> That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.
* https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1162183695270387712
Cooper was reading from a GQ interview:
* https://www.gq.com/story/stephen-colbert-gq-cover-story
Colbert was quoting Tolkien.
Not for me. When confronted to death or intense pain, everything else becomes insignificant and futile. And when things go back to normal, I tend to forget. I suppose that to be fully functional human beings, we need to ignore the harsh reality of life! Is it really possible to "internalize mortality"? I know some people try very hard but are they immune to anxiety and daily worries, are they happier? I haven't met such a person yet.
Honestly answer. Do you face death all the way? Does the immense pain dissipate, and similar thoughts had with no pain attached?
There is gold in the ashes. It is up for the individual to identify.
Death is painful and dreadful. Anxiety ridden. Everyone feels it when contemplating death. Like the Mideveal ages everyone should walk around with a golden jeweled skull.
We plan for life, never for death. Find in the saddest moments, the hardest moments, the beauty the light gives you.
For in death, there are no answers that pertain to life just as life has no answers that pertain to death.
You may have control over living this life, but only if you fully see the beauty that death allows in life.
Don’t let the anxiety stop you.
Darkness, surrounding and surmounting, where no self exists, life boundlessly feeding into the ether and the ether boundlessly feeding into life.
A process of forget, death, decay, growth and born. Where the process is outside all of that.
The process that persists yet you go away.
Think about that darkness there, that scary insurmountable darkness of the persisting process. The persisting process that if it had awareness and wanted to undergo death and growth it could not, yet you are bounded by this process. To always grow and die, either eternally forever or one time in the whole of forever. Both time being a perfect circle and a straight line, you being the one point for all of that eternity.
To be reprised or forgotten about forever.
Darkness shattering.
The paralyzing will, if fostered, cared for, can exhume paralyization and can find a dark addicting taste for the affinity of the unknowable.
After every near miss, it takes me a while to trick myself into rejoining the world of the living, where paying rent and doing laundry matters.
Being a geek has been an asset. I can lose myself in solving problems. Focusing on those thoughts to push aside the other thoughts.
This current cycle, I got a puppy. Total pain in the ass. But he still needs to be walked, so I get up and we walk. Rinse, lather, repeat.
He started an idea, developed, and has a team to continue it.
He did his role.
What is next for him? Hopefully he has enough money to live without working. Then he can put his efforts into himself.
This quote stood out, because as a promise to your family, it really sucks. We never know what the moments that matter to other people are going to be. Big events are nice. But when you think back on your life, how many important moments were from small events? Just having a nice talk, doing a chore with your dad, telling your mom about your day? How many idle comments from friends ended up having a large impact on you?
When dealing with family, you need to be there enough that moments happen, because the scope of their impact on the lives of those around you are not predictable.
I'm fine with people sacrificing for their work, but don't try to sell the "I'm doing it all" crap.
The weird thing is, despite being unconscious for over a month, I woke up feeling like I hadn’t missed anything, and even now I look back at this with slight disbelief - surely you’re thinking of someone else, surely it wasn’t that long. I felt like I’d been out longer after a general for surgery a few years ago.
They did run a whole battery of neurological tests on me once I was conscious and eating - they were pretty surprised I had no obvious brain damage - I had maintained a fever over 108 for several days, despite ice baths and the, what, 20g of daily antibiotics? I do wonder if there was some, but rather more subtle than what was being looked for.
Re-integrating was weird. For everyone else I’d been as good as dead - they’d seen me carted off in an ambulance, and then a few weeks later term had ended. I on the other hand basically went straight from the end of one school term to the beginning of the next with zero intervening time, and nobody could figure out why I was pissed off. They kept asking me about what had happened - and I answered honestly that they probably knew more than I did.
It also sucked that I had no soft landing back into classes, and in the time I’d been unconscious they’d started calculus - I came back and had to differentiate and integrate and had no frigging idea what I was actually doing - I remember sitting in an A-level maths exam a year later and finally having the revelation that it was about curves and rates of change.
All this because I had what looked like a zit on my knee. It grew until I couldn’t fit trousers over my leg, school offered me a sticking plaster, and said I wasn’t getting out of sport that easily. Then my leg opened up one night fetching water in the kitchen, and I lost consciousness. I’ll never forget the sight of custard in crude oil swirling over the linoleum - perhaps that’s one side effect of the coma - my last conscious moment is vivid in the extreme.
