Slept last night for a couple of hours after playing fallout-tactics. Woke up to find my old man had brought me my meds plus bought me (on lent money) the two tubes of local anaesthetic gel for my torn-out toenail's bloody painful bare nail-bed (I.e the bit the 'quick' protects) whilst I was asleep, so when I awoke, pain meds were right beside me ready for me as was the rest of my med bag (its always a couple of bags, one large one and one smaller one, because there are quite a lot for various different things, hence my custom title 'pharmaceutical dustbin, actually more of a reference to what the GP I had assigned as my personal official GP before the one I had now, the first one now retired, sadly due to depression; who jokingly called me a pharmaceutical dustbin, both for having a lot of prescription meds for my stomach, pain, seizure relief and protection, nerve damage, neuropathic pain and various other shit, and the fact that a prescription of sedative-hypnotic/anxiolytic benzo pills that would last most people a month would serve, without tolerance built up through use, to provide me with perhaps three doses. To get some sleep last night, I ended up taking all but the three pills of nitrazepam from an old rx I'd already used from an entire box, and it BARELY got me to sleep for perhaps 3 hours. I take them rarely, when I really need to, as I am aware they can cause a hellish withdrawal, even a fatal one, either way, causing severe seizures and dreadful suffering such as those who have experienced both hardcore heroin withdrawal and the mildest of benzo W/D almost universally say they would take a hundred, a thousand hardcore, megaton-level opiate withdrawals in compared to the slightest love-tap in terms of benzo WD. But even when never having taken them before bar once, twice etc., in my life, a few times separated by many months not even a drop of tolerance could exist, the sort of doses that would make most people sleep so deeply a hammer to the kneecaps AND balls..wouldn't so much as make their eyelid twitch, for days, and days, and days on end. That, will PERHAPS get me a few hours, or if really, really lucky, a whole day of sleep (my sleep cycle is more or less the opposite than most people. Up at night, asleep during the day, so I say, days sleep, not nights sleep, because I am rarely asleep at night, save only for when it gets to 8-9am. 7 if I go to bed real early.
But today, when I awoke, I found he'd been out and got my stuff, since I can't currently put a shoe or sock on one of my feet and go to do so myself.
And tomorrow, I thought I had a dr visit, about getting on memantine, I thought I'd have to go on crutches, and freeze the fuck out of the foot that had one of the toenails ripped out in the winter cold. But today I rang up to find the time of the appt, and found it was going to be a phone consultation. Suits me mighty fine. He's the good doctor there, the fair one, the one who will look after those in need without pre-judgement or prejudice (for example he knows, and I can be frank with him about the things I've taken in the past, I could tell him a sentence such as 'tonight I have a kg of methamphetamine to produce' and he'd still not judge me for it if I did have a kilo of meth to produce and either use, sell or both if I did tell him just that. He's a really kind, fair guy so I can trust him to listen, and make any decision to be made based upon the facts he both knows and when he knows something not, that he will listen to facts presented and explained to him (he himself says that in terms of pharmacology and biochemistry, I am so far beyond his knowledge that I have to explain things usually for him to know what I am talking about, although I neither rub that in, it would be illogical, gain me nothing, and besides I don't WANT to offend him or make him feel inferior. His knowledge of biology might be by far, inferior, but I have neither need nor desire to remind him of the fact, only to give him the explanations he does need, if he needs them, I like the guy, I respect him, and I would not wish to lose his respect. Hell, I respect and like the guy enough to lend him both volumes of a precious, precious antique medical book set from the late 1700s, complete with some previous unknown owner's hand-written cursive notes bearing their recipes for their own personal recipes from everything from cough remedies, to personal laudanum recipes to personal skin complaint topical preparations; all written on old, yellowing, fragile pieces of paper, not part of the book volumes, but parts of the actual former owner somewhere down the line, either patient or physician, so doubtless, especially as a complete set, they are probably quite valuable. Didn't GIVE them to him, not to keep forever, but lent them as long as he needs to finish reading them, the only proviso that he treat them with the same respect and care as I do, and as he would treat his own personal property, and of course, that he knows they are lent. Just so long as he keeps them in as good a condition as they were when I lent him them, and of course, telling him that there are those handwritten notes in there, so he knows not to open them where they could fall into something and be damaged, since I'd imagine for almost certain that with something like that tucked in throughout the pages of both, they are unique of course and will be worth considerably more. )
They date from back in the days when nitric acid was used to treat piles in your arsehole, babies were had mercury metal rubbed into their gums, bashed up and pounded into chalk to divide it up finely (called 'grey powder'), they used mercury ointments (such as 'blue mass' 'grey mass', mercury metal, mercury (I) chloride (called then, 'calomel'), the extremely poisonous; in fact one of the things in my lab that scares the fucking shit out of me the most, of all the nasty things in there, mercury (II) chloride is the one thing in there, more than cyanides, that give me the willies more than anything else, corrosive sublimate, HgCl2 (mercury (II) chloride, mercuric chloride, mercury (I) chloride being mercurous chloride).
