kidneys just do that sometimes, i guess

June 07, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that appreciates the oddly busy tranquility of a city view from a tall window at night 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI got about halfway through the construction edit on the next episode and then something mildly nuts happened; see the #dadthoughts section for the full update!Will you be the one of the three heroes who gets us up to 40 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews on Apple Podcasts??? There's only one way to find out!!Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberHalf of America's adult population has been vaccinated. Pencil 11/11/2021 into your schedule and if we're all very good and lucky, we'll see you all at the next Instant Band Night.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Not a whole lot in this section this week due to, well, see the next section 🎃 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Right up front, everybody's fine! But this one's a doozy.Well, we didn't end up going to the zoo on Friday. We did, instead, go to the ER, because after noticing some swelling and some consultations with advice nurses and a doctor, we had what I'm going to call a fractional but nonzero worry that Quentin might have appendicitis.He does not and did not have appendicitis.What he does have is a bout of something called idiopathic nephrotic syndrome, which essentially means "at some point his kidneys started dumping protein into his urine and we don't know why." This upset the osmotic balance in his bloodstream, which made the surrounding tissues start to retain fluids and swell up. Fun fact: the proteins being lost also include immune signals, so he was slightly immunocompromised and caught a little something that gave him a fever and a sore throat and an amount of sneezes that would've been comical under any other circumstances (the respiratory panel just brought back rhinovirus markers, nothing more specific). When we brought him to the ER on Friday morning, he was looking puffy and while not in pain exactly, we could tell he just wasn't feeling super great; to say he hadn't slept well the night previously would be a vast understatement.He's fine now -- appendicitis was ruled out fairly quickly, but it took most of a day to get the ultrasounds, x-rays, and lab work that brought his kidneys to the forefront -- but the treatment for this thing involves steroids, along with infusions of protein to the bloodstream to draw water back out of his tissues and a diuretic to help him piss it back out. Plus they need to monitor his blood pressure, which is a tad high (a normal side effect of this whole business). End result: this shit takes a while. I'm typing this from our room on the 12th floor of the hospital where he was born, the room we've been inhabiting since Friday afternoon, and likely we'll be home the day I send this newsletter if his blood pressure behaves (though in this world there are no guarantees).He's definitely doing much better -- he kicked the fever after the first night and he's essentially back to his old self again. Fun fact: the pediatrics ward here has some kind of play consultant or specialist or something who came by and learned a few things about Quentin, and returned with Duplos and Play-Doh (which we're taking home) and pages of construction trucks to color with crayons. We got the in-room TV to work* and there's a channel that offers a lot of short-form toddler-level programming interspersed with commercials for grown-up things like cleaning products and home security that I don't fully understand (we might switch to our own laptops and some good ol' Sesame Street). The air in this place is bone-fucking-dry and the nurses have brought the grownups pitchers of ice water that I try not to drink in Quentin's eyeline -- he's on fluid restriction and can only have a certain amount of water per day, on account of how his body currently wants to swell up instead of create pee. The view from up here is spectacular; as a bonus, I can definitely see the apartment where some dear friends of ours lived until they moved to Colorado, and the house where another excellent friend had a great 30th birthday party.The lighting controls in this room are not just counterintuitive but actively adversarial, as if built by the monkeys Scotty theorizes constructed the Enterprise-A: pressing a button that says OFF does nothing, pressing a button for a specific-seeming area of the room lights up some whole other shit instead, or nothing happens, or the entire room turns on, or the entire room turns off. The nurses don't know either -- in fairness, nobody could know how this shit works, because I truly think it's either broken, installed wrong, or was designed by a drunk marmot in the first place. Or all three. It's a miracle I worked out which button to press that leaves the rest of the room dark, but lights the little alcove where my narrow couch sits, which is where I'll do my best to sleep (Mavis can't stay here, through no fault of her own -- her 7-months-pregnant body requires an elaborate arrangement of pillows to stave off discomfort and heartburn that this couch absolutely does not accommodate in any form).It's also where I'm typing this. Quentin's sleeping even now; for the first night, it was my self-appointed duty to ensure that his IV line and monitor cables didn't tangle as he tossed and turned -- now that he's been here for a bit, they've switched him off the IV as much as possible, and he's down to a single pulse oximeter on his big toe. He's a deep sleeper, which is a true blessing, because I still don't get sleepy until close to midnight. As an extra bonus, both Mavis and I caught the little cold Quentin did, which has played merry hell with our energy levels on top of all this; we do, however, have one of the best local support networks a small family could ask for, so no complaints there. I think I've almost kicked the rhinovirus to the curb, although Mavis is definitely still in the thick of it. I'm getting a lot of reading done. And writing, it would seem. How about that! So that's what we've been up to since Friday .............. how are you?* It wanted to walk me through two tutorial videos and wouldn't let me do anything else until I'd done it, which I thought I had multiple times, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye. 

  • AHEM: "Watch What’s Happening in Red States: In states where Republicans control the legislature, American life is rapidly changing." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Here's a brief interview from Yamiche Alcindor with a Tulsa native whose brother was killed by cops five years ago on what the Black community there is still owed. (PBS News Hour) 

  • Surprising no one who actually fucking lives here, the stimulus checks did a lot to help poor people. Maybe that should become a regular thing. ($NYT) 

  • The fact that Citizen started out with the name Vigilante tells you everything you need to know about the mindset of its founding team. (CNBC) 

  • Fluctuations in the underground electrical field could be a precursor to earthquakes. Okay! (Science Alert) 

  • Let's all agree to come to terms as a society with the fact that smart home tech is just a comically bad idea. (The Verge) 

  • Where do the bacteria that live deep within the crust of the planet get their energy from? Turns out: the radioactive decay of water molecules??? (Quanta) 

  • This is a pretty good roundup of "The Greatest Achievements in Dumb Internet Video" by some folks including Ryan Broderick, who does a great newsletter about internet culture called Garbage Day that I recommend. (Polygon) 

  • Now that more people are getting into the great outdoors, where the hell are they going to camp? (Outside) 

  • Space junk put a bullet hole in the robot arm the ISS uses; now imagine if it had gone through the hull. (Space dot com) 

  • "We have bigger problems than COVID-19’s origins" (The Verge) 

  • Scientists have worked out that food scraps could be turned into useful materials for packaging. (Anthropocene) 

  • If you're going fishing on Lake Superior, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources wants your fish guts. (Duluth News Tribune) 

  • Speaking of fish: 19 million years ago, over 70% of all the sharks in the ocean died off, and nobody has the least clue why. (Yale) 

  • "Mutual Aid May Be Last Year’s Most Enduring Legacy" (Eater) 

  • For anyone else who was wondering why there was Ellie Kemper Discourse last week, I've got the explainer. (Vice) 

  • How do you predict which animals species will do better and which won't when humans arrive on the scene? (Anthropocene) 

  • Have some numbers on whether Americans really truly care about bipartisanship or not. (538) 

  • Listen, I know there's a lot of content from The Verge in the newsletter this week, but maybe they're just doing a good job right now. Here's a great rundown on virtual brands filtered through apparently insane activity around chicken wings. (The Verge) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsThe Proper MindsetSnake LibraryThe Devil You Know 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.