Covid Recovery update

For those who don't know me personally, my spouse and I had Covid in the first part of September. He lost three weeks of work. I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and ventricular tachycardia. We're "recovered", but full recovery is taking a lot longer than any virus should. We've had some devastating flus before, this is different. This is dystopian sci-fi territory. This should make you think. Anyway...

This week's symptoms: 

Dull pain, bottom rib left side...which is kind of weird, since I had a dull pain bottom rib right side the month before I got the coof. Precursor? Coincidence? I was checked out and was not gallbladder issues, etc.

Hair is still coming out at approximately 60% more than usual. I've lost about 40% of my total hair volume at this point. Taking collagen, biotin, etc. should help, according to other long-haulers. We'll see. Not ready to chop off what I have left just yet.

Still having GI issues, as in everything just shoots through me. Actual diarrhea about half the time. I wouldn't mind so much if were actually losing me some weight, but, no. I'm hovering around 170. Could be worse, since I was around 180 BC (before coof).

Can't get blood O2 above 93. Gordon has been at 100% for weeks, the stinker. And that's another thing I'm noticing between our personal experience and the accounts I'm reading in the Covid Long Hauler support group on Facebook: this virus is NOT normal and natural. Read into that what you will.

Everybody has a different experience and different symptoms long-term. There are some commonalities, like diminished taste and smell, fatigue, hair loss, etc., but then it just feels like everybody else is experiencing a super specialized reality after that. Rashes, cardiac issues (mine was only at onset), swollen digits, recurring pneumonia, continuing weight loss, lack of appetite, numbness and/or tingling in extremities or an entire side of the body. The list is long. I really wish people in that support group would list their BC medical conditions and what prescriptions they're currently taking, because I think that is a huge factor in all of this. I think Gordon and I are amongst the very few of the cases who aren't obese and/or on one or more drugs.

Still happy to be in the "vaccine" control group, though. Wait this out, people. The next five years is going to be interesting, but probably not in a 100% happy way. Tell your friends and family you love them, whatever their medical choices.

Book review: The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*****Spoilers*****


I love Penny's fictional village of Three Pines, tucked in a valley in the woods somewhere between Montreal, Quebec and the US border. I love her characters, from Chief Inspector Gamache to Ruth the irascible poet laureate to all the other denizens of Three Pines and Gamache's fellow LEOs. What I don't love is how socio-political topics are becoming more and more prominent in her stories. Although not unexpetcted, it's getting to be a bit much.

It's not like she hasn't telegraphed this tendency. Since the first novels in this series, I've been a bit dubious about her giving Gamache an aversion to firearms: a veteran LEO, who's very capable of using a weapon...but won't carry one unless he has to (how does one determine that unless you're pre-cognizant). In this installment even Jean Guy decides not to pull the trigger in the story's climax, because, per the author, of "love". He feels he'd be a terrible father if he were capable of taking a shot at a person threatening another person with a shotgun. I think a man incabable of lethally defending an innocent person is not a "good man". What if it were his child being threatened? If he can't step up, he's useless.

The most onerous facet of this novel is the fantasy "post Covid" world she has constructed. Obviously this novel was written during the worst of the "pandemic", and Penny has drunk all of the government and media Kool-Aid regarding this crime against humanity. This novel takes place a few months "after the pandemic". The vaccines have solved the crisis, there is no more Covid, and everything is back to normal. Yay! Needless to say, this story will not age well in coming months and years. Firstly, things are NOT back to "normal" anywhere. Depending on your location in the world, you may have a free and open society again, or you may be facing restricted travel and economic ruin if you don't have a "vax passport". There are people, as I write this, who are so traumatized by all the fear porn from the government and their media lackeys, that the mere sight of an unmasked person makes them flinch. Secondly, as we deal with increasing cases of vaccine injury and death, coupled with the monumental ineffectiveness of the experimental mRNA drugs (they are not vaccines), this novel, unlike her others in the series, won't be "evergreen". 

Also "post covid" in this novel is a crackpot academic (reduntant?) who has posited that, post covid, the world's resources are limited and that forced euthanasia is the answer. What the actual heck? I have no problem with writing a character like that, but having half of Canada think she's right?! Sorry, not plausible. There is never a reasonable presentation of this character's arguments in the novel, such that a moral, reasonable human being would go along with her proposal. It's literally absurd.

Here's hoping the next novel sticks to a solid murder mystery and leaves the wacky sociopolitical fantasy out.

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