Covid alters Mental State, says Times. I have always noticed that every general anesthesia costs you 5 IQ points

 New York TIMES

Nearly One-Third of Covid Patients in Study Had Altered Mental State

The hospitalized patients showed signs of deteriorating neurological function, ranging from confusion to coma-like unresponsiveness, new research indicates.

 

Nearing the end of Robert Galbraith's TROUBLED BLOOD. She adores Spenser, as well she should.

Think how she must have loved Spenser's imagination.

I read Spenser not for class but for pleasure while working nights in the Freight House of the Kansas City Southern Railway in Port Arthur. That was late 1957 and early 1958, but here I was re-reading (for fun) in July 1959 after I knew I was leaving in several weeks for Evanston, Illinois.

This is where she gets her title TROUBLED BLOOD.

Ordered good eyepatch April 26 but it was delayed. This photo is about May 1, 2020

I ordered the eye-patch while I still thought I had lymphoma--did not learn till the next day that it was Valley Fever.

 I worked for hours with this scratchy eye-patch around May first while waiting for the 2-day delivery of comfortable eye patches that took still more days. When the new good patches arrived I did not need them! That is how incredibly fast fluconazole worked. The ocular oncologists said I was deluding myself, but after one day on the anti-fungal drug I could feel an improvement, sort of, but I was sure. Now, the lesion did not close all the way till early September but I could read, even through the brown fluid, very soon.

I am hobbling along because of the Deep Vein Thrombosis (left thigh) compounded by the aftermath of a serious fall (damage to right hip) in the driveway (caused by DVT) but feeling grateful. Ouch, that is not the cheerful picture. Let me try again:

There, that is more cheerful.

Well, My Cousin Matthew Pottinger is a Republican but at least he has enough good sense to wear a mask in the face of ridicule.

 

The tight quarters of the West Wing were packed and busy. Almost no one wore masks. The rare officials who did, like Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, were ridiculed by colleagues as alarmist.

The more I think about it the more likely it seems that family members will be Tweeting as if POTUS were capable to Tweeting

 These really will be Fake Tweets.

An Unkind but realistic question: will Jr or another family member be Tweeting as if it were the POTUS himself?

 Will there be FAKE TWEETS?

Covid19 is scary for those of us about to turn 85

 Last year, I would not have worried so much because I was walking 2 miles a day on the beach and running a little of the way. My lungs were as good as TB left them in the mid 1950s. But early this year I had to stop exercising. Men, have you tried to exercise for three weeks with a catheter after surgery? Then, weakened, I ventured to the beach just a few times and came down with near-blindness in the right eye. At the great ocular oncologist's office in Stanford I was told that it was fast moving cancer that had moved up from a body riddled with cancer. One of them talked about removing the eye. And that is my good eye, not the left one. The great man said fast moving, not melanoma, because by luck I had taken a picture of the eye on 31 January and all was fine, for my history. So a certain amount of stress in the next weeks. We made our holograph wills before going to Stanford and more formal wills after getting back. We still have not taped boxes 70-80 or so to mail to the Berkshire Athenaeum, though we got them packed. Then after 3 weeks and a few days an oncologist down here showed us the lighted up chest and said it looked like lymphoma but he was ordering a dozen tests to rule out anything else. The tests, and a lung biopsy, revealed that I had Valley Fever, which sounds much better than lymphoma but is absolutely devastating. Now, I have not been allowed to exercise since early in the year. I was told a month ago that the latest horror, the Deep Vein Thrombosis in the left leg, was controlled enough so that there were NO RESTRICTIONS on exercise. Next four days: Short walk, 2 mile walk, 2 mile walk, emergency room. Pressure stocking still, and the right hip damaged from falling on the driveway three weeks ago as I tried to wrestle garbage cans. Now, at almost 85 I would be in a high risk category even if my lungs were OK. So I look at a man the Speaker of the House describes as morbidly obese and who is 74. They count 74, juvenile 74, as Senior Citizen. I am down here because the windows are closed against the worst air in the world and it is a little cooler here on the floor where I nap in the afternoon. The news is pretty upsetting.