They used many forms of arsenic compounds, lead compounds, other mercury compounds, silver nitrate (called then 'lunar caustic', for some reason, silver has always it seems, had an affiliation in the mind of mankind, with the moon) on the EYELIDS, to cauterize and treat styes (an infection of the hair-follicle an eyelash or other hair grows from), and used all manner of other stuff that today if your GP tried to give you them you'd likely slap him in the face and report him to the authorities for the grossest of negligence.
(although there are two exceptions. Under specialist-use only, by chemotherapy experts, as a hospital-use-only agent, it is used, often in combination with a form of vitamin A as a chemotherapy drug for those who don't respond to first-line chemo drugs for acute promyelocytic leukaemia, under the name 'trisenox', and as well as a treatment for second-stage african trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) caused by one of the two forms of the sleeping sickness trypanosome, transmitted via the bite of the infected tsetse fly. Both are nasty, but in the case of sleeping sickness, once it reaches the stage where it enters the brain, the options are treatment, or certain death with no exception. So nasty as hell side effects are really something that you can't choose not to risk. And refractory leukaemias...well you don't have much option either, if everything else fails, and all-trans vitamin A with arsenic trioxide is again, although riddled with likely side effects, preferable to certain fatality. Either case, its do or die. (although granted in a very few, rare cases, some terminal cancer patients do seem to make miraculous recoveries and kill the cancer themselves) but thats the kind of thing that happens once in a blue moon, and generally speaking you either get the treatment, or you get a pine box and a hole in the ground, and the alternative choice is being burnt and put in a jar to be scattered somewhere by family later on in somewhere the former person liked in life)
So arsenic is not entirely without medical use, but, like the highly toxic heavy metal (metalloid/semi-metal, actually, like tellurium is and the 'metallic' form of selenium, as well as the 'metallic' form of arsenic) antimony, we still use antimony too, in certain, highly specialized circumstances, specifically, pentavalent antimony compounds of certain types, specifically for treating leishmaniasis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentavalent_antimonialIn the days of those antique books from my library, though, they used it for as trivial a reason as an emetic. They'd even make solid pills of antimony metal which would be handed down through families, from generation, a user of an antimonial pill as they were then known, as a purgative would swallow it, puke and shit violently, after a minuscule amount of antimony was absorbed from the pill in the digestive tract, it would then come out of the other end, be fished out, washed, and re-used indefinitely, families only needing a single one, and it being passed from generation to generation to generation.
Quite probably the most economical medicinal treatment ever known in the history of man. The same pill being able to be taken not just by many members of the same family, but many generations of generations of that family. Just fished out of the toilet, washed and put back in the medical cabinet.
There were antimonial cups too, cups made, just as it says on the tin, of antimony, wine would be kept in them overnight, to produce an emetic called antimonial wine, the acidic wine causing traces of Sb to be dissolved into the wine, of which a small quantity would be taken by mouth, and the result would be severe purging, used to treat cases of poisoning. A single such cup would in effect last indefinitely. Not that I'd USE it...but I would LOVE to own one, as a piece of history for my collection of interesting artefacts and literature, fungi, plants and the like.
We still use Sb (from the latin, 'stibium', meaning antimony), its symbol on the periodic table, for leishmaniasis treatment when it must be used in some cases when other treatments do not work. But for this only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentavalent_antimonial (pentavalent arsenic compounds, unlike those of antimony and phosphorus, or nitrogen are quite uncommon, As(V) being quite uncommon, although they exist). antimony pentoxide, IIRC doesn't exist save as a hydrate, unlike the well-known and frequently used phosphorus pentoxide, P2O5 [technically P4O10, as it occurs as a dimer, its the anhydride of orthophosphoric acid, H3PO4) ], the nuclear option when a dessicant is needed, able to dehydrate even 100% concentrated sulfuric acid, one of THE most powerful dessicants, to its anhydride, sulfur trioxide, dehydrating H2SO4 to SO3 and the H2O being ripped from the sulfuric acid to form H3PO4, phosphoric acid. For non-chemists, in other terms, as far as drying agents to, then if P2O5 (its still usually referred to as such rather than formally as P4O10) won't dehydrate it then nothing will.)
