Wasting away from Covid

Firstly, you all know me as an author, not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV, although I could.

I will not delve into conspiratorial territory where covid is concerned.

Since I picked up the dreaded infection in the hospital, I suffered the usual complaints of no sense of smell or taste. There were other abnormalities that went along with these symptoms too, but weight loss triggered many other concerns, which meant more doctors.

Un-explained and rather rapid weight loss usually gets most doctors sending you to an oncologist. In my case, they sent me to a GI doctor who ran multiple tests before sending me to a hepatologist. (liver doctor)

Without thinking about what she was saying or how it might affect me, she said the cause was most probably liver cancer. We needed to find out what kind so we could see if it is treatable.

The last few months of 2021, I spent getting my affairs in order. The weight melted off, and I began to resemble a holocaust survivor. I am certain depression played a role in my weight loss too.

Having spent the last part of 2021 and the first part of 2022 taking different tests to determine the cause of the weight loss, they determined it was not cancer. This was the last week of April 2022.

The ‘doctor’ who had been tossing around the C-word turned out to be a PA. She held herself out as a doctor and introduced herself as a doctor but indeed was a PA with two years of training working in the office of a specialist. When I inquired what the doctor thought about what we were doing, her response was… “He hadn’t had time to look at your case.”

How can a specialist who has a PA doing his work for him allow a PA to toss out the C-word without knowing for certain what the diagnosis is? How can a specialist in all good conscious not supervise his PA? After six months of being their patient, how the hell could he just ignore what she was doing? How many other patients of his is she misdiagnosing or just scaring the shit out of them?

That is my rant about the state of our medical care today. I just wonder how they coded the bill to the insurance company. Was it from a specialist or a PA?

The problem I have stems from Covid long. There are no experts on Covid, and truthfully if someone said they were, I wouldn’t believe them. I do believe Covid was invented, and I don’t believe the vaccine was or is ready for prime time, nor should it be a once size fits all solution. That is my opinion.

Most of the symptoms you read about regarding Covid long, I manifested over the course of the last 12 months.

With unexplained weight loss still an issue, I was about to seek some medical purpose Pot as a possible remedy to see if I could get my appetite back. Thankfully and truthfully, I didn’t have to go that far. Before my discovery, I doubt I was getting 1000 calories a day. The labs show that I was malnourished.

I mention that because I think it is relevant to the conversation on how this ‘medication’ might be working.

Truly, my heart goes out to people who suffer from anorexia. If you have ever wanted to puke thinking about eating, that is what it is like and what I lived.

Telling someone to ‘just eat’ is cruel. Imagine you had to eat living grub worms to stay alive… That is what it was like for me.

My life was waning; I forced myself to eat things that made me gag. It was that or die.

I read a story written by a young lady who was dying of cancer. She talked about watching her body waste away. I got it.

I swear I don’t get money for this, but I am telling you what I found that is over the counter that turned things around.

Geritol, yep that liquid you might have seen your grandparents take, I take a half-ounce of it every day and most probably will for the rest of my days. Keep it out of the reach of children.

My energy levels have returned, my weight is going back up, and I crave certain foods again. When my neighbor asked me how I was doing, and I bragged about eating an entire hamburger, she had a puzzled look on her face. Friends, that was a huge deal for me and a milestone.

I don’t know how Covid affects the brain, but it does more than just jack with your sense of taste and smell.

As a side note, I told this story to a friend of mine whose daughter is suffering the same fate. She told her doctor what I said, and he laughed at her. “It is just iron and vitamins…”

If that were me, that doctor would be fired on the spot.

For a moment, let’s say it is a placebo effect. The brain can cure you or kill you, all on its own. You have no doubt heard of hypochondriacs. That is the same thing. A person with that affliction will assume they are sick, and they will become sick.

My liver enzymes and other numbers are showing that it is not a placebo effect; however so, that is my story. I am telling you that stuff is working for me. I have turned others on to it, and it is working for them. Just possibly when you starve your body, there is a ‘shutdown’ routine. Again, not a doctor but I suspect that the body burns what stores of energy or fuel you have before it begins to shut down your organs. I would wager that the unexplained weight loss many patients experiences is part of the process of dying.

Geritol is old and has been around for a long time. I could not find it locally at any drug or grocery store. I don’t imagine they sell much of it.

