Raccoon Roundworm Is Your New Swine Flu

The menace known as Raccoon Roundworm, a “rare, deadly disease,” has brain damaged an infant and blinded  a teenager in Brooklyn. Those are the only victims — so far! — of an illness contracted by consuming dirty raccoon poop.  Still!  There’s never a time to not panic lately, is there? If only to drum up some scary headlines.

So, in the interest of  your health, remember:  Don’t touch or eat raccoon poop.  Duh.  I’ll be soaking in my Purell bath if you need me.  [via Gothamist]

It’s Got a Good Beat, and You Can Save Lives to It

Disco may be dead, but it could also keep you alive, or something:  “‘Stayin’ Alive’ might be more true to its name than the Bee Gees ever could have guessed: At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help jump-start a stopped heart.”  Says CNN:

It turns out the American Heart Association has been using the song as a training tip for CPR instructors for about two years.

They learned of it from a physician “who sort of hit upon this as a training tool,” said association spokesman Dr. Vinay Nadkarni of the University of Pennsylvania.

He said he was not aware of any previous studies that tested the song.

But Nadkarni said he has seen “Stayin’ Alive” work wonders in classes where students were having trouble keeping the right beat while practicing on mannequins. When he turned on the song, “all of a sudden, within just a few seconds, they get it right on the dot.”

The more you know!

Not Just Lip Service

I was on the phone Sunday afternoon with my friend Julie when I noticed my left thumb had swollen to approximately twice the size of my right. As I had spent the last four days in a cold medicine haze, fighting some upper respiratory malady, I wondered if I had absentmindedly burned it on a mug of tea without noticing.  (Would this be the same fugue state that prompted me to view  Threesome for the first time in fourteen years via that Netflix “Watch Instantly” feature?)

Later, as I was heading out to the diner for a bowl of soup, I noticed my foot was tender, making it hard to walk.  When I got home and inspected closer, my foot, also my left, was swollen and I could barely wiggle my toes.  My fever had broken and besides a bit of a lingering cough, I was pretty much over the cold.  So this, this was something new and unforeseen.  From googling, I was able to determine it was some sort of water retention (ew), and even though unlikely, I wasn’t ready to rule out gout.  Paranoid I would somehow die in my sleep, the swelling overtaking every part of me like an alien virus, I tried to reconstruct the journey of my illness from Thursday on, noting the symptoms in my Moleskine notebook along with what over-the-counter medicines I’d taken. That way, should I be discovered days later, even the most cut-rate detective would hopefully be able to piece together the clues of my demise.  That’s me, always thinking ahead. I attempted to sleep with my feet elevated to maybe alleviate the swelling, but as I was also trying to prop my head up to be able to breathe, It was probably moot.

To my horror,  I woke this morning to find my lower lip and chin had ballooned, as puffy and misshapen as if I’d been pummeled in a bar fight or had undergone extensive dental surgery.   I called in to work and managed to wrangle an appointment with my doctor, enduring the ride downtown with the left half of my lip plump as a Vienna sausage, keenly aware I was being studied by my fellow subway riders.

After forty-five minutes in the waiting room, then a modicum of chit-chat in my doctor’s inner sanctum, he finally fixed his gaze on my face and asked, “What happened to your lip?”

Well, thank you, that’s exactly what I’d like to know!

He listened to my breathing and felt of my swollen feet, jotting copious notes in my file.  Putting my shirt back on,  I caught sight of myself in the mirror and noticed my lip had grown to three times the size it was when I first woke up.

The doctor determined it was some sort of allergic reaction to the blood pressure medicine I’d been taking for the last two months, an angioneurotic edema, I think he called it, but he might’ve said anal retentive adobe for all I know.   Neither would’ve made any cognitive sense in the moment.   I just wanted my face and feet to return to their proper size.  He said to stop the medicine I was taking and wrote a prescription for a steroid to deal with the swelling.

I trudged back uptown on the subway, attracting even more stares, and then to the drugstore to fill the Rx.

I popped the first doses of the steroid when I got home and probed my swollen face.  If I were a Hollywood actress of a certain age trying to regain my youthful visage through elective surgery, the tabloids would snidely say I have “trout pout.” A veritable Melanie Griffith after an injectables bender.  But even that  would be too kind.  No, it looked as if I’d flown to Mexico for and found some back alley quack to fill me with syringe after syringe of collagen.  My lower lip was so engorged it was positively Jocelyn Wildensteinian, or Amanda Leporian if you prefer.  Pete Burnsian even!

By late this evening I was able to walk without wincing,  my feet having deflated a bit, my lip reduced in fullness to what would be called pleasantly bee stung, as if I used that plumping stuff that was all the rage with the ladies for awhile:  Lip Venom,  or Lip Strychnine,  or Lip Agent Orange, or whatever it’s called.

Crisis averted!  Yet, I’m now taking pills to counteract the allergic reaction to the pills I was taking that were supposed to make me healthier, or at least as healthy as I should be for my age. Bah.

And to be honest, while I usually don’t like intense physical scrutiny, there was something weirdly powerful about walking around looking like an aberration, a freak freed from the circus, mentally daring strangers to gawk at me, knowing, thankfully, I’d soon be able to blend back in.

Abercrombie & Stitches

No good deed goes unpunished. Take wholesome American clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch, who donated $10 million dollars to an Ohio hospital. In a show of gratitude, the institution agreed to name the emergency department and trauma center after the company. A&F simply wanted to give back , and now they are mired in controversy. A group of vocal protesters, masquerading as “concerned citizens” are somehow incensed that this sunny clothing brand would benefit from their philanthropic contribution.

It is troubling that a children’s hospital would name its emergency room after a company that routinely relies on highly sexualized marketing to target teens and preteens,” the members of the coalition wrote in a letter that was sent on Tuesday to the hospital’s office in Columbus, Ohio.

One of these neo-puritans even called it “egregious,” claiming that these purveyors of well-constructed cotton t-shirts and cargo shorts are “corporate predators” responsible for “sexualizing and objectifying children.”

Clearly the “child advocates” do not have the best interest of the young patients in mind. just imagine, in another brilliant bit of synergy, what the restorative effects of having sponge baths administered by buxom sun-kissed blonde nurses would be, while ab-liscious, muscled young doctors homoerotically tussled with one another in the corridors, their new cargo pocket scrubs riding suggestively below their hips.

Why, their virility would be a veritable panacea to the infirmed. Think of the children!

Gills or Tits

So, yeah, there was that news story that an assload of drugs, from sex hormones to antibiotics, appeared in “24 of the 62 major metropolitan water systems” according to the AP. (Of course NYC was not part of the test, so.)

Whatever, at some point from drinking water I’m going to get either tits or gills, if EVERY OTHER HORRIBLE THING happening in the world and in our own country doesn’t kill me first. So, I’m almost at peace with the whole thing. Which is sort of counter to my usual hypochondriac panic. Progress?