My Year of Stoic Challenges
This is not the year-end post I intended to write, but it is the post life has written for me.
As most of you know, I suffered the bitterest tragedy of my existence on July 21, 2024—the near-instantaneous death of my soulmate and husband, Michael.
This came not long after I had endured over two months of the most excruciating physical pain I’d ever known. Due to a back injury, I had to alternate between standing, crouching, and walking like a perpetual motion machine. I dreaded the nightly agony of trying to find a position in which I could sleep. I repeatedly told Michael he had saved my life. I could not perform even the simplest of physical tasks, such as bending down, and he handled all my chores in addition to his own.
That injury followed on the heels of caretaking for my mom after her second hip surgery, which was a much rougher go than her first round, during which she also stayed with us while recovering several months prior. And when she got home, her senior kitty, Cody, died a few days later, breaking Michael’s and my hearts as we had bonded with him while caring for her kitties daily.
In 2023, I learned of the attempted sabotage by someone I had mistaken for a friend, catapulting me into seeking a deeper understanding of covert narcissistic abuse, Cluster B personality disorders, and dark triad traits.
This coincided with cannonades of online harassment, trolling, and other security threats that persist to this day but that I cannot discuss publicly as I am practicing zero contact per Meredith Miller’s guidance on narcissistic abuse.
The demoralizing censorship, debanking, and other AI-enhanced erasures I have experienced at the colluding hands of Big Tech are by no means unique to me, Dr. Mike Yeadon being the paragon of this particularly vicious form of invisibilization and Dr. Jackie Stone having taken her life over it.
Those are the broad strokes.
And now, I have learned the chronic cough my mom has been suffering for the past six months may be caused by a life-threatening Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infection, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium made more dangerous because of her lupus, Sjogren’s syndrome, and Hashimoto’s disease.
Her only option, according to her pulmonologist, is undergoing an immediate ten-day course of ciprofloxacin (cipro), an antibiotic so dangerous, I have been hearing horror stories about it from both personal friends and online sources for years.
It’s either that or a weeklong hospital stay with an IV-administered antibiotic that may have an equally frightening safety profile, adding the risk of hospicide to cipro poisoning. The only other oral antibiotic she could take for this is levofloxacin, which she previously had a bad reaction to, so that’s out.
The day after receiving this news, I wrote the following Substack Note:
My dear readers, I apologize for not reaching out to friends individually like I normally would, but I don’t have the luxury of time, and since TriTorch already posted a comment at Jeff Childers’s post this morning, I figured it would be simplest to just share my reply (below).
In short, my mom was diagnosed yesterday with Pseudomonas, a life-threatening lung infection, which is even more dangerous for her because she has lupus. Her pulmonologist wanted to immediately start her on Cipro, an extremely potent antibiotic with a terrifying safety profile. I happened to be messaging1 with TriTorch when I received this news, hence his being alerted in real-time to what was occurring.
I catapulted into action to advocate for my mom and conduct research to ensure we choose the best course of action. I had already been up for over 24 hours, and it was 29 hours by the time I finally got to bed last night. I did get a good night’s sleep, thankfully. My mom and I have decided on a plan of action, which I shared in the extensive comment below.
I want to thank each of you for your phenomenal kindness and support as I grieve the loss of my beloved Michael and am now undergoing this new challenge with my mother. Please forgive me in advance if I am unable to reply to comments, Notes, emails, messages, etc. as I care for her over the next couple of weeks.
Warmest gratitude and love,
MAA
Thank you so, so much, TriTorch, for your extraordinary support and devastatingly beautiful words. I just read your poignant comment and the replies and am sobbing with gratitude to you and the rest of the C&C family 😭
I wanted to update everyone here on the latest as well as providing some additional details for context.
My mom has had a chronic cough for around six months. She thought it was allergies at first, then when it persisted, she thought maybe it was bronchitis. I kept needling her to make a doctor’s appointment so we could make sure it wasn’t serious, but then she’d start feeling better for a day or two, so she kept thinking it was just a chest cold or something that would go away on its own.
It didn’t, and it continued worsening, so she finally made a doctor’s appointment. The x-ray showed lung inflammation, so they did a CT scan. The good news is they ruled out cancer, which was our biggest concern. They still didn’t know what it was and thought maybe it was atypical bronchitis. This didn’t sound right to me because her symptoms are not ever-present. She does okay in the mornings, but then she starts having coughing fits in the afternoons and evenings. I knew there was something more serious and unusual going on.
Thankfully, she was able to get a pulmonologist’s appointment quickly due to a cancellation. He then scheduled her for a bronchoscopy on Monday. Yesterday, we received the results.
