A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a break from one of my new projects, and to see a movie at a Regal Theater, basically the only worthwhile theater where I live, complete with an IMAX screen. The big problem of late is that the quality of new movies is so horrific that I didn’t know if there was anything worth watching. I noted that Neal McDonough was starring in an Angel Studios picture, “The Last Rodeo”. I wasn’t all that excited about it, but I figured most of the movies he starred in were at least passable. He has played in many TV shows and various movies in the MCU universe. I happened to have enjoyed “Greater” about the life of Brandon Burlsworth, offensive lineman for the Arkansas Razorbacks, who might have been the most improbable and most successful walk-on in college football history. I figured, why not see this one too?
The Last Rodeo is a somewhat saccharine tale of family struggle, when a grizzled former rodeo champion runs into financial problems right as his grandson develops a brain tumor and needs emergency surgery to correct it. It is an interesting film in that respect, but it also shocked me that a major assumption was made. Joe Wainwright (McDonough’s character) and is wife NEVER QUESTIONED the original diagnosis. It appears they too were of the belief that doctors, particularly those who work on cancer patients, were instant demigods and were not to be questioned about any diagnosis. They allowed their their emotions to override their logic and their own intuition about the situation they faced.
From that point on, I just watched the movie as an interested third party and become somewhat disengaged from the plot. What this family was doing was falling for the same “we’re all gonna die” perspective when anyone projects that there is a diagnosis that might even be remotely fatal, instead of taking a dispassionate look at their son’s and their own circumstances before rushing into action.
Many of you are probably reacting to me now with the thought “how heatless can you be?” and “do you not have a soul?” That was the same lame reaction I got from the literal universe of leftist sycophants during the entire COVID-19 “crisis”, which I will label until the day I die, “the Covidiocy”. I was told I was an “anti-vaxxer”.
Before all the COVID hysteria happened, I made the decision, based on research I had conducted and on discussions with those who had experienced problems with shingles, to get the shingles vaccine. I research my actions before I take them, period. Puerile ad-hominem attacks are routine among the cowardly, and I just ignore them.
Instead of merely arguing an emotional point, which it seems most people do instead of dealing with pertinent fact. I am going to go through the passage of my life to demonstrate why your willingness to throw your medical freedom away, no matter how dire it is, is a REALLY bad idea. That is what a large number of people did during “the Covidiocy” and it cost them their jobs, their lives, damned near the entire American economy, and our Bill of Rights, in the process.
I am not just going to give a primary example. I am going to give you the complete 59-year history of problems my family and I faced, and how reaction to information made a difference, for good and for ill.
Let’s go back to June 22, 1966. At that time, I was big into swimming at our local community pool, and even competed for the first time. As a kid, I was a bit scared of heights. I decided I would brave the high diving board. I think this diving board was less then 10 meters, and more like 8 meters. What I learned was that I was a good diver, and could even do a summersault on occasion. I was diving with my friends, but I had the need to control the spring motion on the board. Even at 11, I had decently strong legs and with a loose board, I might not withstand the recoil. Before third time I got on the board that afternoon, a couple of my friends, seeing that I would not notice the adjustment to the spring control, decided they’d set it back to maximum spring. As a result, the board, when I jumped on the end, actually did recoil and sent me to the side of the pool, where my head hit the concrete upon landing. I was unconscious for about 2.5 minutes, but came to. I was rushed to Greenville General Hospital where I was kept awake pretty much all night while x-rays and other tests were being conducted. My doctor was also a physiologist and knew other orthopedic doctors with a ton of experience. The crack in my skull got almost all the way to my brain stem, and there was concern that if I did not have some kind of surgery, that I would likely die. Instead, my doctor and his friends monitored swelling and continuously observed the wound, and found that if my neck were braced and allowed to naturally swell and then heal, that no surgery was needed. It was extremely close, but those doctors, based on their experience in head injuries, made a good call. I had to wear a partial brace with bandages to contain swelling. In about 7 weeks I was very nearly back to normal, and by fall I was as good as new. There was no panicked need to “do emergency surgery” or to use a “Hail Mary pass” to blunt swelling, as there was no infection found. There were no MRI machines or other technology involved. There was only extensive experience in head injuries that came to my rescue. My parents were as relieved as I was. That is about as close to “biting the bullet” as I have ever come. I didn’t blame my friends, either. They were just like me. They were a couple of dumb-assed 11-year-olds. I don’t think they understood the seriousness of what they did before it happened. Back during that day, doctors really did believe in doing no harm first. The least invasive approach to achieve the best result was all they cared about.
