Prednisone

Readers who recently lost a loved-one, human or canine, to cancer might want to skip this post. Belladonna, that means you.

A year or so ago, Belladonna lost her beloved dog, Hercules, to cancer.

He went into rapid decline and stopped eating. She took him into the vet on a brutally cold day. The vet ran a few tests and we got the bad news.

The vet explained that cancer treatment is nowhere near as advanced for dogs as it is for humans. If she pulled out all the stops she might be able to stretch out the inevitable conclusion for a year but that Herc's quality-of-life would be wretched.

Or, she (the Vet) could give Bella a script for oral steroid called Prednisone and Herc would have seven-to-ten days where five years would be peeled off his life. He would act like a puppy again. But it came at the price of allowing the cancer to roam through his body unopposed by his immune system.

Bella opted for the Prednisone. Herc had nine awesome days for Bella to say goodbye. He ate a lot of cheese-burgers while sitting on Bella's bed...both big-time no-nos in earlier days. And then he crashed. He crashed fast and he crashed hard.

The cancer had invaded his central nervous system and he started glitching, big-time. He was twitching and shaking. I found the fact that his eyes were spasming in independent directions to be particularly freaky.

Two hours after the start of the crash, I transported Herc to the vet. Because we were going to be early, I drove around some of the local, gravel roads where we had gone on long walks in the past to kill some time.

Bella said her final good-byes and held him while he received the injections.

***

Very, very few of us were alive during the Russian Revolution or the Weimar Republic's hyper-inflation and subsequent embrace of Hitler. Few of us were alive at the start of the Great Depressions. Those events have been "spun" and retold so many times that it is now difficult have an authentic sense of the times.

We grope for analogies in hopes of finding a road-map for our current, difficult times. We look for situations and scripts and sequences-of-events that we can embrace because those stories are authentic. Because we saw them first-hand. Because we lived them.

I humbly submit the story of Herc's final days and the Prednisone as one of those road-maps.

The Elites' fixation on WOKE is a hyper-dosage of Prednisone attempting to squash the symptoms of the cancer within, trying to squeeze out a few more days of "normal"ish. The cost of interrupting the steady progression and intensification of symptoms results in an earlier death and to have the crash at the end accelerate at a nightmarish rate, to be like the snap of a bullwhip.

Steel yourself. There will be a crash and the rapidity might be startling. It is likely to get freaky.