Wednesday Afternoon SugarLinks – Try not to bruise it

by | Jan 8, 2025 | Daily Links | 158 comments

Getting punched in the head is bad for you.

Study shows head trauma may activate latent viruses, leading to neurodegeneration

Researchers have uncovered mechanisms that may link head injuries and concussions to the emergence of neurodegenerative disease, pointing to latent viruses lurking in most of our brains that may be activated by the jolt, leading to inflammation and accumulating damage over time. The results suggest the use of antiviral drugs as potential early preventive treatments post-head injury.

Pro Tip: Don’t get punched in the head.


My luck, it would be some sort of deadly snake or a testicle-eating spider.


Harley Quinn Locks Down New DC Series, But Its Disgusting Premise Has the Internet Incensed

Harley Quinn Fartacular: Silent Butt Deadly #1, written by Joanne Starer and illustrated by Ted Brandt and Ro Stein, is set to release on March 26, 2026. The narrative promises to focus on the Gotham Siren passing unprecedented amounts of gas. While you might be wondering, “Okay, but what’s the plot?”—well, that seems to be the plot. Needless to say, more than a few fans are disgusted by this toot-centric direction DC is taking with Harley.


About The Author

SugarFree

SugarFree

Your Resident Narcissistic Misogynist Rape-Culture Apologist

158 Comments

  1. LCDR_Fish

    Afternoon links at 10 PM (local)….

    Re the head injuries. I’ve read a lot of stuff separately, but not sure we posted as much here about it – regarding the SOF suicides coming after TBI from firing rocket launchers, etc. Weird to think about it being accidentally self-inflicted as well, and not just from IED detonations, etc.

    • Gender Traitor

      WDYASF? (IED I get.)

      • LCDR_Fish

        NYT – I know, but you can search for a few others…I got them in my news feeds separately.

        https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html

        David Metcalf’s last act in life was an attempt to send a message — that years as a Navy SEAL had left his brain so damaged that he could barely recognize himself.

        He died by suicide in his garage in North Carolina in 2019, after nearly 20 years in the Navy. But just before he died, he arranged a stack of books about brain injury by his side, and taped a note to the door that read, in part, “Gaps in memory, failing recognition, mood swings, headaches, impulsiveness, fatigue, anxiety, and paranoia were not who I was, but have become who I am. Each is worsening.”

        Then he shot himself in the heart, preserving his brain to be analyzed by a state-of-the-art Defense Department laboratory in Maryland.

        The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.

        The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function.

      • Gender Traitor

        Thank you, but my question was “What do your acronyms stand for?”

      • Rat on a train

        SOF – special operations forces
        TBI – traumatic brain injury

      • EvilSheldon

        As someone who’s been shooting 15-20,000 rounds of ammo every year for the past fifteen, reading this does not exactly fill my heart with joy.

      • rhywun

        The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons

        wat

        Firing what kind of weapons?

      • Rat on a train

        406 mm gun?

      • Bobarian LMD

        According to my nephew, the USMC puts you on a round count when firing the Carl Gustaf because of this.

      • OBJ FRANKELSON

        RoT, I am not sure how many SEALs are firing battleship guns (aside from that one cook who fought Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones, that is)

      • slumbrew

        This is not the work of a cook!

    • Tundra

      Same with hockey players. A non-trivial number of them end up really fucked up and suicidal.

  2. Jarflax

    once accepted as an unpleasant consequence of intense athletic competition, are now recognized as serious health threats.

    I’m pretty sure that when prior generations called someone punchy that meant they understood that head trauma was bad.

    • Brochettaward

      I feel like I’m the only one who ever made this point when CTE came up. People act like it was some big surprise that concussions and repeated blows to the head cause deterioration later in life. Like it was groundbreaking stuff. Meanwhile, there were terms for it and everyone has seen old boxers who have lost their ability to speak.

      The entire CTE thing is a racket.

      • Pope Jimbo

        Every IoT company I ever worked for at some point, created a booth demo where sensors were put into a football helmet and then monitored. People coming into the booth could whack the mannequin wearing the helmet and see a visualization of how hard the blow was to the head.

