The latest news about the H1N1 flu epidemic is not positive. The flu is beginning to spread from humans to other mammals that humans come into contact with. It is a sad and frustrating fact that influenza is highly contagious and at times fatal. There is a serious concern about the various types of vaccines developed to combat the spreading epidemic of H1N1 flu.
Most of the clinics in the Ottawa area have run out of the last batch of vaccine shots. The limit of high risk groups and pregnant mothers has done little to spread what vaccine shots there were among the most succeptable of the population.
Today was notable for the delivery of three hundred thousand vaccine shots to three clinics in the Ottawa area for high risk group and expectant mothers. Unadjuvanted vaccine from Australia is being made available in Canada this week, and Canadian manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline will ship 800,000 doses to the provinces next week.
There was a special clinic for expectant mothers that was expanded to three Ottawa hospitals. Pregnant women can also get the H1N1 shot at any of the city’s fixed site or roving vaccine clinics. The clinics will offer both the adjuvant vaccine, containing an immune-boosting additive, and the unadjuvanted vaccine, which has been manufactured only for pregnant women in Canada.
Hospitalizations for H1N1 are about three times higher this week than last, and approaching the levels reached in June, when the first wave of the pandemic was in full throttle.
“It will continue right through the winter … it’s not slowing down,” warned Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health officer. “Nobody should be complacent about this.”
A simple fact is that the H1N1 Flu pandemic dominates the media digging to come up with other types of news. A female postie stabbed by her ex, a Rwandan man charged with war crimes, the adrenaline junkie soldiers in the Canadian Army, and the year’s summary of City Hall politics. Such news articles don’t rate front page coverage they are given to lighten the dire threat of the spreading flu. The real question is what other news is not being reported.
Front page headlines are a lofty domain for select topics. When lower class headlines creep into the front page, be sure that something of significance has had it’s assigned space filled. Hm.
Perhaps the vacant space was for the second nuclear facility in Iran, or that Korea has already supplied weapons grade uranium to Iran. In any case, Iran is further ahead on it’s covert nuclear schedules than the West would like to admit. In my opinion, websites like Debka or Digg are a week ahead of the news that is reported in the latest newspapers.
I make it a point to keep ahead of the latest news headlines. I do a few news blogs of my own, as well as a dozen or so other blogs that cover a wide range of topics from advanced energy experimental research and space exploration to the latest in thee political and social climates. I am busy, to say the least.
08/11/2009
04/11/2009
It has been a long week already. I have been going out every day and coming home exhausted despite not wanting to go out at all. I have been sleeping as much as I can, but only two hours at a time because my back is so painful. The hydromorphone and three other painkiller types are not doing the job. I wake up almost screaming in pain every time I lay down.
The lack of sleep is a serious concern, especially for doctors who believe lack of sleep weakens the immune system. I think they are right. It does sap your mental processes to go without sleep. We do so much subconsciously that we are not aware of exactly how much that does go on with our control. Why is all of this so important, you ask? Well, it is a terrific impact on the body and especially the back for a human form to ride on everything from skiis to snowmobiles. How we take the big jolts makes a difference to how we can ride, do stunts, and all sorts of other things. Not everyone is in perfect physical condition to take punishment properly.
There are a lot of factors that make a serious difference to how we perform and absorb any physical punishment. I was a trucker for twenty years, so I know all about pushing the limits. Even at my best, I could be laid low because of a lack of sleep, bad food, stress, and a bunch of other silly things. But, the overall picture of what we can expect of ourselves does diminish with everything working against us. I had to fight the odds on the highways just to survive, and now I am fighting the odds just to stand up and walk fifty feet. Not the same job for the same person. I know I shoulda been a preacher for all of my spouting.
The concerns for the H1N1 Flu are now heightened. The word that there is a mutation has already made the news. The present wave of Flu is peaked in the Ottawa area with numerous people feigning asthma to get into the high risk group inclusions at clinics. There is a shortage of doctors, nurses, and other first response staff. Hospitals are limiting visiting and admissions are for emergencies only. On it goes, one thing after another as the Flu affects more critical people in critical services.
