[18hammers]

I have seen what happens to those when age comes to town. Drugs, likely all kinds, often heart related meds that bring problems of there own.
 Friends age as well, you and them get mobility problems, visits become infrequent then stop. Income drops, costs rise.
People loose their drivers license and if rural that is like a death sentence. Increasing vision problems along with balance issues will leave you unable to perform lots of home repairs.
Stairs will become difficult then dangerous. In social relations with others you will find your thoughts and wishes ignored then just unwanted. You may find  someone eager to assist you, and they will, right up to the point they prey on you for gain.
I have seen all this and more. I am not going anywhere with this post, just giving the facts of life, and saying prepare ahead for this.   

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As a person with serious mobility issues (I'm missing a leg, lol), I can say with authority that surviving very long on my own on a Doomstead would be impossible.  However, as part of a larger group of Doomers, it would not be hard at all, assuming the doomstead is properly set up.

I have 4 mobility devices, plus a prosthetic leg, crutches and canes. Two of my mobility devices are electric, a 24V electric wheelchair mostly for indoor use but it does function outdoors as long as the terrain is fairly flat and a 4 wheel 48V electric scooter for outdoor use.  Both use standard deep cycle 12V batts.  In addition if I have repair issues with my electrics. I have a standard manual wheelchair and I recently modified a knee scooter for use with my amputated leg.

I couldn't do anything requiring climbing or chopping wood etc, but I could easily run and maintain a hydroponic or aquaculture system, do food preservation and preparation and a variety of electrical wiring and plumbing tasks, although I'd likely need a helper with better hands.  A kid age 10 or more would do fine.

On the plus side, since I already live a pretty cicumscribed existence, I am already used to being stuck in one place so I'm over the cabin fever psychological hump.  I don't take any meds besides pain killers, which I could do without though it would be unpleasant.

My outdoor scooter has a 40 mile range on a charge, so as long as there are still some kind of stores open I could go shopping or trade goods with nearby doomsteads.  A small solar PV setup would easily keep my mobility devices charged up.

All that being said, it's pretty obvious that the medical issues you accumulate with age will shorten the length of the human lifespan back to where it was before the days of modern medicine fairly rapidly.  Going back as recently as the early 20th century, average lifespan for men was 65.  Go back to the 1800s, it was in the 50s.  The modern epidemic we have with diabetes will quickly kill off a lot of people once insulin becomes unavailable.  Even just bad vision will shorten average lifespan as prescription lenses become hard to find.  Many more women will once again die in childbirth and few premature infants will survive.

Now, there are these days quite a few Doomers well into their 70s still fortunate to have decent health and all their limbs who run their doomsteads mostly on their own or together with a wife of similar age.  Many of them do it as a refuge for children and grandchildren to come to when SHTF Day arrives.  It's a good retirement hobby for people like that.

I have no progeny, nor do I have any real desire to live any longer once we have reached the point in collapse where the power is sporadic, food is hard to come by and the society is coming apart at the seams.  I fully expect to be one of the first to go when SHTF Day arrives, and I am quite ready to cash in my ticket to the Great Beyond.  I consider myself along with Lou Gherig to be the Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth, to have lived to see the end of Industrial Civilization and had a great ride to get here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNLKPaThYkE

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Sounds like a really bad and very frightening episode.  Can I ask how old you actually are?

Another resident here who still has most of his marbles but is slightly deaf is one of the few residents I chat with regularly.  He's significantly older than me in his late 70s I think,  but like me patrols the facility on an electric wheelchair.  He's actually more social than I am, he spends around 1 hour a day at each of the 6 "courts" which have 17 rooms around a common area, then the 6 courts themselves surround an even larger common are where the main desk is situated by the front entrance.  He also parks there for a while each day.  I tend to spend most of my day the same as I always have, in front of my computer in my room.

He is here because he lived out in the bush here after serving in Vietnam where he was one of the victims of the Agent Orange fiasco, which the military paid off dishing out big settlements to the victims.  According to him, he got nearly $1M, which he parlayed over the years to about $3M flipping houses and buying at auctions stuff like 4 wheelers from oil companies that went bust in the 80s, then reselling them individually from his front lawn.  I take this with a grain of salt because old folks here will claim to be rich, but why stay here if you could afford a private 24/7 CNA?

His explanation is that besides the big settlement, it's the VA not Medicaid paying his bills here, and his monthly retirement check is from the military not SS, which Medicade would garnish all but $200, as they are now doing to me.  So, why should he spend money for private help, when he gets this for free?  Gotta agree with that reasoning.

