How Science Bites

Or how I got ticked off and learned to hate the healthcare system.

I was laying in bed, the sickest I’ve ever been in my adult life, in late April of 2020. The whole experience started on a Sunday afternoon.  My in-laws were coming over for dinner during the great lock down of the human race for my father in-laws birthday.  It was considered a somewhat rogue gathering at the time, but my people are such a people that belief in family as family even stands during a pandemic. 

I was prepping our planned meal for the celebration and I didn’t feel good. I was tired and felt somewhat hungover. Maybe I was.  In retrospect I can’t really remember what I drank the night before, but when I stopped working on dinner to take a shower everything changed. I turned off the water and began to towel off and my body went into near shock from chills. My teeth chattered and my arms and legs began to shake uncontrollably. I grabbed a thermometer out of the medicine cabinet and took my temperature.

101.5 degrees.

Fuck!

This was the middle of THE GREAT PANDEMIC. The one that sent 24 hours of terror out from every television in the world. Waves of death were happening. Mostly old people… who were being given poor treatment protocols… in mostly empty hospitals… for a novel virus that had only a moderately higher mortality rate than the yearly flu.

It was a concerning moment that brought an abrupt ending to our dinner plans for the evening. That one might kill their elders was a prominent weapon in the televised campaign of fear. While I had come to doubt the raging fear being waged against us concerning the so called pandemic, now I was definitely sick.  

Being sick is not part of my life experience.  Besides maybe a few colds, the flu or whatever in my life, the last time I had been truly sick was 33 years earlier when I had gone water skiing in the Ohio River in 1987. Then, I was being pulled up on a set of borrowed skis, behind a borrowed boat, by the renegade son of the local chief of police, when I failed to pull into a standing upright position on the skies and received a high pressure water enema of Ohio River water. That evening I came down with a fever and explosive diarrhea that required an antibiotic that was administered daily, for a couple weeks, in the form of a rectal suppository. It was an experience that convinced me to never hesitate getting upright on skis quickly, and to avoid allowing the water of the Ohio River into any orifice of my body.

Now, in the mist of the great pandemic of fear, there I was, laying in bed with a very formidable headache that made opening my eyes an act of excruciating pain, muscles that screamed with rigid stiffness when turning over in bed, and a temperature that was banging on 103 degrees every six hours, just as I was taking another dose of ibuprofen to bring it back down to a relatively cool 99.9 degrees for a few hours.

I remember thinking, “if this is covid, no wonder old people are dying.” 

After lying in my bed alone, that was soaked from my sweat, for 24 hours, I was instructed by everyone who cared about me to go get a covid test.  I remember thinking, “why?! They have no treatment to offer.” I also had reason to believe that I was not suffering from covid.

The advice the vast majority of so-called doctors were giving at that time was to stay home, stay isolated, and try not to die while you’re alone.  Many people, especially the elderly, died alone following those very instructions. They were ostracized and made to spend their last suffering moments of existence in solitary isolation, without the comfort of being surrounded by those they loved so an imaginary curve might be flattened for the greater good. 

On Tuesday, two days after I had become overwhelmed with my illness, I dragged myself out of bed, got into the car with my wife, and rode twenty fucking insufferable minutes so a plastic, bubble wrapped woman could stick a swab deep into my nose and wiggle it around. This act was performed on each nostril. 

I was in so much discomfort that the bubble wrapped woman lit up with giddy surprise and exclaimed, “wow! You didn’t even flinch! You really must not feel good!” She then informed me that I could get results online in two or three days.

I remember looking at the whole scene, the testing tent, the bubble wrapped women with plastic shields in front of their face, the paperwork my wife was filling out, the distant trees and pale blue sky, thinking I have to ride back home for another 20 minutes before I can lay back down in bed and go to sleep.

The illness had made me delirious and thinking clearly had become a labor of broken thoughts, but one realization that kept coming back to me was the fact that I had zero respiratory distress. Nothing. Just a raging headache, muscle pain and constant sweating and fever.  In my delirium I was becoming more and more convinced that whatever covid was, I didn’t have it.  I really needed to see a doctor.

Here, I’ll place my disclaimer.  I’ve never liked going to doctors. In fact, I don’t go to doctors for most any reason unless I’m REALLY FUCKING SICK! Which I never am.  My general thinking has been if I feel good, I don’t need to see a doctor. If I feel bad, why do I feel bad? Can it be attributed to my lifestyle? Change my lifestyle. I need exceptional evidence that a doctor is necessary before I waste my time with a businessman who profits from telling me I’m sick and only his help, which will cost much money, can fix it.

