Life Expectancy – Happiness Between Tails by da-AL

Vote + amazon music + Podcast: Hope for the Future by David Hunt

October 20, 2022October 20, 2022da-AL22 Comments

Heading over a picture of a VOTE button.

Hope for the Future by David Hunt – Happiness Between Tails

#AIDS #Health #History #CDC #LGBTQ+ What do know about when AIDS was first diagnosed in the early 1980s? David Hunt, a radio journalist at the time, shares his experiences. Share your thoughts, experiences, and questions by recording them on my Anchor by Spotify page — or comment at HappinessBetweenTails.com — or email me. Like what you hear? Buy me a coffee at http://buymeacoffee.com/SupportHBT Time Stamps (where segments begin): HBT introduction Intro to today’s topic and guest 1:05 Hope for the Future by David Hunt My question for you HBT outro Links used for the HBT blog post of this episode: Original blog post for this episode at Happiness Between Tails. About my own novels in progress. David Hunt’s website Check out the Happiness Between Tails blog post for this show to see a still from the video that David and I produced. — This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/depe9/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/depe9/support

Click H-E-R-E for my new podcast page at AnchorFM. Today’s show features the podcast/audio version of Hope for the Future by David Hunt. The text version comprises the second half of today’s blog post.

At the Happiness Between Tails podcast page, you’ll also find links to subscribe, hear, and share it via most any platform, from Spotify and Apple Podcasts, to Google Podcasts and Pocket Casts, along with RadioPublic and Castbox and Stitcher and more, plus an RSS feed. The full list of 50+ places is at LinkTree.

Voting day is right around the corner. Readers and writers, please don’t throw away your voice. Fortunately, there’s still time to make it easy on yourself. Vote by mail! I just did.

Rev up your keyboards and pens and lips — tell every single politically like-minded connection you have to vote and to do it immediately before they find themselves too busy or too absent-minded!

Most of my decisions were easy. 1) Naturally, I’m pro-choice, and 2), whenever possible, I support candidates least likely to give an inch to our ex-ogre, errm I mean former president.

Besides voting, this week I’ve been progressing with learning about podcasting. Since my show’s start a little over a year ago, it’s been on amazon music (and a bunch of other places, as listed at the top of this post). Have you ever reached out to someone or somewhere and, when they took 10+ months to reply, you could’nt remember why you did? In this case, amazon music has a free bonus for podcasters, though I’m murky about particulars…

No matter. Since this show is for me to practice and learn, I did as they asked. Here’s the advert they requested, highlighting that Happiness Between Tails podcast streams on amazon music…

Upon receipt, they quickly (wow!) emailed back that it looked good (double wow!), and asked which of their music genres to aire the commercial on. Umm… I asked them if they have analytics on which attract dear blog-sphere folks like you. But, now hoping they won’t take another ten months to get back to me.

What genre of music do you listen to? Do you ever listen on amazon music?

Dunno how many free times this ad will air, when, and so forth. Will keep you posted if I learn more.

Now that we’ve all voted (yes?), today’s guest blog post is by David Hunt. He also contributed here too. Basically, we met as infants, working at a car rental at LAX. Since then, together we’ve traversed many winding roads.

Voting in mind (and again, tell your friends to be like you and me and get out their black pens to vote now), wouldn’t it be great if our votes resulted in supporting great workers like those at the fore of HIV/AIDS?

Hope for the Future by David Hunt

Thirty-five years ago this month the CDC warned about a troubling outbreak of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five otherwise healthy young, gay men in California. Later that summer, when I reported on the outbreak for radio station KPFK, the number of cases had grown to 41, including 6 in California and 20 in New York. And, in addition to the rare form of pneumonia, gay men were starting to come down with a rare form of cancer and other opportunistic infections. By the end of the year, this new disease, later called AIDS, would claim 121 lives.

Clinical immunologist Joseph Church at Children’s Hospital L.A. with a young HIV-positive patient in 1992. From “Hope for the Future,” produced by David Hunt and Daal Praderas.

I don’t suppose anyone who covered the early years of the AIDS epidemic came away untouched. I’ll never forget Robert Bland’s soft brown eyes and calm determination to serve as “an AIDS guinea pig,” even as he acknowledged that a cure would surely come long after his own death. Or the button imprinted with the defiant message “I Will Survive” that San Francisco AIDS activist Bobbi Campbell proudly wore right up until his death in 1984. Or the scathing criticism gay journalist Randy Shilts leveled at bathhouse owners who refused to provide their customers with condoms or educational materials. Courage, defiance and anger; like the stages of grief, these came to symbolize for me the stages of AIDS activism. To be honest, fear was there, too, just below the surface.

