Memnison Journal

I’m finally over a horrible upper respiratory cold that knocked me around quite a bit – with a nasty dry cough that seemed to go on forever. It pretty much levelled me for weeks on end and took a huge chunk out of my general stamina. Everyone else in the house has been felled by [...]

Going to the emergency room with another leg infection, this time from a gash on my right leg…been doing what I could to reduce things over the last few days since I got the gash, but it’s getting red and heating up. You can’t imagine how upset and annoyed I am about this.    More later; [...]

…cross fingers and all that.    My earlier post on this talked about dealing with a new set of docs at Edward Hospital, and so far, it’s paying off.  I’m on long-range doses of penicillin for the near future, about 2g a day (broken into four pills) and have to wash myself down with Hibiclens (surgical [...]

Meredith came home early today sick to her stomach and running just under 100F; the H1N1 still isn’t available out here except a trickle with the public health departments, and there’s been some deaths with teenagers (usual serious swine flu symptoms).   I can’t take the live virus nose spray, and that’s all that’s available. Susan [...]

On Saturday, I started getting the red splotchy stuff, and it was really apparent Sunday noonish that it wasn’t going away and my body temp was going up in the area, and so on…so we went off to Edward Hospital in Naperville – to get a fresh set of eyes on the situation, since I [...]

Weird – the guy who transported me up to my room from the ER last night was going on at length about the horrible injustices done to former Congress critter James Trafficant; I hadn’t heard that name for a while.  Most of the rest of his blurb was a odd and incoherent rant about the [...]

It’s early evening on Friday, and I’m slogging tthrough a ton of paperwork that’s built up; the washer is re-doing the blankets for our bed, and I’m getting tired – today was my first day back at work, and the last couple before that were ‘hi, I’m groggy!’ “Hi, Groggy!” Today, Susan and Meredith (Susan [...]

Back home last night; feeling logy and icky today and sleeping most of the day.  Meredith seems to be getting out from under the strep throat, Susan seems to be coming down with it, and Connie’s leaving today for out of town till Saturday or so (long-expected absence, but a horrible time for it).  I [...]

The last leper colony in Europe, the Tichilesti (founded in 1928) is still going in Romania. Sadly enough, the disease isn’t done for quite yet.  Elements in its rise and fall may be found in the slave trade and in the spread of tuberculosis. (See here for TB’s history.) Leprosy appears to have originated in [...]

Back in the Hospital since Friday night with cellulitis of the lower leg again; this went from a reddish splotch the size of a quarter on my ankle to covering my lower leg in about 10 hours.  Usual treatments and I’ll probably be home again in a day or so from now, but what the [...]

This is the sort of thing that was worrying me about my infections back at the beginning of summer.

Big jump in the rates of teen cases of STDs and syphilis and teen pregnancies during the Bush administration, according to the CDC.    A different sort of ‘don’t ask, and we won’t tell you’.

Both of the kids do, indeed, have sinus infections (probably as a result of their not taking care of themselves with bad allergic sinus reactions to pollens, etc.) and both are sick and cranky.   And both are on antibiotics; Mere still can’t handle pills, so we end up trying to see what we can get [...]

Not mine, but the fears of this woman who has a baby die on her from MRSA, and the larger story of how the bug spreads in the article.

The workmen are out in the back of the house, digging the French Drain thing for the drainage project; I hear a steady thonk-thonk-thonk (there seems to be a total of two guys to do the digging and all, and man, that’s got to be killer work by hand) and will have to go off [...]