Episode 230: Salty Is Infected

Salty & Spice talk infections and antibiotics and what to do if you have to deal with this dangerous situation where there is no medical help available.

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Transcript

Spice: 0:00

Hello, everybody!.

Salty: 0:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show the Big Show, most importantly, critically acclaimed a podcast that is recorded in our vehicle. And today we are in the Hemi studio. That's right, the eight cylinders of power studio and I have a, I have a love for high performance, rear wheel drive cars. And this time of year is when I pay for my love for haima high performance, rear wheel drive cars last year, I was stuck because of the failure of my normal everyday driver, which was not a high performance, rear wheel drive car. I was stuck driving my race car, my nearly 500 horsepower Mustang with all of the anti slip and anti skid and all that kind of stuff removed from the car, so that it can do better burnouts and hook up on a track track. And I was driving that in the ice and snow. This car is much better than that. This is totally beside the point. But there is ice and snow on the ground today. Not on the highway. That was yesterday. But yeah. Anyway, welcome to the show the Big Show, we've already got our diversion version out of the way. And first I need to this is a an unusual warning we're putting out on this podcast. We don't normally warn people, it will still be g rated. Because that's just how we roll. But we are going to be talking about a subject today that if you're squeamish, you might want to skip this one. I'll tell you what it is it's a it's a health, a human health issue. So it's not like it's disgusting. Disgusting, but it's not like it is. You know?

Spice: 1:54

or anything. It's just

Salty: 1:56

what it's just you know, you might be a little squeamish because we're gonna be talking directly and succinctly about symptoms, and about diagnostic things in it's not gonna be a pretty podcast now. You know, spice and I are we're really big believers in being transparent. And being open and honest about how you know, we are how our health is how we're wired. we're wired,

Spice: 2:25

how we prep in a direct applied to our personal situation kind of way.

Salty: 2:30

Yeah. So that's part of what this is because I'm infected. Right now. I am very infected. I am extremely infected. Yes,

Spice: 2:38

bad tenants. He is struggling to get evicted.

Salty: 2:41

Yes, I have bad tenants. I am trying to get evicted. I'm trying very hard for those little bacteria fellows to go away. In fact, we

Spice: 2:51

called him the big posse yesterday,

Salty: 2:53

yes, we took a shot in the room. And that's really what we're gonna be talking about today, we're gonna be talking about dealing with infection because the type of infection that I got, and even more so the type of the very ones of the infection that I mean, it hit when it hit it hit hard. If we were living with before. Antibiotics

Spice: 3:19

are temporarily without antibiotics,

Salty: 3:22

I'd have been in trouble. I mean, I just survived it

Spice: 3:25

might not have

Salty: 3:26

actual serious life threatening trouble. This is for those people who are out there bashing modern medicine. I would be maybe on my deathbed today. If it were not for me. But actually, this is not an exaggeration. No, this is I probably wouldn't today, I'd probably just be very sick today. But I might be heading toward my deathbed. From this.

Spice: 3:50

It would have been about deathbed time, almost.

Salty: 3:52

I mean, it was, I think, the quickness of the onset of it. And the severity of it. It was like Wham. So if any of this has got you like I think I'll pass we've got a lot of other podcasts, go back and listen to some of the older ones. Hello, I'm going to take a second diversion and say, if you've never really gone back to the old ones, given a month or two before you do because I'm going back and I am fixing a lot of the audio that we had earlier. Our audio is much better now than it was then. And I'm removing I'm truncating them so I'm not removing content. I'm removing a lot of ohms and ahhs and, and blank gap spaces. Basically, when I truncate a podcast it is up about five to 7% shorter, but it makes it much more listenable the pace is faster.

Spice: 4:41

The recent ones you've been doing that for six months or

Salty: 4:43

so, the recent one so if you're used, you're used to these will sound a little different than the original one. So I'm going back there and you know, as time permits, I'm fixing them and and redoing their transcripts and stuff like that to a more accurate transcript. Okay, pressing right Let's talk about what happened to me this weekend. I'm gonna have to stop talking here preset because I have a sore throat, which may or may not be related to my infection tangentially related, it's not directly related because I'm not having a throat infection. But so I woke up yesterday morning and by the way, squeamish people now you should really be gone by now.

