The fight for diverse and conscious voices

I do not imagine anyone reads my journal and does not think we ought to have at a minimum a single-payer option and mandatory paid sick leave. This entry isn't an argument, it's to document the hilarity.
( The saga so far )
So that's somewhere between 6 and 8 problems, depending on how you math, four humans I've needed to speak to, and I've long ago lost track of the number of hours this has consumed. And it's only been two and a half weeks. But remember, folks, socialized medicine is bad and wasteful and our system is just fine and dandy and not at all wasteful.

Home today sick with noro. Bad day yesterday, bad night, including two frustrating hours of sitting in an ER waiting room (in pain) and getting no help. I'd rather be miserable at home in my own warm bed than on a cold bench in a bright lobby - though to be fair they did bring me a heated blanket on request. Pygment was her usual awesome self. After two hours I felt better enough to walk steadily down the hall to the bathroom so I said fukkit and left.

This is far from my first rodeo, for which there is a story...

Once upon a time I went to undergrad at UPenn (aka Not Penn State). Student Health there was part of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). At that time, and generally whenever I check, HUP is rated as one of the best teaching hospitals in the US. This means that you get a lot of older staff - who have seen it all and are pretty damned jaded - and a lot of younger staff. This dichotomy later will lead to the "two out of three doctors surveyed" incident, but that's a different story.

To tell this story I have to start Freshman year. Those of you who've known me in person know that I have a full beard. Back then, though, I did not. My beard (at age 18) was pretty scraggly, so I shaved. Often I shaved the sides to give myself what we called a "Klingon beard". Kind of like this dude - https://www.writeups.org/wp-content/uploads/Klingon-soldiers-b.jpg particularly since I had long hair at the time and there were several (original) Trek nerds in our social group.

Problem was that I was an absolute spaz with a razor. I'd nick myself on Day 1 and then on Day 2 I'd scrape it and make it worse. Scraggly or not, my beard grew pretty quickly. On a bad day I'd look like I had tried to go nose-to-nose with a feral bobcat.

Scroll forward to Sophomore year. By now I've learned that I can get all my classes stacked on M/W/F. This gave me two days mid-week to catch up on homework and assignments (leaving my weekends free for D&D and drinking - see "why do I never drink rum&coke"). This also meant that I only shaved three days a week, leaving four days for healing.

Then came November of that year; I distinctly remember I started feeling bad and left SCA Dance Practice early. By the time I made it to my dorm I headed straight for the bathroom and... just eww. In those days we didn't have the word "norovirus"; we called it the "running runs" because you were constantly running for the (gods help us shared dorm) bathroom in order to evacuate both ends.

After a few rounds of this it became clear that it wasn't just a one-time thing and I called Student Health, where the gent who answered... well, I could hear the grizzle in his voice. He told me to stay put, try to drink water or flat ginger ale, and come in when student health opened at 7. This is also where I learned that when your mouth tastes like metal you are really dehydrated.

So I did the shelter-in-place thing, didn't sleep at all, and dragged my exhausted ass down to SH before it opened. They had unlocked the outer airlock door but not the inner so I could at least stand in a foyer out of the cold. And I must have passed out briefly because I leaned up against the locked inner door. The next thing I know I am literally _falling_ into Student Health because the junior resident apparently decided I was giving him a hard time about being five minutes late and just unlocked the door and stepped back.

Once he realized his mistake he was all the apologetic and gave me many good drugs, including my first experience with a suppository. Turns out that if you want a medication delivered to the lower colon this is a super-effective way to do that. A couple hours later I was sufficiently hydrated and under control to drag my ass back to my dorm and pass out. I slept through most of Wednesday, waking up long enough to shower and drink a little water then go back to sleep. By Friday I was able to manage some Saltines and felt pretty good about that.

Then it was the weekend and by the time Monday rolled around again I looked in the mirror and I had a full week's worth of beard, which was actually pretty good and past the scraggly stage. I threw my razor in the trash and haven't shaved since.

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I hope you've enjoyed this story and I have a question for you. If you are the sort of person who kisses people who shave, does stubble bother you? I find it irritating as heck, but maybe it's a thing you get used to?

Blogging this mostly for my own reference. Starting with my annual physical in January I've been attending to various medical grr-argh things and trying to do something about some of them. If any of them turn serious I'll post more. Generally I'm not dying any faster than expected.
( medical bullet points )

As I mentioned in the last entry, one of the side effects of dusting the stone was that they didn't get enough for a lab sample. That means we don't really know what caused it, so there's no sensible medical intervention. Instead, we get a series of diet recommendations that are generally seen as effective against stones of all kinds. Herewith, in bullet-point form:

• Increase urine volume. A fancy form of "drink more water. No, really, more than that." Some of the associated literature gets very specific, including a suggestion that if you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to go pee you're not drinking enough. That's a hard no for me because although I can do it if need be I definitely get much worse sleep if I'm interrupted and sometimes I can't even get back to sleep at all. My sleep is already bad enough, let's not make it worse. They also suggest one 2-L bottle of water per workday, which is a lot more than I'm currently going through.
  
  Among the tips for increasing water intake are having a glass at "transitional times" like upon waking, before leaving the house, when arriving at work, after using the restroom. Add frozen bits of lemon, lime or orange in place of ice cubes both for flavor and to acidify urine. Choose moist foods over dried - cooked rice, for example, carries water about equal to its grain weight.
  
  Interesting side note - it's suggested to avoid grapefruit juice. Since other citrus is encouraged I'm not sure why this is. Have to look into that.


• Consume adequate calcium. Despite some stones being formed from calcium deposits, it's not advised to avoid or reduce calcium intake from food. Calcium supplements are disrecommended. Considering how many Tums I chew in a given week that's going to be a challenge. One source says if you're going to take them, take with food - the problem is that I take them to control reflux, which causes me not to eat.


• Decrease sodium. Generally good advice, but particularly here excess sodium tends to go out in your urine and it does so by binding to a lot of calcium. If you get calcium stones this is a primary formation pathway. As with other discussions of dietary sodium, it's the hidden sources that get you. Obvious things like salty snacks aren't as problematic as packaged foods, sports drinks, and the like that have tons of sodium we don't recognize.


• Decrease protein intake. I mentioned this early on. The most recent literature I was given differentiates meat protein (which should be limited) from dairy or vegetable protein, which are apparently not sources of stone formation. I don't understand why that is, but there you go.


• Watch out for oxalates. That's mostly spinach, rhubarb, almonds, and miso soup though there are oxalates in lots of things. Spinach is the biggest culprit, by a large margin, which is unfortunate since it's my main source of leafy greens. Bother.

Health update. Nothing particularly icky. tl;dr we're in the final week before surgery.
( interesting mostly to me bits of medical knowledge )

Surgery is set for the 17th; I'll call next Monday to get more precise timing. Cross your fingers, say prayers if that's your thing, and wish me well. I'd really like not to roll badly this time.

Well, at least I have more data now, though I'm not super happy about the situation.
( It's medical stuff and some people don't like that, so here's a cut )

No, seriously. This is an update on my undesired passenger so ...
( I'll cut this for the medically squeamish )

If this doesn't make you cringe and want to cross your legs then YKIOK but YKINMK.

This contains discussion of minor surgery and infection. It's a follow-up to my last entry about infection. Some people don't like reading that stuff...
( nothing too gross, I promise )

(another thing that got eaten by the can't-post bug; sorry if I've turned into Posty McSTFUAlready.)

This trip I finished two items of media I think are quite good and worth talking about.
( The Information: A Story )
( Food, Inc. )

The last update was pretty goddamn depressing. Since then things have gotten better.
( Details )