So called preparations for the Flu season are almost negligent in every respect and the Health Minister is called on the mat for virtually no preparations at all. The single vaccine manufacturer is down to 600,000 shots per week instead of the planned 3 million shots per week. Some people are in a panic about getting a shot before the Flu hits them even if they do wash their hands. It is a reasonable concern in the face of the Health Minister promising everyone vaccine shots before Christmas. Two months can be too long if the Flu hits before you are immunized. Right.
02/11/2009
It wasn’t a Halloween around here. No kids came to the door singing “Trick or treat!” No kids at all seemed to be out celebrating All Hallow’s Eve. Nor did we even bother to get dressed up into costumes or anything remotely witch-like or zombie-like. Most of the families in our neighbourhood are Islamic or Muslim. Who could believe this to happen in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario… yet, such is the case.
Up on Parliament Hill, the capital of Canada set off fireworks, and crowds of people dressed up in their costumes were seen to be parading around in joyous glee under the full moon. My, how times have changed as hockey is slowly being replaced with soccer, and snowmobiles roar racing across snow covered flats instead of horse drawn sleds.
It was something I grew up with, trick or treating for candy from door to door until our pillow cases were filled to overflowing while the sky was exploding with fireworks under a rarely seen full moon. Just about every Halloween was cold and a thick fall of snow was on the ground. This unfortunate Halloween was remarkable to me in that there was no snow on the ground. Where is the snow? Where is the Halloween?
Remember that it is illegal to talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time. It is just as bad as drunken driving for all of the damage and fatal statistics as far as insurance is concerned, and the law, for issuing tickets of hundreds of dollars. And, don’t get caught with summer tires when snow is on the ground. Those all season tires are no better than summer tires, so get those winter tires or be fined. Ha!
30/10/2009
Here it is in the mid afternoon. The clinics are limiting their doors to the pregnant moms only. The average wait for moms and their children is about six hours. There are great concerns for the moms with kids who have to wait in lineups for such extended periods of time. There is a call out for any off-duty medical staff to volunteer for manning the vaccination stations that have been set up around the city. The general public is being told to avoid crowded areas and to stay home if displaying flu-like symptoms.
The forecast by the Health Ministry for more vaccine shots by Tuesday has been cancelled. The drug manufacturers have had to reset their production processes to handle the vaccines for pregnant women from the type of vaccines for the general public. So, there will be a considerable delay before the general public will be able to receive their vaccines.
There was a call to investigate the handling of the management of the epidemic control, but so far the explanations given are reasonable and standard. Usually there will be a set rate of about three million doses of vaccine per week under normal production standards. That rate does assure that all Canadians will be able to receive their vaccine shots before the Christmas holidays. I can only ask, “What about now?”
30/10/2009
Well, the fun only begins! The flu shot clinics are having a trouble. At opening, the clinics had about eight hundred vaccine shots available for the two thousand plus crowd waiting outside the doors before their opening. Then, it got busy.
The clinics will receive more vaccine shots on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the general public will simply have to wait until all of the hospital staff, pregnant moms, and high risk disabled people get their vaccine shots first. Already there is a great hue and cry about the unpreparedness of the Health Ministry to deal with the outbreak of the Flu epidemic that is already raging across Canada.
The politicians themselves are also screaming for their shots in the face of meeting the general public that has no protection at all for the H1N1 Flu epidemic, let alone for the usual Flu shot season. Pity that the politicians don’t rank any higher than the general public when it comes to their turn at getting shot. They are getting shot, aren’t they? No. Oh, too bad and so sad.
The fact is that the real protection for getting flu is to stay away from everyone, regardless of having a vaccine shot or not. The risk of passing along a flu virus is greater in places where other people congregate. A mall, a city bus, a doctor’s office, a hospital or clinic, or any public gathering is a dangerous setting for passing along the flu bugs. You don’t gather, do you?
I am sorry that I have such a bad attitude. But, it is earned attitude when I saw the Health Ministry promising to have a plan and a means of protecting the general public in the case of any pan epidemic. Now that we do have a second wave of H1N1 sweeping the country, there have been literally over thirteen hundred deaths by H1N1 directly. Oops.