Unknown: 5:24

Okay.

Salty: 5:26

She's not that she's like why do I but she's a path Oh physiologist and nothing is squeamish for her. Well, there's only one or two things which I will not mention. That totally freaked her out. But we're not talking about those. But you know, she's like, Oh, so Bingo. Yeah, really. Most people will find it. Ooh, most people will trust me here. You won't go again. Whatever. I've been maybe a little bit off my feed the last week maybe under the weather Not, not anything big. Wednesday, I got off of working. Admittedly, I did drive six hours Wednesday, it's driving that kind of hours and mileage is tiring. Especially on the roads we drive on. We're not driving on these big six eight lane highways that, you know, you just go down the road now we're driving on roads that require you to keep a constant vigil for wildlife. It's a big deal.

Spice: 6:19

twisty two lanes full of deer.

Salty: 6:20

Yeah, twisty, two lanes hilly full of deer, you really have to pay attention to what you're doing. There's no shoulder, whatever. So if you drop a wheel off, you're going into the ditch and probably rolling. You know, it's kind of dangerous roads. So you have to pay attention. So that works. But I was unusually tired. Wednesday night, like hammer. Okay, Thursday pump better, got up to work. Normal Friday morning, yesterday morning, which I was off work yesterday, I get up and I'm feeling normal. I walk in to the bathroom. And I start to urinate. And I'm feeling burning, like a serious like burning. And my urine is a little bit blood color. And I'm like, Oh, this isn't good. And then I pass a blob of mucus that was bloody. And I'm looking at that going well. I'm thinking Mr. Salty, you have a UTI. I've had this once before your several years ago, not nearly as severe. So um, so I talked urinary tract infection, your urinary tract infection. Now, urinary tract infections are generally variable in how severe they are. They have multiple causes. Spicer is going to get into that here in a bit. They can be everything from fairly moderate, and easily self correcting to extremely severe. Oh, okay, well, that's, that's as bad. I guess I'm gonna have to do the usual I'm gonna push the water. And they can happen. Obviously, I'm not a woman, they could happen in men and women. They're much more common in women. But they do happen in men quite a bit. I mean, it's not like it's an uncommon thing at all, especially older men. Yeah, and I'm not a young man anymore. And I would assume that once I've had one, that tells me I'm susceptible. That's a guess. The goal. Um, so anyway, but I don't feel like I'm quite empty. But anyway, I go back to sit down in my chair, talk to my, my doctor in house who's

Spice: 8:35

not a physician.

Salty: 8:36

But she's my health person. She takes a look at the situation. And she says, Well, yeah, you probably

Spice: 8:43

hear the burning and it's a UTI. Yeah, but most UTI is are relatively mild. Many of them would self correct. But if they don't correct pretty quick, it's best to get them treated. So I suggest he wait for a few hours and see if it gets better. And if it doesn't see the health care provider, the roads are nasty, slick.

Salty: 9:02

here's the here's the tricky Twister though. It's snowing, and it's been snowing after ice. So the roads are iffy. The roads are not good. She actually canceled her class and went virtual. Because Yeah, she didn't want to go in the roads were iffy enough that, you know, she zooms in class, and they are set up to do that. So this is not like it's like huge, super ridiculous thing. But, you know, people know that if the roads are bad, she's gonna do a zoom class. Our students know that. So anyway, that's that's the conditions on? I'm like, Yeah, okay, maybe I should go see. Now we live in a small town, where we have a medical clinic that's open four days a week. They're actually opened the fifth day, but there's no doctor there. There's no prescribing nurse. So when we're looking at medical care, we're looking at urgent tech care in a town that's 25 miles away, not a big deal. Just letting you know the situation. So I go sit down on my chair, you know, check my email. Do my morning stuff. And then I've just I've got to go back to the bathroom. So I go back into the bathroom. And this time, it was a totally different story. It was like peeing actual stream of blood and mucus, mucus, mucus, mucus. I mean, it was a mess.

