Well, I'm starting to think of my three weeks of continuous pain in the past tense, at last. This is good. I can lie down in different positions at night, stand up and move around during the day, just as I did before being sick. I have not recovered completely. I may not recover completely. The rather distinctive shape of my body has changed, and during the three weeks of pain my skin started to change from the "young" type to the "old" type. Getting my strength back will take work. And though I was born and raised a fiscal conservative, these days I'm feeling much more fiscally conservative about the whole idea of government "health" agencies than I've ever felt before.
Go figure. We've spent more than a year under a continuous bombardment of propaganda about how the dreaded coronavirus, which most people need a blood test to tell whether they've had or not, is actually a serious life-threatening disease for some people. Well, it is; most of those people did not have much in the way of a life before COVID-19, nor were they expected to have one ever again, but for them it is a terrible, painful disease. I have one neighbor who knew for sure when he had it. He's spent most of the past year living in terror of having it again. I knew for sure when I had a peculiar (but not prolonged or painful) cough and (very mild) pericarditis, too, at the same time that large numbers of my townsfolk started taking the blood tests and learning that that cough and pericarditis (or the lack thereof) were COVID-19...and like most people, I did not feel that COVID-19 was something to miss work for. I'm a writer, so doing quarantine was easy for me and seemed like the public-spirited thing to do. But while in quarantine I was doing house and yard chores to get my exercise in, and to relieve the guilt of staying home when I'd coughed in a peculiar way maybe ten or fifteen times.
People in my town did die from COVID-19. At least they were ill enough to be tested and have it confirmed that they had COVID-19. The actual symptoms they had were in the general category of pneumonia, which removes the sickest from every human community every year and can be caused by lots of different virus or bacteria. But I lost two of my extended family's oldest living generation, a cousin who had a weird blood disorder for six years and a cousin's ex-husband who'd been fooling with drugs enough to be physically disabled for seven years. It was not as if anybody had seen them walking around, or even sitting up and talking to people, enough to miss them, actually, but they did die and the last thing a doctor confirmed that they had wrong with them was coronavirus.
But ohhh, woooe, we needed to break down and restructure our whole economy because of this silly little coronavirus. Well, we did need to change some things about the way we do business. We do have unprecedented numbers of active citizens over age seventy who are able to walk about and work and make their own decisions, and don't want to be shut up in hospitals, just because old age makes them vulnerable to things normal people don't notice as diseases. Coronavirus is one of those things. The common cold, the ordinary flu, the Norwalk Flu, streptococcus bacteria (so common and harmless that one strain is often added to food), and even staphylococcus bacteria (the ones that, if noticeable as infections in acne, can be considered an immune system dysfunction in teenagers) are some of the other things from which these older people need more protection, by way of common courtesies like maintaining a good healthy distance during conversation. People in nursing homes die of staphylococcal and streptococcal pneumonia every year. I love active senior citizens, hope to become one, and am glad to see society taking an interest in protecting them. But I go online and read the thoughts of multitudes of people, including active senior citizens, whose predominant reaction to the coronavirus panic is more like We shut down restaurants for THAT?! Say WHAAAAT!?!?!?--and they do undeniably have a point.
The panic was probably unnecessary. The panic was certainly tacky. Dr. Anthony Fauci (you're telling me Trump couldn't find another doctor who was willing to be his administration's Surgeon General, better qualified than that old...??????) has backed and filled and self-contradicted enough that, if something weren't badly wrong with him, he would have gone home and tried to change his name before now. We needed more self-quarantines and social distancing. We did not need to shut down all the decent restaurants and threaten kids with fines if they were caught playing basketball.
Anyway, although people in the Eastern States are so tired of hearing about coronavirus that we're not expressing appropriate empathy for people on the Plains for whom this disease has not peaked and is still a growing danger, in most of the more populous states and the coastal cities coronavirus is, basically, over. Thank Heaven. E-friends are talking about the micro-rebellions against mask mandates they're seeing.
A meme that's going around claims that the Arabs found that covering people's faces helped break the will of defeated enemies. I suppose it depended on what they covered their defeated enemies' faces with. Anyone who's been in the Middle East when the wind picked up is likely to agree on historians' best guess why the Arabs started covering their own faces. Nobody likes having their skin sandblasted, that's why. There are face coverings that provide relief from wind-blown sand and face coverings that make breathing difficult. The Arabs probably did become the world's experts on both.
