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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Chris Cuomo can save your life: “The fever softens you up. It makes your body hurt so you don’t move — and then it gets into your lungs. Stand up!”
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Published: Apr 08, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
Chris Cuomo got a call from “a friend of a friend of a friend,” who is a doctor and pulmonary expert.
The doctor told him to get up, stretch his torso (despite the discomfort), and try to hold his breath for 10 seconds (although he felt unable to do so). Then the physician shared crucial advice to fight back against the disease:
He said, ‘I saw your X-rays, it’s in your lungs. And you got the right fear and you got the wrong approach. You can’t wait it out. He said you have to fight. And not in some silly metaphorical way … You’ve got to do the things that will beat this virus. You’ve got to breathe deep when it hurts.'”
Cuomo’s edict: “When you get a fever spike, you can’t take confidence that it’s going to go down … You’ve got to layer up, you’ve got to drink, you’ve gotta take Tylenol, and you’ve gotta fight back. You’ve gotta make that fever go down any way you can. The virus is banking on you doing nothing. Your indolence, as the doctors call it. It wants us passive, on our backs.”
BEST VIEWER COMMENT: “Don’t be afraid. Just be ready to fight. I did jumping jacks when I could barely breathe. I stuck my hand down my throat pulling up mucus. I didn’t sleep for a week. It was hell but you can do it. Not everyone will get it this bad. Just be ready if you do and fight.”
Frann sent me very much the same advice from Dr. Sarfaraz Munshi, urgent care lead at Queen’s Hospital in London.
1. Take five deep breaths in, each time holding the breath for five seconds.
2. On the sixth deep breath, take it in and do a big cough (cover your mouth, of course).
3. Do two cycles of the above and the lay flat on your front (on a bed, ideally) taking slightly deeper “normal” breaths for the next 10 minutes.
“You’ve got to understand the majority of your lung is on your back not on your front. By laying on your back you’re closing off more of the smaller airways and this is not good during the period of infection.”
JOHN PRINE (1946 – 2020)
Bruce Springsteen: “Over here on E Street, we are crushed by the loss of John Prine. John and I were ‘New Dylans’ together in the early 70s and he was never anything but the loveliest guy in the world. A true national treasure and a songwriter for the ages.”
Jason Isbell: “He got up to sing at open mic night and he sang ‘Hello In There’ and ‘Angel From Montgomery.’ Those were his songs for open mic night.”
You get the idea: John Prine, who surely could have written a classic song about the virus that killed him, was a bodhisattva who masqueraded as a human for 73 years. I always followed him, but in 2005, one song on “Fair and Square” made me stop everything every time I heard it:
You and me
Sittin’ in the back of my memory
Like a honey bee
Buzzin’ ’round a glass of sweet Chablis
Radio’s on
Windows rolled up
And my mind’s rolled down
Headlights shining
Like silver moons
Rollin’ on the ground
We made love
In every way love can be made
And we made time
Look like time
Could never fade
Friday night
We both made the guitar hum
Saturday made Sunday feel
Like it would never come
Gonna be a long Monday
Sittin’ all alone on a mountain
By a river that has no end
Gonna be a long Monday
Stuck like the tick of a clock
That’s come unwound – again
So I arranged an interview:
HB: Why do these songs sound so familiar?
JP: Because this was the most comfortable I’ve ever been in the studio. I sang these songs in concert over the last 3 years. I knew they fit, I knew people liked them.
HB: “Hello In There” was an instant classic. Forty years later, can you bear to perform it?
JP: More than any other song, it gets stronger every day for me. I never tire of singing it. I don’t know how I came up with such a pretty melody. It was an exercise — to use every chord I had ever heard. I paid a guy five bucks to write it out so I could publish it. I couldn’t believe it when he played it on piano.
HB: Some of these new songs are so funny, do you laugh while you write them?
JP: I laugh at the funny lines — hey, I laugh at even the serious stuff. When it’s going well, I feel like I’m taking dictation. But I don’t have hundreds of songs waiting — you’ve heard them all.
HB: Do they come out in a rush?
JP: I type so slow I can edit as I write.
HB: You say you’re lazy. Do you feel guilty when you go for months and don’t write?
JP: I’m not Catholic, I’m not Jewish — I can talk myself out of feeling guilty. Because it’s easier to not write. I only love the songs I have to write. I trust a song like that — a song straight from the gut. There are some really good songs that, if you don’t write them down, someone else will.
HB: On “Fair & Square,” there’s a political song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human” — but it’s mostly funny, with only one direct reference to the President.
JP: I always felt that way about protest and politics — include it in your conversation instead of raving about it.
HB: How does that song go over in the red states?
JP: When I’m first singing about some issue, people change the subject. Later, it seems about right.
HB: What’s your daily media intake?
JP: I hardly read at all. My wife reads three books at a time, but I read “Archie and Veronica” — in the comic book form.
