In the interests of full disclosure, my readers should know that in recent weeks, I came within hours of dying from a sickness called “covid pneumonia” – so I am told by the medical professionals who treated me.
I live in North Idaho, and in early September the Panhandle Health Department issued a warning that a wave of covid infections was expected. How they knew this, I don’t know. Regional hospitals cleared all wards and departments to free up beds and personnel. My understanding was that they were shorthanded because non-vaccinated personnel had been fired. How babies were being born, broken bones mended, and heart attacks treated, I don’t know. But the medical establishment was expecting a tsunami . . . and it came. I got caught up in it.
At first, my grown children got flu-like symptoms but recovered after a few hours or a couple of days. My wife came back from seeing her Dad in the nursing home in a neighboring state, and came down with the same thing only with a persistent cough. My grown daughter got it, but decided to be tested for covid. It was covid.
My wife and family made a quick recovery; I did not. About the time I was making pleas for prayer for Rob Skiba, whose material we feature and discuss on this website, I came down with, evidently, the very same infection that he had. These pandemic waves are sweeping the country. Last I heard this same crisis is happening in Minnesota.
After passing out in the shower for three straight days and my sputum turning pink, I knew I was in trouble. My daughter came home from the clinic with a clever device that you put on your finger and it measures your oxygen. Mine dropped from the low 90s into the 80s. We went to the clinic to get tested and hopefully treated. They did what they could . . . yes, I had covid, “you need to go to the hospital.” So, we went.
When I got to the emergency room reception area, it was crowded. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Receptionists were shuffling wheelchairs around in an attempt at doing something, but no one was being looked at or treated that I could tell. Someone brought me some oxygen. But it was the most macabre triage I had ever seen. The hospital was full of covid patients. I was thinking, “Essentially, these people waiting in the lobby have to either go home or wait for someone to die.” (Newspaper reports from that time-period confirm that there were in fact 0 beds available in the hospital.)
I looked around and could identify ex-military and decided, “If these guys can’t get in, I sure won’t.” So, I told my wife to take me home.
But before going home, I told her to take me to Wendy’s Restaurant; I wanted some chili. I hadn’t eaten for days because everything I tasted was gross to me. The chili was delicious.
When my oldest son knew I was coming home, he was beside himself in disbelief. He pulled some Ivermectin off the shelf (we keep livestock) and began trying to figure out a dosage that would work for me. I suggested he work off the weight recommendations. I didn’t need the dose of a 2000 pound bull!
When I got home, I was given a dose – so I am told, because, by this time, my oxygen was in the low 80s and I don’t remember taking the Ivermectin and I was losing track of time.
I wish I could report that the Ivermectin worked, that I instantly got better, and that we are living happily ever after. But I was too far advanced in the sickness: too little, too late.
Later that night, my numbers dropped down into the 70s and my family called the ambulance.
I was aroused from slumber by my son, who quietly pleaded, “Dad . . . Dad, the ambulance is here. If you don’t get on this ambulance, you are going to die.” So, I consented and off we went.
I don’t want to mire this story with the tiny personal details, and I am still working on a time-line to figure out what happened. But when we got to the hospital, I was admitted immediately and treatment began right away – in the receiving area. No beds in ICU were available.
I was treated by a young EMT. I had numerous IVs and of course oxygen. After a quick run to the scanner to confirm the diagnosis, I was put on steroids, antibiotics, and Remdesivir. Friends were telling my wife that the treatment was going to kill me. I felt it was time for the nuclear option. I was throwing myself on the Lord’s mercies. Either the treatment was going to kill me or it was going to cure me, but like they say in the Army Corps of Engineers (at least in one dramatized story during World War II), “Soldier, are the odds better than zero? If so, then do it, and do it now!” – boots on the ground science.
By this time, my wife had gotten my sister involved from Denver, Colorado. She had been a nurse, the head of a hospital nursing department, and had worked for the HMO Kaiser Permanente Corporation for many years. I knew she would be able to navigate hospital bureaucracy and demand immediate treatment. As I discovered later, the cocktail had a 78% success rate, if treatment is prompt. People die of covid because of delay; I had almost waited too long.
Hours passed – still in the corner of the hospital basement, no room in the inn, as they say, but at least I was being treated. Then the word came down that a room was available in the ICU. The EMT checked my numbers one last time. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know. “It worked didn’t it?” I said. He grinned and nodded his head. Before I was ever admitted to ICU, I knew we had taken the high ground – “boots-on-the-ground” science.
It still would be days of treatment. They recommend seven; I was done in five. But I was still in the hospital for a week, for various reasons, partly because of mental confusion and partly because of my previous back injury. The doctor thought I should go to a rehab hospital. I told him that I needed to “shelter in place with my people.” He said he could do that. I was past the infectious stage; he sent me home the next day.
