Gary sans steroids

Yesterday, Gary woke up to his first day without added steroids. Despair, doom, "I will never get better." It is true: his inflamed skin doesn't seem to be any better. 

Today, Gary woke up from his second day without added steroids. Cheery, sunny, "I just need to learn to live with this." This is more concerning, because I have now looked up all the things that could be wrong with him, including:

• Hodgkin's disease (My dad had that as his first cancer.)
• Syphillis (His immediate response: "Where did you get syphillis from, Ellen?")
• Crohn's disease (Someone at work suggested I inquire about Crohn's on his devices so that Amazon and the like will start suggesting books and movies about Crohn's, which might work were there a Crohn's sub-genre, which I doubt.)

I cannot discuss most of these things with him, because he gets just enraged and claims that I want him to die. So now there's going to be an entire week until he goes to the doctor, and then ... who knows? I guess they throw antibiotics at it next.

Comments

[KC]

Steroids are weird.

(I bet there *is* a Crohn's sub-genre for advertising, *but* if he doesn't have significant GI issues, then it's probably not that. VERY sneaky plot, though, to suggest things to someone who needs to come up with them "on his own"!)

[theQueen]

KC - oh, he does indeed have significant GI issues , dating back to his gallbladder explosion in 1989.

[KC]

...that may be legitimately worth investigating, then. (although if autoimmune, I would have expected the round of steroids to knock it at least to some degree)

[theQueen]

KC - I keep remembering those episodes of House where the diagnostic technique was "give him steroids, if that doesn't work him give him antibiotics."

[KC]

... I know several people where yeah, that is what the doctors have tried on them for Acute Mysteries, although sometimes the order is reversed, depending on symptoms. (usually while also getting tests going, but look, if you're not going to be able to culture out bacteria until 3 days from now [if it's gram negative], then in adequately dire situations you start treatment and *then* figure out what it is/was once more test results come in)

I haven't ever watched House, though.

[theQueen]

KC - Oh, you should watch it. Very well-written engaging show. Don't binge it, though, because it is very procedural and would become repetitive.

[KC]

I have been getting motion sick from video for a decade or so (at least, panning/zooming video or video in which a lot of things are moving; talking heads are fine; but even the "before/after commercial break" swooping in Jeopardy got me, when a friend was on it), so I have missed most things from the last *mumble-mumble* years, since I have not lived with a TV in the same home since my first apartment in university.

But. House is on the long list if the motion sickness goes away but the sickness does not. (if the sickness goes away, forget media, I'm gonna be back to being out DOING MORE THINGS)

[theQueen]

KC - That seems remarkable. I remember childhood motion sickness. This POTS thing sounds awful.

[KC]

No one else I know with POTS has the motion sickness with video thing (but also everyone has their own weird stuff - when the autonomic nervous system Goes Awry, very weird things happen; a more common thing is that my arms and legs completely forgot how to sweat, which exacerbates heat intolerance), but also yes, severe POTS sucks. (okay, even mild POTS sucks. But it sucks less than severe POTS.) That said, there are worse things out there! At least I am not allergic to drywall dust! And we adjust to things with time, often.

[theQueen]

KC - I just read about a famous person who has POTS now, but I don't remember who.

[KC]

One of the Wiggles (an Australian children's singing group) had it a decade+ ago, and it was *very* useful for publicity. But also POTS onset is often postviral, and Covid turns out to be *really good* at provoking it, so... uh. Yeah. There are more people with POTS now (but hopefully most of them will be less severe? or recover? some people do!), and presumably some of them are famous, but I haven't kept up with that. Maybe there's a wikipedia page...

[theQueen]

KC - Oh, the Wiggle. That was exactly the one. And there are post-covid rashes too.

[KC]

Yeah, covid messes with a lot of things in the body and brain, so there are a lot of weird switches that can get flipped or weird functions that can go awry. Not good. Would like to continue to avoid. :-)

(but the world, on the whole, seems to be "eh, catching it repeatedly is inevitable, we won't worry about masks or ventilation" although at least some people are still getting vaccinated? And I wonder what the psychology is behind this - that reality is unacceptable [either economically - worker gotta be in their cubes - or personally or interpersonally] so we'll just largely ignore it and pretend it's like the flu? but the IQ hits, and the likelihood of long covid in various forms, and the spike in stroke risk... these are not parallel to the common cold or flu, and are ultimately going to have economic and personal and interpersonal costs?)