Spice: 10:19

They want to look like blood clots if I didn't know what blood clots look like, instead, they look like

Salty: 10:24

okay, This changes everything. This is, well, let's wait and see to Okay, you are going to the doctor and going, as soon as the roads are clear enough to get there. Long story short, after two or three more urination, because I'm feeling a need to urinate, it's all part of the deal. And she'll explain this. I mean, I'm feeling like I'm not emptying. You know, it's like, go get my car, I drive myself over to the urgent care. I go in, I give a sample, which was a bloody mess. Actually, it really was. In the person looking at it, she kind of looked at the sample. And she said, Yeah, I see why you're here. So I go in there, they run tests on my sample. This is stuff they can do right there, the office

Spice: 11:15

dipstick test,

Salty: 11:16

and the woman hands me, the doctor hands me the results of the test. And they are really bad. They're really bad. With one little caveat. They are bacterial. That's a good thing. Because if they're fungal, that's not as good.

Spice: 11:35

If it's viral, you're kind of stuck.

Salty: 11:37

Yeah, they're viral, this could get bad. So I get this big long list of she says this is pretty much bad across the board. So they took the nuclear option, they gave me a great big and it was a big shot of something or other I, whatever it is, they give I don't know what it was, it was an antibiotic,

Spice: 11:57

or combo,

Salty: 11:59

or combo thereof. And I could find out what it was. But video is really, really, really curious. drop me a note via the email on this thing, and I'll find out what it was. But it's the one that commonly go for UTI is because it means it's obvious from the lab results, this is an infection, they give me this in the butt. And she's like, okay, there's gonna be a little bit of a stick. And I didn't even feel the needle. I mean, it was fine. And that was painless. And she kind of kind of grimace and said, well, that part was, yeah, you may feel a little bit of a burning sensation here in a bit. That's the light again, and I'm like, that's a cane. Okay, you're shooting my butt with light again? Well, part of the deal. It's a buffer anywho. Long story short, it did help. I'm already better. But I have started a 10 day, I didn't bring the bottle, I theoretically started,

Spice: 13:00

you did start,

Salty: 13:01

I did start a 10 day regime of antibiotics, I will finish completely. And no matter how he's feeling by then, at this point, no matter if I'm, if I have no gut enzymes left. And having the worst case of diarrhea that I could have, which does happen from antibiotics. I'm gonna finish them. And at this point in time, I am going to turn the story cuz I'm done. Okay, I'm feeling better today, at least as far as, yeah, I am feeling better. I my throat a little sore. And so I'm gonna stop talking. I'm gonna turn this over to the pavlo physiologist in the family. And she's going to talk about all this stuff. And also, she's going to go through what you're going what you would do if you were in the situation I found myself in and you couldn't get to a doctor. And we she's got a medical reference with her here, the outstanding book, where there

Spice: 13:57

is Dr. David Warner, and Carol Thurman and john Maxwell,

Salty: 14:01

outstanding, for there is no doctor, and you can get it as a free PDF. Yes, I recommend doing what it takes to order a copy of this book. You can get it as a PDF, but you know, PDFs and electronics book is something you can grab with the powers out, whatever.

Spice: 14:18

When somebody asked me this morning, I mentioned this book, can you get a hold of it? Yeah, we've got a copy. Do you know where it is? Oh, yeah, within five feet. And it took me about two minutes to lay my hand on it. That's about where it ought to be. Because that's where you're gonna need it. If you need it.

Salty: 14:34

Give one more diversion. salties rule. If you have stop bleeding stuff, don't bury it in a pile of other stuff. Because you need to be able to get to that now without having to dig through stuff and bleed over all of your property. Just a caveat. That's the one thing that I get frustrated about. It's like, Okay, I'm cut. I'm bleeding all over everything and we've got 18 cases. As a pop on top of the anti bleeding stuff,

Spice: 15:02

we actually have anti bleeding stuff that is one open drawer away, you just haven't figured out which drawer.

Salty: 15:10

So there we are. Do we see what's going on? Are we relating here? Can we see the room this is going?

Spice: 15:18

Yeah, the emergency bleeding stuff is right, nice and handy, but apparently hasn't. So, okay, I have, I am not a physician, but I teach things related to human health for a living. I teach pathophysiology and stuff like that. So I'm not clueless. And as soon as he described to me as symptoms, I knew it was UTI. They're dead common. I know women who've had 32 things. They're not as common in men under the age of 60. But they're

Salty: 15:49

fairly common. I mean, it's common enough. It's not a one in 2 million types.