She has a Pseudomonas infection, which her doctor described as extremely serious, and he wanted her to start on antibiotics immediately.
Pseudomonas can be life-threatening for anyone, but it’s particularly dangerous for her because she has lupus.
The pulmonologist wanted to prescribe Levofloxacin, but my mom had a severe reaction to just one pill of that previously, so that option is out. The next best option, he said, is Ciprofloxacin (Cipro).
I was extremely concerned about this choice because it has a horrible safety profile, and I have heard about numerous severe reactions to it. I called her pulmonologist’s office to express my concerns and find an alternative antibiotic with a better safety profile.
Unfortunately, he said if she doesn’t tolerate the Cipro, she would have to be hospitalized for a week while receiving intravenous injections of an antibiotic.
This was not a viable option, either, because hospitals are so dangerous, and I didn’t want her to get hospicided! Plus, he couldn’t even tell me in advance which antibiotic they would put her on because that decision would be made at the time of admission by the hospitalist, so she could just as well end up on Cipro there (when I asked about this possibility, I was told they may still use it but combine it with Benadryl if she has a reaction; this sounded like a potential nightmare of mushrooming drugs to treat cascading side effects, so I want to avoid this scenario if at all possible).
I researched all of the other antibiotics typically prescribed for this condition, and they all have horrendous potential side effects. This is such a severe infection (often antibiotic-resistant), it requires the most powerful antibiotics available, and those inevitably come with great risks.
The greater risk, however, is leaving the infection untreated as it could easily be fatal, and it clearly was not going away on its own.
So we had a Hobson’s choice and felt the only viable option was to proceed with the Cipro prescription and just hope everything goes smoothly and she doesn’t suffer severe side effects.
I did not want her to be alone while on Cipro, however, so we decided to have her stay with me during the 10-day course of treatment. That way, I can continually monitor her, and if she does have a dangerous reaction, I can get her to the hospital ASAP and pursue the IV administration as Plan B. (I pray that won’t be necessary, but if it is, I will be studying Jeff’s hospital guide!)
Her insurance requires her to use Walgreens, which is notoriously understaffed, so they haven’t even filled the prescription after nearly 24 hours [update: the prescription still hasn’t been filled as of this posting].
This is actually helpful, though, because it gives us a day to prepare for my mom’s stay. I just got over a head cold, fever, and sore throat (the first time I’ve had anything like a cold or flu in over 20 years; thankfully, I had ivermectin on hand as well as an arsenal of supplements, so I followed the FLCCC protocol for flu along with my own additions and recovered within a week), so I need to change the sheets and clean as much as possible.
I am also going to make bone broth, turkey breast, and turkey soup to aid with her healing, so I have a lot of cooking and cleaning to do before she arrives!
Once we had a plan of action in place, we both felt better. I still have concerns about Cipro and wanted to make sure this was the best course of action, so I consulted a natural pharmacist friend and the husband of a longtime friend. We just happened to have met in person last week and had struck up a correspondence because we learned we have a shared passion for not only health but also the COVID injection harms (thanks to our mutual friend, Bill Kauth, for raving to him about my Substack; Bill attended Michael’s service, and I talked about him and share a pic of us in the eulogy post). I decided to consult him because I know he is knowledgeable about Big Pharma corruption, the dangers of most drugs, and natural alternatives. He agreed with our decision and said it is very important for her to start on antibiotics because Pseudomonas is such a dangerous infection. He also recommended she take Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics, which he has published papers on and considers the best probiotic in the world. Even though he and his wife were about to hop on a plane this morning to visit their family for Christmas, he took the time to mail a box of those probiotics to me (at no expense) before they departed. He also provided instructions and offered to do a Facetime once they arrive so he can walk us through the process (need to make sure they’re not in the stomach at the same time as the antibiotics, etc.). That should protect her gut health while she takes the Cipro and help her recover afterward. Having that as well as his availability to advise us gives additional comfort during this experience.
Apologies for the lengthy post, but since everyone here was so exceptionally kind and supportive, I wanted to give you the full picture and let you know things are progressing as well as possible under the circumstances.
We have many blessings to count, including:
1) we finally know the cause of her cough;
2) she doesn’t have cancer;
3) it is treatable;
4) 10 days on antibiotics isn’t as bad as the year and a half on antibiotics she was warned about if it was another kind of infection they had feared;
5) it will be gone in a couple of weeks if all goes to plan;
6) the best probiotics in the world and availability of one of the best natural pharmacists in the world (I would name him but don’t want to do so without his permission; I did encourage him to join Substack to share his life-saving knowledge, though, and will introduce him later when he gives the okay and is ready); and
7) the prayers, love, and support of the C&C community and countless friends, readers, and other compassionate individuals around the world 🙏
Thank you, everyone, for your amazingly wonderful support, and please excuse my relative unavailability in the coming days in advance. And now, I need to get busy cooking and cleaning!