However, at that moment, in April of 2020, I knew I needed to see a doctor. I needed a professional assessment of my situation. I was very sick and I felt absolutely zero sense that I was moving towards feeling better.  It was literally the first time in all of the decades of my adult life that I wanted to go to the doctor.  So, on Wednesday morning, feeling absolutely as bad as ever, still banging on a 103+ degree temperature every six hours, I decided to call a doctor.

Oh the irony…

My doctor, who admittedly I had only seen once in the last ten years, wouldn’t see me, nor would any doc-a-box or any other urgent care doctor offer their services. 

Why?

Because I was sick!

L. O. Fucking L. 

Doctors who won’t see you because you are sick! It makes as much sense as a fire fighter who won’t enter your house because it’s on fire. It screams, “I AM A FRAUD! I’m only here for the money and the pret-a-porter outfit that justifies my outlandish rates.”

Because I was sick, no doctor would risk seeing me. They offered to allow me to pull up outside, where they would send out a bubble wrapped woman to test me for covid, if the test came back negative in a couple of days, they would provide what services they could in the parking lot or recommend me to emergency services.

It was at this moment that I swore to the mercurial gods of medicine that, without having giving sacrificial proof, no one in the healthcare system would ever again be treated as a person worthy of respect, or spoken of with respect for the rest of my existence on Earth. Whatever intelligence they may hold, however great their knowledge may be, they are fearful people who are only concerned with their own status and well being. Such people can not be trusted in a life or death situation. You can never trust someone whose concern is solely focused on their own safety to be willing to go to whatever extremes might be necessary to save another human. 

Let me tell you a hard truth. Your doctor, most likely, doesn’t care about your life. NOT AT ALL. They care about their reputation. To that extent they don’t wan’t you to die. It’s bad for their reputation. However, to go to an extreme measure to save your life is even a higher risk for your doctor. If a doctor breaks protocol and the patient dies, they loose far more reputation than they do by sticking to the agreed upon rules and seeing half of their patients die. This dictates most doctors will allow people to die in their care, day after day, as long as they follow the systems standard of care, their peer agreed upon status quo. 

In short, you are a financial resource to your doctor and it is not your survival, but the protocol they record in their “tracking system” in regards to their treatment of you that matters in their world. Their world is a world of academic papers and citations. It’s a world of academic letters that follow their names, and these letters dictate the size of their home and the exclusiveness of the gated community they reside in and who they play golf with on the days they aren’t dispensing pharmaceutical dictates to rubes in their offices.

It’s here that I’ll inject an important fact to my story that I’ve withheld from you, dear reader. But, it’s a fact that I did not withhold at all from each and every person I spoke with at the time of my illness. I was, in fact, quite emphatic about this fact to each and every doctor, nurse and receptionist I spoke to at the time and yet they all refused to see me.

The lock downs of early 2020 occurred right at the time I put my garden out. With the extra time availed to me during the stopping of my business, I decided to expand my garden. This involved peeling off the sod where the new beds would go and moving it to a part of my homestead that suffered from water runoff. It was laborious work, but I developed a system of cutting the sod into roughly 18 inch wide by 24 inch long chunks of grass that were fairly easy to lift into a wheelbarrow and move to where I would lay them out in their new spot. 

Doing this required repetitive lifting of large pieces of grass sod and this process resulted in an inundation of ticks. I was finding them crawling on me throughout the entire process. When I finished working, I would come inside, strip, and take a shower immediately. Still, I would on occasion find one attached.  

If you read about diseases transmitted by ticks you’ll learn that if you pull an attached tick off within 24 hours, there’s a good chance that they will not transmit anything to you. I suppose, if you’re the type of person who enters nature one day a week this is good news. When you’re involved in bear hugging nature day in and day out you need your partner to perform a full body tick check every evening to guarantee that no tick has been attached for more than a day.

While the full body tick check is a regular practice in my house, there are times when a tick is found, fully attached, that leaves one to wonder “how long has this little bastard been sucking my juice?”

About a week before my illness I’d had found just such a tick, a Lone Star tick, pulled from my upper right butt cheek. I didn’t really give it much thought at the time. I had literally pulled more than a dozen ticks from my body during this sod removal process. Any repetitive process becomes normal after it occurs multiple times. However, I do remember my wife saying a few days after removing this tick from my ass, and several days before my illness, that the itching spot on my butt was swollen and looked bad.

At the time, I scratched my ass and thought little of it.  A week or so latter, while suffering from a raging temperature, headache and muscle pain, I thought about it a lot. II consistently relayed these thoughts to the medical “professionals” to enlighten them in regards to my tick bite and severely swollen and itchy ass during the previous days.