        The demo is pretty trivial, the sensors are tiny and passive, so you don’t even need power if you don’t want it. Just plug in later and download the data.

        You could easily add this to football helmets (and hockey helmets) and actually collect a ton of data about how hard these athletes are pounding their heads if you wanted to.

        The Big Sports guys, though, have learned from the Big Tobacco execs. Don’t collect data you know will be incriminating. Just pretend you are as surprised as anyone when there are adverse effects from getting your head slapped around.

      • Fourscore

        I see a lot of body pummeling, particularly at football/hockey. That kind of repeated assaults on the body can’t be helpful. It only takes one trivial miscue and a body may be walking forever with a bad limp and a lot of pain.

      • OBJ FRANKELSON

        CTEs/TBIs be damned I still think the new kickoff rules are gay.

  3. The Other Kevin

    I’m paranoid about leaving my car windows open here in Indiana. I’d be really paranoid about it that close to the equator.

    • Jarflax

      In Indiana the deadly sin that climbs in your car is probably gluttony

      • Gender Traitor

        I thought it was guns that would climb into cars in Indiana (especially cars with Illinois plates.)

      • DEG

        I thought it was guns that would climb into cars in Indiana (especially cars with Illinois plates.)

        I’ve been in Indiana many times and guns have never climbed into my car.

        But I didn’t know about having to have Illinois plates. That would explain it.

      • R.J.

        You have to have the right feed. 9mm in a little bowl would coax one or two in. Or fancier, depending on what you want to attract.

      • Evan from Evansville

        “You have to have the right feed. 9mm in a little bowl would coax one or two in. Or fancier, depending on what you want to attract.”

        I’m interested in a 1911, but a reliable revolver always does the trick. What else can we reel in? *flips notebook open; clicks pen, swivels it in hand*

    • SarumanTheGreat

      I’ve had enough fun with creatures crawling into the engine compartment to get warm. Few things wake one up faster in the morning than lifting a truck hood and have something hiss at you that doesn’t belong there.

      Note: Possum, not snake.

      • KK, Plump & Unfiltered

        Varmints under the hood are what broke my A/C one time. In May. In the South. During COVID. My only choice was to take it to the motherfucking dealer.

      • Bobarian LMD

        Having a cat get drug thru the fan belt ain’t all that pleasant either.

      • slumbrew

        I had a goddamn rat chew into the hood insulator to make themselves a little nest.

        I levitated when I opened the hood and it came flying out.

      • SandMan

        I got home one cold day and my Dad had the hood to his truck open, and was washing out the remains of a cat with a garden hose.

  4. The Artist Formerly Known as Lackadaisical

    Fart fetishists rejoice.

      • Bobarian LMD

        Rule 34 says it will have a broad audience.

      • Pope Jimbo

        C’mon, you know Swissy doesn’t like cheeky puns in these links.

    • JaimeRoberto (carnitas/spicy salsa)

      It will do well in Germany.

    • EvilSheldon

      When you can’t come up with a plot idea, Literotica is there for you!

  5. Sean

    a testicle-eating spider

    Wait, WHAT?!?!?!

    • Aloysious

      They weigh one and a half bananas and are twice as dangerous as venomous ducks.

    • Derpetologist

      not off-topic:

      Giant Amazon Spider Preys on Opossum
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuKfAFI19pg

      I have a book called Hunter. It’s the autobiography of a guy who was a game warden in East Africa for 40 years in the early 20th century. He has a story about some African tribesman who had his testicles eaten by a water buffalo.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._A._Hunter

      It’s my favorite book from my maternal grandpa’s library besides The Cartoon History of the Universe.

      • Shpip

        Well, that part of the world has no shortage of blood and gaur.

      • R.J.

        “May your testicles eaten by a water buffalo” is my insult for tomorrow.

      • Derpetologist

        My bad – a cape buffalo.

        Water buffaloes live in Asia.

      • R C Dean

        “Giant Amazon Spider Preys on Opossum”

        Not clicking that link.

