Just in case...

[ecosophia]

I've been disquieted over the last few days to hear that quite a few of my readers have had dreams in which mass death has been a major feature. (The discussion has happened in the current Covid open post, if you're curious.) One of the things that's made me most uncomfortable about this is that I had a dream of the same kind. 

In my dream,  I was part of a small group of people who were being given a tour of a brand new hospital. We got into an elevator and started up, and then the elevator stopped suddenly between floors, and started going down much faster. The doors opened on the ground floor and a loudspeaker was blaring that there had been a mass casualty event and every visitor needed to leave at once to get out of the way. I headed for the nearest exit from the hospital, and woke up with the words "mass casualty event" ringing in my ears. 

Now of course dreams are dreams, and they don't always, or often, predict events in the waking world -- but sometimes they do. Precognitive dreams are a known phenomenon among those who don't rule such things out on the basis of sheer dogma. That being the case, it occurs to me that certain simple preparations might be worthwhile. 

One of the main impacts we can expect from any mass casualty situation here in the US, especially if it isn't localized, is an even more complete breakdown of the hospital systen than we've had already, After decades of reckless corporate profiteering, most hospitals are struggling to keep the doors open, and it doesn't help that a great many nurses and other frontline personnel are being treated in ways that are extremely abusive, even when compared to other working-class jobs -- which is saying something. If something causes a wave of sickness or injury, hospital care will be effectively unavailable for quite some time thereafter. 

That's where some simple preparations might help. Until the 1960s, when the medical industry in the US became obsessive about soaking consumers for every last dollar, most people got the majority of their health care at home -- and that included nursing care. The Red Cross offered classes and certification in home nursing, and a great many health conditions were seen to by family members of the patient, in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. You can still find copies of the manual for the Red Cross classes in the used book trade and some other places.

It seems to me that whether or not the dreams in question turn out to be premonitions, this might be something worth keeping in mind -- one more way in which a few simple preparations might make all the difference in the world. 

Comments

[methylethyl]

That reminds me that I should dig up my old copy of "Where there is no doctor" and review...

[ecosophia]

If that works for you, by all means. I admit I was somewhat underwhelmed by that book -- which is why I suggested something a little different.

[kulibali]

Another classic of home healthcare is Where There is no Doctor.

Healthwise handbook

[(Anonymous)]

Another option is the Healthwise handbook. It gives a better overview of when an ailment has become an emergency, but it still refers people to the hospital when rest and oral fluids is not enough.

I got my copy when I was on the Oregon health plan and I have since found it useful for avoiding deductibles.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank for this.

For those open to the concept, I would suggest trying the Hathors' instructions, which are very easy to follow, for making medicines of light:

https://tomkenyon.com/medicines-of-light

Another Possibility

[(Anonymous)]

Given our government’s recent record of instigating trouble on Russia’s borders during the Olympics there is a slight possibility that your premonition turns out to be true but not related to Covid.

[booklover1973]

This leads to the big question about omens, their characteristics and their reliability. Long ago I had a dream about a third world war, which obviously didn't come to pass. I have encountered other things which may or may not be an omen, like a huge murder of crows in the local park. It is yet too early to verify or dismiss these putative omens.

[ecosophia]

Exactly. That's why I presented this one in terms of "well, we don't know, but..."

[fringewood]

Thank you for this! I'll see if I can find a hard copy as well. We are currently collecting how to books (how to make shoes, etc) both digital and hardcopy and this will find a good place in our collection😊 I appreciate that you look for practical solutions to possibly frightening events. Many blessings to you and Sara.

Where There Is No Doctor

[(Anonymous)]

May I suggest the book:

Where There Is No Doctor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_There_Is_No_Doctor

Re: Where There Is No Doctor

[(Anonymous)]

There is a spanish version "Donde no hay Doctor" adapted to Latin American situations.

fears

[(Anonymous)]

I hope the mass death doesn't have anything to do with a nuclear exchange.

Something is building

[chaosadventurer]

While I haven't had such dreams (that I remember), I have felt very on edge, growing all week.

I grabbed both formats of that manual for my stash, pity the text only isn't too usable. A copy will be on my Kobo before long, and I think I will be printing a hard copy of it as well just to be sure.

[(Anonymous)]

There are two books that I found out about through Mennonite missionaries that I knew - "Where There is No Doctor" and "Where There is No Dentist". Might be worth looking for as well.

I have not read them, but have always intended to.

shewhoholdstensions

[(Anonymous)]

Should have known not to recommend books that I have not read myself...

Sorry.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you ever read Ingo Swann's excellent book 'Psychic Literacy'? One of the aims of the book was to educate people and get them switched on to the various forms of psychism with the intent of reducing the avoidable suffering that comes from not understanding or ignoring precognitive information about future events. He has a chapter or two discussing disasters, and emphasises the way in which the really big and deadly ones leak into consciousness in dreams and even art and literature months or years before the event heralded.

The more widespread the reports of dreams of this nature, the more I'd be paying attention.

