carrying a valise in the shape of a fish

I’m 35 now. Also here’s the original doodle

Chéri Hérouard (1881–1961)

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

Imagine Ilya in the morning, mcgriddle in hand and happy as a clam, suddenly coming across a Very Large Bird.

He does not know what it is. Cannot comprehend that this what a turkey is in real life. It is between him and his car. It takes him 43 minutes to give up. He is not getting to his car while the turkey is there. He sits dejectedly on the curb to eat his now cold mcgriddle.

The turkey approaches. Ilya knows a fear he didn't realize existed.

The videos are all over the internet. He goes to practice and Connors is teasing him about the turkey. A rookie is imitating his frankly girlish squealscream and subsequent frightened fleeing. Fans of opposing teams show up and throw fake turkeys on the ice at him. Shane texts him a link to the video. Sveta will feast on this humiliation for one thousand years.

Three weeks later he encounters a different turkey. He's determined to defeat it. It doesn't matter that it's the middle of the day and there isn't a mcgriddle in sight. His Honor Is At Stake.

He fails. He encounters another turkey. He flees. It keeps happening. And for some reason someone always has a camera. There are compilation videos. This is Ilya Rozanov's lasting legacy in Boston.

He moves to Ottawa. He thinks he is free. This is everything he could have ever wanted. He is close to Shane. They have a plan to come out as friends. They talk about spending their lives together. Ilya has already planned out the proposal. Everything is perfect.

He rolls up for the first day of practice and there. Wandering the parking lot.

in 2019 the FDA approved a drug called trikafta (which is really three drugs in one) for cystic fibrosis treatment. what it essentially does is patch up the malfunctioning proteins that cause the extra sticky mucus. trikafta is effective on about 90% of cystic fibrosis patients.

people who had spent their entire lives in and out of hospitals, on and off of ventilators, suffering from pneumonia and sometimes treated through painful procedures like intubation took this drug, got out of bed, coughed up an entire lifetimes worth of mucus out of their lungs over the course of a few hours, breathed clearly for perhaps the first time in their lives, and now go on to live well into their seventies.

My ward is the respiratory ward - CF is one of the things we specialize in.

Since this med came out we haven't had a SINGLE CF admission to the ward

There used to always be a CF patient spending a couple of months with us at a time

There's a man who is 23 years old who I was sure would not survive his next admission (aim saturations 85% is end stage lung disease)

There's a set of the local frequent flyers that we all know so well

Except

No we don't

On the CF specialist ward (with reasonable staff turnover)

Half the staff have probably never even seen a CF patient

Additionally, it should be noted that metrics like life expectancy are in no way a guarantee of... Anything. There are significant outlier CF patients who are at an advanced age now despite the odds due to a variety of different factors, having lived the majority of their lives before the development of modulators.