HB: Who do you listen to?
JP: I buy a lot of CDs, and I listen to them once. But Van [Morrison] or Bob [Dylan] or Merle [Haggard] — I listen carefully to all of those.
HB: Taking care of yourself?
JP: I have a poor diet — I’m a meat and potatoes guy. That has something to do with how I see things. There are no peas on my plate.
“Fair and Square” won a Grammy. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
“The Tree of Forgiveness” — his first collection of original songs since “Fair and Square” — was released in 2018. I called it the best record of the year. As did many. [To buy the CD from Amazon and get a free MP3 download, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
It’s all great, but one song — “Summer’s End” — was instantly immortal. Beautiful writing. Beautifully simple. And the video: beyond…
Summer’s end’s around the bend just flying
The swimming suits are on the line just drying
I’ll meet you there per our conversation
I hope I didn’t ruin your whole vacation
Well you never know how far from home you’re feeling
Until you watch the shadows cross the ceiling
Well I don’t know but I can see it snowing
In your car the windows are wide open
Valentines break hearts and minds at random
That ol’ Easter egg ain’t got a leg to stand on
Well I can see that you can’t win for trying
And New Year’s Eve is bound to leave you crying
The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking
I still love that picture of us walking
Just like that ol’ house we thought was haunted
Summer’s end came faster than we wanted
Come on home
Come on home
No you don’t have to be alone
Just come on home
Holly Gleason – she wrote Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives — and Prine were close friends. She shared some memories. You can see the movie…
Christine sent me this fabulous story.
For perspective, though, you can’t beat John Prine: “I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you’re not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life.”
YESTERDAY’S NEWS TODAY
from the Washington Post: President Trump has removed the chairman of the federal panel Congress created to oversee his administration’s management of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package — the latest action by the president to undermine the system of independent oversight of the executive established after Watergate. In just the past four days, Trump has ousted two inspectors general and expressed displeasure with a third, a pattern that critics say is a direct assault on one of the pillars of good governance.
UPDATE: A HEAD BUTLER READER IS MAKING MASKS
Yesterday I posted this: Alice Glass is an out of work theatre artist in Berkeley. She’s making high quality masks with a filter pocket. She lives across the street from the post office so mailing’s not a problem. She writes, “I’m a one woman operation and while working quickly, I don’t have super high volume, but I would love the boost.” Find her masks on etsy.
ALICE CHECKED IN THIS MORNING: “Wow what a day! I sold 78 masks today! I can’t thank you enough for sending so many kind supportive folks my way!”
HER FATHER: “In addition to the orders, Alice said she got many encouraging notes from fellow Head Butler readers. What a great network you have here.”
TODAY’S ESSENTIAL: A VACUUM SEALER
If you’re going to the market once a week and buying in quantity, vegetables are a problem. They lose punch and wilt if you don’t feed them. Ditto if you have a garden. The solution: cryo-vac.
To buy the Slaouwo vacuum sealer from Amazon, click here.
To buy Vacuum Sealer Storage Bags (pack of 100), click here.
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES: For supplements, creams, and other possibly necessary items, click here.
A BOOK FOR TODAY: CHILDHOOD’S END
“Childhood’s End” is just 200 pages long. Of the hundred books that bear Arthur C. Clarke’s name, it’s generally regarded as his masterpiece — a novel of supreme ambition and scope. And that’s not literary talk: The novel covers the period from the arrival of the Overlords in the mid-20th Century to that moment, a century or so later, when humanity rings the closing bell of life as we know it.
To read more and order it, click here.
MY TWITTER FEED
– “You know what would make me happy? If Mike Bloomberg would become a vulture capitalist and buy ALL of Trump’s properties when he can’t pay Deutsche Bank’s loans and then on the day he loses the election, he gets evicted from the WH AND all his former properties. The spawn too”.
– Tim Snyder (he wrote On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century): “The plan seems to be to not count the dead in Republican counties and not count the vote in Democratic ones.”
EASTER DINNER
Lamb keeps poorly. Ham is forever. Consider my old favorite, the Holiday Ham.
One caution: If you buy a pre-sliced ham, no one will be happy.
Prep time: 5 minutes. 6 basic ingredients. Insanely good.
Cooking tip: set the ham in a tin foil pan. Or, better, two. It’s so much easier to dispose of a sticky foil pan than spend fifteen minutes scouring one you value.
serves 10-12
16-18 pound ready-to-eat ham, pre-cooked, with bone in (A smoked ham is okay; an unsmoked ham is better. But do NOT get a spiral-cut ham — the edges will overcook.)
l box dark brown sugar
l/2 cup Gulden’s mustard
l/2 cup bourbon
l/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
l cup honey
2 tablespoons ground cloves
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix ingredients. Pour over ham.
Cook in oven for 2-3 hours.
Baste constantly after first half hour.