Expanding Epidemic

By the time I began working as a video producer in 1985 the AIDS epidemic had expanded beyond the gay community, and now affected people of color, teens, women and even infants and children. An educational video I co-produced for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in 1992-93 told the stories of three families struggling to deal with AIDS. it featured a 12-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl (pictured above) and a baby boy. The message of the video, targeted to the parents and caregivers of children with HIV/AIDS, was not to give up hope, that new drug therapies were being tested and would soon be available. We titled the video “Hope for the Future.”

I don’t know if any of the children on the video survived long enough to benefit from the new drug cocktails that eventually made AIDS a largely manageable disease. I heard that the baby died shortly after we finished production. One thing you learn in an epidemic is to ration the amount of grief you have to handle at a given time. While I’d love to see those kids grown up and healthy, I’m not ready to face the other possibility.

If anybody’s still counting, AIDS has claimed more than 35 million lives worldwide since 1981.

David Hunt’s blog

More about the initial outbreak... and more.

Pediatric AIDS then and now.

Have you voted? And what genre of music do you listen to? Is it on amazon music?

Honoring World HIV/AIDS Awareness Month

December 2, 2019October 20, 2022da-AL35 Comments

Pessimistic about the world? Have you written off activism as a dead end? Think again. Thanks to the courageous efforts of one activist at a time, we’ve come a long way since the hellish first days of AIDS. Once upon a time, being HIV positive meant early death and having to endure enormous bigotry.

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay.

Fortunately, these days we have ways to prevent it. Folks who are tested early and are found to be HIV positive can live long lives with treatment.

Moreover, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is working to end the U.S.’s epidemic within the next ten years!

In addition, it’s working to end discrimination in the U.S. against patients with HIV!

Since 1988, each December, people worldwide show their support to end HIV, both as a disease and as a stigma. We pay our respects to those whose lives have been cut short by it, and to those who live with it.

Here are some of my impressions of the early days of AIDS, which I wrote in reply to my good David Hunt’s post here. He also wrote about it here. Another site with historical information is Gay in the 80s.

Do you ever feel like activism is useless? How do you keep from getting down?

Guest Blog Post: Tips for Sleuthing the Past by Margaret Lossi

October 8, 2018December 11, 2018da-AL1 Comment

Who will your search turn up? Photo thanks to Ryan McGuire of Gratisography.com

Writers and readers alike, for times we’d like to look into our histories, author Margaret Lossi offers tips for how to get started. My two novels are works-in-progresses! Lossi says that when it comes to looking up one’s family background, be prepared for surprises…

M.A. Lossl

The Family Tree

Warning: family history can lead to emotional discoveries.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but you begin at the end! That is, you begin with you.

Check your birth certificate, verify your parents. It may seem like a given, but just sometimes people find they are adopted, or their mum is really their grandma. It pays to check.

Check your parents birth certificates, to verify your grandparents. Then work your way back through the generations, verifying birth certificates.

These first steps build the strong foundation of your family tree, so worth doing well.

It is not a case of how far back you can go, but the quality of your data

You may wish to answer a family question. I knew my parents were second cousins, so wanted to find out about this link. Set yourself a goal to work towards. Whatever your motivation, make sure you verify each…

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Now We Are 2 (only): Sweet Lola is Sorely Missed by da-AL

September 23, 2018September 23, 2018da-AL94 Comments

Lola our black Labrador mix dog at the beach.

Our home is too quiet, too empty without our dear Lola. Last Wednesday, she joined her twin brother, Pierre.

Lola our black Labrador mix dog when she was only a few months old.

We were privileged to have her. Like Pierre, she was loyal in every way to the end. The two were trusting, kind, obedient, and fun loving.

Lola our black Labrador mix dog, to the right of her brother, Pierre.

Second in her heart only to her human family was her adored brother who passed away a few months ago. Hopefully, now they’re together, forever safe and happy.

Lola, our black Labrador mix dog, is sorely missed.

A kind fellow blogger said that losing a dear pet never gets easier. Indeed it doesn’t…

Guest Blog Post: Ignorance by Chuy

August 7, 2018September 23, 2018da-AL4 Comments

It took me a long time to learn this. Paz’ dog Chuy taught it to him…

Chow Dog Zen

Road to The Wonder Woods

Just because you

Don’t Know

You are

Beautiful,

Perfect,

And Precious to this

Great Cosmos

Doesn’t mean

It isn’t So.

