A Village Sensation When your humble servant returned from Russia and arrived in the village by taxi, I was greeted by some extraordinary news. Our eighty-year-old neighbor, after being a widower for a year, had married a seventy-year-old woman. “Is that really a sensation?” You may criticize me. I will answer: “You are one hundred percent right. That is not a sensation.” But when a seventy-year-old woman becomes pregnant by an eighty-year-old man with a walking stick and false teeth—that is a sensation! Science tells us that most women give birth before the age of thirty. And here was a seventy-year-old woman who, against all expectations, was about to become a mother. Nobody could digest the news. The old man’s grown-up children thought that their father and his elderly wife would soon leave this world one after the other. But then something drove them crazy. A new heir had appeared on the horizon. The matter concerned a property consisting of sixteen sotkas of land, seven houses, t...
How the polio vaccine almost killed me. So background is that I am in nurse practitioner school and about to start my clinicals, of note I work as an ER nurse in a relatively small town area. While uploading my vaccine record to the portal thing, I realized I can’t prove that I had the whole polio series as a kid, even though I probably did have them. And because I was waiting until the last minute the only option I had was to get the adult dose like that week. Important note for the story is while I was in nursing school I worked full time as an EMT on an ambulance in the same city. That’s a detail we will revisit later lol. So I made an appointment at the health department, took my dog to go get his vaccines at the vet, ran into the health department to get my vaccine real quick and I was going to be on my way. Get the dose, walk out, right past the sign (that I remember actually looking at) that says wait 15 minutes to make sure you don’t have a reaction. If that isn’t foreshado...