    • Bobarian LMD

      Even worse, what about a candiru attack?

  6. Shpip

    Brazilian man left his car window open overnight. The following morning he found a sloth hanging from the steering wheel.

    Very near the Port of Miami is a place called Jungle Island, which advertises a Sloth Encounter.

    Last time we cruised out of Miami, I asked the wife if she wanted to check it out. She replied that she’d already been with me for thirty years, so….

    • Pope Jimbo

      I was surprised by how hairy that Brazilian sloth was. I would have guessed that at most, it had just a tiny strip of hair down its back.

  7. Nephilium

    I recall reading somewhere that sloths only come down from the trees to defecate. And it’s not like he can just shoo the sloth out of his car.

    • Yusef drives a Kia

      Of course not, that would be un slothy

    • Suthenboy

      If you are nice to them they are pretty docile. In fact they make pretty good pets if you are into that sort of thing.

  8. SDF-7

    The following morning he found a sloth hanging from the steering wheel.

    That danged DMV inspector from Zootopia is branching out…

  9. The Other Kevin

    “Harley Quinn Locks Down New DC Series, But Its Disgusting Premise Has the Internet Incensed”

    They were bound to run out of ideas sooner or later. I think the correct answer is “sooner”.

    • Necron 99

      Not even a new idea.

      “The #1 movie in America was called “Ass.” And that’s all it was for 90 minutes. It won eight Oscars that year, including best screenplay.”

    • Suthenboy

      The comics world has been skin suited by proggies hasn’t it? Proggies are the least creative, imaginative people on the planet.

      • Nephilium

        For quite a while. Just look up Ironheart for an example.

  10. JaimeRoberto (carnitas/spicy salsa)

    Hopefully that sloth stays in the slow lane.

  11. SDF-7

    more than a few fans are disgusted by this toot-centric direction DC is taking with Harley.

    Sounds like DC Editorial decided to troll its fan base. They should have just brought back The Heckler.

    Wonder if Paul Dini has any creative say in how much they fuck up Harley these days…. presumably not.

  12. Shpip

    The results suggest the use of antiviral drugs as potential early preventive treatments post-head injury.

    Viruses wandering around in your noggin unabated vs. sudden death by myocarditis. Well, life is full of trade-offs.

  13. DEG

    The narrative promises to focus on the Gotham Siren passing unprecedented amounts of gas. While you might be wondering, “Okay, but what’s the plot?”—well, that seems to be the plot.

    /scratches head
    /walks away

    • Rat on a train

      The Spleen should sue.

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        That’s the name!
        Paul R was great

    • rhywun

      /same

      Filed under “stuff other people might care about”.

    • rhywun

      my career as an architecture critic

      Oh, this is going to be interesting. 🙄

      So few paragraphs, so many “arch-conservative screeds”.

      Right-wingers were able to capitalize on this rhetoric because underlying it was an inconvenient truth: A lot of new buildings are ugly.

      LOL! Tapping out. We’re done here.

    • Suthenboy

      I dont see anything in the way of improvement in most modern architecture. It is like other modern art, it tries too hard to invent something new when ini fact, in my opinion, there hasn’t been much in the way of improvement since the ancient greeks. Neoclassical is fine with me. Some renaissance stuff is good, revivalist stuff. I would love it if every brutalist/commie/box with windows were demolished and scrubbed from memory. As for the abstract stuff it is shit.

      • rhywun

        For most modern critics (not the old-school critic I linked – she was from an earlier more sensible time), the main idea is that the weirder, the more anti-human, the more “edgy”, the more “transgressive” – the better.

        They already hate Trump of course but they equally hate the idea of Trump supporting a revivalist style.

      • Pine_Tree

        Most of it is much worse than shit. Meaning that it’s deliberately designed to demoralize the people and culture around it.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        It is the old “transgression” argument. For the progressive left, the idea that you always need to push the boundaries, act against the mainstream, that drives them. Thus the need for “modern” architecture, art, literature, etc.

