|
|
|
Moderna and the spleen
Wednesday, April 28 2021
Yesterday I removed a bunch of boxes from deep storage in the southwest corner of the laboratory (boxes that included several ceiling-fan bulb-cover glass pieces, aluminum lamp reflectors, and an entire Apple ][ (complete with two floppy drives) and then managed to paint about six square feet of floor that I hadn't reached in the last big floor repainting of 2017 (partly because I hadn't felt like dragging out that Apple ][). Today I made further incursions into regions unpainted in 2017 when I moved all the copper pipes out of "long items storage" beneath the north end of the table that sits in the center of the east ceiling-wall. I also removed a wheeled storage unit, opening up floor where the green patches were the same pastel mint-icream color that used to be on the walls of Gretchen's basement library (the color down there has since changed as well).
I have a few things that give me unexpected pleasure, such as the new home I've found for the laboratory's landline handset charging dock. That dock used to be on a swinging platform attached to a celing-wall protuberance originally installed to accommodate a bulky 900 MHz phone base station-with-handset-charger. Now that ceiling-wall protuberance is the attachment point for a monitor arm supporting the upper left monitor of Woodchuck's five-unit monitor array, and there's no longer room near it for a phone handset recharger dock. So, several weeks ago, I mounted the recharging dock on the laboratory's east pillar, the one supporting the solar deck's southeast pillar. The dock is nice and solid there, and the phone fits in it happily, belying the struggle I'd had modifying the dock to accommodate the more recent Panasonic DECT 6.0 handset, whose docking interface had been subtly changed in apparent hope of driving sales of compatible docking and base stations.
Another thing that dates back a few weeks that gives me pleasure is a collection of cat hair balls I've made. This all started when big fluffy Oscar started shedding in the early spring. As I'd pet him, his hair would stick to my hands, and I'd roll it into balls, which would sometimes form globes so round and perfect that I wouldn't want to throw them in the compost (as I normally would). I found that I could add to these balls with subsequent fur, which I was now gathering deliberately with a flea comb. My largest fur ball is nearly as big as a tennis ball, and I have several more. I've also successfully made a small fur ball from the short black hairs loose in Diane's coat, but it's unlikely I'll be able to make anything like the big tawny balls I've made in just a month or so from Oscar's loose fur.
I'd thought making balls from cat hair might be something I invented, since I started doing it spontaneously without any other humans inspiring me. But it turns out that cat hairball making is a popular fiberart, and people even make clothing for their cats with their own felted hair. Not surprisingly, the Japanese are particularly into cat hair balls. This isn't surprising, given that they've also made an art out of mud balls.
I needed another quart of Sherwin Williams Jargon Jade (my second quart this year), at the end of the workday, I drove to Herzog's Uptown and got that. I also got some groceries at the Ghettoford Hannaford: french bread, bagels, beans, diphenhydramine, and a twelve pack of Hazy Little Thing IPA, my first grocery purchase of beer since January. Since the arrival of the pandemic, it seems Hannaford discontinued the old method of providing bagels loose in a case, with the idea that customers use forceps to load them into bags provided. Now they come pre-bagged, four to a bag, so there's no chance that someone put their covid hands on your bagel. (Of course, those of us paying attention now know that covid doesn't seem to spread on surfaces, but a year ago even I was rinsing off our groceries in the sink.)
This evening, Gretchen sent Powerful out to get Chinese food from a place where we have gotten Jewish Christmas dinner, somewhere out on Lucas Avenue. Not long after dinner, Powerful experienced a recurrence of something that had happened several days ago: terrible pain in his abdomen. This time it was so bad that Gretchen took Powerful to Northern Dutchess Hospital, whose waiting room was full of people vomiting into plastic bags and talking loudly on their phones. The problem with Powerful turned out to be his spleen, which showed up in an xray as looking like it had experienced blunt-force trauma. The doctor attributed this to a possible blood clot, and said he'd seen a few other cases just like this recently, though never before this year. He wondered if such spleen problems might be a rare side effect of the coronavirus vaccine. In a way that makes sense, since the spleen plays an important role in the immune system and filters the blood, particularly of things that have been attacked by the body's antibody defenses. But it's been nearly four weeks since Powerful's second shot of the Moderna vaccine.
Gretchen and Powerful returned at around 3:00am. His only prescribed medication was motrin, an OTC painkiller.
My three biggest Oscar hair balls and my one Diane hair ball, with a quarter and a Vincent Van Gogh coffee mug for scale.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210428 feedback
previous | next |