Ah, but the 1970s arrived, and all of a sudden, every diagnosis seemed to become life-threatening. I was in college during the so-called “swine flu epidemic” and I had apparently contracted it. At the Georgia Tech infirmary however, there were two doctors who understood what herd immunity was, and how best to use it to my advantage. That was done by rest, proper supplementation (with Vitamin C and zinc). No crazy vaccines were recommended. That was the best thing that ever happened to me, as I might have been exposed to Guillain-Barre Syndrome if I were given the swine flu vaccine. I was back in good shape in 4 days.
That was the good news.
The bad news happened when my father was having problems with excessive coughing, something that was a direct result of his smoking (and I think at one time he was up to two packs a day). On May 9,1975. he went to a cardiologist to discuss his problems after getting X-rays the week before. The doctors informed him that he had essentially terminal cancer and that he had at most 6 weeks to live. He was told to “get his house in order”.
I want you to back up just a moment though. How in the hell could anyone back in the mid-1970s really come to that conclusion without any deep diagnosis? They only thing these doctors really had there were x-rays and blood tests. There were no real MRIs at the time and CAT scan devices were at best primitive, only being introduced 4 years earlier in 1971. The only thing we knew, based on the x-ray, is that he had a very large tomato-sized lung tumor located right near his aorta. That looked quite serious, and it was.
My parents were distraught of course. They looked at it as if it was the end of the world. My father, whom if I had the time I would explain his extensive medical experience that happened quite by accident in the U.S. Navy at another time, believed that doctors were miracle workers. The doctors at Greenville Memorial Hospital were actually proposing emergency surgery, something I thought was VERY bad idea, given the fact that tumor surgery was pretty limited. There were no robotic surgery techniques or other enhanced procedures, just the old scalpel and rib spreader.
My father, ever looking perhaps for that silver bullet, listened to the spiel the heart surgeon was giving him, and it was a stim winder. He just knew that it would be a straightforward procedure and even though it was 9 hours of work, that he could get the tumor out successfully. As the nerd I was at the time, I had read all about heart transplant surgeries and knew the odds at that time were iffy a best. My father, however, bought the spiel hook line and sinker. Even my father’s sisters seemed convinced it would work, but it pissed me off personally. I was not going to win any argument ( as why would you ever question a parent to begin with?) so I just said a prayer and stood by.
My biggest concern is that if he had surgery it would weaken his energy reserves, and he could not withstand chemotherapy, which was the only other solution available. As it turned out, I was right and it did weaken him quite a bit, but he remained resolute throughout. After about 2 weeks, he began chemotherapy locally, and because he was smart enough 5 years earlier and got health insurance, he could choose almost any place he wanted to go for treatment, and was able to be taken on by M.D. Anderson Cancer Treatment Center. They were able to reduce the tumor size by 90%, but the protocols ran out nearly 2 years after, and he died 2 years to the minute that he first found out he had lung cancer. Had my father not had insurance, our family would have been bankrupted, even by 1977 standards. M.D. Anderson did a marvelous job with his therapy, they simply ran out of effective treatments for it.
My father’s cancer WAS NOT, however, the 6-week “get your house in order” situation that was being pitched. The only regret I have is that he could have avoided surgery altogether and had a chance to live as long as his one of his sisters, my aunt, when she passed in 2008. I think the surgery was clearly surgery for profit, as when the surgeon opened him up with the spreader, he knew instantly that he could not operate on it. A real Nostra-dumb-ass move on his part. He hooked my father on the “silver bullet approach” when even I could see that solution was a non-starter. My father was a salesperson and a manufacturer’s representative. Who better would there be than for a salesmen to buy a sales pitch?
I have a very long and pristine memory. I remember things people cannot believe I remember. I have even caught Grok 3 separate times make factual recall errors. I had to beat it into submission to find the links and then I found them for it.