P2O5 is very stable, and is the white, highly acidic, corrosive, nasty ass smoke produced in dirty great clouds when elemental phosphorus burns. At least it stable in dry environments, it is unstable towards water, of course, being an ultrapowerful dessicant, but kept in a dry environment it will continue to exist as it is indefinitely. But if you want something dried, and its not acid-sensitive, then distillation from P2O5....that WILL dry it, and get whatever your dessicating drier than dryness itself.
Useful stuff too, although not the cheapest of drying agents. And definitely not shit to get on your skin, as it'll turn to acid in moments and burn halfway from here to china, just starting out as 100% orthophosphoric acid and as it mixes with biological tissue fluid/blood then it will simply slowly dilute (phosphoric acid being the acid in cola, and if you leave a tooth in it overnight, in a glass of coke, it'll be gone overnight), and rip the shit out of whatever it contacts, flesh, blood, bone, connective tissue, it'll melt through you like a blowtorch and probably hurt like all fuck when it does)
I've never BEEN burnt by it, well, not directly. I did once suffer a very small white phosphorus burn as a little kid when distilling phosphorus, although it was only a couple of mm in diameter. And the main consequences were extreme pain and afterwards, phosphorus poisoning, mildly, and thankfully, the exposure was to obviously less than 40-50mg, because white phosphorus is more toxic than cyanide, and 'all' that happened was mere paralysis, almost completely, of the arm where a spot of willy pete touched my wrist, leaving me unable to so much as pick up an object or hold a pencil, for almost a month, perhaps a little longer, shaking like a parkinson's patient.
Did complete the distillation, heating red phosphorus in an air-free environment to cause transformation to the white allotrope of phosphorus, and distilling it to purify it, but when handling it, accidentally got a tiny, tiny speck on me, smaller than a match-head, and it burnt through my glove and then into me, both burning and poisoning me at the same time.
NOT much fun at all. And phosphorus burns...jesus H christ do they ever hurt like fucking hell on a toilet shitting out it's hell-spleen. Can't compare to any other burn I've ever had, save only the time thanks to the filth, I got blasted in the face with superheated pressurized dry-steam, lithium amide, sodamide, lithium and sodium hydroxides, alkoxides, ammonia and just for fun, neutral PH, but gritty and irritating phosphate salts, the time it knocked the goggles up off my eyes (it hit at an undershot kind of angle, accompanied by a blast of plastic shards) and then proceeded to burn the fuck out of my eye, scorch off my cornea partially, where the worst hit...that hurt worse, but otherwise, even having my skin burnt off down to the bare muscle on most of one of my hands by SOCl2, or burning myself with perchloric acid.
After the eye incident, I invested in a full-face, neck and forehead blast-shield. Like a welding mask but without the dark UV-protective tint, although I do have a welding mask as well as a spare set of goggles to go under the blast shield, the latter meant to take corrosive volcanoes, even modest-scale explosions, as well as shrapnel if it has to. Not that I INTEND explosions/shrapnel/corrosive volcanoes, but IF one were to happen, then its there, over my goggles and gas-mask to protect me, then its there, and anything like that pressure-propelled shrapnel-and-base-blast were to come the way of my face it would just bounce off the shield rather than coming within 10 seconds of blinding me (only reason it didn't was I kept my head on and mind focused on the immediate need, and ran like fucking hell on a bike towards the tap, to turn it on full blast, pry my eyelids open and wash the fuck out of my eye for a long time, then calling an ambulance, hurriedly putting in some local anaesthetic for the burnt eye to enable me to function enough to quickly complete the last step of my reaction [it only took a few seconds, just pour a slurry of something into a flask and done], stash the glassware where the paramedics wouldn't see it and potentially report something they thought I ought not to be up to, then go unlock the door and go back to washing my eye out.
(yeah, I know, I know, making sure I completed the reaction whilst I still could do (the reagent being used is very, very unstable to air and water, decomposing instantly)...only an spesh chemist would have gone quite THAT far...but, well, I'd spent hours preparing the unstable reagent and it wouldn't have waited for me to get out of hospital. It HAD to be done then and there, on the spot, so I did. Guess that's a card-carrying spazz-tech [pun intended] for you
)
It had to be done, I'd spent about 4-5 hours preparing my reagent, and I wasn't going to let it go to WASTE...jesus...fucking shit no, all that time and effort go to waste...? me? you must be shitting on my breakfast if you think that is going to happen on my watch!!