Spice: 15:54

Know, there's a bunch of microbes on your surface, who would love to make a living up there and your nice warm self, if they could manage it, and they can crawl up the urinary tract. Honestly, it's a shorter climb in females. And that's why we're the more likely to get urinary tract infections. But guys do get them. Because some microbes just start good at going for long walks. So you get the infections, they're fairly common. A lot of them will self resolve if untreated, but some of them all some of them will kill you if untreated. So he describes the burning sensation, I'm almost certain it's a UTI from the start, okay. But the roads clear up a little bit, go get you taken care of because there's no reason to play around with it. And when he came back half an hour later and told me it was much worse and invited me to check out the problem. Well, okay, that I was actually concerned, but he was already on his way out. So I didn't tell him how concerned I was. I mean, he

Salty: 16:46

gotta admit, it was not, not something you were happy with.

Spice: 16:49

No, I was not happy with it. And I would have initiated treatment by myself. Even though I am not a qualified medical provider. If we had not had access to any qualified medical provider, I would have jumped in at this point, because I found the picture alarming enough,

Salty: 17:06

you cannot do that. What we mean by that is we will always go to a qualified medical provider, if they're available.

Spice: 17:14

I do not mistake my knowing some things about the subject to being an actual physician, or other prescriber,

Salty: 17:22

if if they're available does not mean Oh, well, yeah, it's Saturday night, you know, six o'clock? I don't know they're still available. Yeah, if they're not available means we're hiking in the middle of the Rockies and we're a day away,

Spice: 17:38

can't get there can't reach them on the phone. That's, you know, cannot contact.

Salty: 17:42

They're just not there. Yeah, there's nobody, there's no, there's no way to get to town. Because,

Spice: 17:49

yeah, probably not a thing. But some places we go, that's the thing.

Salty: 17:53

Or, you know, if there's social unrest in the ADK, get through it.

Spice: 17:57

So I was thinking, alright, if he couldn't have gotten to Urgent Care today, if this had been an inch of ice on the roads instead, what would I have done? Well, then I would have called a real provider, and gotten better advice on what to do. Now we'll go more severe expression and say, Okay, I can't get ahold of anybody who has been specifically trained in how to handle this, then what do I do? Then? I pull out this where there is no doctor. And if I hadn't known it was a UTI already, which I pretty much did. I would have used this book, and it would have given me a very good indication that it was a urinary tract infections problems with the urinary tract. Oh, here's what you could have. And here's the most common one. And here's the signs and hey, look, they match exactly what salty was experiencing. That would have gotten me there. And then it's got this advice, what do you do about it? First, you start drinking a lot of water, because his immune system was already fighting it. That's what the mucus was about, if you can help it, by flushing those suckers out faster than they can replicate, your immune system can often get ahead of it and get rid of it. So that was the idea of the drinking a lot of water. His first inclination was I'm having trouble peeing, I shouldn't do that build up pressure. And I'm like, see that you really want me to keep drinking and having to go more often. And I'm like, Yes. And that was what that was about. And then if the person does not get better by drinking a lot of water if you have a fever, and then the doctor who did write this book starts talking about what drugs they should take. And later on in the book, they've got dosage amounts and information like that on it. So and then it's got a second line drug. If these don't work, try this other one that's harder to get more expensive, and it's got dosing information for that. So this is the kind of resource that can really help you deal with this sort of situation. If something comes up very suddenly now UTI is do not generally jump from no symptoms specific to a UTI to raging monster UTI in 12 hours. That's highly unusual activity. He saw thought it was highly unusual, as well. So this isn't just me talking. Usually you've got more warning. But if something like that does come upon you, you have the kind of tools that you are prepared to deal with that. Am I qualified to prescribe antibiotics? No, and I never expect to do it. And I hope to never do it. But nevertheless, I've got this nice little book that lets me know if I do have to make hard decisions like that, or risk having somebody I care about just die on me, I've got a little bit of information to go on.