Personally, I live in a state that presented mask mandates as the way people could legally get back to work, so I've been in favor of them. I note too that a lot of people look better with the right kind of face covering, for their individual face, than we look with ou teeth hanging out. Myself among them.
But can we now turn our attention back to actual health problems, things that normal people notice for themselves without having to take blood tests?
As documented in earlier posts to this web site: I woke up feeling "under the weather" on a Monday morning. On the Monday afternoon I didn't see the effects of poison spray along the railroad, so I just tried to starve out a possible infection and exposed myself to herbicide vapors for three or four hours and felt very "sick and tired." I got lazy and bought food, including a generally safe brand of chicken products, at the Food Lion in Gate City. This store is best known for its disgustingly tacky pricing policies and its rude (and COVID-clueless) employees, but it also has a long history of selling tainted meat and dairy products. I just hadn't heard of anyone buying food there and being very sick in the last year or two. So I went home and cooked and ate rice with this chicken in it, on the Tuesday, and it tasted perfectly normal to me and had no noticeable effects on the cats. Then on the Wednesday morning I was awakened by an acute pain centered in the liver area. This pain was the announcement that I was about to be sicker than I've ever been in the past fifty-some years.
If I'd been rich I could have ordered blood tests and suchlike to confirm what I could only hypothesize by self-observation. Glyphosate can cause paralysis. My usual reaction to glyphosate involves a few hours during which my digestive tract is paralyzed while it forms bleeding ulcers. During those hours odorless, tasteless salmonella bacteria hit my digestive tract and, rather than being mopped up and flushed out by my bacteria-resistant blood as it would normally have been, it was free to turn everything inside me to green slime. I couldn't even wash it out with charcoal in water, as would normally have been easy, because water was not getting down. I felt thirsty and sipped water for the first four days, and nearly all of that water came back up.
By the time I felt concerned enough about starvation to try eating solid food (yes, it stayed down) two full weeks had passed during which the only thing I ate had been the rice with the tainted meat in it. My sight was dimmed. My strength was diminished. I'd lost a lot of writing time; if I'd had a more physically demanding job I'd still be unable to do that job today. I'd had pain continuously, without a noticeable break, for three weeks. This is a serious health problem, with which silly little COVID-19 is not to be compared.
I've lost friends and relatives to glyphosate poisoning, by now, too. The difference is that they were smarter, healthier individuals who have been missed. Most noticeable at this web site has been Grandma Bonnie Peters, the well-known home nurse, celiac health counsellor, special diet food entrepreneur, not to mention dear friend of mine. GBP technically died of a stroke she was deliberately pursuing after learning that her out-of-control celiac reactions had developed into liver cancer. Why had she been having out-of-control celiac reactions? Begins with G.
There was a cousin on Dad's mother's side that I had grown up respecting. He owned businesses and invented gadgets and was, in Dad's opinion, one of the most intelligent relatives we had. He really deserved to be remembered as the one who showed us how to fight a fire, rather than as the stubborn old fool who persisted in spraying his garden and denying that after spraying his garden he always spent hours in bed with narcolepsy as his most noticeable glyphosate reaction. He developed Alzheimer's-like symptoms in his eighties, started forgetting things like his children's names as well as things like the way he always reacted to the chemicals Dad never talked him out of using. One evening at dinner with some of his children, he nodded off as he'd done so many times before, and when his sons tried to help him get to bed, he was dead.
There was a woman with whom I worked different markets at different times, a deeply lovable woman, barely seventy years old. First her husband was diagnosed with cancer and then she was. She was not a celiac but she started having celiac-like reactions, first to wheat, then to other things. The diagnosis was breast cancer, metastasized--it would have been--but I remember how it metastasized. Glyphosate may not have been the only thing that killed her but it was the thing that most noticeably caused her pain.
