Archive for Medicine
Some assorted life updates: 15 days after my lower back started hurting, it’s feeling a lot better, though still some pain. (No advice, please.) I now have even more sympathy than usual for those of you whose back issues don’t go away. I posted my first post in the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook, […]
I’ve now acquired my first pair of prescription hearing aids! Some assorted notes and thoughts: The room where we sat while the doctor set up the hearing aids had a prominent sign on the wall prohibiting photos or audio or video recording. I was surprised and mildly put off—I never think to record discussions with […]
A post about assorted recent and forthcoming medical stuff. Nothing bad here, all is well. (The thought of the comments that I would likely get on such a post was stressing me out, so I’m closing comments on this.) Content warning for a little bit of stuff about weight and BMI, though not much. This […]
Here’s an update on my hearing-aid insurance situation. Short version: It turns out that my insurance fully covers the expensive hearing aids that I want to get (yay!), so my last couple days of intermittently fretting about this were unnecessary. (As usual, of course, this situation underscores some of the problems with our healthcare system. […]
Sometimes September turns out to be the month when I coincidentally do a bunch of medical checkups and such. This year, that started in September but has continued into October. My recent medical progress includes: Getting the covalent bivalve booster shot. Getting the flu shot. Having a cancer test done. (Don’t worry, the test showed […]
Kam and I almost went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once last night. We’ve been hearing great things about the movie—in fact, such extremely great things that I’m having to discount them to set my expectations lower, because if I go into a movie with too-high expectations, I generally enjoy it less than I […]
For the past few months, I’ve been using the at-home COVID test that my workplace provided to employees. It’s called Cue Health. It’s not a PCR test, but it’s apparently roughly as accurate as PCR; like PCR, this is a NAAT (Nucleic Acid Amplification Test), which looks for and amplifies the virus’s RNA. It therefore […]
I’ve seen several web pages that explain how to calculate vaccine efficacy, but most of them explain it in terms of a formula rather than explaining what the formula means. Here’s the simplest conceptual explanation I’ve seen: a VE of 90% indicates […] a 90% reduction from the number of cases you would expect if […]
At some point in the early 1990s, I spoke with my college friend Alex on the phone, and was surprised that his voice had dropped in pitch by at least an octave since I had last talked with him. I think he told me something about having belatedly gone through puberty. It turned out that […]
(Content warning for discussion of a suicide.) A little under two weeks ago, around the start of Labor Day Weekend, I had an anxiety spike, which was made worse a couple days later by various things around the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard about the award’s name. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why […]
Mary Anne was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. I'm having a hard time writing about it right now, but if...
When Sara went out on leave a couple of months ago, I went to see a counselor. (In fact, she's...