We regularly take a multi-day drive to her parents, and on one I noticed she had to use the bathroom a lot more frequently than usual. Another friend lost his wife a couple years ago to pancreatic cancer, that started with some lower back pain. The moral of the story: Don't ignore changes you notice in your body.
My wife’s hair thinned a bit too with chemo and she never got her eyebrows back. She been drawing them on for almost 10 years now.
I first felt the tiny lump in her breast and then she couldn’t find it. I had to nag her for a few months to go get it looked at. She just waited for her routine appointment which was 4-6 months after I nagged her. In hindsight, I wish I was more insistent as I think it could have been removed without needing chemo earlier on. She was early 30s, and at that age at least, she’s of the opinion the double mastectomy and reconstructive surgeries were a breeze compared to chemo.
I knew it was not good when I felt it the first time (in college I worked in a pathology lab, have handled a lot of cancers and I knew she had brca genetics) Who knows really if chemo could have been avoided but my point and learning was, you are with this person more than anyone, if you notice something and are concerned for them you need voice it and create action.
Glad your wife's treatment seemed to work out well.
I'm sure it was hard to watch your wife wait out the next Dr appointment. I have a friend and they decided to "pray the cancer away", and didn't seek medical treatment until there were skin lesions visible. The nurse at that appointment had to leave the room to vomit it was so bad. They went through surgery+chemo+rad and she's been in remission for a number of years now. So, even in fairly bad cases of waiting it out, there can still be good outcomes.
Definitely don't wait though. In my wife's case, they were confident that surgery would resolve it. But when they got in there, it was "acting weird"; it had grown much, much faster than it should have over that time. Initial diagnosis was stage 1, after surgery they called it stage 3+.
I had to do battle with the insurance company, because our company was changing insurance, with the new insurance becoming active 4 days before her scheduled surgery. We have a "benefits advisor" that always says "if you have any questions, ask us and we'll take care of you", but they've been fairly useless. In this case, they were telling us that we needed to wait until we had the new insurance cards, which would happen sometime within a few weeks after the new policy became active, then we'd have to submit for pre-approval, which could take another few weeks. And the specialized surgeon was scheduling like 6 weeks out...
We eventually found that we could personally guarantee payment, and the doctor was confident that insurance basically never denies coverage in situations like ours, so we went ahead with this course and got everything paid for. Which was good, because as I said, the cancer was "acting weird" and in the 2 weeks between initial location of the growth and the surgery that we were lucky enough to be able to get in due to someone else needing to reschedule, the growth doubled in size. Another 4-8 weeks very likely could have resulted in spread to the lymph nodes and much worse outcome.
Another moral of the story: Don't let the insurance company push you around. With cancer, time is always of the essence.
When it’s cancer, you have to move quick. I knew that from my experience in the clinical setting. That was over 20 years ago now but I still remember when a biopsy or specimen tested positive they’d want to know STAT and would then be calling the patient back in to discuss options immediately. The OR schedule would change to accommodate new cases and such. Outside the ER and Code events, most things in the hospital seemed to move slow especially the outpatient stuff. But as soon as C was involved doctors everyone wanted everything done yesterday.
It’s a good point on insurance as that’s the most common delay/blocker from how doctors would want to proceed. My wife’s young age (denser breast tissue) required a special type of imaging to detect. Insurance didn’t want to pay for it and it was something like 20x more expensive than the normal type. We went ahead and paid, thankfully we could, and her oncologist fought with the insurance a bit about why he justified it. Eventually we got reimbursed. The doctors apparently used her case to help build a new insurance-approved standard for imaging of young high risk patients, which is pretty cool byproduct of our stress.
It was a similar scary high growth type cancer, between the time the imaging was confirmed and a week or two later when it was surgically removed it had growth from 1.8mm to 3.5mm diameter. Which was still considered extremely early detection from what we were told. If she was not already aware of her brca risk and seeing an oncologist annually, it might have been much larger and likely metastasized possibly in the lymph nodes by the time it was discovered. Scary stuff, you guys did the right thing acting quickly for sure. I spent a good portion of my career in healthcare finance, and see how decisions are made regarding capitalistic agendas and have experience the patient side of these decisions as well, needless to say I’m strongly in favor of socializing healthcare and even removing the profit motive entirely. Some things shouldn’t be investments. It bothers me that all those against it are just ignorant to the existence of these kinds of issues and have been fear mongering. I think we have current resources to “do it right” if we put the proper thought and execution into it.
The proposal of making smaller healthcare groups so that healthy people aren't paying for sick people to make it more fair is exactly the wrong direction to go as a society, IMHO. And I say that as a person who has spent fairly small amounts over my life. We can basically guarantee that with the exception of early, cheap deaths, that everyone is going to need healthcare. Spreading it out among everyone just makes sense to me.
