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Text of the page (random words):
it hurts him to walk so he doesn t walk much he s overweight and short of breath most of the time rob s wife died in january of 20 and has lived by himself since then understandably he feels lonely a lot and we do what we can to keep him in touch from 2 hours away last thanksgiving 2020 rob called us a few days before the holiday and told us that he wanted to join us for thanksgiving dinner if you recall last thanksgiving virtually our entire family had covid and thanksgiving dinner was basically part of our quarantine since all of us were sick at the same time we told rob that he shouldn t come that we all had the dreaded virus and we didn t want him to get sick since he was kind of a poster boy for the category high risk rob said no he was going to come and expected to join us for dinner we reiterated that we didn t want him to come but we never could dissuade him thanksgiving morning came and about an hour before dinnertime sure enough rob s car pulled up in front of our house and he hobbled up to our door toting a bag full of pies i brought five pies with me and i m not gonna eat em by myself he exclaimed we sighed and invited him in if he was that determined to have dinner with us what we we gonna do so we gave him a spot at the table we had a good dinner and a few hours later he got in his car and went home every day for the next couple weeks we waited to hear from him or another family member informing us that he was down with covid and would be dying soon we even speculated that living alone after his wife s death he was effectively killing himself and wanted to spend time with loved ones at the end of his life but the call never came finally after a couple weeks while she was still in the hospital jenn called to check up on him how are you great i m fine you were in our house when we all had covid nope i m good we checked back in with him a few more times but he never did get sick the whole situation was perplexing to us and we kept trying to figure out how it was possible that high risk as he was he came into our house and sat at our table while we were all still sick and never showed the slightest symptom then it occurred to us his wife had died in january of 20 a couple months before the lockdown covid wasn t front page news yet we saw photos from china and still hoped it might not come to us but if anything rob s wife was even higher risk than he was she was only in her late 40s but she had ms and maybe a couple other things besides her death was very sudden one day she had trouble breathing and within a couple days she was gone suddenly it became clear rob s wife had died of covid even before any of us was really aware of it and he had been exposed to her hard i don t know what symptoms if any he experienced at the time but it seemed clear that he had breathed plenty of mask less non socially distanced covid air while he took care of his wife in her final days and so when he came to our house for thanksgiving he had a body full of covid antibodies even 10 months after his wife s death and whatever exposure he had at our house was quickly dispatched and so the punch line natural immunity is real and robust instead of calling us un vaccinated and part of the problem we covid survivors are a key component of the end of the pandemic posted by craig at 10 19 pm 7 comments labels covid high risk immunity thanksgiving dinner sunday september 12 2021 science marches on https www sciencemag org news 2021 08 having sars cov 2 once confers much greater immunity vaccine no infection parties just for the sake of saying so science magazine is not a lightweight journal and it is very far from any kind of conservative political bias to state things clearly people who once had a sars cov 2 infection are much less likely than never infected vaccinated people to get delta develop symptoms from it or become hospitalized with serious covid 19 and just to be clear they caution that intentional infection among unvaccinated people would be extremely risky so no infection parties please the article notes that a single dose booster given to previously infected persons reduces their risk even further but from the start natural immunity confers more robust resistance to future infection and for a longer time than does vaccination of never infected persons which is what i was saying a couple months ago the thing i don t understand is that judging from public rhetoric natural immunity either doesn t exist or isn t worth talking about there are only the vaccinated and the unvaccinated people like me are counted among the unvaccinated when we actually have superior immunity to that conferred by vaccination we survivors should be counted among the immunized whether that immunity came from the natural response of our bodies to infection or from a vaccine but there seems to be a very stubborn resistance to that very basic scientific truth and i have no idea why posted by craig at 12 56 pm 6 comments labels covid immunity science friday august 27 2021 be safe posted by craig at 12 09 pm 8 comments labels humor safety wednesday june 9 2021 follow the science a brief note for my well intentioned friends who are ever so solicitous of my health and well being and who aren t to my knowledge among my regular readers the reason people get vaccinated is to induce their bodies to produce the antibodies which will fight off the disease and hopefully prevent the disease from taking hold in the patient s body by whatever means high tech or otherwise a replica of the actual virus is introduced into the patient s body so the patient s immune system will respond producing antibodies to fight off the replicated virus which will hopefully be sufficient to fight off the actual virus should it come to take up residence in the patient s body so the vaccine is all about the antibodies clear now if my body already has the requisite antibodies i don t need a vaccine to induce my body to produce them and the antibodies which are circulating through my bloodstream were produced by contact with the actual virus not a replica of it so i maintain that my situation is no worse and quite likely better than if i d been vaccinated in political terms and you all know just how very much i love talking about politics when those in charge go about counting who is and who isn t immunized i maintain that natural immunity should count at least as much as and probably more than immunity induced by a vaccine please don t misunderstand i m not telling anyone else what s he should or shouldn t do with regard to being vaccinated and i have no quarrel with anyone who has been vaccinated especially if they haven t had the virus i m emphatically not anti vax but if i ve had the virus i have the antibodies and vaccination is superfluous it s like getting a flu shot after you ve had the flu so my very earnest friends i m touched by your very deep concern and solicitude for my health and well being i really am but honestly i m good posted by craig at 2 49 pm 7 comments labels antibodies immunity vaccination virus wednesday may 19 2021 gratitude again and always i m not saying anything non obvious by telling you that i haven t posted much of late which it is what it is for those of you wondering how we are we are well jenn is fully recovered from her erstwhile brush with mortality we are both fully retired now which is nice we have added three new grandchildren in the last couple months