Do You Have Any Stories Regarding Medical Treatment of You or a Loved One Since 2020?

How Bad is it Out There?

Story Time with  Amy

I wanted to talk about the worst illness of my entire adult life, and my childhood too unless you count whatever weird immune reaction I had to my mother’s blood at birth. As was true at my birth I am pretty sure that I would have died from complications of the condition had I not lived in modern times with modern medicine.

 It happened rather recently in the span of things. In December of 2018 I was contemplating my trip back to America at Christmas as I was in Phuket, Thailand, at a then new bungalow. I still live there now, though in a structure next to the old one.

Me and my now husband had had a good time of things, but things were very uncertain back then after my first husband’s death. Ka was the caretaker of his mother and was not at all sure about ever going to America with me. Mar, his mom, needed a lot of help with things and was getting around on a crutch at that point, which was progress from her walker following the motorbike accident which had wrecked her hip. The relationship’s intensity level had been in retrospect too much too soon, and I think both of us wanted to put some distance between us to reflect on things. My now husband had an idea just a few days before I was planning to leave Thailand with my daughter, possibly forever. Let’s have shrimp larb loi!

Shrimp larb loi, for those who don’t know, is raw shrimp. I’d had it dozens of times over the years. It tends to be heavily spiced in fresh hot pepper, fish sauce and lime juice, with basil often being added into the mix. I loved both raw foods and strange foods and considered myself to have something like a stomach of steel at the time. Thailand offers ample opportunities to get your Andrew Zimmern on, and I hadn’t neglected it.

 I knew something was wrong almost as soon as I swallowed a few bites of the shrimp larb loi. Mar  was complaining almost immediately too. I did as I often do I this situation. I ate raw ginger roots, and fresh garlic cloves, and a few fresh pequina peppers from the yard. My stomach still felt quesy when Ka offered to buy whiskey and club soda.

Well club soda is good at calming stomachs right? Mar had been complaining but she had some antibiotic from her previous staph infection that she still had access to. Ka had heard our complaints after a few bites and had refused to eat this shrimp. I drank and thought little of it, until I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like someone had shot a hole in my stomach.

I was throwing up a lot but went to a pharmacy in Phuket that gave me a two week antibiotic prescription. I took it and began feeling better right away and the incident was all but forgotten. A few days later I flew to the USA, then me and my daughter flew from Las Vegas to Detroit to spend Christmas with my brother and his family in Ohio. I felt fine the whole time.

A little after New Year’s 2019 my two week antibiotic prescription from Thailand ran out. A few days after that I was driving my nieces and my girls home from an arcade I had taken them all to, when I suddenly had to throw up. I opened the minivan door at a stoplight to do so.

My sister in law insisted that I might have caught a little bug that one of her girls had had a few days before. I took some Immodium she gave me and I tried to go to sleep. Overnight I began throwing up violently, emptying the contents of my stomach and then throwing up some more. I tried to drink water, soda, beer or anything else and would always throw it up within 10 or 15 minutes. Overnight I continued to throw up every 20 or 30 minutes like clockwork. There was nothing in my stomach but bile but I couldn’t keep even that down. My throat was beginning to feel like it was on fire. I would guess that I threw up maybe 50 times over the course of the night. It would not stop, even without consuming anything.

In the early morning I was so shaky and dehydrated that I realized that I had to go to the ER. I literally crawled up the stairs to get my mother to drive me there. I threw up once at a stoplight on the way to the hospital. They came out with a wheelchair at the entrance. I was too weak to stand up without assistance.

The screener seemed to like me as he eyed my Nevada driver’s license. He asked me what brought me to Ohio. I told him I was visiting family for Christmas and had been born in the hospital I was in, a true story, of course. He mentioned that he was from Toledo too and talked about a high school on the South End. He made some small chat about Las Vegas and how could I stand the hot summers and what was my favorite casino and the like.

The screening questions took a long time. I was flagged for a mental health assessment when I told him that my husband had died six months before. Was I depressed or suicidal? No. Was I taking any type of medication, drugs or using alcohol to excess? No. Did I need to talk to a grief counselor? No. My esophagus was burning up and I felt like one of these times I would just puke out my whole digestive tract.

I had to be brought a bucket as I could feel that I was going to throw up again soon. He hurried through the last screener questions rapid fire being the mere formalities that they were. Had I handled any livestock? No. Any birds? No. Had I been to Africa in the last 30 days? No. Had I been to Latin America, including Mexico? No. Had I been to parts of the Caribbean? I began throwing up in the bucket. No. Had I been to South America? No. Had I been to Asia?

“Yes. I was in Thailand three weeks ago.”

The screener looked at me with this you’ve got to be kidding me stare. I thought he had already checked the box for no and moved onto the next question. I was a Toledo gal Las Vegas was one thing. But what the hell had I been doing in Thailand?

He went through the last questions and I was wheeled to the back. I was given an IV drip and something to stop me from throwing up. I was terrified they were going to find something wrong like pancreatitis. My scans and bloodwork looked fine, so they didn’t know what the problem was. They gave me a prescription to control the vomiting and sent me out of there. Then I flew back to Las Vegas.

The prescription somewhat controlled vomiting, but I continued to feel like somebody had shot a hole in my stomach. I felt sick if I didn’t eat and sicker after I did eat. My weight dropped to an all-time adult low of 110 pounds, which was skeletal on my 5 foot 8 inch frame (50 kilos 172 cm). Then a doctor from Toledo Hospital called me with some news. I had an antibiotic resistant e-coli infection. The puzzle pieces all fit together.

