Category Archives: Uncategorized

Don’t Take a Painkiller before Your Covid Shot!!!

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Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, Feb. 18, 2021 (HealthDay News) — You finally managed to score an appointment to be vaccinated against the new coronavirus and you’re a little nervous about side effects, so taking a painkiller right before you get your shot seems like a smart idea.Not so fast, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, the agency is telling people not to take pain medications like Motrin, Advil or Tylenol before getting their COVID-19 vaccines.

Why?

It’s possible that taking a painkiller before getting a vaccine will result in a “decrease in antibody response,” explained Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Although the odds of a diminished immune response aren’t really known, Poland said it’s better to suffer the side effects than take the chance of making the vaccine less effective.

“After receiving the vaccine, if one develops symptoms that they feel they want to treat, it’s fine, but ideally not before,” he said. “Now, that’s a recommendation by CDC, out of an abundance of caution.”

There are exceptions, however: People who usually take pain relievers, such as migraine sufferers, should of course take their medication, he added.

“Go ahead and take it rather than end up with a full-blown migraine and end up in the ER having to get much more intensive or expensive therapy,” Poland said.

He also noted that the aftereffects of the vaccine can differ between the two doses, with the effects after the second dose typically being worse.

“I’ll tell you after my first dose, I had a little bit of a sore arm. After the second dose, I had a moderately severe sore arm, and I had four hours of shaking, chills with a 101-degree fever along with fatigue, headache and ringing in my ears. I took one dose of Tylenol, went to bed, woke up the next morning and was 80% to 90% better, and within that half-day, back to normal,” Poland said.

These side effects are caused as the body’s immune system revs up to fight the invader, which is just what’s needed to produce the antibodies to blunt the virus.

Before getting vaccinated, people need to set their expectations appropriately, Poland said. “The symptoms are transient, they’re self-resolving, they are not an indication that something’s going wrong,” he said. “If need be, go ahead and treat them.”The CDC also cautions against taking antihistamines like Zyrtec or Claritin before getting the COVID-19 vaccine, “because they could mask the onset or development of allergic or hypersensitivity reactions,” Poland added.Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, agrees that it’s not a good idea to take a pain medication before getting a vaccine.”My general belief on this is it’s never a good idea to blunt fever, because fever is an adaptive part of your immune response,” he said.

“Let your immune system do its job,” Offit said. “The second dose was pretty rough. I had fatigue and fever, but I handled it by whining. Whining was my way of handling it.”

More information

For more on the COVID-19 vaccines, head to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

SOURCES: Gregory Poland, MD, director, Vaccine Research Group, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; Paul Offit, MD, director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, member, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee

WebMD News from HealthDay

Lavender: FOTD Feb 24, 2021

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For Cee’s FOTD

Joke of the Day

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Sorry, couldn’t resist, given my poem of the day:

FOTD Feb 22, 2021: State of the Lot

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Here are photos of the current state of the little park I am building in the lot below my house. I just purchased the carved stone snake head and will form the body out of the small bushes that are currently laid out behind it. As the bushes grow, the body will flesh out more to scale. I’ll have a stone tail sculpted later after my bank account recovers from past projects. I bought one more sculpture as well, but you just see the uncarved back of it in the photo.  The four Dr. Seuss trees will be planted elsewhere in the lot, not in the positions where they currently are. Bit by bit, the neighborhood weed forest and dumping ground is turning into a thing of beauty. Stonework by Jose. Planting by Pasiano.  Financing and art direction by Judy.

Empty!!! (One Word Sunday Prompt)

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\
He said: Hands are for doing.
Double pods

For One Word Sunday’s Prompt: Empty

The Letter S: Lens-Artist Challenge # 136

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Shades
Sparkles
Sparrow
Spines
Star
Spiral
Sacks
Spout
Seat
Sip
Spider
Secret
Sanctuary
The Letter “S.”

Click on photos to enlarge.

For the Lens-Artist Challenge #136: The Letter S

Winning Over White Supremacists–One Hater at a Time

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This blog by Annie makes such a valid (and conciliatory) point–and offers hope for a solution to divisiveness in the U.S.

annieasksyou's avatarannieasksyou...

Image from American Progress.org

I am writing this piece with images of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol still very fresh in my mind. It is a huge stretch to think of those brutal, sadistic, remorseless thugs and imagine summoning an iota of compassion for them. But others of their ilk–and many psychologists and researchers–say that’s precisely what’s needed.

They call themselves the “formers”: former Klansman, neo-Nazis, or generic white supremacists or other racial extremists who are now devoted to guiding those who’d followed similar paths to come to a better life.

Christian Picciolini is one of them. As a 14-year-old, he’d joined a violent group of white power adherents who became the “Hammerskin Nation.” As he described his feelings to Dave Davies in an NPR interview, the group threw him a “lifeline of acceptance…I felt a sort of energy flow through me that I had never felt before—as…

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Wise Men and Fools

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Wise Men and Fools

Pompous men and religious zealots rush into the fray
professing as the solid truth speculations they
determine to be necessary for things to be righted
and other fools support them because they are short-sighted.
But wisdom is as wisdom does and not as wisdom thinks.
It floats up to the surface when foolishness just sinks.
It tends toward calm and practical when flightier heads turn manic
and is irreconcilable with discord and with panic.

Fools may build vain edifices reaching to the skies
that are palatial prisons—follies in disguise.
In time of war, a bunker furnishes more protection,
offering a wiser choice to screen us from detection.
Fools raise their hands and wave at us, inviting their own end,
standing straight and rigid when a wiser man might bend.
Fools rush in where sages might not speculate,
instead letting  the evidence sit and percolate.

Sages, fools and charlatans mixed up in the fray.
For those who cannot tell the difference, now we’ll all have to pay.

 

Prompt words for today are wisdom, irreconcilable, practical and palatial.

Heart’s Eye

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lifelessons's avatarlifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown


Heart’s Eye

Who can pass a bookstore door
and fail to note the vellichor
or fail to feel within their heart
the message of a piece of art?

A  poignant poem or pithy quote,
well-loved and thereby learned by rote,
is a means by which we might denote
that part of us that we devote

to what we can’t repudiate—
that part of us that is a gate 
to a special way of seeing—
the heart’s eye of a human being.

Word prompts for today are art, repudiate, vellichor and denote.

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