Why do I bring that incident with my father up? I did that because the very same thing happened to me in 2018 when diagnosed with the vestibular schwannoma (an acoustic neuroma on my left auditory nerve). My local ENT did an inspection of that ear and noticed an anomaly and had me submit to an MRI on both ears. It turns out that I did have a significant but not huge acoustic neuroma in the left ear. He instantly scheduled an appointment with a well-known research hospital in the state (which I will not name) and I met with the chief of neurosurgery there. This dude was somewhat well-renowned an in his 70s when I spoke with him. He also had a very young (in fact, completely inexperienced) neurosurgeon who worked with him. When he first stepped in to talk with me, he was a bit nonchalant about my condition, but as he talked he began to spin the idea that it could perhaps be incredibly serious and he wanted another specialist (this kid) to look at it. He stepped out for about 20 minutes, and came back with a “troubled” look on his face. Having learned cards from one of the best players I ever saw (my grandmother of all people), I knew this guy was trying to pull a fast one over on me, stating that he had serious concerns about my brain stem should the benign tumor begin to grow rapidly. He immediately suggested that I get the surgery in 6 weeks.
What he did not know was that when I got the MRIs that confirmed my condition, I purchased two separate 500-page reports on the subject of vestibular schwannomas, and based on through review, I came up with the only two solutions possible. If the condition really was a threat to my brain stem, and I was having severe headaches, that surgery would be a good idea, because I could indeed die from that condition. If not, however, the best thing would have been to DO NOTHING because surgery would result in being deaf and with a permanent loss of balance. I knew early on in 2010 that I was having balance issues when doing squat thrusts in the gym, and in 2013 on a golf trip to Arizona, I could no longer balance on a bicycle, something that shocked me. The only reason I went to the ENT doctor was that I was having trouble with hearing in my left ear all of a sudden.
What concerned me most was that my PPO was only giving me one choice of treatment, and that was surgery. Anyone who knows me well (and there are at least three that do on this platform), I have a very low tolerance for “bullshit” and have demonstrated it a few times even to “authority figures”. I was not going to take this lying down, and I went to my insurer to plead my case for more choices. I even called a friend of mine in Oregon who got me an appointment with probably the most renowned private neurosurgeon in the USA. I was able to see him, to visit John Hopkins University Hospital, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and even I was able to get my insurer to allow me to visit M.D. Anderson in Houston.
That summer I engaged in medical tourism, and to the person, all of them said that surgery was unnecessary and that all I would need to do is to monitor it as those tumors are incredibly slow-growing. The lead surgeon at Vanderbilt, when he got my MRIs, built a 3-D modeled image of the tumor. This guy has done literally thousands of similar surgeries in his lifetime. He told me, “I absolutely LIVE for doing those surgeries, but in your case, there is NO WAY in the world I would operate on it!”
As it turned out, I was being pitched a truckload of horse manure just like my father was 43 years earlier. My memory and my experience paid off for me. That is one reason I take notes and do not forget experiences like that.
And now onto the case of why medical freedom is so important, even if my leftist and fascist friends want to force lockdowns over me and others. I will not belabor you will the complete story about my brother, but it was a truly sad tale in the end.
My brother was a musical genius and perhaps even an intellectual genius at the same time, but he couldn’t focus on things for a day before drifting off to something else. He, like Paul McCartney, learned how to play piano by ear and the same with a guitar. He became expert with rhythm guitar, was good at bass playing and even mastered a 12-string guitar. He built his own four-channel mixer by himself. He could innovate when he really needed to do it.
Had he remained focused on his music, you would probably remember his name. He was a comedic genius too and could debate things seriously. There is an entire long story about that comedic talent too. Many in the Charlotte, North Carolina area would know what I am talking about if I explained it.
When we traveled together, that is what we did a lot of the time. We debated. His friends, and he had many, all loved him. Growing up with him, I loved him and hated him, but in the end I miss him as badly as my mother and father, who all passed before their time.
Early in his life, he read voraciously, and was a big student of history. As he grew older, he became rebellious of everything, my parents, me, and damn near anything else. He eventually became a heavy drinker, and at some point engaged in a bit of drug abuse. I know he used hash often, and though I cannot fully prove it, he may have at one point used cocaine. He had to get his GED as he failed out of high school, but still managed a degree at Georgia Southern University. I could tell you about his run-ins with the law, but even those were stuff of legend (that I will not discuss here). I really don’t like remembering the late 1980s, as I had to help him out a lot. He knew tool and die equipment as well, something he learned in industry. If he wanted to do it, he could do almost anything.
The reason I mention substance abuse if that those who engage in such activity end up with some aggressive form of heart disease. When I got a call from the NC county coroner’s office in 2007, he was found unresponsive in his apartment. Because when you die alone in your apartment, the county is obligated to perform an autopsy, and he had one. He had complained of congestion two weeks before he passed away, but I did not know his circumstances were that dire. In eight weeks, the autopsy came back. He died of myocarditis. I had done some DNA testing on myself, and determined that I might be susceptible to that same thing. Now I had proof.