[ecosophia]

Now there's a blast from the past! No, I haven't read that book of his, but I remember when he was in the public eye quite a bit. Of course that was before the pseudoskeptic movement made further research into parapsychology the kiss of death for researchers...

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I'm sure he'd be disappointed how things have turned out on that front. He was predicting a psychic revolution in culture as knowledge about psychism increased, and that book was part of his effort to make that happen.

[ecosophia]

The golden age of parapsychology in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the many bright opportunities of those decades that never went anywhere. I hope some of that can be excavated from the scrapheap in the years ahead.

[hippieviking]

I haven't had any dreams of mass death but, right after reading this post I was going through some old lists looking for something and I came across some notes I'd scribbled down six or so weeks ago.

I had been praying and Odin "showed up" rather directly in my mind. I asked him a few questions and he basically told me to, "get ready, because it's going to be hard". I took this as meaning get physically ready as in fitness and tuning skills (and I am already pretty fit). I also asked him about the outcome of my work and my religious exemption. His response was a very clear "it isn't going to matter". I don't claim any sort of premonitory power nor do I necessarily believe there is about to be some sort of world shaking event (my world maybe...) but the experience was not a typical one for me and I thought the timing of stumbling across the notes immediately after seeing this post was odd. I figure you ignore the gods at your own peril so I've been doing extra PT and tuning up skills.

HV

[(Anonymous)]

Having a propensity for war gods (don't ask my why, it just *is* okay?!?), I have had the sense for some time that quite a few are circling for an event or period of upheaval - I witnessed omens during 2016 that I believe signified the election of Trump as the beginning of a new historical period.

I can't shake the feeling that even though it's been very interesting so far, it's about to get even *more* interesting. Which frankly, I don't particularly care for.

[(Anonymous)]

No mass casualty dreams here but I did have a deeply disturbing dream repeating itself over a period of about a week just over a week ago where I had a pill-like object lodged in the back of my throat on the verge of being aspirated. I would try holding myself upside down in a desperate attempt to dislodge it safely. The dreams were upsetting enough that I followed your recommendation of putting out a bowl of vinegar on my bedstand. After having another weird dream where I found myself coughing up an odd lump of tissue (a tumor?) which I extracted with some difficulty from my mouth, the dreams have stopped.

Now I can't see that this is actually related to your (and others) dreams but the theme of some sort of medical issue is curious. I still have an old book from a college course I took umpteen years ago: First Aid put out by the American National Red Cross as well as a book I rescued quite a while ago from the Recycling Station discard shelf: The Modern Home Medical Adviser edited by Morris Fishbein MD. It's a hefty volume (copyright 1940) old enough to have procedures explained in fairly simple detail and achievable without complex med-tech. Both will be keepers. The dreams may not be literally true but may be pointing towards a collapse of complex care, so the more we know, the better off we'll be.

And the bowl of vinegar is staying on my bedstand for the time being, just in case.

JLfromNH/Mauve Bilious Groundhog

[(Anonymous)]

I had a recurring bout of waking up with that exact same "There's a thing in the back of my throat and if I just let it be, it's going to choke me to death" thought over the period of October-December. I probably had it 4-5 times. I haven't had it in the past month or so, though, and I never got the thought that I expelled it so much as I got used to "oh, its that weird choking thing again". Maybe I stopped worrying about it and it went away?

Still very weird to find someone else is getting the same experience! Maybe if I get it again and have the presence of mind, I'll picture myself expelling whatever it is and see what happens.

[stcathalexandria]

I have the American Medical Association's Family Medical Guide (pub 1982 edition) and have used it consistently over the years for diagnosis. It has handy charts in the front so you can start with the ailment, then answer the questions to know better what it is. Then the disease descriptions tell you more details on treatments and complications.

This is a listing with used copies of the revised edition of what I have. It's up to 4th edition now but have no idea if they dumbed it down.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/American-Medical-Association-Family-Medical-Guide-9780394555829

Now that being said, maybe what I should be looking for is something more on emergency care or field medicine?

[methylethyl]

That looks very handy! I often see stuff like that in the bins at the thrift store, but it hadn't occurred to me previously to pick up a few of them... it'll be a mission for this week!

[ataulfo]

I was absolutely struck seeing this.

[brenainn]

Thanks for the premonitory warning. I am preparing to print a hard copy of that nursing guide as I'm typing this. And how fortunate, as I was just at a thrift store today and found a really nice, heavy duty binder in which I can now place it. Given the unbelievable incompetence of the Biden Administration and the current geopolitical situation, I suspect that there be a lot of accuracy in this dream. Again, many thanks for the warning and the nursing book recommendation!

Dreams

[(Anonymous)]

No dreams specifically about a mass casualty event, but I’ve been sensing something quite unsettling in the air, so to speak, for about a week or so.

It feels to me as if something is about to break from stress, about to let go. This feeling has been concurrent with the truck convoy converging on Ottawa, which ostensibly is good news for everybody but the political/managerial class ... so .... we’ll see.

