Our RV Adventures

TEOTWAWKI  (The End Of The World As We Know It)

Well, it now looks like Brandi won’t start working from home until next week, so it looks like my Jan will be home this weekend. As of right now, Landon is out of school until April 10th,

Jan and I have our annual Doctor visits next Tuesday morning, that is, if they don’t get canceled. Jan also has her yearly mammogram that afternoon, and she got a voicemail this afternoon saying her appointment is still on. But I guess we’ll see what next week brings.

One thing I’m going to ask my doctor for is a prescription for Chloroquine. This is one of the two drugs that, according to doctors in other countries, seems to slow down and even eliminate the WuFlu (or Kung Flu, which now I like better) from the body, even after you’re showing symptoms.

The other drug is Remdesivir, an antiviral that’s been around for about a decade,

I’m hoping my doctor will give me a backup prescription for the chloroquine since I’ve taken it before. Twice, in fact.

Chloroquine is an anit-malarial drug that’s been around for a long time. Long enough that I took in it the early 60’s when we were living in Colombia, S.A. I got a mild case of malaria, and the chloroquine seemed to have cleared it right up. But apparently, not quite.

In 1967 when I was living in North Alabama, I started having occasional seizures, with chills, shortness of breath, and sometimes a slight fever. But when I finally went to a doctor, they had no idea what was causing them.

And it was not until I was down in Florida later that year that I again went to the doctor. And after I described my symptoms, he asked if I had ever had malaria. When I said yes, he said, “Well you’ve got it again.” A couple of months on chloroquine and I’ve never had another problem.

When I asked the doctor why they hadn’t been able to diagnose it up in Alabama, he laughed and said, “I imagine they don’t see much malaria in north Alabama. We see it a lot down here.”

On another drug note, if you do think you have the Kung Flu, it might be best to not take ibuprofen (Advil,Motrin), naproxen (Aleve, Naprosyn), or even aspirin. All of these are NSAIDS (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), and doctors in Europe are finding a lot of bad side-effects when NSAIDS are used for the Kung Flu.

So for that reason, I bought a big bottle of Tylenol when I was out and about today. Needless to say, Tylenol is not an NSAID.

Remember the H1N1 pandemic of 2009-2010? Remember all the empty store shelves, closed schools, stores and restaurants, canceled sport seasons, and ‘sheltering in place’?

Did you blink and miss it, like I apparently did?

Well, W.H.O. declared H1N1 (Swine Flu) a pandemic in June 2009. And by the time it faded away about a year later, 60 million Americans had been infected, over 270,000 people were hospitalized, and 12,469 deaths were recorded. In fact, over 1,000 Americans had died before the U.S. government ever declared it a National Emergency. And worldwide, about 200,000 people died.

As of right now, worldwide, there are about 200,000 known cases of Kung Flu, with about 8,000 deaths recorded. Again, that’s worldwide.  Right now in the U.S. we’ve got about 6000 cases with approximately 100 deaths.

And of course, remember that about 80.000 Americans died in 2018 from the plain old flu.

So when is a pandemic not a pandemic?

So far I’ve not been able to find any definitive reason on any of the medical sites why this pandemic might be worse than that pandemic. Or even if it really is.

And in the FWIW department, research in China seems to show that people with Type A blood are likely to be more vulnerable to the new virus, while Type O people seem to be more resistant.

Finishing up, Jan and I were extremely shocked and saddened to hear that our long-time friend Charles Yust has been hospitalized after he collapsed and suffered a traumatic head injury and multiple major brain bleed. According to his wife, Chris, he is not doing well.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Chris and Charles, and we hope for the best.

Thought For The Day:

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As I mentioned yesterday, Jan came into work with me today and then hung out at the Harris County Library. Then after grabbing  some last minute supplies at the local HEB, she picked me up at the office, and we headed up to Katy about 3pm.

Landon had gone to work with his mother this morning, so we stopped off at Brandi’s office in the Richmond/SH Tollway area to pick him up. Then it was on to the Chick Fil A on SH99 for some, what else, chicken.

We had planned to eat it there, but found that until further notice, they are drive-thru/take out only. And, although the line was long, with their double lanes it went pretty quickly.

Turns out we only beat Brandi home by a few minutes since she ended up leaving work a little early. And as it also turns out, I may get Jan back home quicker than I thought.

Her office is trying to decide if everyone will start working from home. And if they do that, then Jan can come home sooner than expected. We’ll see, I guess.

Within the last couple of days, China has revised their estimate of when the virus started there from mid December to early November. And this could be good news.

One, it means that the virus has been in the U.S for as much as 60 days earlier than first thought. And this means that the ramp-up we’ve been seeing in the last few weeks is not a steep and dangerous as first thought.

And two, it explains why so many people around the country have been diagnosed as having ‘atypical flu’ earlier this year. ‘Atypical’ means the flu version you have doesn’t match any of the prevalent strains going around.

And a lot of people have been chiming in on the blogs and forums how they had flu back in December and January that was diagnosed as ‘atypical’.  All the medical folks could tell them was that what they had wasn’t one of the known versions, since there was no test available for WuFlu.

Finishing up, I found another chart, this one from the W.H.O., detailing the differences between WuFlu, the FluFlu, and just a bad cold.

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Thought For The Day:

“Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.” – Benjamin Franklin

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