bringing the official count to 12 and giving us some delightful ways to keep our retired selves engaged and at least in my case out of trouble as life in ourtown begins to emerge from its viral cocoon i am struck again by what has been a recurring theme in my life gratitude gratitude for the goodness of life gratitude for the web of family and friendship connections that make my life rich and meaningful and which are in their own ways emerging from a year s disruption gratitude for daily provision retirement is kind of a hoot at somewhat regular intervals money magically appears in my bank account and for a future full of hope in that vein i m re posting a pair of my better old posts at least i think they re not too bad beatle lyrics reference alert for your edification and enjoyment god bless you all sometime around the year 1420 a monk named thomas a kempis wrote a book the imitation of christ in the original latin imitatio christi which in the fullness of time would become the most widely read christian book besides the bible and in its turn it also became one of my own all time favorite books the imitation reads like a medieval christian book of proverbs wisdom for living the christian life from a wise old monk it is simply dense with rich and challenging quotes several of which have made their way into my book of favorite quotes not available in stores one of my favorites which i commend to the attention of all my blog friends is this from chapter 6 of book 3 a wise lover does not so much consider the gift of his lover as he does the love of the giver i first came across this many years ago but it has become one of the favorite bywords that jenn and i will quote to each other it bespeaks a kind of humble gratitude which has served us really well in building our marriage over the years on the face of it it s pretty simple really sort of like etiquette for opening presents on christmas morning be grateful for the gifts you get even if they re not exactly the ones you were hoping for but you know thomas doesn t present it as etiquette advice he just says a wise lover more like this is wisdom beyond what meets the eye and it works on multiple levels as most of you know i m adopted at some point when i was in college i connected the dots and the realization dawned on me that i had been somebody s unwanted pregnancy once upon a time it occurred to me that my very existence was due to somebody i d never met taking the trouble to see me through nine months of pregnancy jenn and i got married and began having our own children 1f was actually the first person i ever knew who was genetically related to me and all the while the realization of what it had cost my birth mother for me to be alive was growing stronger until finally the sense of gratitude for my own existence became my strongest motivation to find and meet my birth mother my birth mother and i have always had a great relationship not so much because either of us are such wonderful people but because at the bottom of it all our relationship is one of mutual gratitude i m grateful to her for giving me life and putting up with everything that went into that including relinquishing me to be adopted by a family that could raise me and she s grateful even after all the years to have a relationship with the son of her womb and a fine son he is if i may say so myself we re both fairly quirky individuals shocking as this may seem to you i know and there could be a lot to be annoyed with in each other if we were so inclined but from the beginning our relationship has been founded on gratitude so the quirks just seem really minor and likewise in my marriage i m so grateful to jenn for throwing her life in with mine for the love she gives me every day and for the richness of the life we share together that her quirks and yes alas she has one or two just aren t a very big deal by comparison and i know it works the same way from her end it s not just a matter of seeing the glass half full or looking on the bright side although both of those are good advice temperamentally i m just not a glass half full person but being able to receive with joy the gift my lover brings beatle lyrics reference alert just because i know how it s expressive of her love for me quite a separate question from how good a gift it is but let me be clear it is a most excellent gift brings deep joy to my whole life i m certainly not meaning to hold myself up as a shining example of superior virtue or anything like that but i do believe we ve learned something really good and valuable the conviction has grown within me over the years that gratitude is on a very fundamental level the most appropriate response we can make for our lives gratitude to god certainly and most fundamentally but even on a more mundane level gratitude to our parents to our teachers coaches and mentors to our brothers and sisters and our friends existence itself is a gratuitous gift for which there is no appropriate response except gratitude loving relationships food clothing and shelter all the mundane daily circumstances that individually and collectively bring joy and meaning to our lives every one of us has his her own set of things to be thankful for and people to be thankful to rather than riff off into my own list i ll just encourage all my blog friends however briefly to give some thought to what you re grateful for and to whom posted by craig at 11 44 am 7 comments labels gratitude re post thursday march 4 2021 getting down to fundamentals posted by craig at 10 35 am 6 comments sunday december 20 2020 back home jenn came home yesterday thank you all for your prayers she is about 90 of her normal ways she has basically had no exercise for a month so even getting up to use the bathroom at night was exhausting but it was nice to feel her warmth next to me in bed and i m sure that just being in the bosom of her family s love will go a long way toward completing her healing we were talking yesterday and it seems clear that this has been by far the longest we have been apart in 40 years of marriage back when i was volunteering at summer camp every summer that was eight days at a time a couple times i went to visit my mom in california by myself for maybe a bit less than a week but this was 17 days and we were less than a mile apart the road ahead is still a long one she ll be receiving iv antibiotics at home for another three weeks and then checking back in for another set of x rays etc while she rebuilds her strength and stamina but my beloved is home i can t begin to tell you how good it is to have her back posted by craig at 12 43 pm 17 comments labels covid home jenn tuesday december 15 2020 the saga continues sorry i haven t kept you all up to date i keep waiting for a convenient break in the action at which to put things down in electrons but there s nothing convenient about this on wednesday december 2 the day after my last post i took jenn to the er a little backstory i and our kids were all surprised that jenn was hit so hard by the virus whereas i who have been much less robustly healthy than jenn over the years had a pretty mild experience of it of all the possible reasons for this discrepancy we noted that i have been loading up on vitamins and supplements since before the pandemic appeared so i started giving jenn the same vitamins and supplements that i was taking figuring that at the very least they d help moderate the effects of the virus but her condition didn t seem to change and she even spiked...