“Thank God you mentioned your recent travel to Asia.” She told me over the phone. “We would have never found it otherwise. Your numbers were off the charts I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The doctor went on to explain that this was a strain of bacteria that had first been detected in India and was becoming common especially on shrimp farms. That was funny because I had never mentioned the shrimp larb loi. Meat inspectors were screening imports into the US, though, so the only way I could have picked it up was from eating something while I was in Asia. I talked with the doctor for almost an hour. She told me she had done her residency in India and took an interest in these things. She had the enthusiasm of a real doctor who had solved a patient’s pressing case and there was genuine excitement in her voice. I had the gratitude of an intelligent patient who wanted to tell my detailed side of the story and was curious about even boring sciency details of what she had found and how she had found it. I thanked her profusely and got a prescription for an antibiotic that she thought would work. She warned me to take the five day course exactly as instructed. Well, duh.    

It was a months long struggle to get my body normalized after that. I did colon cleanses and intestinal flushes and tried supplements, probiotics, prebiotics and anything gut health related. Ironically I seemed to recover back to near my old normal after I came back to Thailand and Ka wanted me to eat shrimp larb loi again. I took a few bites of it but it has generally been off my food list. My stomach of steel is gone. I still like sushi though. I probably should pick up ivermectin for reasons not related to Covid.

Mar struggled with this same thing too, and I believe it contributed to her death months later. She went to the hospital several times needing an IV drip and she frequently stopped eating. She was skeletal and extremely weak and one night fell against her walker when she got up to go to the bathroom, ultimately causing a brain bleed. The ecoli bacteria that just wouldn’t go away probably contributed to her weakened state.

Long story short, I’ve now had three times in my life where I do not believe that I would have survived without modern medical intervention, those being my birth, the birth of my first daughter, and this incident. I am therefore not in a position to hate doctors or believe that everything that they do is some type of pseudoscience. Early that morning I went to ER after throwing up 50 times I could see the outlines already of what would have been a horrid and probably very fast death. Here’s a chart of the top causes of death in the US in 1900.

Note the number three cause of death then was illnesses of the digestive tract. This includes diarrhea, illnesses of the stomach or the intestines, and lots of other things. Food poisoning if you will would be high on that list of specific causes. If you begin to throw up everything including water, you quickly become dehydrated. If you get to a point where you are throwing up bile every time your liver produces too much, you won’t even make it that long. I couldn’t even stand up that morning and it had been 12 hours. How long would I have had in that condition? One day? Two days? How long before the stomach acid destroyed my esophagus?

I definitely believe that bacteria does exist and spread in roughly the same way outlined, though it has long fulfilled Koch Postulates anyways. Even there though there are holes. Sometimes a cruise ship will have a bad food borne contamination of tainted watermelon, say. Many people will be sickened and a few will even die. Some people don’t get too sick and some people get very sick. Probably a few people don’t get sick at all, due to some balance of bacterial flora in their intestinal tract. Or you could be like my aunt and not eat the watermelon.

A great Thailand tour guide tip is that you probably should not eat raw shrimp that has been hanging out in vats next to raw pork and raw chicken from a store called Supercheap in English. That’s one takeaway lesson from this.

Now I probably would be a little incensed if someone tried to tell me that my antibiotic resistant e-coli infection was due to, I don’t know. A warning from God that I was with the wrong guy, or a sign of my prior bad health, or a symptom of exposure to 5G. All of those things are possible they just aren’t probable, direct and more fitting to what actually happened. Some of you might feel that way when someone discredits your very difficult bout with Covid.

But I also am open to every healing modality that I come across. My mother prayed for me during that time, for example, and even sent money to a Catholic charity to say prayers for me at their mass. I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d read a scientific paper that praying doesn’t work, so please don’t do it. I was looking for answers to my health issues. If somebody thought energetic vibrations from singing bowls might affect things in a positive way, why wouldn’t I try it? Knowing what my health problem was caused by was only half of the battle.

That is exactly how it should have been with Covid from day one. Every single treatment arsenal should have been on the table, starting with long established drugs with low side effect profiles. Hey it’s World Ivermectin Day!

Letter to Alex Berenson on World Ivermectin Day

One part of what was so evil is the continued coverup of damage from the Covid jabs. But the other side that was equally evil is the denial of repurposed drugs that showed promise in treating Covid based on fraudulent, designed to fail studies. Other things like simple vitamin supplements were just ignored altogether. This was done specifically to promote the Emergency and the Emergency Use Authorization for the “vaccines.”

I can understand doctors having difficulty in diagnosing what is wrong with some patients. Science does not always move in a straight line and hindsight is always 20/20. For a thought provoking read on that, check out this interesting history of scurvy. These were the brightest minds acting in good faith with the information that they had available to them. I have a great deal of respect for doctors and scientists.

In case I missed it in my non medical school training, I thought the primary goal was saving patients. That would mean discarding treatments with high death rates (such as using ventilators or remdesivir) and experimenting with treatments that have shown promise. Hospitals did not do this because there was no money in it. But I find the denial of promising treatments especially galling. You don’t need to understand the mechanism of action the endpoint is always better survival.

I’m curious if any of you have stories regarding working or being in contact with the medical system for either you or family members since 2020. Are there still good doctors who did everything that they could? Did you need any healthcare that was Covid or non Covid related? Do you think bad treatments or denial of good treatments contributed to any loved one’s deaths? Can this system be fixed, or should all of those unwilling to abide by the genocide just start their own health services from the ground up? Why don’t doctors make house calls anymore?

Any thoughts to share on this? I tend to avoid hospitals as much as I can. But I recognize that they are there for a reason…