        Now, I like modern art, as I do find that it accomplishes something that classical painting didn’t; it lends itself to painting emotions. Feelings. The modern novel stripped away a lot of the artifice around a story, and allowed the story to simply speak for itself, and allowed the reader to come to any conclusion. And that I like.

        Modern architecture? When what you are creating is a habitable space, you have that to consider first. Much of modern architecture fails at that. They are hard to heat, hard to cool, are ugly, and so on. Thus the failure of the first rule of design: Form Follows Function.

      • R C Dean

        There is a lot of good architecture that isn’t classical or neo-classical. But brutalism, modernism, whatever the fuck post-modernism is supposed to be, etc. ain’t it.

  14. KK, Plump & Unfiltered

    No comment on y’all’s taste in Duran Duran songs.

    So, listen. I have tomorrow off, which results in 2 questions:

    1) Would any retirees, ne’er-do-wells, procrastinators, layabouts, or inveterate drunks be interested in a Zoom this evening? I know Wednesdays has been a thing in the past. No idea if it’s still a thing. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87821224358?pwd=eW55MTRDbDNtQkh2aHd3M1Nmenlzdz09

    B) What could I do with my day off tomorrow that would piss off Jimmy Carter?

    • creech

      Rescue an abandoned bunny?

      • Tundra

        Well played.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        “B) What could I do with my day off tomorrow that would piss off Jimmy Carter?”

        Don’t let someone get their chocolate into your peanut butter?

    • Pope Jimbo

      The Reflex was my serious girlfriend in high school and I’s “song”. Long story why, but every time I hear it, I have all sorts of good memories of young love.

      • Tundra

        Oh yeah.

        Photograph by Def Leppard has the same memories for me.

        Yours is better, but no ragrets. Kim was smokin’

    • Grosspatzer, Superstar

      1) Retiree here. Been a while…

  15. Tundra

    KK is gonna be happy.

    I saw them on that tour. Fantastic show.

    My luck, it would be some sort of deadly snake or a testicle-eating spider.

    Same, but I think a pet sloth would be cool.

    • Pope Jimbo

      Walking a pet sloth is quite a time commitment. Are you ready for that Tundra?

      • Tundra

        Honestly it’s probably perfect for me.

  16. Evan from Evansville

    “Study shows head trauma may activate latent viruses” <– I s'pose it may have unlocked gout, but I assume I'm good-to-go other than that, yeah?

    • Yusef drives a Kia

      You need a Master padlock, keep that shit locked up real gud

    • Evan from Evansville

      I’m all wired up, somehow. It’s actually…remarkably impressive. Not sure, but seems like legit fusion in most places…hmmm. My Wolverinish similarities are handy and fun. I’d quite like to have a master key to unlock Ev to unleash His True Form. Think DBZ. *feverishly thinks past 9,000*

  17. J. Frank Parnell

    God damn it, there’s probably some chick on onlyfans making 7 figures/year dressing as Harley Quinn and selling jars of her farts.

    • Suthenboy

      What a world. We really are just monkeys aren’t we? *Heavy sigh*

  18. Evan from Evansville

    I thought the sloth was a stuffy placed by bystanders, to ridicule or perhaps politely show the driver’s folly. Damn. Usually, I’d quite enjoy if cute mammals invited their way into my car, but I don’t want endangered, threatened, or otherwise ‘vulnerable’ animals to put *ME* at risk of nation’l and other Eco fucks.

    Having said that, the flattering female form is suffering terrible territorial decreases. Their habitat’s at risk! But ya see, I’ve decorated and made my ’13 Chevy a comforting environment, yet one vibrant in potential. I readily encourage their automotive advances. Mi coche, tu coche, yo.

    • pistoffnick (370HSSV)

      Sharing of cooches can be unhygienic.

  19. Sensei

    Medical debt soon will be banned on credit reports

    Spoken about before here, but some interesting conversations at work about it. Was told that 22% of mortgage declines were for medical debt payment issues.

    So will they change the underwriting criteria or write more mortgages since why pay your medical debt?

