A couple weeks ago on my way home from my regular Thursday afternoon
volunteering at the RR museum, on a damp and sometimes drizzly autumn
day, I made the left turn from 12th Ave onto Howard St and into a patch
of wet leaves. I immediately recalled why the season is called fall
. A
driver in an SUV stopped and asked, Are you alright?
I said, Well, my
pride is completely shot.
I suspect that she wanted to say, Well, you
were riding a bicycle. If you had any pride to speak of, you would have
been in a Lincoln Navigator.
But she said something nicer instead.
Anyway, a quick check of body and bike showed only a skinned knee and a
broken pedal. I continued home, where I applied a bit of hydrogen
peroxide to the knee — unnecessarily, I thought — and then
on to the bike shop for a new pedal and a second check of the mechanicals.
All for free. Life is good.
The next week on Friday afternoon I had an ISA certified arborist looking over the copse that is my yard, making suggestions happily in concert with my own views of urban forestry. In the middle of the conversation, my knee began to stiffen up. Odd, I thought, to be stiffening up 8 days after the trauma, and I put the matter off. A bit of heat and I was functional. But the swelling didn't go down by itself and so — feeling this was too minor a complaint to bother with, and yet having a knee that woke me up every time I rolled over — at last I checked in with Dr Miller. He extracted some yellow fluid which proved, upon laboratory analysis, to be full of drug-susceptible staphylococci. Life may be good, but this particular life was living in the wrong location.
My third trip was therefore to the drug store for some cephalexin, a safe and well-tolerated antibiotic with possible side effects such as diarrhea, dizziness, headache, indigestion, joint pain, stomach pain, tiredness, … severe allergic reactions (rash, hives, itching, difficulty breathing, tightness in the chest, swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue), agitation, confusion, dark urine, decreased urination, fever, hallucinations, red, swollen, or blistered skin, seizures, … unusual bruising or bleeding, yellowing of the eyes or skin. Under artificial light I don't think I could recognize yellowing of the skin.
Tiredness, though, I definitely noticed. Whether it was from the cephalexin or from waking up every time I rolled onto the front of my knee I can't say with certainty. In response, I rode my bike to my lawyer's office where I told my Shakespeare joke about engineers, then I rode to the Brown County library where I didn't find a copy of the magazine I was curious about, then I rode to the St Norbert College library where I didn't find a copy of the magazine I was curious about, then I walked to the SNC box office because that saves me a dollar compared to riding directly home and buying the ticket online.
When I did get home, I found that my health insurance premiums will be
going up 62% and that the skin on my chest was reddened and slightly
rough. Naturally, my first thought was, If I'm going into anaphylactic
shock I'm glad it is under the old premium structure and not the new one.
Agitation, confusion, indigestion … what were those side effects again?
I've been reading about how some engineers, mainly civil and structural, have proposed increasing the minimum levels of schooling to qualify for professional licensure. According to their own words, these engineers are trying to gain the same respect for their profession as is given to doctors and lawyers. (This argument has been running for 30 or 40 years in various forms. Another group, mostly mechanicals, thinks this group is nuts, and a third group is exempt from licensure and won't participate in the argument.)
In response to this effort, a movement to rewrite one of Shakespeare's plays has sprung up. The idea is to add one line in the 4th act of Henry VI, Part 2. The new line, of course, will be this: Second, let's kill all the civil engineers.
One wonders whether these reformers think through their ideas before proposing them, or even afterward.
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