Not enough lying in those briefings
Cool, so the president’s tame doc admits he lied in the briefing yesterday. That’s fine then. No doubt tomorrow he’ll admit he lied in today’s.
In a jarring news conference Sunday, Trump’s doctors said that even though the President has had at least two concerning drops in oxygen levels, they are hoping he could be discharged as early as tomorrow from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Because he’s barely sick at all. Really. You can trust us on this.
Conley again failed to answer basic questions about the President’s condition and admitted Sunday that he had omitted those alarming drops in the President’s oxygen levels during Saturday’s news conference because he wanted to “reflect the upbeat attitude” that the team and the President had about his condition and didn’t want “to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction.”
I guess he means steer everyone’s perception of the course of illness in another direction? He can’t steer the course of the illness itself by saying things to the press. Anyway, that’s quite an admission. “Yes, I lied about it yesterday to make it sound better.” Oh. Ok then.
Conley acknowledged that his evasive answers “came off that we were trying to hide something” but said that “wasn’t necessarily true,” adding that the President is “doing really well” and is responding to treatment.
Was it contingently true? (Yes.)
The President has experienced “two episodes of transient drops in his oxygen saturation,” Conley said Sunday. The first significant episode occurred late Friday morning when, Conley said, the President had “a high fever and his oxygen saturation was transiently dipping below 94%.” The President was given oxygen at that point, Conley said, answering a question he had evaded during his Saturday briefing.
“After about a minute on only two liters, his saturation levels were back over 95%. He stayed on that for about an hour maybe, and it was off and gone,” Conley said Sunday. Later on Friday, Conley said, Trump was out of bed, moving around the White House residence with only mild symptoms.
On Saturday, the President’s oxygen level dropped again “to about 93%,” Conley said. “We watched it and it returned back up.” But the incident led doctors to start treating Trump with the steroid drug dexamethasone, which has been shown to help patients with Covid-19. It is typically given to patients on supplemental oxygen or ventilation.
I.e. patients who have very severe cases.
How about the lungs? Any damage?
He offered no detail about what X-rays or CT scans have shown about whether there has been any damage to the President’s lungs.
“There’s some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern,” Conley said, not explaining whether they were expected findings in the lungs of a normal patient or a Covid-19 patient.
Plus the thing about admitting he lied yesterday.
Meadows made the mistake of trying to get some of the truth out, so now Trump is pissed off at him.
Earlier on Saturday, Meadows had also attempted to signal that the President’s initial condition was more serious when he spoke to pool reporters as an unnamed official after Conley’s briefing that morning. But his identity was later revealed by The New York Times and The Associated Press, and Trump was furious at his chief of staff for contradicting the White House physician’s upbeat assessment, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN’s Jim Acosta Sunday.
How dare anyone who works for Trump tell us the truth?
A separate White House official confirmed Trump is unhappy with Meadows, as the chief of staff is now viewed by Trump advisers as having damaged the credibility of the current medical briefings on the President’s bout with the coronavirus.
Ah right. Meadows “damaged the credibility” of the briefings because he told some of the truth, while Trump wants the briefings to be lies.
Dude’s last words are going to be lies.
93%? I should be so lucky! That’s not an unusual reading for me when I’m awake and not sick. When I’m asleep, it can drop to 88%. I’m always setting of alarms when I’m in hospital.
See, this is why I am absolutely terrified of catching COVID-19. Because it will kill me, and I don’t want to die just yet. I’ve survived several previous attempts on my life by my errant biology. But, then again, I know what my brain is like on low oxygen, and it isn’t terrified and panicking. It becomes calm and happy. I have thoughts like “This wouldn’t be a bad day to die, actually.”
As were probably his very first. There will be some debate over the percentage of lies in between, among those journalists and historians who can be bothered. And that will be the Trump Era..
Guardian pick of the comments on https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/04/trump-covid-president-us-dead#comment-144261242
Stay safe Tigger, there are people who care about you, particularly us! :)
Awww, thank you twiliter!
I do my best to stay alive. I have a CPAP now, which helps when I’m sleeping – and after my trip to hospital four years ago, where the nice young cardiologist aborted an imminent third heart attack by the ingenious method of stopping my heart himself; then diagnosed SVT (the AF and unstable angina had been diagnosed ten years earlier, a mere 32 years after I first had symptoms of both AF and SVT) and got me on yet another heart medication, I haven’t been back to the cardiology department (except as an outpatient for regular check-ups).
Yes, Tigger — you keep bouncin’.
Okay, this set off a little alarm bell, which, coupled with some things known of Trump’s background, suggests the President of the United States may be a believer — in New Thought.