I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know if the treatment that worked for me would work for you. I cannot prove anything one way or the other. It might have been the Ivermectin or it might have been the cocktail. It might have been that I only needed the cocktail for five days instead of seven. Maybe I only needed five days because I took the Ivermectin. My understanding is that the longer the treatment with the cocktail the more damage it does to your liver and kidneys and then secondary crises develop that lead to death.
North Idaho is a bifurcated culture. On the one hand, you have a professional class that sucks up to authority figures. When I was wheeled into the hospital from the ambulance, the head EMT said, “No one is judged here.” Only later did I figure out what he meant: that there is a class of people who believe that if you get sick from the covid, it’s because you were “socially irresponsible” for not getting vaccinated. Yet, when I was in the hospital, I learned that Congresswoman Cathy Rodgers from Eastern Washington – someone who is fully vaccinated – had covid. Go figure.
I said North Idaho’s culture is bifurcated – you have the professional class on the one hand, then you have the common folk on the other. There’s a lot of proud, sturdy Americans here. North Idaho has the highest concentration of retired military and law enforcement in the country. For over a hundred and fifty years, the economy was built by loggers, miners, farmers, and ranchers. You can still find men here . . . and women who still enjoy being women.
For these people, covid doesn’t exist. It’s a figment of the minds of the opposition party and other wanna be dictators. To them, I didn’t have covid. I had pneumonia.
Regardless, the disease was real and the treatment worked. The medical staff treated me with professionalism, although not as top-rate as when I was in two years ago with a broken back. I think they might have had to pull some people off the streets and put a name tag on them. One nurse told me how a staff member quit because of the stress. He said he was going back to house painting.
In recovery at home, at first, I couldn’t do simple math or write cursive. That’s how badly damaged I was, either from the disease or the treatments or from the oxygen deprivation or even the Ivermectin, I don’t know. But after a few days, I got all of that back.
My heart is still weak. Before the sickness, I could do 50 push-ups and only stopped because my arms got tired. Now, I can do 7 and it’s my heart that gets tired. But at least I am alive and I am getting stronger every day.
When I got home, I was heartbroken to learn that Rob Skiba had died. He had been in a coma and on a ventilator. The EMT asked me if I wanted to be resuscitated, I said “yes.” He asked me if I would want a ventilator, I said “no, those things scare me.”
I am not making any medical recommendations here. I am only telling you my story because this thing is not over and probably never will be. The biological engineers have let the genie out of the bottle, and it’s a demon.
Duncan Long, writing his book Surviving Major Chemical Accidents and Chemical/Biological Warfare (Loompanics) back in 1986, thought that there would be increasingly clever ways devised by adversarial nations to wage biological warfare. At the time, he thought it might be a good idea to take any vaccine recommended by the government, because the recommendation would be founded on the prescience of an imminent biological threat from a foreign power.
But when he wrote the book, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States and the professions were full of patriots. Today, the professions have been purged by the Woke Bolsheviks, even out of the military. Expect a precipitous degradation of our institutions. They will be run by the incompetent but will be given increasingly draconian powers to make up for it. If you want to know what is coming, what is happening right now, read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (Russian spelling) Gulag Archipelago. It’s about the Siberian prison camps of the old Soviet Union. Pay particular attention to the account of Stalin’s “Five-Year Plans” and the show trials used for scapegoating when they inevitably failed. The only thing we don’t have yet are the camps – the Gulag. But they are planned and openly discussed by Western intellectuals.
Currently, the Western democracies are experiencing sabotage of their economies to transition the populations for the “Green New Deal.” When the shortages come and people are dying, expect various “patriotic” groups, religious groups, and nonconformists to be blamed.
Already, the supply chain crisis is blamed on people who shop on-line, who are sheltering in place from the pandemic. Expect that the labor shortage will be blamed on the people who refuse to be vaccinated. There is talk of sending these people somewhere for “re-education.”
I’m only saying this if history is any guide and human nature is what it is. I want you to see beyond this, to prepare for God’s Great Day, but I don’t know. I ask the same question that Jesus did: “When the Son of man cometh, will he find faith in the earth?”
- JWS, October 31, 2021
Survival Praxis is published bi-weekly only to the 2046AD.org website.
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In reading hospital records, it’s not entirely clear how long the “cocktail” treatment using Remdesivir lasted. I originally thought it was three days out of five. My wife tells me that a seven day treatment was never prescribed, yet they sent me home with steroids to take. The “5 out of 7” in the text above is probably not accurate for the Remdesivir, but probably is for the antibiotics and steroids.