Now, if you thought my indigent and extreme reaction to our medical establishment at the time to be unjustified, understand, I live in Tennessee. Even with a 103 degree temperature and vision splitting headache I was able to discover that there are roughly 17 tick born illnesses that exist in my area. Many of them come with less than ideal outcomes. 

It is because of this information, on top of what seemed at the time, and has since been proven, an over reaction to what was nothing more than a novel, bad version of the flu, that I became a vocal critic of what is laughably called healthcare in America. I was very sick, with all the indications of being infected by an illness carried by ticks, in need of immediate assessment, and not a single doctor cared to take this information and offer me any diagnosis or treatment with something as simple as antibiotics.

But fear not dear reader, I write this story today thanks to my own initiative. One that was taken well before my I became ill. I have long understood that the system might not be there for me when I am in a time of need. Though before 2020, I viewed this in some extreme circumstance.  Having witnessed Katrina and having housed friends from New Orleans during Katrina’s aftermath, I learned that we should always be prepared for a situation where our daily systems might not be available. Knowing this, I had obtained two bottles, each containing 100 capsules, of Fishmox, more commonly known as Amoxicillin. 

During my illness I was taking ibuprofen every six hours to break my temperature. In the middle of the night, between Wednesday and Thursday, my covid test results still outstanding (it would come back negative in two more days), I stood in my dark kitchen, alone in the silence. My head was throbbing and every part of my body ached. After taking the ibuprofen I stood starring into the abyss and considered my situation. I had been rejected by every doctor. My covid test was still out. There was nothing but darkness, silence and overwhelming physical pain.

In that moment, I went into my emergency “bug out” bag and grabbed the bottle of Fishmox, or Amoxicillin, I had obtained from a pet store on my own volition, a drug labeled to be used for fish (not for human consumption). The pill numbers themselves matched exactly what a doctor would prescribe from a pharmacy (for five times the cost), and swallowed a 500mg capsule.

The next morning I woke up with a fever that was still 102 degrees. I took another fishmox capsule with my ibuprofen and laid suffering in bed. 

My temperature stayed below 102 for the remainder of the morning. I continued to take Amoxicillin three times a day for the next two weeks. The fever broke within the next 24 hours. The muscle pain subsided after few days. Having read about diseases carried by ticks, I was aware of the necessity to continue taking a consistent, high dose of antibiotics. I was weak for the next month or more. Whether it was the illness or the heavy doses of antibiotics I will never know. I knew no doctor worthy of dispensing such knowledge. But I healed.

Mostly.

I’m near certain at this point that what I was suffering was a case of Lyme disease. There were subsequent after effects that are hard to consider as anything else.

In the time immediately after this infection I had brief, but observable, swelling in the knuckles on my hands. Very rare, but occasional heart palpitations, and brain fog. These symptoms have long dissipated now. It’s only in retrospect that I realize the severity of what happened to me.

I point out that this began during the first waves of covid. Understanding its implications as a campaign of fear, I never took the vaccine. Now, I realize the campaign of fear was created to sell the vaccine. That’s another story BUT it has taken me the better part of four years to become aware of what I went through and in many ways it’s no different than what occurred with the so called pandemic during that time.

Few people know the origins of tick born illnesses. They are not natural. Ticks were some of the first areas of reckless research in biowarfare. Ticks were seen as early as the 1940s as a way to distribute illness that could debilitate a population. Most every known disease transmitted by ticks is a product of biowarfare research. Once you know this, you realize we are already living in the middle of a global war. Maybe it’s inadvertent, maybe not. 

Lyme disease is known to be a product of biological warfare research. It’s estimated that there are approximately 500,000 people a year infected with Lyme disease. If left untreated it I can be fatal. If treated late, it is debilitating. It first appeared in our environment in 1964 and yet no one in the medical community diagnosed it as a disease transmitted by ticks until 1975, and even then its implications were not fully understood or disclosed.

This puts Lyme disease in the same category as AIDS and Covid19. These are biological weapons that were released into our environment either intentionally or accidentally by people who considered researching such novel means of death and destruction of greater value than researching ways of improving health. 

This should not surprise anyone who views the nature of power, politics and the goals sought by the people who desire such positions of public persuasion. What should be of concern to the average man is knowing this, why do your doctors, the mere common practitioner who cares for your health, ignore such facts. 

More importantly, why does anyone consider such grifters and snake oil sales man’s opinions when it comes to your health? I’m not a doctor. I’m just a guy. I’m just a guy that suggests others, guys and gals, who collect things, brick a brac, around their house, to consider adding some Fishmox or Ivermectin to their collection. Just things to have around and read about from time to time. Why not? They are cheap, interesting, and they might be of help when no one else will consider your situation.

If you want to know more about the horror of what has been created through bio-warfare research on ticks, I recommend checking out The BITTEN Files.