Tag Archives: Covid-19

Mad Poem: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 26, Parody

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Mad Poem

We’ve been pinned to our homes
for a year, maybe more,
and after a month
it’s turned into a bore.
We’ve stared at computers
or the walls of our rooms,
our social encounters
just tweets, Skypes or Zooms.
We’ve missed our Starbucks,
the beach and the mall.
Our range of diversions
has been nothing at all.
Restaurant after restaurant
called on the phone
has said they were closed
and to leave them alone.
When we called up our friends,
we had nothing to say
for we did the same things
for day after day.
We yearn for the freedom
that will come with a vacc.
It’s not fair that our elders
can get what we lack!

 

My poem was a parody of the Dr. Seuss poem below:

Sad Poem

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a parody of another poem. 

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

Performance in Combatting COVID, Country by Country

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Click on link below to see how countries rate in their response to Covid:

https://interactives.lowyinstitute.org/features/covid-performance/

A First-Person Description of the Covid Virus

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Vin Prest on “Life is a Rusty Rollercoaster” wrote this vivid account of his battle with Covid. Since his is the only detailed report I’ve read that was told by someone who actually experienced the disease, I’m reblogging it here. I think, given the underrating of the experience by our President, that it is important that people hear about the first-hand experience of someone else:


Click on this link to read the rest of his account: https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/181911079/posts/65

Americas Doing Worst in COVID-19 Pandemic, Making Up 55 Percent of Global Deaths

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https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-map-americas-worst-covid-19-pandemic-deaths-1530183?utm_source=pushnami&utm_medium=Push_Notifications&utm_campaign=automatic&UTM=1599571315021

 

Read the Signs

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Read the Signs

Days of wild adventure, pulsing with delights
are turning into zombie days that fade to zombie nights.
Nothing on our agendas. No traveling, no dates—
our calendars reduced to onerous empty slates.

It does no good to protest. God hears not when we ask.
We merely have to don that necessary mask.
Though every instinct urges camaraderie,
Mother Nature warns us that she will wait and see.

Will we clean up our messes? Put out every fire?
Calm her winds of warning before we all expire?
Ban plastic from her oceans, stop digging for black gold?
Cool the global warming and restore the cold?

If we will not listen, she’ll only turn deaf ears
to all our present pleadings, to all our future fears.
Oh foolish foolish children, just dealing with effects
instead of paying heed to what nature expects.

 

Prompt words today are instinct, nothing, protest, onerous and zombie.

Just How Effective are Masks and 6 ft. Spacing?

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https://www.khq.com/news/khq-investigates-how-effective-is-a-mask/video_e308a1e8-b74f-11ea-ac6d-878bd6f54032.htmlhttps://www.khq.com/news/khq-investigates-how-effective-is-a-mask/video_e308a1e8-b74f-11ea-ac6d-878bd6f54032.html

 

 

Campused

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I actually wrote two poems to the prompts today. This was one I wrote in a notebook while waiting in the dentist’s office. I decided it was sort of a downer in a time of too many downers, so I wrote another, but it called out from the notebook sitting on my desk beside my computer, so here it is with all its warts.

Campused

It’s a kind of surviving, this new life we share.
We rarely leave home and we don’t cut our hair.
We mainly commune with our kids and our spouses
and cover our faces when we must leave our houses.
We maintain a distance of six feet away.
We deterge our hands countless times every day.

A soupcon of hand sanitizer’s our goal
when touching a surface not in our control.
Not a world of our choice and not one by design,
so we sulk and we protest. We pout and we whine.
Yet we are not blameless, for it’s the result
of the short-sighted goals of the consumer cult.

Parents respond when kids get out of hand.
So, too, Mother Nature must take a stand.
She’s decided to send each of us to our room
lest we mess up her world, thus sealing its doom.
If we won’t behave, she must take a firm hand.
We’ve not followed her rules, so we have been banned.

Prompts today are surviving, design, soupcon, deterge and kind. And also, for dVerse Poets

Coming Clean about Hydroychloroquine

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Click on link below to read article:

https://www.newsweek.com/coming-clean-about-hydroxychloroquine-opinion-1526225?utm_source=pushnami&utm_medium=Push_Notifications&utm_campaign=automatic&UTM=1597929316825

Chapala Diary, Page 1 (My Contribution to The Lonely Artist Covid Art Challenge.)

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Friday, Aug. 7, 2020

At the beginning of the Coronavirus Sequestering period, I issued a challenge for people to create an art piece that chronicled their experiences during this time. Go HERE to see that challenge.The idea was that we all started out with the same materials, then added what we wished to to come up with an art piece that chronicled these first stages of our isolation. Four friends accepted the challenge, but I’ve only received photos of their work from two. I’m going to be blogging their photos over the next two days, and if anyone else has photos to submit, please do so now.  Below are the photos of my completed project. See if you can find the pieces in it that are some of the materials given to each artist.

(Please click on the first photo to enlarge it and read the story of my Covid Vacation. Clicking on the next arrow enlarges the next photo and gives more of the story.)

Today is the first day of big bright yellow butterfly season. I sat in my studio and tried to get shots of them darting around the tabachine bush, but they were too fast for my camera lens. Here’s one that didn’t get away, but a distant shot.
Morrie and Diego pulled their usual plaintive sit-in at the door of the studio. This time, I gave them each a dog biscuit, but didn’t let them in.
Another dog biscuit? No. Sorry, fellas.
I mended my Covid-19 art piece for the third time.
This is a depiction of Diego stealing one of the three and a half dozen freshly-baked cookies he managed to steal off the kitchen counter when I was distracted by the plumber. Over his head buzzes a bee–one of the colony of thousands that it took us weeks to remove and relocate from the lot next door so we could clear it. More to be heard about these bees and Diego a bit later.
The whole Covid scare and the resultant social isolation that lead to my creation of this memorial box just happened to coincide with rainbird season–that month-long infestation of cicacas that announces the coming of the rainy season. During this time, the air is filled with their loud choruses of clackings and whirrings.
The rest of the box is a collage of alone-time activities–music,
the constant news reports of possible cures, both real and bogus. As usual, Kukla jumping up on the newest addition to the box.
Time passing slowly for some, more quickly for me when I kept busy. The pages weighted down by the pastry are some miniature mock-ups of my next children’s book, finished during this period except for the final adjustments to the illustraions.
A bit of imbibing,
The good, the bad and the ugly. All part of life’s crazy quilt.

My photography session over,  we’ve all moved from the studio to the gazebo. I’m in the hammock and Diego is rolling around and growling on the grass. I’ve never been able to figure out what prompts this. Is it pure kidlike glee or a bee sting? If it is bee stings, he’s a slow learner because he’s been rolling in the grass and growling for years and yet he still tries to catch bees in his mouth every time they venture near, which is the second reason for the bees depicted in the Covid-19 memorial Retablo. Now it just needs a wooden frame and it is complete.

Tomorrow, a depiction of another piece from my Covid Challenge–that of my friend Candace’s piece. If anyone else accepted the challenge and has photos to send me, hurry hurry.  Go HERE to see Candace’s answer to the challenge and HERE to see Jean Mulleneaux’s contribution.