Chuy

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Now We Are 3 (only) by da-AL

March 10, 2018September 23, 2018da-AL150 Comments

Pierre, da-AL, Lola, K-D — Pierre a few months ago, at about 14 years old.

This morning I stayed in bed till late. I was awake, but I didn’t want to get up to a house without Pierre in it.

Yesterday I had to put my dog down. Such a gentle euphemism for murder. To put one to sleep. My dear, dear dog-man trusted me, yet I tricked him. First by lulling him into thinking it was a normal day by asking my husband to roast a chicken at home that delighted his nose and soothed his belly. But afterward a vet arrived. She knotted a tourniquet at his rear thigh, shaved an area below it, and injected a sedative. His fitful gasping evened, his pain-blinded stare softened. Amid caresses and loving murmurs, the vet administered a second shot to finish him off.

My dear Pierre at 9 months old.

But Pierre lingered within his peaceful half-sleep. So another shave. Then a third shot to a different leg. That one finally killed him.

Nicer ways exist to frame this, but my heart won’t listen to the many fine arguments for how, whether, and when.

No, I don’t know of a better way to have done it. When his kidneys began to fail, and arthritis increasingly ravaged his days and nights, I promised us two things; he’d never take another trembling ride to a vet, and he’d never be wet again (he was a Labrador mix one-of-a-kind who hated water).

Fortunately, we could afford to have a vet to visit our home for those final injections. Fortunately, I could be with Pierre, my sweetest, most uncomplicated of friendships and loves. Fortunately, he’d lived a good long life, as dog lives go.

All the same, this was the awfullest decision I hope ever to make.

Life is beautiful, merciless, humbling.

As much as our recent time together — these months of arranging throw rugs, moving furniture, closing doors so he wouldn’t get tangled among legs or be locked into rooms or slip and not be able to get back up, all which upset him to no end — these months of his hobbled struggle to follow me everywhere and to share walks with his sisters even though he’d fall within a few steps from home — this stoic period when, despite his waning appetite, he’d eat all that my family hand fed him while I experimented with healing remedies and weight gaining foods — this era when we set ramps and nudged him up and I learned the trick to gathering his 55 pounds into my arms to navigate down — these weeks of carrying him outside to pee in the middle of the night because the shame of soiling his diapers showed naked in his eyes (debilitated kidneys need volumes more water to compensate)…

and even though yesterday was the worst, today not a whole lot better…

I am thankful for every moment we shared. Hopefully, he knew he was loved…

Snuggle Dogs by da-AL

February 21, 2018September 23, 2018da-AL44 Comments

Our best friends are those who cheer us through our ups and cheer us up through our downs.

Mr. Gentleman Dog is aging. Growing older is a gift, but it extracts a price. For some of us, the cost is higher than for others.

In Mr. Gentleman Dog’s case, arthritis is wearing away his hips. And his kidneys don’t work as well. Rather than soil stuff, several times a night he rouses himself to ask to go out into the cold and pee.

But every day, he still has plenty of moments that he enjoys. He still loves treats, short walks, and cuddles.

And he loves the warmth of friendship…

Guest Blog Post: “Open Me First,” in Sharon Lynne Bonin-Pratt’s exact words

December 15, 2017December 15, 2017da-AL9 Comments

6 tips for heartfelt giving by writer and fellow blogger Sharon Lynne Bonin-Pratt…

Sharon Bonin-Pratt's Ink Flare

The holiday dilemma: what do you get for the person who has everything?

Perhaps something goofy like slippers that sing Rock Around the Clock, or something extravagant like a set of diamond encrusted napkins rings, the kind of thing that becomes an expensive party joke. Maybe a bauble like a garden statue of lighted snowmen or a set of holiday themed coffee mugs, useless most of the year because, well, they’re holiday themed and who wants to drink coffee in July with Rudolph’s red nose stenciled on it? We can get truly original: a dozen bottles of wine with personalized labels, Humphrey Malarkey Family Reserve Chardonnay, so it looks like Uncle Humph became a boutique vintner on Christmas Eve. Another possibility is the very exclusive Himalayan Cilantro Sea Salt Spa Scrub with Acai Crystals – imagine how much fun Great Aunt Agnes will have trying to figure out…

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Brushing, Fish Oil, Turmeric, Digestive Enzymes for Young and Geriatric Cats and Dogs by da-AL

July 9, 2017September 16, 2018da-AL49 Comments

Striped cat with great fur — Cats are better sleek than scrawny.