Anyway, that brush with death didn’t change my outlook one bit, but then again I was an invincible 16 year old. The ones since then have definitely left their mark.
I went from feeling fine to I might need a repeat prescription, to having to get a taxi home.
The next day I ended up doing an end run around A&E and went from the lower risk renal ward to the high risk to the ic ward and spent two weeks in Lister.
I am surprised that the US hospital didn't recognise it though - senior Nephrologist who saw me after said its "bloody easy to diagnose"
And yes I did get a blocking for not calling 999 (911) when it happened
Good lord, your school let the thing grow on you without sending you to the doctor!? That's unbelievable negligence!
Negligence was kinda the name of the game at British boarding schools until the late 90’s, and probably still is - “the parents will never believe it” works 99% of the time.
20,000mg, am I reading that right? According to my non-medical background that's a shitload of drugs. Good to be reading this knowing you came out of it ok.
Surely the world would be better off without further optimising targeted spam.
If your job is consuming all of your mental space, which is clearly the mindset he describes in the article, there is none left for your family.
Maybe this is simply because anything I read on LinkedIn gives me that feeling.
In the case of one of my relatives, the result was confirmation they had the flu (and too late for Tamiflu or the like to be effective). In my case, it was intestinal perforation that (six months later) led to part of my large intestine being taken out.
Big congrats to this guy for getting through it.
I'm glad this guy could get the care needed to survive, and I wish him the very best in his recovery.
Certainly all the care he received in Toronto would have been covered, assuming he's Canadian.
It's wild to me that the potential financial impact of this was part of the picture for many of the US people reading it (especially the startup founders who are probably without insurance right now, and this would leave absolutely financially ruined for life).
I sure hope he had travel insurance. Likely did as most companies offer it for employment travel.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/medical-emergencies-i...
This is a serious question people ask themselves whenever they get sick. It's one no one should have to ask, but one many Americans have had to sincerely consider.
I am wondering if having allowed emergency wide-spectrum antibiotics freely for such cases would help? Time seems to be extremely critical in such cases.
The problem is you also need emergency physicians available equally freely and ubiquitously to identify the need. Unnecessary use of powerful, broad spectrum antibiotics has significant potential adverse personal and public health consequences, and the general public is not qualified to appropriately assess need for use.
I am not sure I would use them at home in case you describe though - I would just run to emergency if possible. Also antibiotics don't work with viruses, fungus or parasites, so its not a panacea.
Very soon people would not only die from rare bacteria related decease but any kind of random bacteria infection.
Wishing you the best, Mark.
> This mainly involves infection by the Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria and more commonly affects young, healthy adults. I didn't do anything to get it, it just happened - like being struck by lightning.
The jarring contrast between medicine's ability to perform surgical miracles, like those described in the article, and it's total inability to understand what causes illness, is just comical. I guess there is money in one and not the other.
I cannot imagine a mechanism whereby stress causes a human body to create a bacterium, effectively from out of nowhere. To synthesise it. Do you have any evidence or even a posited mechanism for this amazing claim? Or is your claim that the illness isn't caused by this bacterium?
I had the same experience in a big, prestigious hospital. After a surgery went wrong they insisted I’m ok and getting better despite my less and less vigorous protests. When they finally accepted to investigate this more thoroughly they realized the severity. The story repeated itself through multiple surgeries. Even just hours before the last one they insisted I should be getting better and again only investigated after several pleas. Which was very surprising considering that when going into this last surgery my chances of survival were under 15%, I was basically in septic shock and already mostly unconscious due to the illness and medication.
I think a doctor’s diagnosis starts with assuming basic issues and escalating later rather than the other way around. It might make sense statistically... unless you’re among the unlucky few.
How does an infection like this happen though? What can you do to prevent it?
> By the time I landed in New York that day in February, I felt a flu coming on. The next 48 hours was a marathon, so I resolved to push through.
And he also experienced some very non-flu like symptoms:
> by Wednesday night I was running a serious fever and my left leg was in a surprising amount of pain.