Anyhow, what landed him here was that  one day he was out behind his doomstead fixing the fence I think, when he slipped and broke both legs sliding down the embankment.  Worse yet, it was 30 below, and before he was lucky to be found, he froze and lost all his fingers and half of each foot, so he's actually in worse shape than me not being able to hold utensils to eat with.

Accidents can happen at any age to Doomers and Mountain Men, but of course the longer you are out there and the older you get, it's only a matter of time before statistics catch up with you.  Thus, even though H-Gs had generally healthier diets than their Ag competitors,, their average lifespans were shorter, around age 45 was doing good for an H-G.

However, buying your ticket to the Great Beyond like Hatchet Jack and leaving your .50 cal Hawkins rifle to whoever thar finds you lord hopes its a white man s about as good a way to go out as any, right?  3 minutes into this clip from Jeremiah Johnson.

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I prefer not to be specific as I know data collection/profilling is a thing on these here interwebs, I will just say greater than 60, I get the seniors discount everywhere. I just could not spring away fast enough when I seen things going pear shaped. Now in retrospective I should have seen that this tree would be more problematic being bent much like a banana.

Although I sympathize with your attempt to avoid data collection and profiling, as long as you pay your ISP with a credit card to provide your internet service, your data and profile is already in the Google database,Amazon has it, the NSA has it, MI6 has it, the Mossad has it, the KGB has it, the Chinese MSS has it...

The horse left the barn quite some time back.  Compared to the people you really have to worry about, a bunch of aging net addicts  and kollapsniks pose very little threat to your security.  I hope I don't scare you off, but if you post on any website, the Admin can find out who you are and where you are posting from.  Your IP address is attached to every post you make.  Anonymity on the net is a total fiction.  Both K-Dog and myself are quite well known by the aforementioned state security  and data collection agencies, both our websites have been subjected to endless disinformation by paid trolls, and we in turn have nailed them down and routed them out.  And we know what we are doing on the net, I am a long time user going back to the early days of the arpanet before the internet, world wide web, www address prefix,and K-Dog is a code jockey, an electrical engineer with even more capability than me to find this information out.  I just ask out of courtesy, and only ever try to ascertain someone's true identity if he/she poses a threat or disrupts my website, which you do not.

Just to let you know my real name is John Litter, my birthdate is 8/31/1957, I live in Anchorage, Alaska and I recently turned 66 years old.     Miraculously I might add, when I began writing on collapse and founded the original Doomstead Diner, I never thought I would stay above ground anywhere near this long, I figured to be dead before I turned 60. My RE is Dying threads go back to I think 2013 maybe earlier.  I even had my own Tombstone custom carved from granite sourced in quarries as far away as India & China, and planted in a Springfield, MO cemetery as a monument to the Collapse of Industrial Civilization.  It waits for my meat package to be shipped back there when I buy my ticket to the Great Beyond, if there is still a  plane or boat that will ship it there at a price I still have left in my estate to pay, which is unlikely at this point.  Even if my corpse doesn't get there, the stones do have embedded in them copies of my DNA, photographs and short biography on paper, and many of the articles I had written prior to final assembly of the monument. 

You can visit the monument after I join my ancestors around the campfire of my people, and I bestow on K-Dog the job of organizing the Wake, if not IRL at the gravesite, at least in cyberspace if the net is still functioning.

Below are videos I made, featuring the monument completion and placement a few years back.

Here's a bonus video featuring K-Dog and myself with Kollapsnik pals Profs Ugo Bardi and George Mobus discussing the Coronavirus problem at its peak.

Many more great vids still up on the Doomstead Diner YouTube Channel, FREE so it's still available.

https://www.youtube.com/@DoomsteadDiner

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I have no illusion of privacy and am aware of alphabet agencies being all knowing, it is more the data harvesting for commercial ad targeting, the demographic profiling for sales purposes that I "try" not to aid. 

Also a reasonable desire, except that anyone interested in commercial ad targeting and demographic data mining of a website like this one or the original Doomstead Diner would end up bankrupt, 1st because there is practically nobody reading it, 2nd because the average age demographic comes in only slightly younger than the already dead and no longer a potential consumer of their product, 3rd because the majority of the few readers our websites attract have little disposable income to waste on the junk they are trying to sell, and 4th that our leftist and rabidly anti-capitalist spin means no matter what product they want to sell, we wouldn't buy it just on principle. lol

If after applying their best and most advanced AI filters and cross matching subroutines to our posts, the products they come up with would undubtedly be (and are, because they are the ads I consistently see pop up on my screen) really cool Dooomstead, Survival, communications and self defense gear you otherwise would not have found with your own really slow google searches of the millions of possible  items and suppliers...well, that's GREAT!  ROFLMAOPIMP.  At last, an application of the network that is useful to me! 

