SO, My last post was Sept 23, and its now Nov 29., on Oct 19th I got yet another blood draw, and my liver numbers that needed to drop below 100 in order for them to NOT have to do a liver biopsy had dropped to 88 (still high, but a lot less high) which allowed them to use the non invasive technology (it tends to return false readings if that liver number is above 100). In this test you can’t drink water or anything for a few hours before going in, and they bounce sound waves off your liver and then measure how much it wiggles to see if there has been any hardening of the liver, aka cirrhosis, because of scaring. There was none… according to the doctor my liver was “nice and soft and fluffy”, her actual words believe it or not. As of this week I’ve lost about 39 lbs since this whole thing started…. I’ve gone from a size X-large to a size medium and have lost enough weight that my BIGGEST pair of leather pants — black suede actually — now fit me. That said I’ve got to loose at least another 40 lbs to get to the weight I should be (and back into my favorite clothes) …. I am however in no particular rush to get there… weight is continuing to come off but no where near as fast as before.
My fault really, it’s not the eating as much as the I’ve semi locked myself down, and am not exercising as much as I was at the start because I am no longer vaccinated enough to risk going to places like gyms where folks are breathing heavily and finding excuses to not cover their faces enough to keep me protected.
As you may recall, my regular readers… The liver doctor wanted ONE final blood test for this year and asked me to hold off getting the covid booster shot until that happened….which I did on the 22nd of November…. of the liver numbers, the one that had previously dropped from over 100 to 88 had creeped up to 89, but the 2nd number had dropped yet another 20 points, so the liver doctor was satisfied at my on going progress. Today is Monday… on Wednesday I finally get the booster, and 2 week after that, covid willing, I’m back in the gym and building my muscles back to where they were when delta spiked in my area.
The larger PLAN was to go to the UK on New Years Eve, covid willing, but the travel buddy has been prevaricating and procrastinating on finalizing the travel plans, dates, budgets, etc, in spite of ensuring me repeatedly that he really does want to go (he’s never been, so I was going to be his personal tour guide — over my lifetime I’ve commutatively spent YEARS in in London). He’s got a lot of shit going on at home and he’s never been one to manage stress well anyway, so I wait.
And now this week we’ve got the omicron variant….
You’ve got to love a new variant that is so incredibly infectious that they were able to discover it in about two weeks. You got the Canadian guy in Hong Kong who was fully vaccinated and in a quarantine hotel across the hallway from a guy from Africa who was carrying the variant, and who managed to get infected even though they didn’t have any face to face conversations… Scary shit. And then there’s the flight of 200 people where one by the end of the 8 hour flight from African to Northern Europe, 66 people who were NOT infected at the start of the flight were by the end.
And yet, according to the Israeli Commissioner of medicine, there have been no serious infections among people who caught it who are fully vaccinated.
For those of you who don’t grasp what’s going on with this one, think of it as though you had an old-fashioned walled city. And an old enemy has shown up with new new ways of poking holes in our walls, or more specifically new weapons for breaching the defenses that are immune system doesn’t recognize as a weapon, and even if it did it wouldn’t know how to fight it.
You’ve trained troops to do various things. You’ve got troops have been trained to man the walls and to stop people from getting in, but obviously that’s insufficient. If the invaders get past them, they’ll face a bunch of women and children with pitch forks at best… and that would be bad. So in addition, you need to also train troops who specialize in urban fighting — as any member of the US military will tell you (even the vaulted US military was stumbling over its own feet before it started retraining troops in urban fighting during the middle east wars). Urban fighters are trained to go home to home, room to room finding the enemy and snuffing them out without taking out the whole city at the same time….. like Queen Daenerys on her dragon when she gets to King’s landing…. which by the way is what is happening with folks who are NOT vaccinated and end up in hospital on ventilators. The defenders are so stressed out by now knowing how to fight in the Urban style that they end up taking out everything and everybody… i.e., killing you in an attempt to kill the invader — and you end up on a ventilator…. all because you didn’t have specialized troops trained at urban fighting.
When they keep telling us, “yes people are getting sick, but they’re not ending up in hospital” that’s because the vaccine has done some relatively quick (6 weeks) basic training of the troops, with one 2 week refresher course 6 months later in how to take out the invaders without damaging the city or the towns folk.
And apparently even though this is a revised invading force, with newer better weapons for getting through our first line of defense (the guys protecting the city walls) this new one … as far as we currently know… doesn’t seem to be doing any better against the troops trained in urban fighting than the previous invaders… at least from what we know so far … so yes you get sick, but no you don’t need to go to hospital to get over it…. but we’re only a few weeks in, with only a few hundred fully vaccinated people having caught it. That’s too small a sample to know for sure what’s going on.
As was true before, most of the folks who have it, are unvaccinated — relying on poorly manned city walls and no specially trained urban fighters.
So that said, I’m getting my new booster on Wednesday and hopefully in a few weeks we’ll know if the vaccinated are ok… and if we are, I might go travel on my own till my friend makes up his mind
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 