Well, if I needed another reason to not go on a cruise, I found one this past week, when hantivirus was added to the number of things that a person can catch on one of those floating Petri dishes. An infected ship found itself anchored off Cape Verde, with nowhere to go. The people on the mainland didn’t want to take a chance by letting any of the passengers come ashore, so those poor sick souls were restricted to the kinds of medical care that one can find on a pleasure voyage.
Three passengers have died and several others have been sickened by hantavirus on board the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings
I am pretty sure that none of the passengers was warned of the possibility of inhaling rodent droppings as they slurped and chewed their way across the Atlantic, but this is just a guess. It might be time to revive the tradition of having a ship’s cat on board. Maybe two of them.
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Mother’s Day is nearly upon us, and for once I am totally ready. When it comes to some of these “special” days, I tend to be a little bit Scrooge-y, since it is my firm belief that they were invented by the Hallmark company to prop up sagging card sales. But honoring the mothers of the world … I can easily get behind that.
Without those brave souls who were willing to put their bodies (and sometimes minds) on the line the human race would have pretty much come to naught 300,000 years ago, as the first pair of homo sapiens would have been the last. There is not a doubt in my mind that if men had been appointed to bear the children we wouldn’t be anywhere in the fossil record.
Nope, the job of bearing children was given to the right people, that’s for certain. And this year I will gratefully honor the mom who lives with me. My own mother has been gone for nearly forty years, but on Sunday I will raise a salute to her as well.
We owe the mothers of the world. Big time.
¡Feliz día de las madres!
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When I was a medical student rotating through the clerkships, I had the chance to observe some really amazing people of the genre that we were taught to refer to as “patients.”
There was the young gentleman who managed to acquire a case of gonorrhea while up in double traction for two broken femurs. There was another young man who conversed in a lively manner with us as we were interviewing him in the Emergency Room, although there was a knife sticking out of his chest which we knew from the x-ray was in his heart.
But there was one young woman, a child really, that I remember today. She was only sixteen and at term, scheduled for a Cesarean section for reasons that I have forgotten. Cesareans were not as commonplace at that time as they are now.
Her surgeon was the head of OB/GYN at the University of Minnesota at the time, and he was both quite old and a misogynist as well. He had chosen to do the operation under local anesthesia, but the injected lidocaine did not work well and the girl screamed all through the procedure. When her baby was finally delivered she slipped into semi-consciousness from exhaustion as her wounds were repaired.
I was standing outside the operating room as she was wheeled out past our group of students and the surgeon who had performed the operation. She looked up at him as she passed, lying on the gurney, and gave him what I can only describe as a take-charge smile when she said:
“See you next year, Doc.”
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I rarely use this blog to express opinions, and I am rarely dogmatic when I do (long pause while snickering subsides). But on this tenth of May 2026 I can say without qualification that the world is better off for having cheese in it. What prompted this declaration was the slow savoring of a bit of Jarlsberg as part of my lunch.
I know that there are perfectly nice people who don’t eat cheese for a variety of reasons and I am sorry for their loss. When I try to imagine a planet without the following necessities of life I begin to weep uncontrollably.
Mac N’ CheeseCheeseburgersGrilled cheese sandwichesCheetosCheese fondueCheddar biscuits at Red LobsterCheezits crackersVeal parmesanPotatoes au gratinQuesadillasCheesecakePhilly cheesesteakFettuccine AlfredoPizza
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … can’t go on …
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One of the names for a group of weasels is a sneak. This pretty well describes our present government and the national Republican Party as well.
Here is an unretouched photograph of one such sneak, which includes Cluck and several members of his cabinet.
They are, quite simply, not to be trusted with anything that is dear to us.
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Little Home In The Valley 