Despite having a high fever and pain, he didn't go to the hospital until he actually collapsed the next day. Had he sought medical treatment as soon as the leg pain manifested, his outcome might not have been as dire.
Stay away from places where a lot of different people touch a lot of different things - and if you have to touch those things, wipe them down first with antiseptic wipes or similar.
In addition to this - take care not to let (or get, if possible - not always easy, depending on what you do for a living, your hobbies, and just life itself) wounds happen on your skin or mouth. If you do get a wound (cut, scratch, bite, etc) - try to take care of it properly immediately; clean it, apply dressing, etc. In the case of mouth wounds (ie - you bite your tongue or lip hard enough to draw blood), about all you can do is a salt rinse and keep your teeth brushed.
Stay away from hospitals and care homes and the like - seriously, one of the best places to get an infection is in a hospital or doctor's office. It seems counterintuitive, but when you have a place where sick people congregate, not everything is going to be "squeaky clean" even when they are regularly cleaned.
You might take the extreme step of wearing some kind of mask to reduce the inhalation of bacteria and/or viruses. It won't completely stop it, but it will reduce it a little.
Don't hang around sick people? If a coworker shows up to work sick, you might want to go home yourself (explain to your boss why, first - and let them make a decision as to who should go home - likely, they'll send the coworker home first). Unfortunately, so many people have kids, and are "carriers" of stuff that don't affect them much because they do have kids, but if you don't have kids and/or don't hang around kids much - you can pick up things that way easily.
Always wash your hands thoroughly after using the bathroom. Elbow out the door if possible (or use a paper towel to open the door).
Avoid stress (easier said than done for some people) - ultimately, though, stress does weaken the immune system; this is known. Better is to understand when you are stressed, and what forms stress can take, so you can know when you are under it. Some kinds of stress aren't always easily apparent. Note that this might also apply to "good stress"; I'm not sure. If you are tired and "stressed" from an extreme workout, I am not sure if that helps or hinders your immune system during your recovery...
Ultimately, though, you can't control everything, and you have to live your life. There's probably no way to trace back to where this guy picked up his infection. If I had to make a guess, maybe the gym? It could have easily have been during a run or a walk outside as well. Or just some door he pushed open to go into a room or building. The bacteria/viruses that cause these kinds of infections and issues are all around us, and our bodies do a fairly good job of keeping them at bay. But sometimes, bad luck happens.
Would bacteriophage have helped?
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?cat=41
He was never in a coma, though, so got to be a bit more chipper about the whole thing.
https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...
Amount of traffic to pathfactory.com is negligible:
The timing of his illness is rather unfortunate, as it caught him in New York, rather than Toronto, which probably cost him a lot of money.
edit: And the fees aren't trivial. https://www.qch.on.ca/uploads/Finance/Fees%20for%20Cdns%20wi...
Even with your unfair comparison: if you have health insurance in the US, it's quite easy to pay higher fees than you would uninsured in Canada. For example, compare Fidelis Care Silver[1] ambulance charge ($150 after deductible) with Canadian ambulance charge ($240 CAD -> $180.75 USD). The completely uninsured Canadian pays only $30 more than the insured American, and that's if the American has already paid their $1700 deductible, and has paid their premiums (which are more than the taxes Canadians pay toward their healthcare). And that's literally just grabbing the first US plan I looked at: I'm sure that there are worse insurance plans out there which people are forced to take.
[1] https://www.fideliscare.org/Portals/0/Members/ComparisonChar...
No one works for free, the medicine costs money. The money comes from somewhere.
The Canadian, on the other hand, doesn’t have insurance premiums or deductibles.
(For the record, I hate the CND health care system. It’s just that, knowing both systems, the US’ is worse :)
Why do some people think this is a shock?
Nobody thinks medicine is ever going to be free. That's a strawman position. You might as well argue in favor of universal toll roads by saying that roads are never going to be free, so suck it up and accept that you're going to pay $50 one-way every time you commute, and $200 one-way every time you get groceries: The people who protest that aren't saying roads are ever going to be free, they're just saying that better payment models exist.
Pay for what? CEO's billion-dollar salaries and luxury jets? I'm pretty sure Canadians aren't paying for that.