[theQueen]

KC - I wonder if these same attitudes persisted after the 1918 flu. I thought I read that took two years to "end" but what did "end" mean? People justbgave up, or there wasn't a risk?

[KC]

It did sort of end, as evidenced by us not getting the young-people-die-quickly-and-purple version of the 1918 flu - it infected enough people that they had resistance to it as it was (which was apparently life-long: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/h1n1-2009-pandemic-influenza/researchers-find-long-lived-immunity-1918-pandemic-virus) and it evolved enough that it was no longer killing the same percentage of people out of the infected, a la Covid's morphing into Omicron (https://www.history.com/news/1918-flu-pandemic-never-ended ).

So basically it "ended" insofar as, between immunity to the original version and mutation into a less-deadly virus, it became a mild seasonal flu instead of a remarkably aggressive lethal flu.

But also the 1918 flu, while it came with *some* post-viral effects, isn't as... remarkable... for them as covid; and also you can catch covid a ridiculous number of times even the same year; and also covid is more airborne than the flu, which increases how many people in a population need to have antibodies before any given version of the thing dies out. (measles: nearly everyone needs to have antibodies, because it is so stinkin' contagious; but lower-infection diseases can be stopped with a smaller percentage of population-level immunity) I am hoping we still end up with a definite solution to covid, though, such that life can *really* go back to normal without however-many more people dying and however-many more people than normal landing POTS (and having post-covid strokes and post-covid other stuff) per year!

[theQueen]

KC - the post-covid after-effects scare me. Mom didn't die from polio, so instead she died from post-polio almost 60 years later. Hope same thing doesn't happen with Covid.

[KC]

... yeah. We don't know what the *long* term effects will/won't be, aside from the risk of POTS [for some people, post-viral POTS goes away after 3-5 years, mostly, but for other people it doesn't], but the elevated risk of stroke and heart attack post-Covid are quite a... thing. And the stupid virus attacks *so many* systems! But hopefully it'll be better than polio? Maybe?

[theQueen]

KC - I know that a rash is a sign of dormant Covid. Still, I don't know if there’s enough evidence.

[KC]

Well, the heart attack and stroke numbers are based on giant statistical sampling, so that's probably enough evidence for that particular thing, as is the POTS. I don't know what else will pop up in terms of extremely long-term effects, nor what they'd validate it against since at this point so few people have *not* been exposed; the "not exposed" are mostly the chronically ill/immunosuppressed people who have legitimately just Not Had It At All and even not all of those. Oh, or some of their family members! So there is that, maybe; maybe their "healthy person" sample can be all the ultra-cautious people who live with people at risk and who have also somehow not accidentally contracted it... but good luck finding enough of them, still.

(like the brain scan stuff: okay, we have some sets of [perturbing] brain scans pre-covid and post, for kids, BUT which of these effects are from *Covid* itself and which are isolation/breakdown-of-lots-of-parts-of-society/effects-of-parental-stress/tiktok/etc., if all the kids in that in-progress-before-2020-study had covid by the time their post-2020 scan happened?)

[KC]

Incidentally re: long covid! https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/metformin-may-reduce-long-covid-non-diabetic-population-2024a1000ja0

[theQueen]

KC - interesting article! Metformin vs long covid.I wonder if it works retroactively, like if long-covid sufferers improve with metformin.

[KC]

Probably not? I'd expect that to also be visible in the data and even bigger news, because that would be REALLY helpful especially at this point with how many people have Long Covi!

My guess is that it probably interferes, somehow, with one of the ways Covid "makes" Long Covid (there are likely multiple paths/mechanisms, since there's plain postviral POTS, which Covid is extremely efficient at, but then there are all the rest of the things, which are not normal for postviral anything-else? And covid infects and wallops different organs in different people.).

[theQueen]

KC - well it's nice it works so the diabetic people aren't worse off.