health

  1. Our Man in Japan Doesn't Know What to Think

    Another coronavirus blog entry. The rate of infection in Japan is quite low. If you believe the government and the Japanese media. No, this isn't a random screed against the mainstream media or government coverups. It has been well-documented for decades that the Japanese media is absolute shit. See, they run on a "press-club" system here. In order to gain access to officials for interviews, news organs and their reporters need to be members of the "Reporters Club," or in Japanese...
  2. Family Resemblance

    Mrs A has a cold. A pretty nasty one, fever nearly 40c. She's been to the doc, it's not influenza, just one hell of a cold, he gave her some meds to help out. So yeah, she's taking the day off. But when I got home from work, she was asleep in bed. She heard me come in, her eyes opened in a kind of unfocused way and... ...she looked just like her mother did... ...towards the end, her brain squeezed by tumors and pummeled by surgeries, her consciousness slowly sublimating into...
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  3. Steeplechase

    Just awoke on this Monday morning from a dream of running and scrambling through the fields, racing my good friend to a point we knew well. No euphemisms, nothing clever here, just a steeplechase in the old meaning of the word, where a man on horseback, out riding with his friends, would say something on the lines of "See yon steeple of St. Nyaralathotep's? Race you!" and the game would be on. We, of course, were dismounted, because this happens in very nearly the real, and the objective...
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  4. It Is Done

    The room had low benches set into the walls and big doors at either end. They'd been let in through the first set, and arranged themselves along the waist-high, U-shaped wall in the center of the room. From down the hall, through the other doors, he could hear the soft whine of the electric motors that powered the... What, he wondered, would you call it? He'd worked in a warehouse, decades ago, running the powered pallet-jacks of boxes up the ramps into the cargo compartments of the...
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  5. Syncretism (a fragment)

    The service was Christian, as was she. I learned how to pick the bones when the little dog died, ten years ago. How far does the syncretism go here? I guess I'll know soon enough.
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  6. The Queen

    There are hierarchies in everything. In Asia, the children's game “King of the Hill” is referred to as “Monkey Mountain.” Dante had his circles of Hell, and, prior to the invention of the elevator, the best rooms in a building were not in the penthouse, but on the ground floor. Everyone else had to trudge up the stairs to get to their office, to their home, to the third-floor, rear apartment with a greasy cot and grimy windows that let in a little light, but no view. Hospitals have...
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  7. No clever metaphors today

    Mrs. A's mom is not doing well. She was moved last week from the hospital she'd been in to one closer to home. The first hospital specialized in surgery and treatment, but they've done what they can for her. I went to see her the other day, and she was sleeping, but when she came to for a bit, there was no recognition in her eyes. Basically, there hasn't been a point anywhere in this last year where a treatment has made her "better". To the eyes of a layman; they've simply managed to slow...
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  8. Schwarzschild Radius

    It's been nearly a year, and at the time, they said it could be as little as three months. Nearly a year? Around a year, let's leave it at that, because at no point beyond her initial hospitalization has she actually gotten better. The outlook has improved, but her condition has not. She was aphasic, but she'd always been a little aphasic; I put it down to a personality quirk. What did the Rev. Spooner have growing in his head? She had seizures though, which she'd never had before, and...
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  9. Anonymous Fame

    So I got the news yesterday that she's one of a kind. Probably going to be famous, in a carefully anonymized way. You know, like Henry Molaison was. H. M. Of course, odds are that her fame will be posthumous, while H. M.'s condition was well-known, except, of course, to him, during his lifetime. See, the docs, and these are good docs, some of the best in the country, not just local G.P.s or corpsmen, say that one of her cancers is extremely rare. Like, one in ten or twenty million...
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  10. Results

    So the doc called the family in for a meeting today. Due to the language barrier, I stay clear of these. No need for Mrs. A to hear, comprehend, absorb and translate all at the same time. Or at least that's the way I see it. However, I don't see any good news coming down the pipe. They wanted her on at least 1300 calories a day, and her charts were showing 900. My aunt is in the same boat, for some reason she's gotten extremely picky about what she will and won't eat. Of course, my aunt...
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  11. Uncultured

    So, TV today. Something on the History Channel, the aliens show with the guy with the crazy hair. Either the Aboriginal Australians are aliens, or we're all aliens, but descended, not from Africa and Olduvai Gorge, but by way of Alice Springs. Wasn't paying attention, not sure. Key points is that Ayers Rock (sic) is an Aboriginal/Alien standing stone thingy, and the 33rd Southern parallel connects directly to the center of the galaxy, and is thus the anchor point for the stargate. Also...
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  12. Final Destination: Holding Pattern

    She was diagnosed last spring when she suddenly went aphasic. They found cancer in her brain and abdomen; the two cancers were, surprisingly, not related. Cancer rarely forms in the brains of adults on its own, it's generally metastasized from somewhere else. Operable. A tumor the size of a baseball came out of her head, and two liters came out of her abdomen. I looked at a baseball after the surgery. Held in up next to my head in the mirror. How is this possible? A two liter bottle next...
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  13. The Presence of Absence

    So I've been having fun. Due to a combination of national holidays and related events that she has and I don't, Mrs. A is visiting her family for the weekend. You know what that means... Time to get crazy. Like Friday, when I went to see "Sausage Party". She wouldn't have liked that film, and it was the late show, in the city. We don't go into the city often, the train ride there and back is just a pain in the neck, but what the hell, she was otherwise occupied, it's me time. And then...
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