3/5/2025

 Wednesday, March 5, 2025

D+118

1927 1,000 US marines landed in China to protect American property

1933 Nazis won 43.9% of the vote in the Reichstag elections

1963  Patsy Cllne died in a plane crash with 

In bed at 9:45 and up at 3:30 to do a full load of laundry. 39° outside with a Wind Advisory for today: wind gusts of 45 to 50 mph, projected high of 42°.  I'm hoping our recycling cart doesn't blow into the swale again.   Kitty's yahrzeit candle is still burning; I'll blow it out at sunrise.  (Except I ended up going back to bed and sleeping most of the morning, getting up at 11 a.m.)

Prednisone, day 318, 4 mg., day 1; Kevzara, day 1/14.  2 mg. of prednisone at 4:20 a.m. and 4:15 p.m.  Other meds at 11:15 a.m.     

Fulguration one year ago today, 'manipulation' tomorrow. My procedure was successful, though unpleasant.  After the general anesthesia, I regained consciousness in recovery with a painful nostril from whatever it was the doctor put in it or throgh it and a bad case of shivering.  It reminds me a bit of the last fulguration I  underwent at the Rawson Avenue Surgical Center with Dr. Silbar and some anesthesiologist several years before this one.  I arrived on a Monday morning for that procedure in intense, actually excruciating pain nd had to wait quite a while because the facility's oxygen tanks had leaked over the weekend, and the anesthesiologist wasn't willing to proceed without oxygen being available if needed.  He and Silbar gave me nothing for the pain I was experiencing pre-op, and when I 'came to' in the recovery room, I was on a morphine drip with a nurse sitting next to my gurney, monitoring my blood pressure and controlling the drip.  I was in considerable pain for a while and had no control over my left arm, which was flailing in the air.  A thoroughly awful experience, after which I saw Silbar for one post-op appointment and then stopped seeing him.  When I asked him why I was in such pain after the procedure and required the morphine, he said he didn't know.  It could have been insufficient anesthesia, he said, or the anesthesiologist would probably say he, Silbar, burned too deeply into the bladder lining.  Unbelievable.  When the young urologist at Zablocki asked me before the cystoscopy that revealed the lesions whether I wanted him to fulgurate them - without anesthesia - I was almost stunned. I said no because of my last experience with Dr. Silbar.  I still can't understand what happened then or why, if anesthesia isn't necessary for a fulguration, I had had anesthesia for my 3 prior procedures and the docs at Zablocki were willing to provide it to me simply on my request.  My medical mystery.  In any event, Geri's 'manipulation' tomorrow will be performed with a local anesthesia, not a general, and I am hopeful it will not be a painful experience for her, during it or afterward.  She's had more than enough pain during the last year.  Her knee pain started in April of last year, leading to 3 surgeries and tomorrow's procedure.'

A lethargic day.  Gray skies, rain, sleet, wet snow, brisk wind from the northwest.  I went to Metro Market and got some Mory's salmon for dinner, with some fresh green beans and the last of the pączki, raspberry stuffed. A six-pack.  I ate the last of my cauliflower bacon soup so I could use the screw-top container it was in for my sweet-sour cabbage borscht.  I watched the rest of Sometimes I Think About Dying on MUBI, an unusual film about Fran Larsen, a young woman with social anxiety.  She makes some progress breaking through it because of her relationship with a new co-worker, Robert, who becomes her boyfriend.  It's a mighty slow-moving flick and not terribly interesting because all we ever learn about Fran is the fact of her social anxiety, her sense of her own uninterestingness, her loneliness, and her subdued desire to break out of it.  It's one of the many, many films I've watched that cause me to wonder what it was about the screenplay that got investors to put up the money to make it.  That said, I'm glad that I watched it.  It reminded me of some lonely, self-deprecating or self-effacing days in my life when everyone but me seemed to have some vivacity and reason for living.  Daisy Ridley played Fran in a role in which she barely ever displayed any emotion, except for one scene in which she cried after saying something mean to Robert.

The State of the Union or whatever Trump's speech is called.  We chose not to watch Trump's speech live last night because we didn't want to do that to ourselves right before bedtime. As I write this, it's 5:30 a.m., and I'm wondering whether to watch "Morning Joe" or to read the newspapers.  . . Now it's 4:45 in the afternoon.  I ended up checking out the Times and the Post, quick reads, and then tuning in for a while to Morning Joe and found out the speech was one hour and 49 minutes long, a record, and that it was full of lies, hyperboles, narcissitic self-adulation, and deprecations of Democrats and especially of Joe Biden, whom Trum just can never forgive for having made him a loser of the 2020 election.  His father ingrained in him that the world is made up of only two categories of people, winners and losers, and he should never be a loser.  He is so clearly a profoundly wounded, inadequate, insecure, and pathetically needy human being that I know I should feel sorry for him, but I can't get past his great nastiness and wickedness, his not just willingness to hurt other people but desire to do so.  He's a criminal, a fraud, a con man,  a delusional and malignant human being who is leading the nation into great harm.  Also, a victim of and practitioner of toxic masculinity.  I truly wonder if he is a Russian agent, if Putin does 'have something on him.'  What makes me even sicker than watching Trump at work is watching every Republican legislator in the chamber on their feet cheering him on, each mostly concerned with his or her own seat, claim to fame, and hold on some power.  Worse yet is the realization that my fellow citizens, fellow human beings, elected these people and put them into positions of power.  "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Pogo. 

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society."  John Adams