See original C&C comment thread for additional details and replies.
I am writing this during the limbo between diagnosis and treatment, suspended betwixt dread and anticipation, anxiety and hope, fear and faith.
Several days before the news about my mom struck, I had listened to the audiobook of William B. Irvine’s The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient.
I’ve read numerous books by and about Stoics before, my favorite being Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Michael read many of these to me along with dozens of other philosophical texts. He had dabbled in Stoicism before recognizing his true self in Taoism.
Michael felt the Stoics played mental games, whereas a follower of the Tao lives in the flow of reality. As I wrote in a scrap that got left on the cutting room floor of Michael’s eulogy:
“I’ve always resonated deeply with the writings of the Stoics, particularly Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, but Michael saw Stoicism as playing games. Practicing premeditatio malorum, for example, involves imagining the worst that could happen and then visualizing ways of coping with that situation to build your mental defenses against it.”
I shared an example of my own experiment with premeditatio malorum in Lines to a Future Torturer and the subsequent podcast.
Michael’s right—these mental exercises are games, but I have found them beneficial for strengthening my resilience, a quality that has helped me survive my year of Stoic challenges.
And so when I discovered a new mental strategy—game, as Michael would say—in The Stoic Challenge, I couldn’t wait to put it into practice in daily life.
The first opportunity struck in the middle of the night. After washing my hands following a mid-sleep bathroom trip, I’d reached for a hand towel and knocked over a vase of roses from a family who has become like my own—the Hudsons of A Mother’s Anthem, whose Cody inspired Lament of the Vaxx-Injured.
The water from the vase washed over the vanity, and I had to remove and dry all the cluttering objects before wiping down the counter. Half-asleep, I laughed at the metaphorical Stoic gods for tricking me into cleaning the vanity, or at least half of it, anyway.
Every time I faced a new setback, I found myself whimsically amused, shaking my head at the Stoic gods for erecting another obstacle for me to navigate and extract a lesson from.
Hours before I learned the results of my mom’s respiratory culture, I read the following Note by Abi Roberts:
“Something has shifted in me, like water being displaced in a vessel. The short period of illness I’ve been through is about more than my immune system; it is my soul crying out to be fed. I have spent too many hours mired in the negative, worrying about things that I have no control over, and not living in the present with the great life I’ve been blessed with.
“Enough.”
I replied:
“Welcome to the contentment of the Stoic mindset, Abi Roberts. I think you will appreciate William Irvine’s The Stoic Challenge. I just listened to the short audiobook, and it has completely altered the way I experience setbacks, whether it be shattering a dish, suffering a financial hardship, or worse. Instead of feeling frustrated, irritated, or angry, try thinking of it as a challenge from the Stoic gods giving you an opportunity to learn wisdom and hone your resilience. You will find yourself laughing at their sardonic humor as each new challenge gets piled on the last. You will feel overwhelming gratitude for the blessings in your life as you practice negative visualization, memento mori, and other Stoic secrets to the good life.”
The seeds for this essay began forming that evening. I jotted on my phone:
“Mom’s diagnosis, antibiotics, up over 28 hours, first day didn’t feel sick in a week, and then this happens. Very funny, Stoic gods.”
And so, even in the midst of such a harrowing plight, I was able to surf the emotional waves with greater equanimity partly because of my newfound tactic.
The most resilient person I know, our best friend of three decades has suffered more health afflictions, tragic losses, physical agonies, financial hardships, and emotional torment than anyone I have ever known.
I remember one of my mentors saying he used to believe Thomas Hardy novels were hyperbolic—until he met her. And that was before twenty-eight more years of ever-escalating miseries assaulted her.
How has she survived when thousands of others would have booked a session at the thanatorium after just a fraction of what she’s faced? In part, humor.
Every time a new crisis arises, we joke about it being piled on the black comedy that is her life.
She never wallows in self-pity. Most people haven’t a clue what she’s gone through. She’s extremely private, doesn’t like talking about her woes, and may get mad at me for even writing this much.
And right now, what matters more to her than anything else in the world is rescuing a beautiful feral mama cat and her stunning kittens—all while having a back that’s literally broken in multiple places and inflicts a constant corset of pain that would have driven an ordinary person to opioid addiction decades ago.
While her unrelenting suffering has only mounted over the years, my lightning strikes of tragedy have been counterbalanced by the healing sunshine of your love, the soothing waves of your kindness, the gentle breeze of your prayers, and the poetic grounding of your wisdom.
