Monthly Archives: March 2022

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Avoid death by fentanyl

Some of the West Point Cadets overdosed on March 12, 2022 are still on ventilators. They took what they thought was cocaine. It was laced with fentanyl and they all nearly died.

Not only that, but two of the bystanders who did not use the drug, but did cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, also succumbed. They stopped breathing because they got a heavy dose of fentanyl giving CPR.

Fentanyl is being laced into ANY illegal drug, and being 50 times stronger than morphine, it can kill you by making you stop breathing. Also, fake pills are made. Do not buy pills on the street. And I don’t care if it is your friend. Remember that when someone is really addicted, the addiction is running the show. They need the drug more than your friendship. People will lie, steal and sell drugs. Protect yourself:

Please read the website at

https://www.cdc.gov/stopoverdose/

If you or a family member uses illegal drugs, please get naloxone to have at home. If the shot is given in time, very soon after the person stops breathing, it can save their life.

Here: https://www.cdc.gov/stopoverdose/naloxone/index.html

If you give someone a dose of naloxone CALL AN AMBULANCE. Because it is short acting and the opioid may take back over. The person may need to be on naloxone iv! You must get them to an emergency room as fast as possible.

Our local Health Department was giving out naloxone shot kits in the last few years for free. Our local police carry naloxone. If you are on prescription opioids, you should be offered a prescription for naloxone and your family should be instructed on how to use it.

And teach your children well. I interviewed my patients for years on the age they started smoking. Most of my patients started at age nine. One woman said age seven. We have to start talking to children about drugs and risk and not smoking anything by third grade. That is the horrific reality.

And Bless the punk band The Offspring for reaching out to opioid overuse people and saying, “Get help. You can do it. Please do not die.”

The Opioid diaries live by the Offspring.

And they too are inimitable.

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Playlist: Inimitable

This for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Inimitable and for the website that threw me out because I “did not explicitly violate the rules”. Yep, that’s right. I am thrown out for or in spite of not breaking the rules. Can you say witch hunt? Or scapegoat?

Oh, man, do I have a song list for the website. And will I name it? Nope. Why would I ever do that? I do have friends there and a mentor. This is not about them. This is about the witch hunters. I curse their tiny brains. And I miss my friends, who outnumber the whiners.

So let’s start with songs by the boys. I’ll do songs by the girls next.

Denial

Hank Williams III: Country Heroes

Bargaining

The Offspring: The kids aren’t allright

Anger

The Offspring: Get a Job

Acting Out

Hank Williams III: Pills I Took

Revenge

The Devil Makes Three: Ten Foot Tall

Grief

The Devil Makes Three: Old number 7

Acceptance

The Devil Makes Three: All Hail

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Playlist: Stages of Grief 3

Stages of Grief Playlist 3

All women all the time today. Grieving for their men or our culture. Fighting back.

Denial

Dolly Parton: The Grass is Blue

Bargaining

Ann Peebles: I can’t stand the rain

Anger

Lily Allen: Not Fair

Acting Out/Fighting Back

Sweet Honey in the Rock: Give Your Hands to Struggle

Revenge

Dolly Parton: Silver Dagger

Grief

Tricia Walker: The Heart of Dixie

Acceptance

Bessie Smith: You been a good old wagon

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don’t kill your clients

I wrote this in 2016, when at least nine people died of overdoses in Vancouver, BC at Christmas, from fentanyl. I knew fentanyl was hitting my corner of the Washington State too. Warning, this contains a lot of swearing (edited so this does not become a “mature” site). I was in a very bad mood when I wrote it. It is meant to be black humor, to help me deal with grief.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fentanyl-crisis-up-to-9-drug-overdose-deaths-in-vancouver-last-night-1.3900437

But the news today is STILL talking about fentanyl and overdose: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/us/west-point-cadets-overdose-fentanyl/index.html. When will we ever learn? And also, drug dealers are not actually trustworthy…. your cocaine might contain fentanyl. Don’t do it.

don’t kill your clients

oh, you think I’m talking to physicians….

….no, I’m talking to my fellow dealers.

See, heroin is rather labor intensive to produce, being from the opium poppy and all that. (When people say “I only take natural supplements.” I want to say, “You mean like opium and heroin? You know, plant based.”) Also, Afganistan, those fungkers shoot you as soon as look at you. It turns out that fentanyl is cheaper to make and you can source the ingredients from China.