    Another coworker has a friend in healthcare receivables. He said similar. Don’t pay. Create a payment plan. Stop paying after one or two payments. Problem solved!

    I wonder what recourse the providers will have. Estate, wage garnishment? No idea, but interesting.

    • R.J.

      The providers will start to dramatically raise charges on insured patients in order to offset losses. Which means insurance rates go up for everybody.

      • Sensei

        No way…

      • rhywun

        ding ding ding

        The rest of us are – yet again – revealed to be chumps.

      • Gustave Lytton

        And prepayment in cash or credit card.

    • Evan from Evansville

      “The rule will also remove an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million people, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said in a press release. “People who get sick shouldn’t have their financial future upended,” Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director, said in the release. “The CFPB’s final rule will close a special carveout that has allowed debt collectors to abuse the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying medical bills they may not even owe.” …𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞, 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞, takes effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register.”

      Yep. A blatant and pre-planned, well in-advance, Fuck You to Trump before (re)inauguration. Add Ukraine $ and how many others now? Such fucking tempestuous children. Really is ‘rather burn it than see it ruled by another.’ I do hope X and more reveals and ridicules Team Blue and more for this.

    • R C Dean

      Well, not being able to consider medical debt raises the risk on mortgages, so rates will go up.

      This ain’t rocket surgery.

    • Yusef drives a Kia

      /not yet
      Finishes cigar

    • rhywun

      LOL

      Damn I miss smoking. I don’t remember it being THAT fun, though.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        Well, I never was a menthol smoker, so no threesomes for me.

        /sad face.

    • EvilSheldon

      That fucking Twix account tho…

    • Evan from Evansville

      *Puff-puff, doesn’t pass*

    • slumbrew

      “hammock threesome” ends up with a trip to the emergency room.

      “hammock anything” is dicey.

  20. Sensei

    Guardian headline.

    Meta is getting rid of factchecking. Should you leave Instagram – and what are the alternatives?

    • rhywun

      “factchecking”

      lol

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        libsplaining, more like

  21. The Late P Brooks

    The narrative promises to focus on the Gotham Siren passing unprecedented amounts of gas. While you might be wondering, “Okay, but what’s the plot?”—well, that seems to be the plot.

    They farmed it out to those South Park idiots?

    • R.J.

      I can’t work with this!
      *Puts away list of “pull my finger” jokes.

    • Certified Public Asshat

      No, South Park’s writing is very good.

    • Dr. Fronkensteen

      No, Howard Stern trying to resurrect his old Fartman schtick.

  22. The Late P Brooks

    “Donald Trump’s Greenland Threats”

    Gadfrey. You’d think he was pounding a lectern in front of hundreds of thousands of people at the Nuremberg Rally, threatening to send in the Panzers.

  23. The Late P Brooks

    Nobody even wants it

    The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday said no bids were submitted for this week’s oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a sale the state has challenged as too restrictive and at odds with a 2017 law aimed at opening the refuge’s sweeping coastal plan to exploration and development.

    Monday was the deadline for companies to submit bids, the agency said.

    Interior Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis said the lack of interest by oil companies in pursuing leases in the refuge’s coastal plain “reflects what we and they have known all along – there are some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling.”

    “The oil and gas industry is sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere; we’d suggest that’s a prudent place to start, rather than engage further in speculative leasing in one of the most spectacular places in the world,” she said in a statement.

    “We didn’t ban drilling there, we just made the process sufficiently onerous as to make it not worth doing.”

    • rhywun

      some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling

      🙄🙄

  24. Derpetologist

    I’ve been cooking more, mostly rice and beans. Cheese and hot sauce make that a lot more enjoyable. Ramen, especially beef flavor, pairs well with mushrooms. By the time the noodles are done, the mushrooms are soft and brown. Sardines go well with ramen and make up for its relative lack of nutrition. Bran cereal and almond milk provide almost all needed vitamins and minerals. I can keep my food expenses to about $3 per day, not that I need to.

    Since I don’t feel like moving again, I applied to a bunch of local jobs, including a clam farm because I like nature and the sea.