Salty: 20:36

Now, since I know, I am not allergic to one of the antibiotics that this book says. And I do have in our preps, some of that antibiotic and I admit, it's a fish in case our fish gets it's a it's a fish thing, this is something we do not recommend that you do, but we have it ourselves. I'm not gonna recommend somebody take an antibiotic that is not specifically designed for human,

Spice: 21:07

I think more harm has been done by a very long shot in people self prescribing when they should not, then the reverse,

Salty: 21:14

right. And I'm just not going to do though, I what I am going to say is I'm not going to be a hypocrite, and sit here and tell you, I wouldn't do it. If my life is on the line. And I don't have any other choice. I'm going to do it because I've got some, some research here that says this type of antibiotic is the appropriate thing to take for this thing. The kicker is I went to a Urgent Care place that ran tests on my urine. And they could see these two lines, boom, boom, this is a biotic This is bacteria,

Spice: 21:58

bacterial, yep. Hi.

Salty: 22:01

So taking an if it's a viral thing, or if it's a fungal thing, taking antibiotics is not going to help you a bit a taking, you know,

Spice: 22:10

the first thing he recommends is does work against fungi. viruses, nothing against viruses,

Salty: 22:18

really not sure what you're gonna do, but it

Spice: 22:20

doesn't hurt against viruses any more than the side effects of the drug, any more than the risks of the side effects of the drug. Here's the thing, though. If you are going to do something like this, do your best be equipped to know how to do it. Right? Have the information, have looked through the book, know how it's set up, know how to use it, have it close to hand and be equipped to do it right? Don't just say, well, I've got this thing in my prep. So I am ready to deal with the situation. You're not the information is at least as important as the medications. And you need all the information. For example, this will tell you what type of

Salty: 23:04

was Cipro?

Spice: 23:05

Cipro is the second line drug.

Salty: 23:08

Cipro or we have Cipro. It will tell you the Cipro but what it won't tell you is how much Cipro how long to take it. Because with antibiotics, we'll come back to this and we pound this on pound to help you have to finish the course of antibiotics. Once you start it. If you take one, you've got to finish the full course, no matter how you're feeling, you have to finish it. Because if you don't, this is where antibiotic resistance stuff gets into your system. And that's a bad thing. And the book has some has some information on that. So this is why the this resource is so available.

Spice: 23:48

Yeah, it forebay I just opened to a page in the back where it says medicines, oh, here's some penicillin. If you've got 250 milligram tablets, here's the amount we recommend you have in your medical kit. Here is the page you go to to see how much you should give, and on what schedule and for what kinds of disorders. So if you're going to have the penicillin, which we don't, because I'm allergic, if you're going to have the penicillin that you absolutely also need to have the information on how to use the penicillin, and it needs to be handy. And you need to know how to access the information promptly when you need it.

Salty: 24:26

And you cannot be a resource. economical prepper feeling better okay. Yeah, well, I've got you're supposed to take eight more pills, but that's really gonna cut into my supply. I think I'm gonna stop here. You can't you don't that is. That's my little reminder. It's time to take my pill.

Spice: 24:48

It's actually not time for another hour because

Salty: 24:50

well, okay, then I'll have to adjust my time. Yeah. But that's my little timer that I set up so that I don't forget to take my Yeah,

Spice: 24:58

my pill. If you worry In a survival situation, shaving the antibiotics might be a necessary thing. But if you do it, when you don't absolutely have to do it, you are shooting yourself in the feet, and it's not going to get you out of combat, it's just going to make you limp a lot. You're doing yourself harm, and you're possibly doing the people around you harm if you shave antibiotic use when you don't have a very strong compelling reason to have to do that.

Salty: 25:23

And it should be a strong, compelling reason. Like if you have 90 of the things and you're using a half of them. Well,

Spice: 25:30

you know, and you have no clear timeline for when you'll ever be able to get more. Yeah. So here was the deal. We came into a situation, we were able to deal with it using modern medicine and trained providers, which is absolutely the best option. But if you're going to have to deal with that sort of stuff, know how to deal with it, as well as have the physical things on hand to be able to deal with it.

Salty: 25:54

Okay, to stick a fork in it. I'm done. All right. We'll talk to you later. Thanks. Bye

Spice: 25:58

bye.