Posting here has been sporadic for the last few weeks because on February 10th I tripped (walking down the front steps) and fell, breaking my left arm just below the shoulder. A clean break that did not require surgery or a cast but has been painful and damned inconvenient.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that for this kind of break I’m looking at 6 to 8 weeks recovery. I suspect the physical therapy will go on for some months. Could have been much worse..
I don’t have a lot of bad habits these days. Don’t smoke or do drugs, drink (beer) in moderation… but when the idea for this post occurred to me, I was thinking of good habits. Things I do with some consistency without having to give them a lot of thought. Consistency being the operative word. If you don’t count brushing my teeth, I really only have one good habit: meditation.
There are almost as many forms of mediation as there are meditators. For me it’s the time I spend each day practicing paying attention. (I’ll skip the long riff on how continuously lost we are in thought we all are.)
2024 will be the 10th consecutive year of tracking my daily meditation. I think I was practicing for five years or so before I began logging my time on the cushion on November 30, 2014. I ran up a string of 371 days before missing a day (pneumonia). I managed 271 consecutive days before missing again (out of town attending the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation.) I have not missed a day since. 2,101 consecutive days (5.7 years). Total days since I started logging my sessions, 3,317 days.
I usually sit for 30 minutes. If it’s almost bedtime I might do a 15 minute session and every once in while I set for 45 minutes or an hour. In terms of perceived time, the longer sessions do not seem much longer. But 30 minutes is the sweet spot for me. My one good habit.
“Light and moderate drinking could reduce the risk of long-term heart disease by lowering stress levels in the brain, according to a new study published Monday. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found a connection between light to moderate alcohol consumption—defined as one drink per day for women and between one and two for men—and a long-term reduction in the brain’s stress signals to the body, serving as a possible explanation for the long-documented tie between light drinking and improved health.”
“Participants who had a history of stress and anxiety had even greater health benefits: Researchers found people prone to high stress and anxiety levels who drank a light or moderate amount had twice the cardiac-protective effects than those without high stress and anxiety.”
Katie Dowd reporting for SFGate, San Francisco
A QAnon promoter with tens of thousands of followers on Facebook and Telegram has died after contracting COVID-19. On her last video, posted on December 28, Weldon was coughing and admitted she felt “exhausted” and “weak.”
Weldon was virulently anti-vaccine, both online and in real life. In one video posted to her social media channels, she can be seen harassing people in line to be vaccinated against COVID-19. “The vaccines kill. Don’t get it,” she shouts. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccines.”
Weldon livestreamed constantly and posted relentlessly on Instagram, Telegram and Facebook, inadvertently tracking her own symptoms. She began showing signs of illness around Christmas. In a December 27 stream, she started off by saying, “Good morning, patriots, I didn’t think I was going to make it. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, and I’m very, very weak. I have no strength. I haven’t eaten in four days.”
On December 31, she posted a photo of herself wearing an oxygen mask with the caption, “Almost died at hospital in CA from Bacterial Pneumonia.” “Bacterial pneumonia” is a phrase commonly used in anti-vax circles to explain a COVID-related hospitalization without admitting to contracting the virus.
Weldon also posted on Telegram, where she had nearly 100,000 followers, that she rejected treatment with remdesivir.
“In what researchers are calling a scientific breakthrough, scientists behind a new study may have found the biological reason we get more respiratory illnesses in winter. It turns out the cold air itself damages the immune response occurring in the nose.” [Story]
Reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of virus and bacteria-fighting cells in the nostrils, according to the study published Tuesday in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
“What we found is that when you’re exposed to cold air, the temperature in your nose can drop by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s enough to essentially knock out all three of those immune advantages that the nose has.”
“Not only do masks protect you from the direct inhalation of viruses, but it’s also like wearing a sweater on your nose […] The warmer you can keep the intranasal environment, the better this innate immune defense mechanism will be able to work. Maybe yet another reason to wear masks!”
On the COVID Caution Spectrum I’m probably an 11 out of 10. And fortunate in my circumstances so I can avoid unnecessary exposure. For the last two years I’ve listened as friends and family lectured me on the importance of not letting “some virus” control your life. “You gotta live your life, dude.”
A philosophy I have yet to hear in any of the countless interviews with people with severe and/or protracted cases. These are mostly of the I’ve-never-been-so-sick-get-vaccinated variety. Where are the folks on oxygen saying, “I almost died but, hey, you gotta live your life, right?”
On May 20, 2013 I began an experiment with plant-based eating. Was never hard-core and always thought of myself as a half-assed vegetarian. I ate eggs and cheese and such. And several years ago I started eating fish.
I never found the plant-based path difficult but in the last couple of months I have strayed. I started dreaming about ham sandwiches. And as I’ve aged (74 next month) I’ve lost muscle mass. Not really anything I can do about that. But part of my original motivation was “I want to be perfectly healthy and live forever!” Silly but true. Neither of those things are going to happen so give me one of those pepperoni pizzas to go.
The following is an excerpt from a 1924 essay by H. L. Mencken. It seems relevant in light of the stupid quackery that’s killing hundreds of thousands.
Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
“Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the 1920s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American life. For obvious reasons, his critics considered him highly skilled at satire but intolerant and often crude. This essay was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1924. Although the medical knowledge of his day was still quite primitive, Mencken knew enough to realize that chiropractic theory was preposterous.”
They’re calling them booster shots but I’ve read a few articles that say it was always the plan to give three shots. Not something you want to publicize when you can’t get so many to get one shot. Barb and I got our shots eleven days ago. From CNN:
For individuals 65 plus, we saw significant declines in VE (vaccine effectiveness) against infection during Delta for the mRNA products,” Link-Gelles told CDC vaccine advisers this past week.
In a study of 4,000 healthcare personnel, first responders, and other frontline workers in eight places who were tested every week regardless of symptoms, vaccine protection against any infection declined from 91% pre-Delta to 66% during Delta.
Pfizer says its studies show booster doses bring people’s immunity back up to what it was right after they got their second shots, or to even higher levels.
How much higher? From the New York Times:
At least 12 days after the booster, rates of infection were elevenfold lower and of severe disease nearly twentyfold lower in those who received a booster compared with those who had received only two doses, the researchers found. The researchers acknowledged that their results were preliminary.
I like those numbers. And if I have to get a “booster” ever six months? BFD. I see my dentist every six months. While we’re on the subject of vaccines… My doctor recently suggested I get a shot of the new and improved shingles vaccine, Shingrix. Shingles is bad shit so I headed for the pharmacy. Turns out there might be a bonus benefit:
RZV (Shingrix) vaccination was associated with a 16% lower risk of COVID-19 diagnosis and 32% lower risk of hospitalization, suggesting RZV elicits heterologous protection, possibly through trained immunity.
At this point I’m masking just to piss off the anti-vaxxers.