    I found an alternative to restarting my wifi gizmo every time my internet goes off. If I just wait 10 minutes then push one of the other buttons, it comes back to life and usually works fine for a few hours.

    • Grosspatzer, Superstar

      I’ve been cooking more, mostly rice and beans.

      Auditioning for the role of Harley Quinn?

  25. The Late P Brooks

    Or the O&G isn’t that stupid.

    There is undoubtedly a non zero chance the reserves there really are not worth extracting yet.

    • Tundra

      Fracking definitely changed the economics.

    • rhywun

      cutting the fire department’s budget

      To be fair, the council that passes such things, like most big city councils, is probably full of even crazier leftists than the mayor.

      • Tundra

        Sure, but where does the buck stop?

        The fact that she can’t even generate retarded platitudes makes her unfit for office.

      • R C Dean

        Guarantee you they don’t cut the fire department(!) budget over the mayor’s opposition.

  26. Evan from Evansville

    Here’s some Evansville wisdom: “Police say the getaway plan for some burglary suspects didn’t work out Monday, thanks to the snow and ice.” Homeowner comes home and finds a strange “ SUV stuck in the driveway, and a truck was being used to try to pull it out.” The drivers couldn’t explain why they were there. The burglars had ransacked the place and got stuck getting out of the damn driveway. She was arrested on the scene and “Police say footprints led them to [the dude], who was at a nearby hotel. They say he had a trash bag that contained items from the burglary victim’s home.”

    Lemme tell ya. That chick… if she were well-fed and not methed out? She could be remarkably cute. Oddly, he’d be cute too, were he the same and not have gone the obvious-prison-tat route. He’s Orlando Bloomish, himself. https://www.14news.com/2025/01/07/burglars-get-stuck-snow-police-say/

  27. KK, Plump & Unfiltered

    I can’t find a daggone sled in this town! Neither Walmart nor Tractor Supply has them in stock. We don’t have any other big box stores within 20 miles.

    • KK, Plump & Unfiltered

      Maybe Dollar General?

      • Tundra

        Do you have a local hardware store?

      • Nephilium

        You can always make do with a cardboard box for a couple of runs. Or one of the big sheet pans/bowls from a restaurant supply store.

        I do not accept any liability if you do either of those.

      • KK, Plump & Unfiltered

        Nothing in stock at Ace Hardware. I just don’t think they stock them around here. All of the ones I’ve found online have to be shipped.

      • Tundra

        Hmm. CL or Facebook MP?

  28. The Late P Brooks

    Sardines go well with ramen and make up for its relative lack of nutrition.

    I make a pack of ramen and let the water boil off . Just as the pan is about to go dry, I drop a can of sardines (in olive oil) in and “stir fry” for a minute. Sometimes I add hoisin sauce. You can do it with a can of tuna, too. Quick and easy.

    • Tundra

      Whoa.

      But that song is perfection.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        It’s platonic, dontcha know.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        Yes, I never get tired of it.

      • Suthenboy

        Am I detecting some displeasure from you at that situation?

    • JaimeRoberto (carnitas/spicy salsa)

      Winston is relieved it isn’t his mom for a change.

    • Rat on a train

      I don’t want to be with you alone …

    • Toxteth O'Grady

      So look out, Oklahoma City.

      • Pope Jimbo

        So you know what is coming? Sooner or later.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        ISWYDT.

      • Tres Cool

        Yufus is going to be your step-dad?

        My, talk about awkward.

  29. Mojeaux

    Forgive me for the novel, but I need to vent and I’m not doing it on Reddit.

    Mom’s kidneys have pretty much failed. This was caused/exacerbated by her sudden conversion into atrial fibrillation, and the kidney failure made her heart work harder, and around and around and around she goes. Where she stops, everybody knows.

    Yesterday, she had cardioversion, which was successful. Her ejection fraction went from 25% to 50%, which isn’t ideal, but it’ll do. So now that her heart is behaving itself, they have a stab at fixing her kidneys insofar as they are capable of being fixed and as long as her heart continues to behave.