And then, you can make fake oxycodone tabs and fake hydrocondone pills and sell them for bitcoin on the silk road. But you know, ya gotta mix the sheet right. If you mix it wrong and a buncha people overdose and die, there are complaints. Ya might get some scared clients, like, junkie friends of junkies. And then there are also those chronic pain people who aren’t junkies but been forced onto the streets to treat they habit, I mean, pain. We got a good thing going, the pill thing, because the junkies think that pills is safer than heroin. You might scare the fungkers and then how the fungk will I be able to buy that island with my bitcoin?

So dealers, ya’ll fungkheads, ya messing it up if you don’t get the goddarn mix right. See, fentanyl is not routinely tested for on the blood and urine drug screens. So the person gets labelled as an oxycodone overdose and no one knows that it’s fake pills. But when there are too many deaths, the goddarn feds and doctors get suspicious and start testing the pills.

Same with heroin. Cheapens things to cut it with fentenyl. But you gotta calculate right, because if you kill a whole bunch of clients at once, 1. you cut into profits 2. you make the cops and docs suspicious. You gonna ruin it for everyone, you goddarn morons.

And now I hear we got a new mix. Carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer. Read the recipes carefully, morons, it’s 10,000 times as strong as morphine, you gotta dilute the sheet 10,000 times. Don’t you know math? Take a goddarn chemistry course.

Don’t fungk things up for the responsible drug dealers. A live client keeps on paying.

Be careful out there.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/dec/11/pills-that-kill-why-are-thousands-dying-from-fentanyl-abuse-http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/24/health/elephant-tranquilizer-carfentanil-heroin/

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Playlist: Bands I have danced to

I have done two grief playlists. I will do more, but it got me thinking about other playlists. And we need distraction from grief too.

I am a swing dancer and jitterbug dancer. I lived in the Washington, DC area from 1985 to 1989 and then left for medical school. I spent a year being depressed about a breakup. The only time the depression lifted was when I went dancing. I started with contra dancing and then took a swing dance class. In the 1980s, we would have 400-600 people show up at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo Park in Cabin John, MD, for a live band and a lesson, in a no alcohol venue. We would dance our socks off for three hours. We barely clapped for the bands, but they didn’t seem to care, because they liked watching us throw each other up in the air!

Marcia Ball

Daryl Davis

(You could watch his ted talk, too.)

Maria Muldaur

Maria Muldaur’s joyful album for the beginning of the end of the pandemic

Uppity Blues Women

Little Red and the Renagades

Doc Scantlin and his Imperial Palms Orchestra – at the Kennedy Warren Ballroom in Washington, DC.

I took the photograph of the poster this morning. It is from the 1980s.

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Time marching

This is a tintype. “Tintype photography was invented in France in the 1850s by a man named Adolphe-Alexandre Martin. Tintypes saw the rise and fall of the American Civil War, and have persisted through the 20th century and into modern times.” — from here.

I do not know who this young man is, nor the year. I asked my maternal uncle before he died and he denied any knowledge of the person. He was the family historian and archivisit.

However, I have four tintypes in the box of china doll furniture clothes and accessories. My sister and I received a box of jewelry and the tintypes from my Great Aunt Esther Parr. She was my maternal grandmother’s sister and married Russel Parr. Her maiden name was White, a daughter of George White, the Congregationalist Minister who ran Anatolia College in Turkey and then moved to Greece. My sister and I divided the box of jewelry and the tintypes. There were eight so we took turns picking. We used them for dollhouse portraits, not realizing that they were real photographs. I wonder if the tintypes are from the Parr side of the family.

Last month I was missing my father on February 12. I was a month off. His birthday was today, Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway, born in 1938. I miss him now, too.

I will label more photographs, since I appear to have inherited the maternal family paper archive. There are people that I don’t know, though, and my parents are gone. My mother’s siblings have died as well. I am so glad I still have my father’s sisters.

Ask your parents about the pictures and the objects they keep, before they are gone and you lose the story. Time marches on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: March.

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Stages of Grief Playlist 2

Wait, another? We don’t go through the stages of grief once. We go around and around, like a spiral. Some days we want to lie down in the driveway and just not move. Others it seems like the there might be a tiny bit of sun in the world after all. A mourning handout from the American Academy of Family Practice writes about a culture where one is considered “legitimately crazy” for a year after the death of someone loved. The person is allowed to be emotional, complain, wear their bathrobe all day and call people at 3 am.

Maybe we are all in that stage right now.

Stages of Grief Playlist 2

Denial

The Offspring: Pretty Fly for a White Guy

Bargaining

Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Hard Times Come Again No More

Anger

The Offspring: The opioid diaries

Acting Out

Nathanial Ratcliff and the Night Sweats: SOB

Revenge

Bessie Smith: Young Woman’s Blues

Grief

Over the Rhine: Let it Fall

Acceptance

Sweet Honey in the Rock: Run, Mourner, Run