My mom feels it, too. As I shared one successive note of well wishes after another from friends and readers, she wrote:
“What wonderful people! They’re so kind and thoughtful! Tell them I appreciate their kindness.”
Thank you for comforting not just me but also my mother, even as she faces her own Stoic challenge.
So how can I help but feel grateful, despite everything? I’m an Apocaloptimist, after all.
It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.
My life has been written by a string of synchronicities that feel too meaningful to ignore.
Like meeting the natural pharmacist I mentioned in my comment above just before learning about my mom’s lung infection. That’s what he actually goes by—The Natural Pharmacist. His name is Dr. Ross Pelton, and he calls himself a “recovering pharmacist.”
Ross and I forged what feels like a friendship of twenty years in a week. He felt alone amongst his peer group during the COVID years, so he was eager to have someone else to discuss these topics with. We are both consumed by a ravenous pursuit of knowledge about healthy living as well as COVID injection harms.
Ross graciously offered me guidance as I fought off my cold symptoms, and then he generously gave of his expertise and store of precious Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics to aid my mom in her recovery from both Pseudomonas and gut-health–demolishing antibiotics.
These are the sort of synchronicities that change not only our own individual lives but those of others spiderwebbing out from us and around the globe.
I encouraged Ross to join Substack and hope to collaborate with him on a future article or more—perhaps a series exploring innovative ways to enhance our health and extend our lives.
Just as our best defense against tyranny is the power of NO, so is robust health our best defense against the murderous and profiteering medical-pharmaceutical cartel.
Like Abi Roberts wrote in her Note, I feel a shifting from lamentation to gratitude, from victimization to empowerment, from backward-glancing to forward-soaring.
Two weeks and one day after I lost Michael, I told Meredith Miller:
“I feel the worst I ever imagined happening to me has happened, so everything else seems trivial by comparison. Of course, terrible things could get added on top, but I feel like if I can weather this, I can survive whatever else happens.”
Meredith replied:
“I think it’s a healthy outlook you have that weathering this painful storm of losing your soulmate and life partner will help you build strength and resilience to survive and thrive through any other challenges life might create. It’s also part of your kintsugi.”
Just as this is occurring on a micro level for me, it is also occurring on a macro level for the dissident community.
We have been psychologically brutalized, emotionally manipulated, and cast out from the herd for Badass resistance to their propaganda, menticide, tyranny, and democide.
Despite all their efforts to silence, bully, smear, and namecall us, we prevail.
Because we are on the side of truth, light, and love—and these eternal forces always ultimately triumph over the liars’ sandcastle narratives, Ministry of Truth memoryholing, and philanthropathic dreams of depopulation and dictatorial enslavement.
And together, we will flap our phoenix wings, shaking off the ashes of 2024 and dropping seeds of liberating knowledge as we glide over the charred landscape, watching those seeds burst into seedlings under the resurrecting forces of rainfall and sunlight.
No Random Things
In yet another stroke of synchronicity, as I was transferring this draft to Substack, I decided to hop on YouTube to find Jackie Stone’s interview as a standalone video to embed above. YouTube happened to recommend Mammoth, a recent video by Otyken, a Siberian indigenous band blending folk with contemporary styles in both their music and homemade costumes, which are exquisite works of art like every other element of their audiovisual performances. Otyken holds a special place in my heart because Michael discovered them around a year ago and had me sit down to watch the PHENOMENAL Phenomenon. They then became the only band whose new videos we devoured upon release.
After I played Mammoth, I noticed another new video I hadn’t yet seen—Oneness. As I played it and read the lyrics, I felt like it had been created to score this essay, from “Different people are given to us by God” to “No random things happen in our oblivious life” to the seeds growing up into a forest, turning into an unbreakable field of flowers.
Oneness
by Otyken
Different people are given to us by God
Some cry with us, the others laugh.
No random things happen in our oblivious life.
It’s common that our love can be unrequited.
One comes to us and it’s not immediately clear,
that he’ll change our fate back.
Someone comes to us from above that we’ve known for years,
first we don’t need him, then suddenly he is the one.
Tree grows from a small seed,
as well as flowers sprout,
They bloomed in the good soil,
the earth accepted them and they came to life.
And so in life, like seeds, we grow up
grow into great forests,
And the seeds among us turn into flowers,
like little stars of big love.
A flower is plucked by the wind.
A tree falls from the wind.
When there are many trees,
there is a field of flowers,
they’re unbreakable.
PLOT TWIST!