What do dogs have to do with cats?

It all began with a brush, some fish oil, and some turmeric. For good measure, some digestive enzymes too.

About a month ago, I cat-sat a 15ish-year-old cat for a week. She was bony, flaky skinned, clumpy-furred, and lethargic. It as just as well that her ‘usual people’ didn’t tell me they expected her to die of old age while they were away.

Kitty ate, drank, and partook of her litter box normally. After a couple days of checking in on her twice daily, her snow drifts of dandruff, her languor, and her scrawniness nagged at me.

Day three, I took action. With each morning and evening visit, I began three things:

Vigorous brushing with a slicker brush, the kind with the bent wires.
A capsule of fish oil squirted into her mouth twice a day too.
A capsule of turmeric sprinkled over her kibble.

Each day, she looked significantly better; livelier, not nearly as angular, and her dandruff had dwindled to snowflakes. Now that her ‘regular people’ continue the protocol, she’s prettier than ever!

Beautiful face of my black Labrador mix dog — Wise and gray make sweet and black all the lovelier.

The following week, I took one of my dogs for a rabies vaccination. After the vet administered the shot, he started slicker brushing my dog. He said, “All dogs and cats need a thorough brushing daily.”

“Doesn’t it hurt short-hairs and geriatrics?”

He answered, “Once they get used to it, they love it. It helps their skin and circulation.”

What a difference! With each brushing, my dogs shed less hair and skin flakes. Today, their coats practically glow with shine and good health.

Digestive enzymes came into play when my dogs’ halitosis and flatulence were becoming chronic. After meals, one of them would pace and pant for hours, her stomach gurgling. When I saw digestive enzymes on sale at the pet store, I decided to try dosing them with my own. Each meal, I split a tablet between the dogs. Now their breath smells much better and they settle quickly after meals!

Like with anything I give my dogs, I started small when testing the try fish oil, turmeric, and digestive enzymes. Then I looked for loose stools, which would indicate that I should cut back. Cats and dogs alike took to vigorous brushing right away, the proof in how they try to elbow each other out of the way once I get started.

Turmeric and Cod Liver Oil for Healthy Joints and Clear Eyes in Older Dogs and Cats by da-AL

June 9, 2017da-AL39 Comments

My dog and me, each of us happy and healthy.

Far be it from me to pretend that I’m an expert in animal health. However, the following remedies have done wonders for my dogs as well as my mom’s cats!

My sweet dogs are thirteen and a half. The day they don’t want to chase balls, go for walks, and bark at the postal carrier, I’ll be worried. Every day, they teach me more about how to grow older with grace. Every day, I do my best to make aging easier on them.

While I know dogs and cats aren’t physiologically exactly like humans, for an extra safety precaution, I often try remedies on myself before enlisting them. In addition, I start off slowly and keep a close watch for possible overdosing and any bad reactions.

Turmeric

This wonderful golden root, touted to aid just about everything, has helped heal my broken knee. Unexpectedly, turmeric also helps me sleep better.

For the past few months, I’ve been splitting an extra high potency turmeric capsule among my pets, sprinkling the contents over their meals. Within two days, they were greeting the day with renewed spryness!

Cod Liver Oil (super fine grade)

About the same time, I found I was constantly wiping gooey/crusty schmutz from the corners of their eyes.

Crusty gooey junk in my dog's eyes. — Muck in my sweetie’s eyes.

Their eyes are different from ours in a variety of ways:

They have three eyelids!
The placement of their eyes depends on the shapes of their faces and noses.
Their rods-to-cones ratio differ from ours.
We see color and close-up better. They see movement better.

Ultra fine grade cod liver oil squeezed into canine eyes, I read somewhere, could refresh their eyes and possibly slow cataract formation.

Hmmm …oil in the eyes?! The idea took time to warm up to. With great trepidation (and secrecy from dear ones who would surely have been horrified) I squeezed some into my own eyes.

Cod liver oil capsule in the palm of my hand. — Always use great care with your pets.

Lo and behold, down to the fishy smell, it was no big deal. The wee bit of blurry vision righted within minutes, and there was no sting. Whew!

Moving onto my furry beloveds, to my supreme delight, within two days, their eyes were clear — plus!! — they could see better! As a result, they’re more responsive and obviously happier! The wonderfulness of this makes tears spring to my own eyes!

Mondays have become ‘oil days.’ They’re never thrilled by the application, but any dog with Labradors in it aims to please. All the more so as they age.

More about what I do for my dear furry ones.