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I have not heard of it, I will check it out though. I had a few Morphine Sulfate pills and a few Cyclobenzaprine to help with the pain. I used them up fast and then only had Tylenol #1 after that. I wish I could have stayed in the hospital for 6 days and been kept in a comma until the swelling stopped, it was that bad. I had no idea skin could stretch so much without bursting. Yes, I can be upright with the help of crutches and hobble around ok now. I know I am lucky, It could have gone much worse.I hope in a few more days I can get around without crutches.

Unfortunately, they won't keep you anaethitized into a comatose state like an anaesthesiologist does during surgery to keep you obliviouus to pain for more than a few hours, a day at the most.  You have to be constantly monitored or you can easily be overdosed and never wake up.  During my worst 3 months prior to the amputation of my right leg (which had gone septic and they were trying to close the wound) I got 20 mg oral morphine every 4 hours, and when it was really bad, an IV drip of a 5% morphine solution on top of that.  That does a good enough job of dulling the pain so it's tolerable, but you are not unconscious.

They sent me home with a bottle of 120 10 mg Percocets, which have 10 mg oxycodone together with 325 mg tylenol as a 1 month supply, 4/day.  After a month or so I decided to go cold turkey and stop altogether instead of weening off it, and had a hellacious 2 week long withdrawal.  I stayed off pain meds for a couple of years after that, basically just learning to compartmentalize it and live with it, since they make it a real pain in the ass nowadays to renew your narc prescription.  Your regular PCP (Primary Care Physician} won't do it, due to licensing and malpractice issues.

After getting sick again with a new case of cellulitis which caused my remaining leg to blow up to the size of the Hindenberg, I got put on oxycodone again at the hospital.  After a cuple of months here at the SNIF, the suprvising doctor would not sign off on the order to keep it coming, so now I have to go every month to a Pain Clinic, where I chat with the Pain Doc about where it hurts and the type of pain, and we chit chat about what meds are available and how to juggle them around.  Don't take too much Tylenol BTW, it's bad for your liver.  Right now I added Lyrica which is a ind of nerve blocker and use 7.5mg Percocets 4X day as well.  This is fine at the moment, and I am making no attempt at getting off it.  I get a ride once a month to the clinic, the doc signs off  on anther order, and they ship up the pills from the corporate pharmacy in the lower 48.  Medicare covers the cost, no clue how much the pills cost each month.

Pain really sucks, and nobody ever can really know how bad yours is, because everybody has a different tolerance level for it, and different resistance to pain meds as well.  The longer you take narcs, the greater your tolerance gets, so to get the same effect, you need higher doses.  When you really need it though in the hospital, as long as you scream bloody murder nonstop for a few hours, eventually a doctor will write an order for some decent narcs.  They wanna make sure you are really serious about it and not just taking them for fun. lol.

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My fluid buildup in my legs was caused by Cellulitis.  Is that the name of what is causing yours?  If so, it's very dangerous and can spread rapidly if not treated with antibiotics.  Just draining the fluid isn't sufficient to cure it.    Ultrasound testing won't reveal it, they need to biopsy the skin to find out what type of bacteria is responsible for the infection.  Before the results come back on that though (takes a couple of days to culture the samples) it should be treated immediately with a broad-spectrum antibiotic to prevent or at least slow further infection.   You need IV antibiotics for this, not pills.  Hospitalization is necessary.

This disease is life threatening if not treated quickly.  Hopefully it is not what you have, but if it is, you need to be in the hospital and admitted yesterday.

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My fluid buildup in my legs was caused by Cellulitis.  Is that the name of what is causing yours?  If so, it's very dangerous and can spread rapidly if not treated with antibiotics.  Just draining the fluid isn't sufficient to cure it.    Ultrasound testing won't reveal it, they need to biopsy the skin to find out what type of bacteria is responsible for the infection.  Before the results come back on that though (takes a couple of days to culture the samples) it should be treated immediately with a broad-spectrum antibiotic to prevent or at least slow further infection.  You need IV antibiotics for this, not pills.  Hospitalization is necessary.

