I’m home sick from work today with a pretty bad sore throat. To find out if it was strep, I tried out Presbyterian Hospital’s Video Visit through the web. If you’re on a computer, they use Webex to do the session through your webcam. Beforehand, I took a pic of my throat and attached it to the request. Because of the pic, she didn’t need to try looking at my throat through the webcam. Because I don’t have a fever or cough, she was able to say it likely isn’t strep. The nice part of this is that I didn’t have to go wait for an hour at an urgent care.
Category: health
Do not mock a cold
I would like to publicly apologize to my cold for calling it a “non-starter” and making comments about how it “didn’t seem to be trying very hard”. After 2 days of almost unnoticeable annoyance, this cold and I have had over a week of almost parasitic “friendship”. From such humble roots, it has become one of the strongest colds I’ve had in a while.
smallpox inoculation
Before smallpox vaccine was invented in 1796, they did inoculation where they’d actually give you live smallpox through the skin. You usually got a milder version of smallpox but your chances of dying went from 30% (getting smallpox naturally) down to 1-2%. A scary choice to make, I’m sure.
how to drink more water
Get a couple of insulated water bottles at Costco. They keep your water cold all day, so you drink more of it…at least I do.
Hangnail…not the nail?
A hangnail is not a broken fingernail as I’d thought, but those painful little breaks that happen in the skin on the side of the fingernail. So what’s the term for snagging a fingernail and having it break half way?
Everybody skips a heartbeat sometimes
I went to Dr. Barry Ramo for a skipping hearbeat. (He’s a real doctor…he doesn’t just play one on TV!) I started noticing it months ago when I exercise or sometimes even when I get up in the morning. I often feel a skipped beat followed by a strong pounding beat. He said it’s called premature ventricular contraction and is nothing to worry about. It happens to most people. Good news to me!
historical quacks
Back before people knew what caused bubonic plague (fleas and rodents), plague doctors would dress like this. The beak mask was to protect them from miasmas or “bad air”.
Redbox and Albuquerque west side doctors
At the supermarket the other day, I looked at a Redbox to see what games they were renting. They were only renting 3 games for PS3. Wow. At least they were new. If Netflix started doing that, it’d be sweet.
I just discovered there are apparently no doctors on the west side of Albuquerque…at least none accepting new patients. Most doctors are apparently on the east side. Also, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield site that helps you find a new doctor is either terribly out of date, or full of lies and deceit.
workout tips
Note to self for those workout DVDs I can barely get through in the first place:
- Have water handy.
- Never ever (ever ever) fill up on tacos and shakes beforehand.
da weekend
Friday evening, we took the kids to a special event at the zoo’s reptile house where we got to take a tour into the areas behind the exhibits where they prepare reptile food with vitamins and so on. They keep new reptiles in quarantine for a little while until they’re sure they don’t have any disease. They had a large chameleon with three large lamps pointing at it. It seemed pretty happy right in the middle of the lights. (The chameleons drop dead rather easily, they said.) They had a refrigerator full of anti-venom for various kinds of snakes. This supply is pretty expensive to keep in stock, apparently. They’ve only had one bite in about 40 years, which is a pretty good record. A cobra in quarantine behind glass flared its hood at Sean. He did not think to do the karate kid cobra dance. The guy who gave the tour has something like 14 snakes and several at the zoo have been in his collection.
Saturday, we helped a friend take some loads of grass to the dump. The piles of grass had begun composting and steaming underneath, which was interesting to see. It turns kinda white under there and smells like elephants. The area where it was resting will probably have some very good soil now.
We played a game of Shoots and Ladders with Sean and Mia last night. Mia enjoyed tapping her piece on the board. I was thinking that we need a good board game that Sean could play. Shoots and Ladders is so random. Lego Creationary is looking good.
Sean got up strangely early this morning and showed me that he’d lost his first tooth. I asked to see it and he had to go up and search around his bed a while before he found it. You apparently lose 20 teeth as a kid, including the 2 premolars behind the canine. That’s more than I remembered.