This is just a "hello, world" post. There's nothing very interesting happening at the moment, and I have to leave soon to submit myself to a truly astonishing array of blood tests.¹ So just to let everyone know that I'm alive, awake, and on the job, here's the cost of natural gas since the war in Ukraine started:
A few years ago it was three bucks. Now it's over $50. In the US it's around $10.
Bottom line: European countries are sacrificing a lot to prosecute the war in Ukraine. In the US it's no big deal. It's good to keep that in mind.
¹Creatinine, white blood count, syphilis, hep A, B, and C, HIV, Epstein-Barr, blood type, glucose level, electrolytes, calcium, bilirubin, phosphorous, magnesium, immunoglobulins, M-protein, uric acid, quantiferon-TB, PTT, etc. etc. Also an EKG and an echocardiogram. And a brain MRI. Next week we do a spinal biopsy, which is really painful. Have you ever had one of those?
UPDATE: 18 vials of blood! Then they chased me down as I was leaving to tell me they'd forgotten one. 19 vials!
Had a bone marrow biopsy earlier this year. Good luck!
Was it monumentally uncomfortable, or in some other fashion hideously painful?
Unlike those experienced by my father & cousin, they're no longer excruciatingly painful; mine was with "twilight" anesthesia, so I was conscious throughout out the aspiration, & felt I could have driven myself home if I had my car (the volunteer driver didn't stay where she said she would or respond to announcements or calls to her cell).
The most pain was the wait for results.
Autocomplete fail, then I missed duplicate "out" -would like draft text in better color than orange - or edit capability
Oh, settle down, Big Guy! It's not like they take a separate draw for each test. (Well... they DO for some...) Anyway, it's just the one needle stick. Plus contrast for the MRI. (The MRI is the only annoying test out of all of them, just because it takes so long and somewhere in the middle your nose is going to start to itch.) (Oh, wait... Did I just jinx you? Sorry!)
Oh... Re: spinal biopsy... You'll be nice and numb and you won't be able to see any of it. My wife had one two years ago, and the only unsettling part was that they let a 3rd-year resident give it a try while the Attending offered encouraging words. She never got the needle in the right spot, so the Attending had to take over. And meanwhile, another resident came close to fainting. And it was all for nothing! No exotic diseases after all that. My advice: NO RESIDENTS! Insist on the attending, which is your right.
As these costs become more apparent, it will also become obvious that NATO should have sent troops months ago (or should send them now) to end the war with a Russian defeat and a free Ukraine.
Yes. It's definitely worth risking a nuclear exchange to enable German families to set the thermostat to 72 instead of 67.
No such risk. But your irrational fears are what will cause this to drag out for years.
It would probably be better to show this with columns instead of a line graph. That would make the suddenness more obvious.
The irony is, when the glaciers are gone, eastern Ukraine will be under water.
Not to mention, much of Russia.
Sounds like a good first steppe...
🥁
The most vials of blood drawn for my tests was either 6 or 8. Lucked out with an excellent phlebotomist.
Hope your session is pain-free & results great!
Syphilus? What have you been up to?
Sophomoric and uncalled for.
US prices are bloated way too much considering the cost/rate of extraction. It's a artificial price bubble.
European countries chose to make themselves dependent on Russian natural gas. When Trump warned them, they openly mocked him. Angela Merkel proclaimed that she was an expert in dealing with foreign autocrats and had Putin well in hand. If the Europeans spend the winter freezing in the dark, it will be the richly-deserved consequence of their own folly, self-indulgence and self-righteousness.
just spent a week in the hospital. my phlebotomist would come by at 3 a.m. for my daily draw. he was having difficulty finding a vein and would pepper the time with a few gawds, oh my gawds, gawd nos. not exactly what one wants to here from his needle sticker. figured out that its his "mannerisms" but still not away to instill confidence in your patient.
Hmmmm ... looks as if we were rocking along at about $10 until the end of January 2021. Then it went to almost $40 over the next year BEFORE the war in Ukraine. What could have happened in January 2021 to cause an almost 400% increase? Thoughts?
Nothing very interesting happening? Looks like someone missed the news of an (alleged) nonbinary university student in Blakkkface Justin T's Hypocritical Woketopia trying to cancel Win Butler, who is only guilty of being the proud son of Texas oilmen.
To borrow from Antitrump Twitter user @dobermanboston, with a side of @dougjballoon:
"In this Ohio diner, AF still means Agnostic Front, not Arcade Fire, but they do know this: Win Butler is only facing cancellation because he had the gall to stand up to the corrupt Democrat Party machine & favor Bernie Sanders's pro-worker campaign over the Neoliberal #idpol of Crooked Hillary Clinton & Sleepy Joe Biden".
Hi Mr Drum. If by spinal biopsy you mean lumbar puncture for the csf, it’s not really painful IMO. The incidence of spinal headache afterwards is pretty high, but it resolves, and “patch” procedures work pretty well.
If, instead, you mean a bone biopsy of the spine, I’ve got no guess, sorry. I assume they’d do a twilight sedation thing, and it might ache a lot after?… Overall, I’d guess it’ll end up being less of a big deal then feared beforehand, as with most of these things. But good luck!
edit:
that last vial is for the vampire disco in the basement.
That's why they never let you in the clinic basement. Never even seen a picture of a clinic or hospital basement, have you? No, it's the vampire disco.
19 vials…. were it only 9 and they were to miss something which later proved to be causal for a sub-par outcome they would be excoriated for not having tested sufficiently and likely sued to within a centimeter of oblivion. The fault lies not in the vial count …