    She has agreed to try temporary (3 months before they have to put in a fistula) dialysis in a skilled nursing facility until her kidneys come back online OR three months have passed with no improvement at which point she’s done with this mortal coil because she will not tolerate more surgery OR until she can’t stand the grind of dialysis and physical therapy at which point she’s just done and she will get extra-strength Excedrin mainlined because she gets violently ill with any other pain relief and Tylenol doesn’t help anything.

    I called my brothers in because I thought we’d be planning a funeral, but I’m glad they’re here because we had to deal with her PCP, who got his back up yesterday as soon as I said the words “palliative care options” (which the cardiologist told me to ask about). He came in this morning very politely loaded for bear and found a dying old lady and her three children all on the same page. It was a … shall we say … contentious discussion and he didn’t know what to do with a family at ease with letting people go, including the patient, who is more than ready to go.

    He wouldn’t talk to me (the DPOA) after he figured out I’m in charge and I called him on his bullshit.(Doc: “I haven’t seen you in a year, Mama Mojeaux!” Me: “She has been to your office four times this last year and I’ve never seen you once. That’s because she sees your nurse practitioner Beth and your other colleague for her hip steroid shot, and I know that because I took her.” Doc: “Um. When were you last there?” Mama Mojeaux: “September.”)

    He stopped talking to Bro2 when he got bitchy about the doc’s condescension and arrogance. (Doc: “Now, Mama Mojeaux, you’re really gonna have to put in the work if you want to get better.” Bro2: “She works hard just to stay at baseline and her baseline sucks. This woman has spent her life putting in the work no matter how hard it is.”)

    Clearly this dude doesn’t know my mom.

    Finally, he just talked to Bro1, who can keep a cool head, so we have designated him as the mouthpiece for this particular practitioner. Bro2 is a bitch and I’m a cunt, and we are not sorry to be that, but things need to get done.

    The cardiologists and the nephrologist and the anesthesiologist have been perfectly lovely and totally on board with us. All the nurses and techs and housekeepers are lovely and are also happy I’m there because I do a lot of little things Mom would otherwise have to call for help with. My brothers and I are very entertaining together, so the staff likes to come in the room when we’re on a tear. Last night’s discussion was a thought experiment where Sisyphus is actually happy.

    No. No, I am not going to try to imagine Sisyphus being happy with his fate. Let’s discuss the conjugation of the infinitive “to shit.”

    Mom just rolled her eyes.

    So yesterday, Mom told the anesthesiologist who came to put her under for her cardioversion that she would not tolerate Dilaudid. He said propofol was what was on the menu. I said that it might not be an appropriate time to make a Michael Jackson joke.

    “I give the Thriller dose, not the killer dose.”

    😂😂😂

    Mom rolled her eyes.

    Anyway, so Mom sent me home to take a shower because I’m offensive and look like I’ve been dragged over a gravel road like Matthew Shepherd, and to relax a bit since my brothers are there to spell me until later tonight.

    But you know, you can take care of business with humor and grace (mostly), but shit gets real when the pressure’s off and you’re alone. I’m tired, I stink, I’m sad.

    And 2025 is only 8 days old.

    • Sensei

      The thread is a bit old, but best of luck in a bad situation.

    • Grosspatzer, Superstar

      Ugh. I have trouble finding words for this sort of thing, mostly because there aren’t any. Virtual hug is the best I can do.

    • R C Dean

      At this point, what purpose does the PCP actually serve? Is there any need to waste cycles on him?

      Purely technical point: your mom is still competent, so the DPOA* has zero decision making authority. Always a good idea to keep the DPOA (and as necessary depending on family dynamics, other family members) in the loop. I was always clear: “I don’t care which family member is the loudest. What does the DPOA say?”

      *Designated (health care) Power of Attorney.

      • Mojeaux

        She can barely speak, but she is of sound mind, so yes, we defer to her always.

        This eventuality is a discussion she and I have had many times.

  30. Tundra

    The videos of Cali are ridiculous. I am awaiting word from a few more family and friends there. So far so good.

    I hope all of our Glibs are safe.

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