Not COVID

I started having headaches in late December. I thought it was COVID. I was wrong.

There is a water heater exhaust pipe going to the roof, and the bottom of the pipe hangs down a couple inches below the top of my head. I walked right into the pipe around the middle of December, hitting my head pretty hard. That's when the trouble began, but of course I didn't know it.

At my February 4 "Wellness" physical exam I told my primary care physician about the headaches. Also the fuzzy thinking. Also the substandard balance. She ordered a brain MRI, which took place on the 15th. This is what it showed:

The left image is top view of the skull. The right image is front view. Right is left, left is right. The white stuff on the right (actually on the left) is a pool of blood, which had been collecting for 2 months, called subdural hematoma. It ain't good. There is a fair amount of blood accumulated - a max thickness of 2.2 cm (7/8 inch, for you metrically challenged folks). No wonder my brain isn't working right.

Next day, the good people at Barnes-Jewish Hospital sent a catheter loaded with some kind of glue into a blood vessel in my groin. It's a new procedure to treat subdural hematoma. The glue gets deposited in the middle meningeal artery (MMA), called (embolization). Barnes is the only place in St. Louis where this is done.

The theory is that the glue stops the bleed, and then over the next few weeks the body re-absorbs the pooled blood. To verify that this is happening, I am scheduled for a head CT on March 1.

I will be very interested to see what the CT reveals.

Meat Loaf

Meat Loaf has been dead for four days, so it's about time I wrote something about the dude.

It will take a few years for someone to write the screenplay, and someone to raise the money to make the biopic about Marvin Lee Aday. Wonder who will play the leading role? No doubt Tom Hanks will do it. He'll gain 150 pounds and shave 35 years off his face. He'll have a vocal chord transplant. He'll win another Oscar.

If there is anyone left on Planet Earth who hasn't seen Meat Loaf's music video "Paradise By the Dashboard Light," or maybe it's been some time since you watched it, here is a link to YouTube: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C11MzbEcHlw

Now and then an artist will capture my imagination because they did something unique and did it well. Meat Loaf was one of those.

People get old and die. Mostly that doesn't bother me, but now and then...

Don't Look Up!

 Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" has a bunch of A-list actors in it. The premise, as I read it, is that a comet is on a collision course with Earth and nobody seems to give much of a shit. Sounded stupid, but then DiCaprio, Lawrence, Blanchett, Hill, Streep, et al made me watch it.

Sounded stupid because it is stupid.

It's a disaster movie. And it's funny as hell. Total sarcasm, heaping scorn on world leaders who can't be bothered with saving the world if there is a buck to be made ignoring the science. Heaping scorn on those who blindly follow said leaders.

Stupid movie. I loved it.

When Will We Say "ENOUGH!!"

Christopher Smith is Sharon's son. Sharon has been Kathy's best friend for more than 50 years. Kathy has been my friend for 40 years, so that is my connection with Christopher, known as Chris.

Chris had his first date with Leslie Reeves about a month ago, the night before Thanksgiving. They were at Chris' house in the wee hours, when Leslie's ex-boyfriend showed up. He beat Chris, then shot him in the head. He shot Leslie in the head.

Somebody got worried that they hadn't heard from Chris, and that person asked the sheriff to check on him. Chris was found unconscious in a pool of blood 12 hours after the shooting. Leslie was dead.

Chris is in a hospital bed, unable to do much more than occasionally open his eyes. 

The shooter is in jail.

Guns. America.

Step Right Up

 Merry Christmas, Everyone!

To help spread joy, I offer this, my new fave, taken just 24 hours ago...

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

When I was a younger man, I marveled at the changes my dad lived through.

I am no longer a younger man, and now I marvel at the changes I have lived through. Here is just one.

This shot is from Schnucks Supermarket, taken a couple weeks ago.

One of my first jobs was stocking shelves at Buscher's Pharmacy in Ferguson, Missouri. It was 2 hours after school on weekdays, and then however long it took me to sweep the parking lot on Saturday mornings. Got a white envelope containing $15 cash every week.

Best part of my job was hanging out with Jerome Cohen, the evening pharmacist. He showed me how to read prescriptions, how to break the cost code on the pharmaceutical containers, and I watched him mix up all manner of concoctions and type labels on the manual typewriter. These days, pharmacists rarely mix anything - they count pills and put them in plastic bottles. There are a few "compounding" pharmacies around if you need that sort of thing.

But prescriptions are not what this is about. What this is about is menstruation.

Mr. Buscher, the proprietor, was a product of his middle-class American society. He decided he had to stock pads (tampons were not around in the late 1950s), but they couldn't be left out on the shelves where just anybody could see them. So part of my job was to put Kotex and Modess boxes in plain brown paper bags, tape the bags closed, and use a grease pencil to write on the box "M  45" or "K  45" as appropriate to differentiate Kotex from Modess. Price was 45 cents either way.

I guess if a new customer didn't know the M and K codes, they would ask the clerk (always a female behind the counter) in whispers, "Do you have any Kotex?"

Incidentally, Buscher's Pharmacy stocked rubbers too. But they were in a drawer in the back, and you had to ask for them. I fantasized that someday I would need to buy some, and I feared having to ask for them.

WB

I recently became aware that Woman Brain (WB) has a different operating system than Man Brain (MB).

A woman I know well, showing her WB, said this,: I don’t know why it would make any difference to men, whether the women playing beach volleyball wear bikinis or shorts.

 

(In case you have been in a cave on the moon for several years, I’ll explain that some feminists have been promoting the idea that women playing beach volleyball should cover up a bit more – that the bikini is too revealing.)

 

Using my MB, I can say without any hesitation, and without any trace of doubt, that male spectator interest is directly related to the skimpiness of the uniform. Cover more, lose more viewers. The survival of the sport is at stake.

 

Bikini.

--------Postscript-------------

Five days after this last posting, it seems appropriate for me to acknowledge that there are times/circumstances/situations/subjects where WB's operating system outperforms the MB's OS. This is just to set the record straight, making it clear that I am not denigrating WB, not claiming MB's superiority.

So take your defamation suit and shove it.