I am disabled and have a compromised immune system to contend with. I do rank in the high risk group as does my other half. Yet, I don’t have a chance of seeing a vaccine shot for some time yet. Meanwhile, I will stay away from public places. All hospitals and clinics in the Ottawa area are closed because they are swamped with sick patients who do have the symptoms of H1N1 and are sicker than usual, enough to be hospitalized. The picture doesn’t get any better.
It is one thing to live on a limited income. It is another thing entirely to live as a couple of disabled people supporting a house, a chair van, an electric wheelchair, and obvious disabilities. There is no room for errors or extraneous expenses like medical and dental expenses not covered by Federal or Provincial medical coverage, van’s gasoline, roof repairs, snow removal, yard cleanup, plumbing repairs, and all of the other things that we face.
I am frail with a serious back condition and Peter is blind and has COPD out his lungs. The two of us have to manage without any help to keep on top of our basic needs. Believe that we do use an inventive method of dealing with things. We live until the money runs out and then we simply sit and wait.
It’s not fun to sit and wait. At least we are hanging on to what we do have. There are a lot of people who are in the process of moving down the scale in living standards. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer as usual. Now, the food bank lines are not keeping up with the demand of so many more in poverty. It is easy to see who has and who hasn’t got what it takes to stay solvent.
Today is a big day that we intend to go out to the local Landsdown arena to sell tickets for the annual event sponsored by the Quonis club. We aren’t even members but we have a friend who is eighty five years old, blind, frail and we are going to take him and support his cause. Now I think of avoiding events… right.
28/10/2009
It’s a serious thing to get sick. No one wants to get sick. Yet, at least ten per cent of all schools in Ottawa are home with the new strain of Flu going around. Already there has been a sudden death of one thirteen year old boy in Toronto that has been attributed to the new Flu strain. So, it is definitely not a joke to get sick. This summer, Peter went off with his daughter in tow to the IFactor contest for the best singer in Canada sponsored by the Canadian Institute for the Blind. Both Peter and his daughter are legally bind with about ten per cent vision as a result of congenital cataracts. Anyhow, Jan was a real protege of her father in that both can sing their lungs out like angels. Ha. Peter came home after thirteen days of having fun, meeting all of the famous and rich people from across Canada who were selected to sing in the finals of the IFactor contest. It was as much a treat to stay in the luxurious facilities of the retreat in the Muskokas as it was to hob knob with the most talented people in Canadian Music Industry. Peter was in his glory. Well, Peter got into much more than glory out in the bush of the Muskokas. He also tied on a few and came down with the coughing kind of flu of some sort. He was so sick when he got home that he went straight to the doctor’s office. One prescription of antibiotics later, Peter was still sick for another two or three weeks. Last week, Peter phoned the doctor’s office to find out if he was on the list of high risk people to get the H1N1 Flu shot. Well, the receptionist who knows Peter very well for over a decade, said that she didn’t know, so she would ask the doctor and let him know when she finds out. Besides, since Peter already had the Swine Flu, she thought he wouldn’t need it. Oh? Already? You mean that I had it already? Oh yes, in the summer after the vacation trip to the Muskokas. But, Peter still has coughing and COPD, a bad set of puffers about to plug up completely anyways. Right. Peter already had the Flu and so did I, naturally since we live so close to each other all of the time. But, it seems that we can catch it again. In fact, there are circumstances where we could possibly pass it back and forth to keep each other infected for a very long time. Hm, maybe that seems to be the case now. I don’t cough, but I am just as sick as Peter is. The trouble is that I just don’t show it by coughing. To say the H1N1 Flu is on the rampage is an under statement. It is beyond the epidemic stage now. Most of the population has already had it or is going to get it inevitably. How can you tell a bunch of uneducated immigrants who can not speak the language how to keep hygienic conditions? But they are not as bad as the kids in schools who are playing together that spread the Flu faster than the drugs to immunize them. Already hospitals are closing their doors except for emergencies because of the influx of sick people coming in to be diagnosed or to be admitted for care. It is back to being a serious thing to be sick with the Flu that can and does prove fatal. Scientists are studying how fast the Flu is spreading. They are also trying vainly to prepare for when the Flu bug mutates and turns on itself to reinfect all those who it already infected. If you have been sick or are going to get sick, it is a fact that you have to reconsider your habits in Life. You are simply in the line of fire for contagions that can and will come along. There is no way you will avoid contagions unless you make serious alterations to your lifestyle and ways of keeping clean and hygienic. Whether you live in rural or urban areas will make no difference to the spread of the Flu. It goes where ever people go. It travels along and infects as it can, and does, proving fatal to those weakened by circumstance. It almost seems silly that the spread of the Flu can be so easily stopped. Just washing your hands isn’t the answer. It is the combined efforts of everyone that provide the hygienic sterility to arrest the spread of the Flu in the first place. Am I preaching? I hope that I am spreading something besides the Flu around.