Amazon is the least expensive (and only) place I have found to get it, but your mileage might vary.

Speak with your doctor about it; I did. My liver doctor didn’t laugh a bit. He has patients on transplant lists because of what covid has done to them. He saw the difference in me in just a few weeks.

What would you care to wager that he keeps Geritol in his toolkit?

I am certain the trick is to stay well-nourished. How or why Geritol made this difference is anyone’s guess but, I suspect it had a lot to do with nourishing those organs that control things like appetite.

-Best

Quality of life or Quantity of life?

 

If you have ever heard that question before you know where this blog is going.

Today, Well yesterday…it all blurs together when you are sleep deprived, a very dear friend of mine was asked this very question by their doctor.

I was there in a supportive role.  Expecting such a thing did not lessen the sting.

Quality of life and death with dignity or Quantity of life while we do all this stuff to prolong your existence.

Many of you reading this might very well be asked this one day.  How will you respond?

More than the how is they why?

You and I walk through our daily life expecting the sun to rise in the morning.  We anticipate that whatever is on our schedule for this day we will have to deal with.  Taking the kids to the doctor or school or possibly some problematic task to tend to at work we know it is on our calendar.

All of these things are distractions really.  They are distractions from our own mortality.

If you are one of my many followers you no doubt have read my account of the accident that befell me years ago.  You know that I faced death once.  Facing our own mortality is different than facing your friends or families death.

My friend through some herculean efforts by different medical facilities could possibly live months to years longer.  The steps necessary to pull that off would interfere significantly with not only their life but those of their loved ones.

How would you face such a thing?

If you put out your friends and family in a pretty big way, you could live longer.  Your quality of life would be limited.  You could ostensibly live a reasonably normal life other than spending several hours a week tethered to some machine.

My heart breaks for my friend.  I don’t know what decision I would make if it were me, so it is impossible for me to judge them.

This situation runs askance of my beliefs, but I do think that assisted suicide should be legal.  While Hospice is wonderful the person going through it must suffer while the organs and other tissues die from lack of nourishment or the buildup of toxins cause them to shut down.

Why in god’s name we cannot just allow them to go with a morphine drip is beyond me.  This country alone kills tens of thousands of babies every year but is hung up on letting terminally ill patients push a button that starts a morphine drip. This action slowly overwhelms their body with a sedative allowing them to just float away.  It is, in fact, an overdose.

As they sort out the legal details of who is paying for what the patient, my friend is in limbo as to where they will go to live out their remaining days on earth.  Calls are made, but of course, they are not returned in a timely fashion.  Insurance will not pay for long-term care if Hospice is involved and Medicare will not pay for Hospice if they still need medical care.

The merry go round of the bureaucracy is never-ending.  To them everything is numbers.   A funeral today is up to $20K if you already have a plot!  That is here in Dallas.

Everything is about money!

Listening to the doctors, I got the idea that they were talking them into death with dignity and quickly as it is less expensive to keep you around since you need so much care.

Possibly I am jaded as I sat there for days on end watching my friend decline.  I see the bureaucracy, and it is rampant!   Wading through it is a nightmare.

• Do you have a living will?
• Do you have life insurance?
• Do you have a regular will?
• Do you have a long-term care policy?

No, not selling anything like this and I certainly do not want to bring you down.

You who follow me know that I love people and I want the best for my friends.  In a genuine way that includes you who follow me here.

One never knows when the sun is not going to rise, and that is a sad but true fact.  We don’t know what is in store after this life is over.  We hope that we will be back with our loved ones and even snowball the cat.  I see the afterlife that preachers sell, and I will not sell that here.

Having said that, I think and believe that faith is essential.  A spiritual connection is paramount to dealing with the death of the body.

Christians call it fire insurance and I scoff at that.  I must admit that if you don’t take it too seriously, it is funny.

I have many thoughts on this subject, and if there is interest, I will expound upon them at a later date.

If you are a spiritual person I encourage you to lift me up in your thoughts and prayers.  I have this friend who will be dead in a short while, and I have another who suffers from an incurable disease that will most certainly end their life as they know it as well.  Two close friends at the same time.

This will present a considerable loss to me personally.  My writing has already suffered as the characters are taking a hiatus while I deal this.

My thoughts are with the one on death’s door and the other who is trying to find death’s door on which to knock.

Thanks so much for your kind thoughts and prayers.

Much Love -TW