After I had drafted this post, I had the profound blessing of enjoying a heart-hugging phone call with Dr. Mike Yeadon, who graciously weighed in on my mom’s condition and proposed treatment. As soon as I hung up the phone with Mike, I received a call from an unknown number. I did something I never do and picked up, hoping it was whom I thought it was. And it was … Dr. Pierre Kory!
Pierre and I had a fascinating exchange about my mom’s diagnosis, which he thinks her pulmonologist got wrong. She still has the Pseudomonas aeruginosa—that’s in the respiratory culture so isn’t in dispute. But he doesn’t think that’s what’s causing her chronic cough … nor does he believe what she has is life-threatening, at least right now and with the right treatment.
He didn’t tell me what he thought it was, though, as he wanted to see the imaging results before drawing a definitive conclusion.
After I got off the phone with him, I asked if he could help me think of the name of a lung disease I’d been trying to remember for several years. I gave him a clue. I remembered one word from the name, but it wasn’t specific enough to pull it up in an online search.
It was the condition I had diagnosed my mom with in October 2018 after reviewing her CT scan results. I told her she needed to give the information I had gathered to her doctors and get referred to a pulmonologist for it ASAP, but nothing ever happened, and her doctors never flagged anything of serious concern on subsequent scans, so I thought it was no longer a threat. But it kept nagging me in the back of my mind, and then I realized Pierre could help me figure it out.
Only he didn’t need to, because before he replied, I realized I could search my browser bookmarks for that word, and it immediately popped up! When I told Pierre, he texted:
“The entire time I was talking to you, I was thinking that this was most likely —”
You’ll have to wait until the next episode of this medical mystery to find out …
© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC
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TriTorch had reached out to me to request that I cross-post this piece, writing:
“I am trying to sound the alarm and raise awareness about the all out assault on our children, and was wondering if you could help raise crucial awareness by cross posting this all important deep dive into the problem.”
I restacked his post but regretfully explained the following, which is yet another example of the Big Tech sh*tf*ckery my Substack is regularly subjected to:
“I’m so sorry, I never cross-post because my newsletters are targeted by Big Tech spam filters, and every time I send out a newsletter, I lose upwards of a couple hundred subscribers. When Google marks an email as spam, it automatically disables notifications, usually without the user’s knowledge. Many people have reported that notifications were turned off without their realizing it, even paid subscribers. Every public newsletter I send out is like a bloodletting, so I have to make each one count and space them out as I can.”
He replied:
“I must, however, implore you to make an exception to your cross posting rule with my article. It is beyond important and has cost me more than you would believe to make it. We must raise awareness about this Margaret, the kids need us no matter the cost. If there was ever a time to make an exception, this is it. No one is coming to their rescue but us!”
That’s when I got the news about my mom’s lab results indicating Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and the conversation veered in another direction. I do hope sharing his post here will compensate for not cross-posting it.
TriTorch later stated, “Political action has gutted civics because civics guts political action.” He also shared Apathy Is the Fire in Which We Burn to give me a sense of who he really is:
He said, “I poured my heart and soul into that. And into this.” (The website he links to dates back to 2011 and covers topics that turned out to be chillingly prescient.)
I especially like the Voltaire quote he uses as the epigraph of the Apathy piece:
“Each one of us is guilty of all the good we did not do.”
Evidently, it is a truncated and slightly modified version of this quote:
“A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.”
For the record, I personally don’t think a minister of state can be excused for harms done in a storm, at least in a manufactured storm like COVID. Mistakes Were NOT Made, after all ;-)
As a pharmacist I can think of no reason why your mother’s cipro prescription wasn’t ready other than the system was trying to put it off as long as possible (a remote fill by robotics is now the most cost effective method of all large corporate pharmacies). . If you need something ASAP the best thing to do is go directly to the pharmacy and stand there in their faces until they fill and hand you the prescription. The #1 priority is always the person standing in front of your face every time. Unless the drug is on back order it would have been quickly filled and you out the door. If they try to tell you that it’s “coming in the order in the morning“ ask them to verify that they have none of the medication on hand to give you now because you need it immediately. Ask to speak to the pharmacist as the technicians often have no clue why you might need a particular drug immediately rather than sometime next week. (Don’t get me wrong there are some wonderful, smart and very effective technicians out there but they are only about 50% of the ones you get to deal with—the rest are new or just lack the critical thinking skills required to make the kinds of decisions that matter-when you get one of these insist on talking to the pharmacist).
Myself I don’t make people wait (even when the system automatically puts an order in for days later) but I do have the luxury of working overnight by myself so I decide who gets what and how fast. And I’m efficient, competent and acutely aware that people needing prescriptions in the middle of the night are generally not there because it’s convenient.
Our hearts are with you❤️