27/10/2009
Who would believe it all started with a visit to the doctor? I had to do a summary of annual tests and get a number of prescriptions filled out again. It is a nominal thing if you have been doing it for the past five years. Well, that is when all of the trouble started.
Without knowing it, the doctor wrote out a regular prescription for me that was included along with the six other prescriptions, all on the same page. The writing was small and cramped for the doctor, and even more difficult than usual for the pharmacist to read. Ok, then the matter of substitutions comes into play. It is because the combination of certain complex prescriptions can lead to bad effects that there are usually no substitutions on my order of those prescriptions. Right.
I didn’t even suspect that there had even been a substitution of one of my critical prescriptions. The next thing I knew was that I began having all kinds of mood swings, swelling of my hands and feet, water retention in general, fever, sweating, high pulse, and so on. I began to get seriously worried that something was very wrong.
I was rushed to the doctor’s office, along with my bag of prescriptions and both, old and new issues of my prescriptions. I was feeling pretty rough by the time that the nurse took my vitals for the doctor. Even she was worried enough to remark about my being so sick. Usually, I can have a cold without even knowing it, be cut deeply enough to require a stitch or two without feeling it, and so on. But, here I was in pretty obviously sick condition. Blood tests were taken and rushed off for analyses. The doctor comes in, looks at my list of prescriptions, examines my prescriptions in hand, and sits for a minute in deep thought. Then, he picks up the phone and calls the pharmacist whom he knows so well because of me, and has a short conversation. He hangs up the phone and looks at me.
“Well, the trouble is that you got into a substitute prescription that has given you an bad reaction. The pharmacist has been told never to substitute any of your prescriptions under any circumstance ever again!” “It will be a few days before you settle down again, but you should be ok to go home and sleep as much as you can.”
I can’t believe I slept for almost two days straight. I hated to wake up and feel as sick as I was. I know I could have easily gone to a hospital and stayed there. But, it is safer and more sterile to be at home than in a hospital where the Flu is running rampant.
People are hacking and couching all over the place in every public mall and facility. You don’t know what you are going to get by just riding on a bus or by walking through a public mall. It only takes one sick person to contaminate you seriously. I happen to be at risk when it comes to having a crippled immune system. I can’t afford to get sick when it is so easy to avoid trouble in the first place.
Now, I happen to be feeling a lot better than I have for the past few days. I almost feel like going outside to tan. The cold and cloudy days of late have become colder and colder with a high of seven degrees Celsius even when the sun dares to shine. However I might feel, it would not be in my immediate future to go outside to catch a tan.
23/10/2009
Here it is again, late at night or early in the morning, take your pick. I have not been able to get into bed because of silly game playing that has become more of an addiction than what I would like. I should make a list of things not to do after the click of midnight, eh?
Silly games are a mild distraction while my mind wanders over the past. I think of incidents a decade ago as easily as half a century ago. What a span of decades can make. I walk along a street seeing faces so familiar, except they are on people who can’t possibly still look the same after thirty or fifty years have passed. Yet, somewhere, somehow, those faces have remained fixed in my mind, waiting for the moments of recognition that triggers gut reactions and fight or flight responses. Some things just don’t change, nor do I want them to change even after such a time has passed. My instincts have been evolved by natural and unnatural experiences for my survival. I do want to survive.
