4/22/2025

 Tuesday, April 22, 2025

D+167/93

1954 Senate Army-McCarthy televised hearings began

2021 President Joe Biden pledged to cut US carbon emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030 at a virtual climate summit

In bed at 9, up at 4:40.  39°, high of 54°.

Prednisone, day 367; 2 mg., day 5/21; Kevzara, day 8/14; CGM, day 7/15; Trulicity, day 5/7.  Prednisone at 4:50 a.m.  Other meds at 6 a.m. 

Last year's journal on this date, in its entirety:  "Terrible night, terrible pain in both hands & wrists, both shoulders."

Side effects of Kevzara.  I saw my VA rheumatologist yesterday, told him of my persistent shoulder pain and some hip pain, and had a blood draw afterwards to check my inflammation markers, sedimentation rate and c-reactive proteins.  I may learn the results today which will determine whether I can continue withdrawing from prednisone and perhaps be off of it by the end of May.  He told me, however, that I would continue on Kevzara injections for one year.  I looked up the side effects of Kevzara and learned:

KEVZARA® (sarilumab) can cause serious side effects including:

SERIOUS INFECTIONS: KEVZARA is a medicine that affects your immune system. KEVZARA can lower the ability of your immune system to fight infections. Some people have had serious infections while using KEVZARA, including tuberculosis (TB), and infections caused by bacteria, fungi, or viruses that can spread throughout the body. Some people have died from these infections.

CHANGES IN CERTAIN LABORATORY TEST RESULTS: Your healthcare provider should do blood tests before and after starting KEVZARA to check for low neutrophil (white blood cells that help the body fight off bacterial infections) counts, low platelet (blood cells that help with blood clotting and stop bleeding) counts, and an increase in certain liver function tests. Changes in test results are common with KEVZARA and can be severe. You may also have changes in other laboratory tests, such as your blood cholesterol levels

TEARS (PERFORATION) OF THE STOMACH OR INTESTINES: Tell your healthcare provider if you have had a condition known as diverticulitis (inflammation in parts of the large intestine) or ulcers in your stomach or intestines. Some people using KEVZARA get tears in their stomach or intestine. This happens most often in people who also take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS)[aspirin], corticosteroids, or methotrexate. Call your healthcare provider right away if you have fever and stomach (abdominal) pain that does not go away. 

CANCER: KEVZARA may increase your risk of certain cancers by changing the way your immune system works.  

Dr. Ryzka told me none of this when he put me on this medication.  Should he have?  Should he have gotten my "informed consent" before having me inject this stuff in my belly every two weeks?  I wonder about this, especially about the risk of perforations in the stomach or intestines, since I have taken a full-strength, 325 mg aspirin every day for the last 4 years or so.  I suspect most doctors don't bother with warning about possible side effects because their probabilities are so low.  Or perhaps because the information is available in the package inserts that come with the medication, the inserts that few patients read or indeed may not be abe to read because the print font is so tiny as to be illegible.  In any event, now that I know the risk of serious illness, injury, or death (though not the magnitude of the risks), should I stop using the med?  Something to think about, or perhaps to do further research on.  First, I await the results of yesterday's blood test.

Dr. Ryzka called me while I was on my afternoon outing and told me that all my numbers were good so I should continue on 2 mg/day to complete the 21 days, then 1 mg for 21 days, and then stop taking the stuff.  That's the good news; the bad news is that all these pains in my joints must be osteoarthritis.

Cruelty, vindictiveness, pettiness, and let public health be deamned.  From yesterday's WSJ:

Trump Administration Irate at Harvard, Plans to Pull Additional $1 Billion in Funding

 The Trump administration has grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of an escalating dispute between the two sides that it is planning to pull an additional $1 billion of the school’s funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.  

Trump administration officials, the people said, thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.

They were surprised on Monday when Harvard released the letter to the public. Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than Columbia University, but now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation’s most prominent university, according to the people.

People familiar with Harvard’s response say that there was no agreement to keep the letter private, and that its contents—including requirements that Harvard allow federal-government oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff—were a nonstarter.

The letters to Harvard and other schools are coming from a new Trump panel called the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. 

Are actions like these coming from Trump himself, or from Stephen Miller, a shanda fur die goyim?  Or does Robert F. Kennedy have a role in this as Secretary of Health and Human Services, or Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education?  My money is on Stephen Miller. 

This morning's lead headline in the WSJ is "Dow Headed for Worst April Since Great Depression: Few think the administration’s negotiations with trade partners will yield results soon enough to ease the strain."    

Such a welcome sight!  Geri is getting ready to take charge of her gardens and landscaping again.

Thinking about Pope Francis's death and Micaela's seder.  The Hagaddah, Elijah, ma nishtanah, and dayenu.  Cardinals in red, bishops in purple, Swiss guards, and the conclave.  Rituals, traditions, rites, customs, protocols.  Why do I find the Passover Haggadah understandable and worthwhile, but all the folderol surrounding the death of Pope Francis (and every earlier pope) and the election of his successor to be so off-putting, repellent, and worse?  Traditions and rituals help to bind people in groups together.  They help provide identity, meaning, purpose, as well as group cohesiveness. They can be good things or bad things.  Family prayerful seders are good.  Nazi ritual a la Leni Riefenstahl are bad.  The haggadah at Passover is a family and friends affair celebrating the survival and liberation of a whole people held in captivity by another people.  The Vatican rituals surrounding the Pope, in life and in death, are about one man, a High Priest, said to be the linal successor of another man supposedly designated by the Son of God, who was God Himself, to lead his people.  All the pomp and circumstance around the Pope is designed to mimic the homage due to an emperor.  The papal Curia is aptly named - a court, as in a royal court.  The Swiss Guards with their bizarre striped, Renaissance-style uniforms, their halberds and helmets, are an anachronistic Praetorian Guard.  All the hullabaloo suggests worldly power and glory fit for a king, an emperor, or a Stalin, Mao, or a Fuhrer.  The first shall be last and the last shall be first . . . Give away all that you have . . . Unless you become as little children. . .

Afternoon outing.  First to the bank to deposit the $100 bills Costco gave me, then to Germantown H.S. to see where Lizzie will be competing on Thursday, then to the post office for stamps, then to 'Birds R Us' for suet, then to the recliner for a nice nap.

My minority view universities and law firms that "cave" to Trump's extortion.  We should not be so harsh, unforgiving, and accusatory about the univeristies and law firms that settle with Donald Trump to avoid the draconian punishments he is able to visit upon them.  The universities are at risk of losing grant monies and needed revenje from foreign students.  The grants that would be terminated or 'paused' could result in the laying off of valued employees and in any event would result in the cessation of the research being funded in part by the federal grants.   I take it as a given that some and probably ost of that research, especially medical reserach, is important, or else it would not have recieved the grant in the first place.  So there is more at stake than merely money.  The law firms who 'caved' represent clients to whom they own duties of good faith, reasonableness, loyalty, and care.  The punishments Trump threatened would inevitably have affected not only the lawyers in the firm, but also their clients.  Presumably many would have to seek other counsel, sometimes at additinal and perhaps great expense.   We ought not be so quick to condemn these organizations and the people who run them.  I'm not saying that they should have settled with Trump or they should not have, but that we should be slow to sling mud at them.  On the other hand, we oughtn't to hestitate in recognizing Donald Trump and his thugish acolytes for what they are: extortionists.