I also had some abdomen pain, but not as much as I do now. It's hard to say if the stomach expanding or the loss of appetite was the first symptoms. I went to my gastro doc first thinking it might be something celiac related, but when it kept getting worse I went to a doctor at austin regional clinic. He said it sounded like a gallbladder issue and sent me to the sonogram. Now I have to go back to the gastro doc on the 28th, which I was lucky to get thanks to how covid is hitting all the docs, and see if we can drain the fluid.

I'm hoping it doesn't start hurting to the point where I have to go to the emergency room and get it drained before then. It's just crazy, my mom died in 2019 from liver/kidney failure but she was in her 60's with many bad habits. I'm only 48 and other than being overweight I don't, I quit smoking many years ago and I almost never drink, but here I am. Now I have to wonder if having covid before I could get vaccinated accelerated the failure.

Anyway, I'll post when I know more. Just really down atm.

I guess I have some bad news. I noticed my stomach was getting larger even though I had no appetite lately. I had my sonogram on Monday and my doctor told me that I have cirrhosis with ascites, which means my liver is failing enough that it is forcing liquid into my abdomen. I also have gallstones, but the doctor said not to worry about those right now.

I gather I am going to have to go have a needle inserted to drain the fluid and then we will see if I am in end stage liver failure. I'll update as soon as I know more.

On the good side, my wife is almost fully healed from the mohs surgery. I hope to be back soon, but right now I am depressed and worried AF.

Blow is the perfect name for the drug. Blow your time away and consequently a good sleep or healthy appetite, blow your brain cells away, blow your pocket change away - enough that you might be blowing on a little sumptin sumptin to get some more, yuck! Plus, you're supporting cartels blowing peoples heads off. I hate cocaine, coca tea is great though!

Can't argue that. I've been in California so long that the idea of smoking inside a business didn't even occur to me. The 'in private homes with children and apartments or townhouses' part I find draconian and unenforceable...and we have them here.
On a side note, I also find it distasteful that cigars get lumped in with cigarettes. As far as I know, there have been few if any studies on second hand cigar smoke, which has none of the toxic additives most cigarettes have so produce a different smoke. I'm not saying it's good for you, just that it hasn't been proven to be the same kind of toxicity....yet they are now taxed the same here, doubling the price overnight. (If you can't tell, I'm bitter, I can't afford them now)

True, cars have far more utility (except to tobacco farmers) but are also far more damaging in many ways. It's not meant to be a logical argument, it's more about getting people to see that they also pollute the air (a normal complaint I hear about smokers) in a directly more deadly and indirectly disastrous way, and I hope they will consider that before angrily deriding someone for a cigarette. It's a disguised 'people in glass houses' argument.

Sadly, yes, smoking is an easy target today....alcohol could be tomorrow, or marijuana again (just became legal here)....I don't like our governments going after the easy targets heavy handedly just because they can. It's too easy to portray something or someone as an easy target and go after it solely because a small persuasive group finds it distasteful.

To play devils advocate, there are a few positive sides to smoking...smoking tastes good (to smokers), it acts as a stimulant/depressant and appetite suppressor, it supports an industry of farmers and for cigars, hand rollers, and it helps thin out the herd. ;-)

The technology to load shift is available, but getting it developed and implemented is one of the components that is missing from the overall power strategy in Aus.

Energy companies, like Ergon (Queensland) are actively trying to limit input, with a hard cap of 5kVa input for residential, and sometimes even as little as 3kVa in some more remote areas.

And while technology like liquid vanadium battery cells (long life, expandable by adding extra tanks of liquid electrolyte) exist, they are still prohibitively expensive.

There are plenty of solutions, but little appetite from the companies and governments, and very little knowledge among the end users. So while we're throwing cheap Chinese panels on rooves with gay abandon, I think it's a little early to brag about what a rampaging success Aus solar is because "lots of panels yo!".

You don't have to change your entire way of life, all you have to do is stop eating animal products - which account for 51% of Global Warming. http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

What does this mean? It means that even if the governments and technology could give us entirely sustainable electricity and transport, then global warming would still destroy the planet, because of the gases released from the 80+ billion farm animals raised each year.


The good news is though, that as individuals we have the power to save the world, with every meal.

Bon appetite, Planeteers: http://tinyurl.com/jfh5wfw

I find your second point more convincing.

Animals are serial rapists. I'm not sure why our diets should be informed by them. Clearly our teeth, and a great many other things, are pretty good clues to what we have historically eaten.

However. I love bacon, but I'm pretty sure I'd eat a lot less bacon if I had to occasionally slaughter a pig to get it. I don't have a moral objection to eating meat, I have an objection (and I am a hypocrite here to boot) with the almost hedonistic way we pay others to do the dirty work so that we might satiate our appetite. Where once our appetite for meat served as the necessary motivation in the face of the considerable effort we had to expend to get it, now I walk for 10 minutes, pay the equivalent of perhaps 10 minutes of my wage, and voilà, chicken ready to eat.

All of this would be "so what" if it were not for the environmental and health impacts this imbalance might cause, as well as the suffering we cause animals in our pursuit to ever drive down the price of flesh.

But yeah, if you have a small list of things you can eat affordably, and meat is one of them then, yeah, it's a bit different. I am fortunate enough to be fairly unrestricted in what I can eat...and yet I still choose to buy animal corpses wrapped in plastic. I'm trying to cut down though!

I just can't tell if you're serious with this, or ridiculing them for their ridiculous biased stance.

The human appetite for spawning children is THE driving force behind every single major and minor category of environmental damage now threatening the human future - deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease. -Reality and Logic

The trick is to also make sure you smoke extra cigarettes to suppress your appetite. Then it all evens out and everything is cool.

I find running curbs rather than increases my appetite. After running I usually don't want to eat for several hours.

Aww yeah, this is the stuff. I have an endless appetite for the work of pretty much everyone involved in this production.

I didn't do medicine so I can't be certain, but a fair amount of my syllabus seemed to be a useful foundation for medicine. I didn't dissect any frogs, we did pigs hearts and rats mind. I also learned a lot of practical things from biology, in fact it was one of the more practical and "relevant to everyday life" subjects I took.

Oh, and I still think there is value to the purely academic stuff. I learned an awful lot of things which I have had no practical use for but are nonetheless precious to me. Truly I pity those who have no appetite for it. Perhaps I was always this way, I don't know, but I'm still a firm in my belief that all that inconsequential arcana has enriched my life and that school had a large part in nurturing it.

They probably lost their appetite while fleeing from a bigger and deadlier predator.