This disease is life threatening if not treated quickly.  Hopefully it is not what you have, but if it is, you need to be in the hospital and admitted yesterday.

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No, the Doctor called it a Hematoma, not cellulitis. The largest they have seen. It feels much better having been drained. The side is all tapped up to keep compression on it.

Hematomas can produce similar symptoms to cellulitis.  Yours likely was a result of trauma, particulaly if you take some type of anti-coagulant to reduce the chance of blood clots which can cause strokes.  Yuo can read a bit about it from this study

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7948628/

In conclusion, elderly patients with reduced resilience and weakened connective tissues who are taking antiplatelet or anticoagulant medications may present with haematoma formation mimicking cellulitis. Thus, haematoma should be considered one of the differential diagnoses for cellulitis in such cases, especially for those with a prior history of trauma.

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That  was not a fun read.

Generally speaking, getting old is not fun, so reading the details about the process is even less fun. I have a morbid fascination with it though, so I like to stay abreast of my own decay as I inch my way closer to my date with the Grim Reaper.

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the constant pain in the right foot is a bitch

I highly recommend narcotics for constant pain. 

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the constant pain in the right foot is a bitch

I highly recommend narcotics for constant pain. 

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I agree, they work but supply, or more correctly constant supply can be a problem.

I have not had any problems with supply on either oxycodone or percocets.  I haven't used morphine in a while so I don't know about supply issues there.

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[TDoS]

Comparing the top of the monument in the video to its current condition, does it look like it has weathered more than expected? Particularly the pins that appear to hold the top plate on?

[RE]

Comparing the top of the monument in the video to its current condition, does it look like it has weathered more than expected? Particularly the pins that appear to hold the top plate on?

Did you take that photo recently?  When did you go by there?  If so, I would say the neodymium magnets are oxidizing faster than I expected.  I thought the epoxy coating would keep the air out better.  I wonder if they still hold their magnetic properties?    Did you try sticking any ferromagnetic object to them?

Those magnets aren't structural, they are a surface decoration.  It's pinned together from the bottom where the uprights are, which is protected from the elements more.

I kind of expect the stones to eventually be cannibalized and individual parts taken as souvenirs.  That stone globe particularly is a one of a kind thing, that was tough to have engraved.  The dodecahedron and tetrahedron also were tough because of the non-square angles.

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[TDoS]

Did you take that photo recently?  When did you go by there?  If so, I would say the neodymium magnets are oxidizing faster than I expected.  I thought the epoxy coating would keep the air out better.  I wonder if they still hold their magnetic properties?    Did you try sticking any ferromagnetic object to them?

Photo from early November. Didn't realize they were magnets, looked like support pins or some part of holding it together. The locations on the US map look like they are doing the same thing. Are they magnets?

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Photo from early November. Didn't realize they were magnets, looked like support pins or some part of holding it together. The locations on the US map look like they are doing the same thing. Are they magnets?

Yes, the ones on the globe are magnets also.  Not just on the US map, also one on Rio de Janeiro in Brasil and another on Sydney, Australia.  All the locations I lived for 2+ years.  The idea was visitors could attach a memento to any of them.  The top ones were to attach a metal top piece which I never got round to having welded together.

I must say you have made me extraordinarily happy to have had at least 1 person who is familiar with my years writing on collapse that has visited the monument.  How did you find it?  It has been years since I last published the location.

I myself have not been back to Springfield since the final placement of the stones, at least 5 years ago by now I think, so that's a good little interval to see the initial wear & tear.  I am not sure of the process on rusting with Neodymium, if it rusts through and corrodes away completely like Iron, or if once the surface oxidizes it protects what is beneath like Aluminum.  I would guess at least for now they still hold their magnetic properties, but if/when they oxidize through they no longer will.  Very powerful magnets though when new.

I don't suppose you got photos of the 12 Principles of Sustainable living for Homo Sap on Earth?  I can't find any of my old files with that stuff on it.

For anybody else who wants to make the trek there, it's at Greenlawn Cemetery on North National Street in Springfield , MO, 37 degrees N latitude, 93 degrees West longitude.  I used to have the location to 4 decimal places, I also can't find that. 

Other than the rusting magnets, structurally it looks to be pretty solid and the site looks like it is being well maintained with good gas powered lawn tractors and Monsanto weed killer.  I wonder how long before it becomes all overgrown?   Anyhow, I think that cemetery is pretty safe from being developed with McMansions dropped on top of it before we get full on collapse.

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