Semper Fi

(I swear the music was not front-loaded.  The true irony of this musical serendipity didn't become apparent until I previewed my first draft.)

Sailor Jim Johnston linked to this Snopes article about USMC Gunnery Sgt Michael Burghardt, nicknamed "Iron Mike" by his buddies.  Read the story, and you'll understand why they call him that.  I read it, and figured more people needed to see the photo (and to read the story, several months old though it may be).

Snopes.com, however, which got the photo from the Omaha World-Herald, doesn't want anyone else getting it from Snopes in turn -- accredited or otherwise.  So they put a monkeywrencher on it that replaces it, if YOU try to link it in turn from THEM, with a rude face, almost ... gee, almost like it was their copyrighted photo in the first place, and not something they copied from the Omaha World-Herald.

So, yeah, here's the Stars & Stripes article on Iron Mike.  And here's a NON-monkeywrenched copy of the photo.  To Gunny Michael "Iron Mike" Burghardt, a hearty "Semper Fi."  And to Snopes.com ... well, Iron Mike says it all, really.

Hey, Snopes guys?  Iron Mike looks a lot better with his ass hanging out in the breeze than you do.

First 24 hours

"First 24 hours of what?", you're probably wondering.  Well, yeah, this is a little lacking in context.  For that, I plead acute intestinal distress ... which is to say, I've spent much of the time between waking up on Monday and this morning not daring to get more than about 10 seconds staggering distance from a bathroom.  By Tuesday morning I'd lost almost 10% of my body mass in fluids.  (Thankfully, it seems to have ... er ... run its course, so to speak.)

So, anyway, about this "first 24 hours".  The one thing I have made it out of the house for since Monday morning is for a trip up to York, Maine, an hour or so away, to see one Chris Delorie¹, chronic pain specialist, for a procedure to perform a temporary nerve block on my left sciatic nerve².  Why do such a thing?  Well, after a prior consultation, it seemed likely that a lot of the neuropathic pain in my foot might be bleedover into the sympathetic nervous system.  (The sympathetic nervous system isn't supposed to carry pain signals.  But, for reasons which aren't yet understood, in many chronic pain cases, it does start carrying pain signals as well as, or instead of, doing its proper job.)

Well, to cut a long story short, over the past 24 -- well, about 28, now -- hours, most of that neuropathic pain has been gone, poof, like turning off a light.  I had one brief twinge of pain across my toes about an hour ago now, at a much reduced intensity compared to what I've come to expect as normal.

This doesn't mean my foot has been pain-free.  Far from it.  The underlying ache that's there all the time is still there, and there's still additional aches and pains when I walk on it; all of the "structural" pain is still there.  But all the burning, shocking, crunching, crushing, slicing, stabbing pains that come out of nowhere with no warning, all the kinds of pain that we euphemistically put down to a little invisible sadistic gremlin whom we nicknamed Mack the Knife, have been notable by their absence, except for that one twinge, which so far has not recurred.

It looks like maybe we finally have a bullet with Mack the Knife's name on it.

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[1] Yes, fellow geeks, brother of DJ Delorie.  Small world, isn't it?

[2] During the course of which his office staff also generously pushed two liters of IV fluids into me, much helping with the dehydration from the aforementioned intestinal distress.