I'm of similar opinion. Tying it to employer makes no sense in our current world. People change jobs all the time. And I've seen boardroom decisions where we decide not to cover a drug on insurance because only 1 person takes it and it is very expensive and we only employ 100 people. Meanwhile, we all know damn well exactly who that one person is. It's Pam down in Accounting, she's open with her battle with MS/Cancer/etc. And, that's not insurance! The fact that it's done by CIGNA/United/etc who has millions to spread it across and the risk should have been baked into the rates we already were paying. It's just maddening.
I had to get out of Healthcare altogether after COVID and the Boardroom conversations I was a part of. The worst was we wanted to close ICU's because uptick in nursing labor was making profit margins lower than usual, never mind the fact we had a ton of cash on the balance sheet the government had given us for emergency funds - I luckily was able to win that battle and we remained open - but yeah, hedge fund owned ICU's during a pandemic...
Plot twist, my wife is an RN and she dropped out of nursing a bit before COVID because of similar shenanigans from the boardrooms: too many patients per nurse, not enough CNAs per nurse. Add to that patient families being jerks.
I agree. But I also think that, then, the size of the vehicles will decrease to accommodate these new realities. Perhaps no steering wheel, smaller dashboard, no need to divide seats. There's lots of space savings to be had.
FB/IG will delete or downgrade content that's extremely embarrassing to the US government; TikTok will do the same for the Chinese government. It's amusing when a subject (e.g. US government funding for a Chinese virus lab doing bat coronavirus research right before the Covid pandemic) hits both triggers - but X does allow that content to some degree so perhaps X really is a bit more pro-free-speech than either FB/IG or TikTok.
FB/IG/Threads openly downrank any political content for good reasons nowadays. There was a thread from one of the execs that I saw a few months ago. I actually like that. Not everything has to be "rage bait of the day sprinkled with geopolitical drama". And whenever I have that itch to scratch, I can just doom-scroll through Twitter.
TikTok is a bit different though, I think they were able to capture the audience and put them in correct bubbles, so if you want to just watch your funny memes, you won't see anything else. But looking at my friend's feeds, they see the opposite - extremely polarizing political content from all the possible sides of the spectrum. It looks like IG Reels has started to eat their lunch, but time will show.
The main factors for Brazil's growth have nothing to do with size of population alone, there are other countries with similar population that are not on same level.
A combination of social policies, fiscal responsibility (or a semblance of it compared to other countries), agro business being the locomotive, a resurgence of heavy industry coupled with Gov. backing (aero/space, oil refineries, etc) and family consumption have helped the country recently.
The current president, and his party, deserves credit for many of those achievements but not all. Let's remember that this is a process that started on the 90s and, yes, accelerated under the current president and his party. Not all have been roses and there is plenty of criticism but it is a change of pace that was much needed.
If not been for the disastrous policies, COVID being the prime example, of the previous administration which turned the economy and politics upside down the country would be further ahead now. I would say we are back where we were, also 8th economy,
We still face many issues: dysfunctional congress, high inequality which leads to violence. But in general, I'd say, we are on the right path.
I have Brazilians in my team and have done business there (including Agrotoken [1]) which prioritized focus in that a agricultural business there. Having said so and comparing to Latam, I found Brazil state institutions such as the central bank and justice branch much more stable, and independent beyond the specific policies and political wing past governments had. Another example is the Pix payment system [1] which would be the envy of other countries. In a nutshell, Brasil could seem slow in many aspects but doing firm actions.
I am leaving aside the talk about poverty, climate change, etc which I think deserves a separate discussion and should be extended to many other countries.
There's not really anything uncommon about a programming language having its origins in academia, a university being Catholic, or a university being in Brazil (which is the world's 7th most populous country). So I also don't really get this.
Not sure if I missed your joke. But this is probably a joke based on the spelling of the word being British. So Americans use tires and the British use tyres.
I wasn't joking, I'm not going to use the American spelling just because I'm talking about how Americans use the word. They really do use "wheel" and "tyre" interchangeably.
I'm an American, and I disagree, mostly. I've never heard someone say a "flat wheel"; it's always flat tire. Also if an American says a wheel came off when they mean a tire, they misspoke/misunderstand what they are talking about. There are plenty of Americans that know next to nothing about their vehicle despite it usually being the most expensive or second most expensive thing they own.
Disclaimer: Midwest USA here, can't speak for other parts of the US.
I can't think of anyone other than the most archetypal ditz (think, 'Friends' character, Phoebe) who would conflate the idea of the rubber part that touches the ground with the metal or other hard material the first term is mounted on. (Naming abstractions removed for clarity.)
So, don't condense your thought here, I would love to read everything.
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