What's upsetting you today?

[DanaC]

Bloodyhell, that's rough. Sorry Sundae

[limey]

God that's awful Sundae. My thoughts are with you and your mum.

[monster]

Originally Posted by Sundae

Mum's friend who has leukemia?
He goes into the hospice today. The cancer has reached his brain.

I had hoped I'd at least be able to see him him when I finished my residential stay.

Fuck cancer.

Probably not much consolation, but he probably prefers that your last memory of him is from a little earlier

[Gravdigr]

That's why I don't go to the coffin at a funeral. I don't want my last memory of someone to be them dead-in-a-box.

[Clodfobble]

I was just tipped off by my agent that the book is not selling as well as they had hoped, so far. Reviews are universally stellar, interviews are happening on a steady basis, but it doesn't seem to be translating into actual sales. And the way these things go, the less initial sales there are, the less effort they put into more sales down the road.

I don't want anyone to become a shill, and it's super hard even typing this here because I'm very anti-self-promotion, but... if you enjoyed it, and if you know someone else who might enjoy it, it would be really cool if you could tell them about it. Por favor.

[BigV]

Beyoncé's concert at the baseball stadium is generating extra heavy traffic, and the ferry dock is just a couple blocks away. I have no other route options.

Cancer? Torn cartilage? Pfft.


Just. Kidding. Really, just kidding. .
I'm glad I have my problems and none of y'all's.

Thought I did learn that a SHOT of cortisone made my shoulder all better, but only after a couple MRIs. The pain was so omnipresent that I was unable to sleep normally. Just in short periods. Shift, and wince and yelp and wake up, and wake TWIL too. Sux. Cortisone is teh bomb.

[Gravdigr]

Popdigr has been having a shoulder problem for going on a couple years now.

The doc has him on Pennsaid. Popdigr says it's a miracle drug. At $1400 per 3.8 oz of cream, it should be a miracle drug.

[DanaC]

Bloody hell. The pennsaid solution (I think under the name diclofenac) is available here at £20 per 60ml. Applied as drops and rubbed into the skin - don't know if the cream is available.

[Undertoad]

I dunno how this works but it's $40 at Walmart??


eta: or "pay as little as $0"?

[xoxoxoBruce]

The walmart stuff is 1.5% solution, I wonder what the cream is?

[Gravdigr]

What Popdigr uses is diclofenac sodium topical solution, 2% w/w (whatever "w/w" means. He has talked to the Walmart pharmacist, and they either didn't carry it, period, or they didn't have the generic, or the brand name or something.

Thanks guys, I'll pass all this along to Popdigr.




I should probably add that Popdigr's doc has been giving him this stuff as samples. He said "When ya run out, just come back for another sample."

[DanaC]

w/w = weight per weight

[Gravdigr]

Thx.

[anonymous]

Ugh. I never want to attend another conference in my life.

It's exactly like I thought it would be. Just crowds and crowds of self-promoters, everyone having big-smile conversations to promote their thing, and not realizing that the people they're talking to don't give a damn and are just waiting for their turn to promote their thing.

One of the women on the panel I was on was an "energy practitioner" who had "healed" her daughter in three years after her "regression"--which covered ages 12 to 15. Basically the kid went through puberty and she was desperate to take credit for it. An audience member asked about tips for cooking in bulk, and this woman's mic-grabbing answer was "bring your child to my 'clinic' so I can help him achieve energy balance." Bitch, what? Stay on topic!

I find myself mentioning again and again that my kids were diagnosed by actual professionals at ages 2.5 and 15 months, respectively, because I'm sorry but if your kid wasn't diagnosed until 11 his problems aren't that damn big, and you are the reason everyone thinks this diagnosis is no big deal.

So okay, the vendors suck, but I thought at least I'd get to sneak into some good presentations when I wasn't at the table--except this year they've separated out 90% of the medical talks into CME-only presentations (i.e., you have to be a physician to get in,) and the talks the doctors are giving to the general public are super-generic overview stuff, none of the detailed stuff you have to have taken chemistry to understand. Which makes sense, because half the people here are absolute idiots, like the audience member who highjacked 20 minutes of our presentation to "ask a question" that wasn't a question at all, it was an entire developmental history of her suicidal, daily-vomiting teen who had been institutionalized several times with significant mental health issues (none of which were autism,) and she tried to play us a video on her phone into the microphone so we could hear her daughter begging to die, except it wouldn't load, and she was crying, and finally she let the panelists respond, the unanimous advice we gave being "go see a damn therapist yourself, woman, you are obviously fucked in the head."

Oh, but at least I've sold books! Well, I sold 6, which is all I have. The rest of the boxes are missing. FedEx has a signature for their delivery, the warehouse swears they were then delivered here to the conference building, and after that... no one knows. If the boxes are not found tomorrow, I am not only unable to sell them, I am out $400ish since I won't have anything to send back to the publisher.

But hey, I've given away lots of promotional bookmarks! And now I've been invited to dinner with more self-promoters who want to pretend we're friends so I'll take their bookmarks. Guh. Never, ever again.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Kind of sounds like when you were first starting on this journey, where everyone had THE answer before they knew what the question was. Pity the people who are dazed and confused by the hucksters and promoters. How do they know where the truth will come from, or how to recognize it when the hear it?