You're a new and better man

[austin_dern]

The stomach flu passed fairly quickly. A day later I was basically able to process sentences again, for example, and to eat things usefully. And my back pain continued to recede. By Wednesday I was feeling quite chipper, in fact. I got out of bed, started showering, had my usual morning coughing fit and then felt the greatest pain I have ever known in my life.

Couple points here. First, while, yes, I have pretty much nothing in my medical history I do cough a lot. An awful lot, especially in the morning. It came on gradually, I thought at first the last lingering gasp of a cold that wouldn't go away, but this never went away. And to cough badly enough to throw my back out --- well, that moved ``ask about this cough'' onto the list of stuff to ask my doctor about next regular checkup. Also ``schedule regular checkup'' onto the list of things I would actually do.

The back pain, though. It was far worse than what I had at Cedar Point. That hurt but I was still pretty much ambulatory. This --- even with painkillers --- was just brutal. The worst was trying to sleep. I could not make my body move in the ways needed to lie down on my side, or my chest. I could barely manage to lie down on my back. And I need to not lie down on my back or else my snoring is loud enough to wake bunny_hugger and shake plaster loose from the living room walls. And then when I needed to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom ... well. I suppose this experience will be tolerable if I never, ever have back pain ever in the rest of my life. I understand there's an excellent chance of never having back troubles ever again.

Trivia: In May 1582 Pope Gregory XIII sent a secret emissary --- Livio Cellini, presenting himself as a tarder travelling with a state delegation from Venice to the Turks --- to Jeremiah II Transos, the patriarch of Constantinople and head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, with details of his calendar reform. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle To Align The Clock And The Heavens --- And What Happened To The Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: 1946: The Making Of The Modern World, Victor Sebestyen. Goodness knows it's not an important point and the details of the United States's repeated surrenders to racist slavers and would-be slavers are hard to follow. But it's so disheartening to read in a footnote explaining Truman's nickname of being ``the Second Missouri Compromise'', the explanation that the first Missouri Compromise was in 1820, about the admission of slave and abolitionist states, culminating in the admission of Kansas. I mean, the name is a hint.

PS: Bringing Up Arthur Christmas Again, just a reminder on my mathematics blog that you should see this movie and there's mathematics it brings up.