I WENT TO THE DOCTOR YESTERDAY

   From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732       1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120      572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242       835      130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136      1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571       703       85

Nov    25     2304    12025        620       518      118

Dec    30     3880    14748       1224       299     465

Jan     14       4142    15512        1151        189      712              

Feb      3       4005   14265       1209       107     398

          17         2537   11383        1195         89      165 

          23        2404   10293       1370       100     263

          24        2525   10814        1433       144      110

          25        2414    10578        1582       119      144

Summary:  What is looming is a fourth wave, this one caused by those variants.  From the New York Times this morning:

The country has averaged about 1.5 million shots per day over the past week. My reporting suggests that the right goal is at least three million daily shots by April.....the peak number of flu vaccine shots in a normal year is around three million per day. President Joe Biden reached 50 million inoculations in 36 days.  100 million is a given.  It will be a disappointment if the USA does not reach 200 million in his first 100 days.  Also from the NYT:

“Wear a mask. Avoid crowds. And get vaccinated when it’s your turn.”

Note the absence of hand-washing.  According to Professor Cris Janetoupoulos:

• So, while hand-washing is good hygiene that should be encouraged, this is a respiratory virus spread largely by aerosols, and the probability of getting live virus from your hands or a surface into your respiratory tract appears small.
• Also:  Interestingly, it is now well accepted that asymptomatic individuals are contributing to the spread of COVID-19, with estimates suggesting that nearly 60% of all spread occurs in this manner.

It's now a month since I took my second Moderna dosage.  I should be safe.  However, for the past decade or so I've now and then experienced piercing pain emanating for inside my ears.  Never both at the same time, and only a couple of times/year.  I correlated those incidents to when the inside of my ear got wet, so I thought some kind of infection was the cause.  

So I went to an ear doctor.  Turns out that this pain (and for me it is not as bad as that image to the right) is common, and it has nothing to do with ear wax and the inner ear.  Mostly old age.  He said it was common neuralgia, an ailment the medical profession professes to know very little about.  For the severely impacted, there is some medication, but you need to take it all the time and there are side and long term effects.  So that's not the solution.  His advice, hope it does not get worse.  

As I was in his office I also inquired about two more discomforts:

• I suffer from mild tinnitus.  Again, he said that is common and, yes, just hope it does not get worse.  More importantly, you know about all those supposed cures for tinnitus?  Like for example Silencil, a kind of neuropathic solution.  He said to ignore all of them.  There is nothing anyone can do.  If someone actually developed a cure, that person would be a billionaire and he would know about it.

• 
  My final question.  How do I safely clean out the wax in my ear?  He said DON'T.  There is no safe way.  The wax just naturally falls out of your ear.  However, he did proceed to use a tool called a curet to remove what little I had, and the process was a whole lot more painful than the Moderna injections.  It almost was like he was telling me...don't do this.

• 
  My experience yesterday kind of reminded me of when I last went to see my ophthalmologist.  I asked this question for the first time ever:  How can I easily get an eyelash out of my eye?  He said, well, nothing much you can do.  Thats it?  Yes.  Turns out that these lashes do not accumulate in the back of your eye and disintegrate over time.  Evolution has found a way for the eye to naturally remove them out without your doing anything.  Amazing but true.

Here science is on the verge of finding a solution for COVID-19 so quickly, and otolaryngologists are treating patients as they did half a century ago.  At least my eye doctor took care of my cataract problem.  I now can see a golf ball roll on the green 200 yards away.

Next week I go to my dentist (but this is for preventive maintenance by a dental hygienist).  As I tally up all the pain my body suffers from each year, my twice a year visit for this torture overwhelms anything else.  Yet, it's tolerable, almost masochistically so, and worth the agony.

Finally, I also have a new knee doctor on my list next week.  This is something I've been postponing for a year during this quarantine period. However, self therapy morning exercises have made such a positive difference that I should cancel this appointment.  Yet, why not, as this will cost me nothing, and perhaps I'll receive some useful advice.

I'll close with:

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