How to reduce stress and be happy

During his extended battle with mylodisplacia, Carl Sagan wrote something to the effect of, “I would almost recommend almost dying to everybody. It’s a character building experience like no other. You get a much clearer perspective of what’s important and what isn’t, the preciousness and beauty of life. I say almost because of the irreducible and essential element of risk”. I’ve actually had a similar epiphany, but being so much more vindictive than Sagan, I’m employing it in a different way. I’m finding it’s just as therapeutic though. [Read more…]

I suffered a massive full-blown widow-maker heart attack

Use DarkSydeOtheMoon@aol.com

Use DarkSydOtheMoon@aol.com

Update 3 Jan 2015: Med students, heart patients, and interested people, here is an actual post written detailing the signs and symptoms felt while I was suffering what was later diagnosed by a cardiologist as a major heart attack. If you’re up for kicking in a few bucks to help with spiraling healthcare costs due to heart attack and poverty level disability pay, my paypal email is posted above.

So I got the cath results: It wasn’t a minor heart attack folks. It was a full blown widow maker where a primary coronary artery got blocked 100%, and that blockage was right at the top, high enough up that the bottom two-thirds of my entire heart could have been deader than fried chicken. I would have been dead before my body hit the floor.

How am I still alive, much less able to spend the last several hours running up and down stairs, straying all over the hospital, flirting with night nurses (Oh man, the brains on these gals, I can’t stop talking to them, their science-y minds are so incredibly hot!) just a few hours after the cath that confirmed a massive myocardial infarction? Well, it’s not a miracle … [Read more…]

The Heart Cath

8:40 AM Central: Driving to St. David’s North Austin Medical Center, I don’t know if I’ll have Internet access or not, but I smuggled in a tablet. I’m geting a heart cath shortly, will tweet under tag #heartcath using @SAndrewDKos. BTW, my aol email address is completely borked and the cust service I got when I called in to get it fixed was horrific. Later this week I might call them and record how terrible it is for Kagro on the Morning and me to ridicule.

The conspiracy: Newtown was fake, or staged, or something

We’ve all seen the lucrative delusions packaged and sold like a pound of butter to the religious right over the years. Some of them revolting, most of them a little bit comical and almost all of them sad. They are created and marketed to fleece hard earned money from people who may lack the finely honed critical thinking skills we take for granted here, but the marks are by and large honest people who do not deserve being victimized and made fools of. That in itself is repugnant: the very voters the grifters depend on for success are held in utter disregard and open contempt. Well, there’s a new one making the rounds and its a doozy: the Newtown massacre was staged by the government as a ruse to take away our guns! [Read more…]

Radio wavelengths bring dim nebula into exquisite high resolution

Manatee1

Not long ago this object didn’t even have a name. It was just a dim hazy splotch in most telescopes, if they could see it at all. After being imaged by a high res wide radio telescope array in New Mexico, the one made famous in the movie Contact, it was christened the manatee nebula for its resemblance to the gentle and endangered marine mammals. More here. [Read more…]

The godbots descend on the bad news of my heart attack

Now that the word is out that I probably had a heart attack last month, my email runneth over. Most of them are dear friends and family members wishing me the best, a few with questions asking about morbid details, what did it feel like, what’s the prognosis, do I need anything, etc. But there’s been one threatening me with eternal hellfire, a few telling me this is God-eh reaching out to me, and one trumpeting it as God’s punishment, basically for being a progressive and supporting Obamacare. Selected excerpts below:

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I’m as serious as a heart attack

Update: I was given some meds to speed the recovery and mitigate the effects of  a likely mild MI before the cath on Monday. I guess they’ve kicked in, because i feel superb. Better than I’ve felt in weeks. Alert, calm, and just fantastic all around. I can’t help but feel sorrow for the millions of people who do not have the health insurance I enjoy. The year 2014, when Obamacare kicks in, can’t come soon enough for this nation.

So, it turns out I probably had a mild heart attack a few weeks ago. At the time it was stomach pain, like in the upper GI or gall bladder region, and not much else. Nothing like what you read about. At first the cardiologist thought I was ok but he ordered a few tests just to make sure, turns out my ejection fraction slightly off, inverted T wave on part of the EKG, persistent high blood pressure, etc. He suspects a near full block at or near the very tip of the heart, the part that points down. We’re fixing to find out for sure: I’ll be cathed next Monday and there’s a 50-50 chance he’ll angioblast a blockage and/or put in a stint at that time. I am going to try and tweet/blog through some of it just for kicks.

I’m not saying it’s God’s Will or anything …

There was a time I felt halfway sorry for Mark Sanford. Remember? Sanford was governor of South Carolina, he disappeared, supposedly to hike the Appalachian Trail. He’d actually fallen head over heels in love with a Brazilian Argentinian beauty and was down south fornicating, much to the chagrin of his wealthy, proper wife back home. Disgraced, Sanford resigned and dropped off the face of the earth. … He’s baaack! [Read more…]