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TC: He is 83, pre-diabetic, has fatty liver disease, and high BP.

Been lurking here occasionally, but thought I’d take a moment to reply to this. A couple of weeks ago, I lost a friend to the covids. He was 85, and in excellent health. Swam regularly, was around 180 lbs. Vietnam vet (from the early days, I guess), good guy. We’d get together on Sundays and go get some Red Lobster and play video games.

Well, a month or so back, I called to ask if he would be coming over that Sunday, and he said he wasn’t feeling well, had come down with the covid. A week later, I got a text from his wife, and she said that he was in the ICU. A few days later, I got another text saying that he had passed.

Poor fella. I called her, and she told me (she was very upset) that they had put him on the remdesvir(?), and then his blood oxygen level had dropped, and they decided that rather than putting him on the respirator, they just let him go.

She had the covid too, but she’s only 70-something and recovering from cancer. Yeah.

Anyway, I miss my friend. No more battleship games on Sundays. And I’m quite ticked off at the medical establishment, for reasons that you have all been discussing quite thoroughly here.

Which is to say - take care of your hubby, because otherwise, they won’t. It’s carousel time.

Oh, and while I’m making a semi-coherent comment here, congrats to Mr. Bags, soon to be grand-geezer. I’d still offer you that chicken fried steak if things work out, but given that you’re in occupied territory, maybe I’ll just offer to send you something nice instead.

Take care, and I hope that things work out for you (both of you).

My husband was in the Army in the early 60’s between Korea and Viet Nam. He spent 13 months in Korea and was stationed at Ft. Benning GA as a jump instructor, firearms instructor, and a hand-to-hand fight instructor. He was a drill sergeant.

So far in TN they have been giving the Monoclonal Antibodies when you are first diagnosed, if you want them. I have read that the Remdisivir is deadly. If either of us ends up in the hospital I will ask not to have that.

Sorry about your friend.

This will sound really “out there”. But do you think there might be a chance that exposure to Agent Orange while in Vietnam might have given him an added susceptibility?

My dad’s 1982 death of lung cancer was felt by his doctors to have been exacerbated by exposure to OA. My half-brother, (a Marine), died this past January of a rare form of cancer. His doctors don’t believe OA was a direct cause, since it’s been so long since Nam. But one opined that the exposure changed something chemically or hormonally in his body, making him vulnerable without displaying any overt symptoms. His immune system became a little run-down from age and overwork, and BAM, enter the rare cancer.