The idea that an “upbeat attitude” and repeating false but desirable facts can literally avoid negative outcomes is one of the basic tenets of New Though spiritualities. Trump’s father — and then Trump himself — attended the church and were big fans of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, who literally wrote a book on The Power of Positive Thinking. Applied to health, the course of an illness could indeed be steered in a negative direction if people are worried and anticipate serious consequences. It also works the other way. Positive thoughts lead to positive outcomes. If you say you’re sick, you are; you say you’re fine, you will become so. Barbara Ehrenbach wrote a book on this increasingly popular bullsh*t: Bright-Sided.
It’s possible that Trump is infected with New Thought, and may even have spread it to others in his administration. His doctors would of course have to humor him.
Oh lordy, I didn’t know that.
Trump’s last words will probably be a brag about how healthy he is.
#6 Sastra
That is certainly in keeping with his ‘no tests, no bad news’ idiocy.
You’ve likely heard by now that Trump made a car trip outside the hospital to wave at the “great patriots” supporting him (that’s pretty much his definition of “great patriot”). Thereby endangering his staff and Secret Service detail. He really doesn’t give a crap about anybody besides himself, shown yet again.
Yep. Absolutely gobsmacked.
Tigger, I woke up one morning 30 or so years ago with arryrhmic tachycardia, and I somewhat ignored it while I was hurrying getting ready for work, thinking it was probably a hangover. I really didn’t know what was wrong. I started sweating and had tingling in my extremities while driving to work and felt lightheaded, and luckily there was a hospital en route, so I drove up and checked myself in and they proceeded to give me medication that made it go away (digoxin if I remember correctly). They never did find out what caused it, and I was there most of the day under observation. They wanted me to return to get a complete battery of tests, but I was much too busy and arrogant at the time to bother with it. I wonder sometimes if it will happen again, but luckily it hasn’t yet. Anyway, it’s pretty scary stuff. I quit drinking after that too. ;)
Goodness, twiliter, that sounds scary! I’m glad you only had it the once.
I’ve been getting bouts of arrhythmia since I had glandular fever when I was seventeen. It was put down to ‘panic attacks’ and ‘low blood sugar’; the chest pains were assumed to be indigestion. So I used to work through until I literally couldn’t see anything or stand up any more, then lie down on the ground and munch on glucose tablets until some eyesight came back (I doubt the glucose did anything). Fortunately, I lived in England and Ireland, and the trigger was heat. So I only had a few bouts of arrhythmia a year (usually in winter, when I was wrapped up in my warm winter motorbike gear and walked into an overheated shop), and one mild heart-attack when I was 39 (which baffled the doctors) until I moved to Australia. Fortunately, when I had my second heart-attack I was 49 and no longer in the too-young-to-have-heart-disorders category.
I’m sure a lot of my episode was stress related, I was struggling financially at the time, my daughter was an infant, and my father was dying of pleural mesothelioma. Tough times for sure. Now that you mention it, I do recall having vision problems with that episode as well, which is probably what worried me into stopping at the hospital. In any event, stay safe and stay as far away from the Covid as possible! :)
Tigger, my sympathy…no, wait, make that empathy. I too have problems, and my doctor would consider (and usually does consider) 93% to be okay. I have had episodes where my oxygen was down to under 60%; I didn’t realize at the time why my doctor (I was in his office in one of these episodes) called my husband; I realize now he wasn’t sure I would make it. He was giving me straight adrenaline (nice headache in the morning) followed by straight oxygen, and he and his nurses were discussing what particular shade of blue I was. I ended up on disability after that episode; two months off work, and major shifts in my medication. Ever since that particular episode, they give me steroids as soon as I have symptoms of bronchitis; I’ve had three courses of steroids since the COVID lockdown, and having asthma at this particular point in history is terrifying. (It was terrifying before, since I am not well controlled; it is worse now). So my thoughts are with you, though I will not pray for you. I’m sure you understand.
twiliter, I thought for years that many of my asthma episodes were stress related, but my doctors dismissed that. I noticed that my blood sugars are particularly high when I am stressed, but my doctor dismissed that. I now have a doctor who believes that stress is a big factor in both my asthma and my sugars. So we’re working on that, but it’s hard to reduce stress while I am working, since I work in a toxic environment, and the administration is malignant.
Hi, Ophelia, just wondering if you could fix a couple of my posts? You can probably tell which ones…Thanks.
I doubt the power of positive thinking is really going to help much against a cytokine storm. If the doctors want to play along with Trump’s fantasy of taking on the virus in a grudge match in the ring, that’s up to them. I doubt all his golfing has helped the paunchy bastard do much against the “invisible enemy” he’s been steadfastly ignoring all this time. He might cheat on the links, but the virus isn’t so easily fooled.
If Trump takes a turn for the worse and the virus kills him, are we going to be told that he’s not really dead, but mostly dead? Now leading an alternative lifestyle? Having a bit of a metabolic challenge? Pinin’ for the fjords? The “on the roof” joke is another possibility, at least as a warm-up euphemism.