Ludolf: Vitals look good.
Torsten: A-aye, they are now!
Must’a had a bad reaction, is all! T’ somethin’ I ate, maybe? Or drank? Or it’s the cold! You can’t abide the cold much yourself, so’s I hear.
Ludolf: Oh, I hate it. So I put on a coat and keep working.
Torsten: O-on it, Manager.
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I was feeling like Torsten paying off his debts somehow, being sent home to chilly Sonheim, and then forced back *into* debt to cover medical expenses, would be crueller than having the embassy bill him for the medical care in the first place.
Oops, silly me, assuming they had medical care. 😒 “Diagnosis: malingering”, huh?
They obviously HAVE medical care.
… noone said it is GOOD medical care.
I think I remember Leif saying it was good medical care. If I’m remembering correctly, this was fairly early on in the comic, while Leif and Thørn were first getting to know each other, before Leif knew that Thorn can’t pronounce his own name correctly, at least given the phoneme set that Leif uses. Thorn then followed it up with explaining to Leif what good health care actually looks like. Leif wondered how they could afford that.
That said, it is medical care that could only be considered good by someone who is stupendously patriotic, likes exploitation, or comes from somewhere with even worse health care (or no health care).
Alternatively, it IS good medical care… it’s just also costly because Sønheim doesn’t do social safety nets (other than maybe the Debt Servant thing, if you’re looking at it from a certain angle. With a telescope. And the lenses in that telescope are rose-tinted.).
I would think a country run by (or at least heavily influenced by) vampires would understand the benefit of long term investment. Preventative maintenance is cheaper in the long term and that’s basically what healthcare is.
I think that it’s pretty clear that the manager is, like many managers, not very good at his job. He abuses his position of power rather than fulfilling his responsibilities, because he can.
Nah, the vampires’ idea of long-term thinking is “all these humans will be dead in fifty years no matter what, and there will be a new bunch to replace them, so why should we dump our money into making sure this bunch lives a few more years?”
So the next bunch is healthier and can do more with fewer costly accidents and delays? And if experimenting in a field bears the risk of debt-inducing medical costs for failure, innovation as a whole suffers? But it’s clear US companies lack that kind of foresight, and they don’t even have a species divide as an excuse.
*grumbles* sure, the tests look fine, the tests *always* look fine. I read a paper on non-anemic iron deficiency recently and I’m eating more meat than I wanted to in the hope that it has a chance of helping, because after my other tests come back negative (they always do) all that’s left is a CFS/ME diagnosis, and we all know the treatment options for that range from “snake oil” to “you made it worse”.
on the bright side, meat I used to not like tastes weirdly good, which is a reliable indicator of vitamin deficiency for me. and my current doctor actually takes me seriously, which is really, really nice even when I still have to do the research myself.
Heh. The tests of my eyes always looked fine until I saw an actual optometrist instead of the school tests, who said I’d needed glasses for 5 years and how did I go so long without them?
But also the problem with “normal variation” is things that may be within total-human-experience-average normal can still be a problem for you, individually. My fevers as a child were rarely taken seriously because my body is naturally about 2 degrees F lower than average, so 5 degrees above normal for me was a “slight” fever but the same for a classmate was a “significant” fever.
Related to your issue, other sources of iron include every deep-green vegetable, in case you’re getting tired of meat.
the thing about yummy green veggies is that they have non-heme iron, which absorbs differently than heme iron; PPIs only interfere with the non-heme type. they also interfere with protein-based sources of b12, so meat isn’t inherently superior. 🤣 nutrition is fascinatingly complicated!
but I haven’t felt any improvement yet, and it’s *almost* been long enough to make a difference, so the odds of getting an easy fix by changing my eating habits are pretty slim. 😛 at least that means I can eat what I like, though?
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