Re: Dreams

[ecosophia]

Interesting. Thanks for the data point!

Big dirty river ereader

[(Anonymous)]

Does any one know how to get book from archive.org on to a kindle? I don’t enjoy reading them in the browser.

Re: Big dirty river ereader

[ecosophia]

Sure. If you go to the page I linked and scroll down a little, you'll find a box on the right labeled "Download Options." "Kindle" is the fifth option down from the top. Archive.org uses a text converter to generate the .mobi file for Kindle, and it doesn't get proofread, so there may be amusing typos in the Kindle text -- but it's readable.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you think we should start practicing on construction equipment simulators (video games) so we know how to use trackhoes and bulldozers to dig all the mass graves we will need?
That was intended as a flip comeback to the Where there is No Doctor posts… but… well, what do you think, John?
Rhydlyd

[ecosophia]

I don't know. I really don't.

The book you want is probably Where There Is No Undertaker...

Alton's "Survival Medicine Handbook"

[dr_coyote]

In Alton's "Survival Medicine Handbook" it's "long term system collapse survival medicine," not "wilderness medicine until the helicopter arrives." It has about everything that the non-medical person can handle, up through simple sutures and antibiotics. There's a fair bit of adaptation of field hospital level care.

As for dreams... mine have been pretty vivid lately, but nothing bad. Mostly things from college and grad school, wandering around the campus late at night. In the mass casualty department, well, the government has been poking at a slightly paranoid nuclear-armed bear for a couple of months. I can see things going very wrong there, although the probabilities seem low at present.

edit: Subject line with the name of the book displayed as olive-on-olive in my browser, almost impossible to read.

Re: Alton's "Survival Medicine Handbook"

[(Anonymous)]

I've got a copy of Survival Medicine Handbook (3rd ed.), too, and as thick as it is, it leaves me wanting to know more about every topic. A lot of the material is "health-related" more than medicine, such as how to improvise a water filter (to remove the big chunks of sediment), sterilize the "clean" water, and design and placement of a latrine. More than "can't get to the doctor", it's "how to live without the expectation of access to a doctor".

The section on pandemics describes TB, plague, coronavirus (SARS), Ebola, measles, smallpox, HIV, but only in general, historical terms: what it looked like, how it was stopped.

I'm glad I have it, and I'm glad that I (now) have the Red Cross 1951 book on PDF, too.

Lathechuck

[(Anonymous)]

I've often wondered how you would make antibiotics in your shop or basement, if you knew that there were no more coming from wherever overseas and that going to the pharmacy would be pointless. I've looked into how you might go making even the old style sulfa antibiotics and OMG is it complicated and fiddly. And those sulfa drugs had nasty side effects.

I'm not sure how much any of us could do if someone got infected from major wound trauma without those drugs. That was the state of the world before WW2 BTW - if you got a wound, you got infected, you died. When penicillin came along it was like a miracle. You poo-poo science and progress but there was a time when it did seem to work miracles.

[ecosophia]

That's quite an overstatement, you know. Penicillin was a miracle in its time because it could cure infections that got into the bloodstream or otherwise became systemic. If you can catch the infection before then it's another matter; antibacterials and antivirals from herbal sources saved a lot of lives back in the day. Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, for example, used to take bunches of St. Johns wort flowers, stuff them into a wineskin, fill the skin with olive oil, and hang it from the saddle bow of their riding horse as they made their way east from Europe. By the time they got to the wars, the oil was blood red and full of hypericin, which is a potent antibacterial. Quite a few of them got home alive despite sword and spear wounds because of that.

[(Anonymous)]

In your dream did you get a sense of whether it was localized or everywhere? Yeah, I get what you're saying about dreams - it really is hit or miss whether they turn out to be anything at all - and when. You might have a weird dream and you might be waiting 20 years before what you saw comes to pass, if it does so at all.

[ecosophia]

I had no sense of that -- it was just the sequence of events I described.

[(Anonymous)]

What was that teaching about using a bowl of vinegar as a dreamcatcher and who promotes it? consider my curiousity piqued. Also thank you everyone for the book suggestions...they'll fit very well among my field guides, survival manuals, books on old school skills, and miscellaneous odds and ends.

[ecosophia]

It's a bit of occult tradition, and it's not precisely a dreamcatcher. The belief is that having a little bowl of vinegar or any other volatile acid will keep certain kinds of disembodied entities from hassling you.

[stcathalexandria]

I have the 18th ed.(1931) of this book from a used book bin at Goodwill, but the latest I can find digitized is the 13th ed (1917) of it which actually could be better.

Practical Dietetics with Reference to Diet in Health and Disease by Alida Frances Pattee https://archive.org/details/practicaldietet01pattgoog

The first part of the book is all about nutrition and goes into great detail about each kind of food and its components, and cooking methods for best nutrition. Then it covers in detail what to feed the sick, how much, and methods. The last part breaks it down by medical condition with charts of times and foods which is very handy. Used to be used for nursing exams for 40 years.

[ecosophia]

Interesting! Many thanks for this.