science fiction and/or fantasy short stories involving dragons.
The quality varies, naturally. As does draconic content – one story doesn’t have a dragon until literally the last sentence and quite frankly seems tacked on just to make it technically qualify for the anthology.
Oh well, the book’s still a good read.
Notable occurrences while I was there :
a. Some poor Asian lady crying her eyes out due to pain. I’m talking the real deep wounded animal crying. I felt so bad for her. So I did my best to send all the happy healing protective vibes her way that I could.
b. Me drinking a Pink Lady. Sadly, not the very tasty cocktail.
This isn’t the 60’s and cocktail therapy has been almost completely discredited.
No, this was a “shooter” of Pepto-bismal and lidocane. Woo, party!
This was to treat my heartburn. And wow, that lidocaine was potent stuff. I was warned to down the whole thing at once because otherwise the lidocaine would make my mouth very very numb.
So I downed the thing and STILL it left my lips and tongue numb for a little while.
Can’t say it had much of an effect on the heartburn, though. Took way some of the burning but that’s it.
Oh well, I feel better now that I have eaten.
c. A triage nurse whose accent was so thick and whose voice was so high that I felt like I was talking to a Frank Welker character.
Like, I am 90 percent sure the last thing she said to me was in Ewok.
She was tiny, too. So it’s not entirely out of the question.
d. More than enough testing to lend me confidence in their diagnosis. Chest X-rays, blood work, an EKG, blood oxygen monitor, plenty of in depth questions, and to top it all off, being hooked up to a heart monitor for a couple hours.
So yeah, I’d say they covered all the bases.
And I do feel guilty for having wasted everyone’s time and effort over heartburn, but only a little. Because when your heart is as messed up as mine, “better safe than sorry” has got to be your guiding principle.
Because overall, I would rather not die.
And that’s progress.
More after the break.
Frogs aren’t that dumb!
So that prompted these comments to come flying out of me :
A minute and 40 seconds of vaguely interesting frog info and then the rest is pointless environmentalist harangue about stuff we all already know because apparently we all need to suffer for not being as pure and righteous as you. Are you sure you’re not actually David Suzuki?
Anyhow, if you want some ACTUAL SCIENCE about the frog boiling thing, what happens is that the heat of the water eventually exceeds the frog’s *sensory threshold *, which is an absolute value representing how much stimulation it takes to trigger a conscious experience of events. From the frog’s point of view, the water “suddenly” got way too hot. Right now, global warming is exceeding the sensory threshold of the nascent global consciousness of the human race. We are increasingly willing to jump out of the pot. But we do not yet have the fullness of consciousness to form a global consensus. It, sadly, will take things getting much, much worse before we are shaken out of our sense of indolent helplessness and pushed into the necessary sense of urgency required to make us realize we are not safe unless we act.
me, youtube, today
Clearly, this bullshit struck a nerve in me.
Partially due to my own raised expectations. The bullshit nature of the whole “you can boil a frog if you heat up the water slow enough” has been one of my many tiny peeves for a very long time. And so when I saw the title of the vid, I was like, “Oh great, smart, science minded people who will agree with me!”.
What more could a fella ask for?
But no, it’s 100 seconds of badly and blandly explained near-science and then the usual “humans are horrible and we’re all going to die” bullshit that turns people away from environmentalism and does way more harm than good in the war for the hearts and minds of the world’s 7.5 billion humans.
Besides, as I have amply illustrated, the problem is not awareness or caring or an understanding of what’s at stake, the problem is the self-serving belief that there is nothing you can do about it.
And like I said in my comments, that will persist until things get bad enough for enough people to feel personally threatened by global warming and thus reach the ignition point where all revolutions begin.
Namely, the point where the average person doesn’t feel safe in their ordinary lives and knows they will not feel safe until things change.
Essentially, once you wake the sleepers, they will do whatever it takes in order to get to go back to sleep again.
Remember that phrase, you billionaire bastards : whatever it takes.
In other words, by any means necessary.
What that entails is up to you. But know that nothing is off the table.
So ask yourself this : would you rather lose 10 percent of your income, or end up with your bloody head on a pike?
Because the human race is not going to just lay own and let you destroy modern civilization simply because of your laws and lobbyists and political toadies.
So don’t be surprised when the people roll right over your army of sycophants that your money has inserted into the system.
Pretty soon, it will be help, get out of the way, or die.
The choice is yours.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.