Regular readers may remember that I started boring youall about this topic after standing in the Friday Market one day and watching my townsfolk react to glyphosate poisoning. A lot of them would later say, "Oh, some sort of virus was going around that day." Some sort of virus may have been going around but they all came down with it during the hour after they were exposed to glyphosate vapors. No two reactions were exactly alike. Almost everyone in that crowd had a very visible reaction, though some of them weren't pleased to learn that their reactions were visible to other people, and can they be blamed for that. One lady whose actual age was about seventy sailed in looking about forty and was led out looking about ninety. People who were normally deft and competent were making stupid, clumsy mistakes. People coughed and sneezed and gagged and rushed off in search of restrooms. Many of those people have used glyphosate themselves and are still in denial about its being what made them ill on that day. But anyone standing in that crowd and looking at the crowd, not only at themselves, could see that they all went into their various reactions in one hour.
I know one church lady--I'm not sure she still considers herself a friend, but I feel profoundly sorry for her, anyway--who could be considered a total glyphosate denier. She's English, not Irish! She has painful chronic hemorrhoids, not pseudo-celiac sprue! Oh right! She continues poisoning her own garden, and she's sick, afterward. She owns her own business so she can afford to tell somebody else to take over her job on top of their own, cannot afford to pay them extra of course, while she goes home to spend the rest of the day in bed. In pain. And she blames her age, thinks she'll be ready to leave this vale of tears at seventy if she lasts that long. She's never even considered reducing the amounts of glyphosate-tainted wheat and other increasingly glyphosate-polluted foods in her diet, let alone trying to raise her own vegetables without poisoning them. She believes fields of native plants look "scary" and "snaky" and "weedy" and ought to be replaced by invasive nuisance Bermuda grass as a poor substitute for Astroturf. She didn't believe she had coronavirus or needed to observe quarantine when she had that, either, and it worked on her. She became grumpy and then started talking completely off her head, saying things that might have been actionable as slander if they hadn't been so far out of touch with reality, and on that day she announced she was not my friend any more. Well, whether she has any friends left at all is her problem. I have seen old celiacs turn against their spouses and children, whom they accused of poisoning them, as they grew sicker before they died. But God knows and I know that whatever she's said to whomever she's said it to has been a glyphosate reaction coming out at her mouth. She's a sick, stubborn fool, and "old" before she's even seventy, but she will be missed.
Most of the people who talk to me at any length are between the ages of fifty and ninety, so a lot of us blame whatever age we are for everything that goes wrong, although I don't. I'm a celiac and I know it is not so. I was stronger, more energetic, and better looking at forty than I was at twenty-five; I've known celiacs who were stronger, more energetic, and better looking at sixty than they were at thirty. If you don't have any chronic diseases, ages beyond seventy usually look and feel different than ages below seventy, but no age is a source of pain. None of my elders has been very active after they were a hundred years old, but several were active into their nineties, and they agreed that at ninety you become tired more easily and stay tired longer than you probably did at thirty, but you do not automatically have pain just because you reach age ninety. When you have pain, at whatever age, there is a reason for that pain. Reasons for pain can include things like posture and food allergies, infectious diseases, chronic degenerative diseases. For most people who pay attention, whatever the nature of their pains may be, the reasons include glyphosate.
I see it in the young as well. Some of The Nephews share my celiac gene, so their reactions are similar though not identical to mine. Other very young people have very different reactions. I know one unfortunate young soul whose reactions involve pain in the eyes, as with measles. I know some whose reactions appear to be "chronic" mononucleosis, except that for at least one college student I noticed a precise correlation with glyphosate exposure. I know a primary school student, one of the "smartest" and cutest kids in grade two, who "lags and drags" and even seems to have learning disabilities on the day after they've sprayed along the roads or railroads.
And I'm quite sure, without having had the energy to call the local hospitals and get numbers, that when poison spraying picked up this spring, a lot of local television watchers complained to their health care providers along the lines of "I think I've got 'long COVID' after all." Their reactions are similar to the ones they had last year and the year before, but they are likely to forget that because "long COVID" finally sounds like a name for what they're going through.
It's not "long COVID." It may or may not have anything to do with COVID. It's our real major health concern on the Point of Virginia, which is glyphosate.
While lying on my back for most of two weeks I was thinking like a writer--not able to sit up and write very much, but thinking in words, anyway. I thought about calling some local "health care providers." I didn't pester doctors, but I did pester the failed nurses redirected into social work at the county health department.
