Month: May 2021

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I keep going back and forth:

• When you're outdoors, wear a mask, don't wear a mask, whatever. Everybody should stop yakking about it.
• For chrissake, for the next couple of months just wear a mask and get yourself vaccinated. This is hardly a big ask. We'll crush the coronavirus by the end of June and then everything will be great.

I dunno. I get tired of the folks who make a big deal out of masks, but I also get tired of the immense weenie-ness of a big chunk of the American public. Maybe I'm just tired, period.

My monthly M-protein numbers are in for April. They're up a little bit, but not by much:

In other news, I had a sudden insight a couple of days ago about my longtime breathing problem.

Readers with good memories will recall that this all started in 2013, after I tripped and fell on my chest. My breathing worsened over the next few months until it got to the point that I was gasping for breath just sitting down. I ended up in the ER, followed by a battery of tests from a pulmonologist which revealed nothing. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that the cause was a couple of broken ribs that went undetected and which I aggravated over time.

My breathing improved steadily after that, but then I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and went through several months of chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant. Those caused lots of fatigue and all of my health problems sort of blended together after that. My breathing problem had improved enough that it was still mild after the initial chemo was finished, but it got steadily worse over the years until recently, when it's become pretty bad.

Except for one thing: I don't have a breathing problem. I can breathe deeply and fully. I've been thinking of it as a breathing problem only because it started out that way and because even a small amount of exertion does cause me to breathe pretty heavily. But that's not a breathing problem, it's a stamina problem. And loss of stamina is a common side effect of cancer meds. Every single one I've taken—velcade, revlimid, darzalex, dex, and now pomalyst—warns of this. It is probably the most common side effect of cancer and cancer meds.

For some reason it took me five years to figure this out, but then again, none of my oncologists has suggested it either. So I guess I shouldn't feel too bad. In any case, what this means is that I can stop wondering what's going on with my breathing and instead accept that stamina deterioration is a pretty standard part of chemo meds that, unfortunately, has no remedy. That won't make me any better, but at least I can stop wondering what the hell is going on.

A friend emails to ask why I don't include, say, Japan, in my daily roundup of COVID-19 mortality. The answer is pretty simple:

This is not every European country or every Asian country, but it gives a pretty good representation of what's going on. Basically, nearly all European countries (plus the US) have very high COVID-19 death rates and nearly all Asian countries have very low rates. Taken as a whole, the mortality rate in Europe is 14x the mortality rate in Asia. This is the result of both a higher case rate (8x higher) and a higher case mortality rate (70% higher).

This makes it pointless to keep comparing Europe and Asia on a daily basis. There is, obviously, something very, very different going on in Asia, and I doubt that better quarantine and masking rules can truly account for a 14x difference.

I've written about this before, and nothing much has changed since then. We still don't have a good explanation for what's going on.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through April 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.