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Saturday, November 26, 2022

Cat Vincent is ill, and angry

Cat Vincent on Twitter

I haven't noticed much activity from prominent British magician and RAW fan Cat Vincent lately, and when I read his latest news, I found out why: He's been ill since early in the pandemic, and likely has  Long Covid, although as he explains, he can't be sure because he wasn't tested when he first became ill:

Although I didn’t lose my sense of smell, a couple of weeks in I decided my other symptoms were close enough to this weird new disease known as SARS-COVID-19 to justify spending a delightful day playing NHS phone-chess, being passed from 111 to the COVID hotline to my surgery and back, only to be told that a diabetic with a chronic inflammatory disorder in his fifties wasn’t considered high risk enough to test for the disease because I hadn’t knowingly had contact with anyone who’d been out of the country recently.

Refusing him a test given his condition makes no sense; I wonder sometimes if many medical folk have become overwhelmed and just don't have the energy to treat every case with urgency. (My 89-year-old mother, fortunately fully boosted, recently fought off a bout with COVID; I didn't think her doctor moved quickly enough to deal with it.)

Cat has had to deal with a lot and he's upset and feels many people he considered friends have let him down. He wants everyone to mask up and stay caught up on the boosters. Read the whole thing. 

1 comment:

Oz Fritz said...

This is a very tragic and heartbreaking account. We can only wish Mr. Vincent gets help to find the problem and make a full recovery. Mysterious illnesses suck. The bright spot in the essay is the cancer remission of his wife; we know that healing is possible.

The transgender violence and the "useless eaters" parts recalls the quixotic question, how to heal the world?; to dream the impossible dream. Gilles Deleuze saw his role as a philosopher as a diagnostician and healer of society. He thought great literature had the same role. Deleuze struggled with health issues for the last 25 years or so of his life.

He has a concept, "counter-actualization" intended to turn the event of deep wound into something else. He uses the example of a French writer, Joë Bousquet who got severely wounded in WWI. He elaborates this in Logic of Sense Series (chapter) 21 & 22.