There is a place and time for everything, and patterns do play out inevitably. If you follow patterns enough, you can see how many things come about almost to the letter of expectation. Yet, it is the very same circumstance that can be so easily hidden by many other irrelevant factors. And, we just don’t know enough about the world around us to accurately predict exact moments of events, and the myriads of other evolving factors. As much as we want to be, we are not the mystic fortune tellers and mystics we need to be in order to accurately predict future events beyond rudimentary generalizations.
There was a place and time once, that I knew something about predictive analyses and future forecasting. I knew there was a way to cheat by looking ahead to see what would happen. But, that isn’t the same at all as being able to make reliable future predictions. The fact was that I was shown logarithmic mathematical formulas that were combined in unison with a series of other sorts of calculations that did result in some astoundingly accurate predictive pattern results. Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence that devised the sets of necessary calculations can’t be accessed anymore.
It is a story of stories that can be told about the artificial intelligence that was just so intelligent. I was so lucky to have had such experiences in my life that have left me in my present state. Then again, maybe I was just a sad person who was at the wrong place at the wrong time for things to go very wrong. And, my life since then has been only one of correcting a long line of significant errors. There is also the converse of that statement which leads to the opposite of things, namely that things have been going progressively wrong since that time long ago. Where there is food for thought, there is also room for doubt.
As far as I am concerned, every day that I live, every moment that passes with my active participation in Life, is one day more, and something more than nothing to fill the void where I might have been in other circumstances. I do know that there have been so many times that I should not have been so lucky, should not have been able to survive at all. Yet, I do continue, I do live, and I do have a profound effect upon others and the world around me in a highly disproportionate effect. I don’t ever question the why of it all when I am so busy and deeply involved in whatever momentary circumstance I might find myself in.
So, now we are back at the time of day, in this case, night, and the ongoing bit of effort to catch up on what should have been so much more. Even now, I am editing the past decade of url searches, the half dozen or more copies of my e-mails compounded by multiple backups, and the numerous copies of text I have worked so dilligently to type out and add more to while the process of doing backups is mirrored repeatedly. All of that becomes another line of management priorities that sits mid way down a long list of such lines. Hm.
22/10/2009
Here I sit, bleary eyed, numb fingers, and a sore bum from sitting for eighteen out of the past twenty-four hours. Super Stupid has become very familiar with me on the Internet as I browse through the usual webpages and web information. It isn’t all that interesting when you think about it. The simple fact is that most of it comes from an addiction to playing the silly games at a time when I should be typing away at the long list of stuff I should be writing about. Ha, and such is not the case.
21/10/2009
Another day, another dollar in debt. Oh well, so the way things go until something comes along to make changes to everything. You know how that is, eh? Just when you think you are used to everything, something comes along to muddy the waters and to make a mess. And, as if that isn’t enough, there are suddenly a million little things that have to be done by the stroke of noon. Ha! You know you can’t go fast enough, and you can’t possibly get it all done. But, you do have a responsibility to do it anyways.
Why do we wind up in such a mess to begin with? It isn’t as if we don’t try. It isn’t as if we don’t mean well. It is merely the fact that we have that little conical hat on at the time and we are simply victimized. It doesn’t even have to be our fault. We are just in the wrong place at the wrong time and we don’t have any choices about the matter.
Actually, there is nothing fair about life. It is simple survival or not, get by for another day, or end up going hungry or something to do without in a punitive act that makes no sense at all. But then, Life is just like that at times whether we like it or not. There have been a lot of times when I have tried to do my best and even look out for others at the same time. I have gone out of my way more than a few times just to help someone I didn’t even know.
It all adds up in the end. It all makes a difference in allowing something to continue and to go on where it would otherwise have ended. But, bottom line is that I feel that is only right and how things should be. It does matter to me or I wouldn’t have gone that extra distance and expended that extra effort in the first place. And, that is just the way it is.