Well, for one thing I learned that the very low level of their intelligence, consciousness, and manners is likely to be aggravating the health problems of local people. For one thing, studies have shown that geriatric patients tend to become sicker when they're exposed to cutesipating, demeaning speech, like bogus endearments and inaccurate titles of kinship coming out of unhelpful strangers, and every one of the characters who picked up the phone at our local health department addressed me in an obnoxious, cutesipating way. Before I started replying to the "sweetie" and similar garbage with "potty-mouth" and "trashbag," even. (Any time a stranger addresses you as something like "dear," it is healthy to address that stranger as something like "trashbag." Thereafter, and until they get down on their knees, lay their foreheads on the ground, and loudly say "I HUMBLY beg your most kind and gracious pardon, Ma'am/Sir." And if people who are being paid out of our taxes have had their heads filled with p.c. nonsense about not trying to recognize people's genders, an alternative to "Sir" and "Ma'am" that might be acceptable is "My Lord and Master the Taxpayer on Whom I Depend for My Living.") I suppose these people normally talk to welfare cheats all day, but considering that they too depend on our taxes for their living, and they too aren't doing anything useful for the taxpayer, I'm not sure why they imagine they have any right to look down even on welfare cheats. If the trashbags who spoke to me were to encounter our local willfully-homeless drug-addicted public nuisance, I think it would be appropriate for them to call him "Sir," also.
That's a serious public health problem in itself, but, more seriously, none of the four trashbags to whom I talked seemed to have any idea that glyphosate is a serious threat to public health. Welfare cheats who sit around watching television all day are generally aware that glyphosate manufacturers have been ordered to pay large amounts of money to people with cancer and other diseases, that "Roundup" has been pulled off the market as a probable carcinogen, and that the fruits and vegetables people have told them they should eat for their health have tended to make them sick since 2009. People whom your and my tax dollars are paying to deal with public health issues are, so far as I could determine, less informed about these things than your typical retired coal miner with black lung. I remember thinking at some length about the possible costs and benefits of flipping the amount of tax money that is paid to retired coal miners with black lung versus allegedly healthy social workers at our county health department, but since becoming strong enough to sit up and crunch numbers I've had a lot of other cyberchores to catch up with. But my guess would be that the coal miners have accomplished more good in this world than the social workers have. My cats have done more for the health of my town, in the past year, than the social workers have. Anyone who's not aware that that glyphosate is a serious hazard to the public health, by now, ought at least to be able to kill disease-carrying rodents.
I e-mailed the state health office to complain about the useless bloated drones in the county health department. Someone from the state health office e-mailed back that as long as the FDA and the EPA were allowing glyphosate to be used, blah blah blah. I e-mailed her back that she can find links to the key studies showing why the EPA's documents were misread even before they were outdated, organized by topic at MomsAcrossAmerica, or by the order in which I've read them right here at this site.
But, seriously? This woman is a government employee. Government office jobs are, to put it charitably, sinecures for people who fit in and don't make senior employees uncomfortable--as it might be by bringing updated information, energy, or conscientiousness to an office that's settled into a comfortable pattern of not doing what it's paid to do for the public. Chances of a government employee risking her job merely to protect our health, or her own health, or the health of her own children, are very low.
When I think about this, I think that the case might be made that government should not have anything to do with matters of public health. History records that in the past government health agencies did take action against some gross abuses of public health, but history also record that government agencies are not places where corrections of entrenched mistakes made by those agencies ever happen. Maybe the reform we need might be to shut down every government health agency every ten years and rebuild it with fresh employees who are up to date on current information, rather than falling back on the fact that they made a mistake forty years ago, as our government health agencies are currently doing with regard to glyphosate. We currently have an EPA that wants to keep on blithely misreading glyphosate documents that they misread in the 1980s. Maybe we need to throw them all out on the streets and reorganize an EPA that can begin with glyphosate documents released in the past ten years.
I don't know what the ideal solution would be, but I know that our federal government's next "fiscal cliff" is going to be longer and steeper than any that has gone before it. Deep cuts are going to have to be made for our country to survive. If we're serious about putting Americans back to work, and finding them fit to work, a good place to start the cuts would be with any "health" agency that's still blathering about coronavirus and ignoring glyphosate.
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