Tag Archives: zoom

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Brain thoughts

The attendees of the conference are all excited and hopeful at the fleshment of our understanding of Covid-19’s effects on the brain.

I am still absorbing the information, getting ready to write about it.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fleshment.

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BRAINS

On Thursday and Friday I spent six hours daily glued to zoom, for the Inflammatory Brain Disorders Conference. Speakers, both physicians and scientists and physician-scientists, from all over the world, spoke. The research is intensive and ongoing. They spoke about Long Covid, both the immune response and “brain fog”. They spoke about anti-NMDA antibody disorder (the book Brain on Fire) and now there have been over 500 people identified with that disorder and a whole bunch more antibody-to-brain disorders! They talked about PANS and PANDAS and chronic fatigue and Mast Cell Activation Disorder and about the immune system over and over. The new information is amazing and I need to reread all my notes. Psychiatry and Neurology and Immunology are all overlapping in research, along with Rheumatology, since these disorders overlap all four.

It is a medical revolution in the making.

Best news was that 96% of Long Covid patients are better by 2 years from getting sick. That is tremendously reassuring, though the number may change. And the definition of Long Covid is still being sorted out and we do not know if people relapse.

I felt that MY brain was MELTED by the end, but I managed to enjoy the Rhododendron Parade on Saturday and just puttered around the house on Sunday.

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within normal limits

I think doctoring makes one cynical. Or at least messes up the scale of normal.

Maybe there are Marcus Welby docs out there, but I don’t know any. Doctoring messes up one’s scale. A wound is compared to black horrifying gangrene to the knee, pain is compared to screaming delirium tremens or full thickness burns or heroin withdrawal, one in four adults can be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder at some time in their life…. so then, what is normal?

What is normal for relationships? How many deeply happy marriages do you know? If half end in divorce, what are the odds?

Where is the line in love? Where is the line between loving the other person no matter what and wait, that is domestic violence. Where is the line for abuse? Do people agree on it?

No. They do not. What I think is behavior that is frightening may be normal behavior to my partner. Is it ok to drink until one is drunk? I don’t want to be around it. I saw enough of that shit at work. I deal with addiction daily. If someone wants to get drunk, they can choose to do that. But not around me. And no, I don’t want to date them. And if they are working themselves to death, is that ok? Well, I might be a tad hypersensitive to that, since I nearly managed that myself. So I don’t want to be around that either. That might be viewed as noble self-sacrifice. But at work, I see the caregiver die before the recipient of the care, all too often. Especially in older couples, where neither one wants to let anyone in the house to help….

….but then, some people do hear me. A woman thanked me last year for saying she should quit covering for her husband. She was afraid, but backed off. He is able to do more than she expected and he also is more respectful and kind to her. She thanked me and I got all shy and tongue-tied.

My definition of love is listening. Someone who listens and hears and lets me listen and hear. When each person can say what they are thinking and feeling and wanting and worried about…. because if only one person is speaking, if only one person is determining what the relationship is, it is not a relationship.

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beach birding

My daughter and I hiked the beach on Saturday. The eagles were out. We saw three at once, two juveniles and an adult. Earlier we saw an adult flying and a juvenile flying. There were either three or five or more.

I watch for them in the trees. Big dark lumps that the zoom lens can parse. This is at full zoom so we were not close. But we were walking around Point Hudson indirectly closer.

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halcyon light

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: halcyon.

Are our memories accurate or do they fool us? Halcyon memories. I really like this photograph but it fools us a bit…. I am zoomed in very far trying to capture the sun breaking through the clouds. The picture is much more dramatic then where I was really standing. I can fool myself….


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zoom

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: sublime.

My daughter was home from noon Saturday until 3 pm Sunday. We took two beach walks in between her spending most of her time studying.

I zoomed in with my cell phone trying to figure out what the tiny gold boat on the horizon is. We thought either a light colored boat or a barge of sawdust…. It rained all Saturday night and some of Sunday and some of the time on the beach. But we had sun too.

This is looking north from North Beach, towards Vancouver Island.