I could give you a couple of other examples of being given a bum rush by “professionals” like dentists and urologists (not my current one, but a previous one). They caused some real damage to me that could have been avoided had I had more choice in the process (I was much younger when the dentist did a number on me).
When the “Covidiocy” hit in late 2019, I had traveled to Texas on business and went through Atlanta airport. It was there that I likely caught Covid-19 before all the media-based horse manure began to flood the airways. Because I supplement with Vitamin D, Vitamin B-12, Zinc, and Vitamin C, it was not really much more than a chest cold, and I was over it just before Christmas. Prior to that, I had not had a cold since 1996. Because I have gone to a very strict supplement regimen, I really don’t get ill. When a local talk show host here in Greenville began to cover the whole COVID mess in detail, I could tell that it was being hyped into mass hysteria. I also knew, based on high school biology and other medical research I had read, that most coronaviruses will mutate over time into very innocuous viruses through herd immunity. These “vaccines” are also known to produce “viral shedding” which can make others sick.
I was not going to obsess over “fear porn” from the Kewpie doll crews at Fox News, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, or MSLSD (as neo-con Mark Levin calls MSNBC). What many of my friends don’t know about me is that I have extensive experience in water-side process control and operation management. Before I decided to go back to graduate school, I was offered a chance at being an engineering manager in Australia for the company I worked for, but it required a two-year stint in Philadelphia, and I really didn’t want that.
I was right in the middle of the Legionnaire’s Disease mess of the early 1980s and had helped several industry sites deal with and eliminate the pathogen. I have seen almost every form of oil-side or water-side contaminant, and have had as a process engineer crawled into some of the most God-awful bio-hazard scenarios and helped to eliminate them. And when it comes to masks, even I know that the only potentially hazard-free breathing mechanism is a vacuum-sealed mask connected to an oxygen tank, where only exhaled oxygen escapes the mask. Everything else is quite frankly kabuki theater.
Anyone who has read any of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s earliest reports on COVID-19 knew that he knew that it was not as big a problem as he later purported it was. If you have read “The Real Anthony Fauci” by RFK, Jr. and “The Pfizer Papers” by Dr. Naomi Wolf, you know how dangerous the mRNA vaccines are, and the negative data continues to compound about them. Still, for some insane reason, President Trump’s crew cannot seem to get the drug companies to pull the COVID vaccine ads that continue to air on radio and TV.
What upsets me the most is KNOWING that I am susceptible to myocarditis and knowing that the use of mRNA vaccines can cause it as a side effect. I should have no issue with refusing the vaccine, which I steadfastly did and still do today. I also know that two of my relatives suffered adverse side effects from these vaccines. No one should be forced to take a vaccine or any treatment that he or she knows could harm or potentially kill them.
It seems Americans forget the great frauds of the past. People should remember the 1957 Thalidimide fraud when it took doctors 4 years to understand the dangers of this ‘morning sickness’ drug. Was drug testing good then? No it was not, and what we have found since that time is that is has not improved 64 years later with the mRNA vaccines. If you have read “The Pfizer Papers”, you would realize how utterly corrupt the complete lack of testing was for this travesty of medicine. Remember the Tuskeegee experiments? If you think your government is trying to save you, think again. Even my aunt who died of cancer did not live long enough to receive compensation from the U.S. government for the years she worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratories without radiation protection during the Manhattan Project. Provisions were made after she died to be compensated under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
I think before anyone makes a medical decision that could potentially be life-threatening, as was depicted in “The Last Rodeo”, one should step back and assess one’s current situation, and look at every side of disease mitigation before jumping on the first diagnosis. You need a complete understanding of the factors involved in making any final decision. Governments and other medical or pharma bureaucracies should have ZERO rights to force people to make decisions that could adversely affect their health forever! You need to be discerning as well because government really only cares about itself and its continuing expansion. You are just a secondary consideration to taxation and wealth confiscation. The USAID fraud exposed by D.O.G.E. should be enough to convince thinking individuals of government’s primary interests. Those are the interests of “forever wars” and wealth redistribution to those who have the power to grift without accountability.
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My mother was given Thalidimide when pregnant with me. I was born missing most or all of the pericardium. Decades later the doctor, our long time family physician and close family friend, apologized to me saying he wished he had understood the problem much sooner.
So glad you didn't get the surgery! I would love to have seen you and your brother debating/arguing. That would have been epic.