Month: August 2022

And how do you collect spilled toner from a laser printer? On a concrete garage floor. I hesitate to use a vacuum cleaner for this because the toner will remain on it, plus there’s likely hot air and hot components inside, and the toner may bake onto places it shouldn’t. Sweeping it up isn’t very effective either. I haven’t tried a wet rag; I’m afraid a little toner might turn into a lot of black ink.

Feels like a profile pic?

And how does the “Mir” card translate into English, worldcard or piscard?

A bit about pharmacies in the USA. Mainly prescription drugs, prescribed by a doctor. The doctor sends the prescription electronically to your pharmacy, and you just go there and redeem it by showing your ID. I periodically get a cough, almost every year, and I just in case do an X-ray and see a doctor. Thank God, it’s all clear, but the doctor prescribes some medications because something needs to be prescribed. Thankfully, not antibiotics – that’s generally the first thing they do. This time the doctor prescribed a mouth spray, which turned out to be expensive at the pharmacy ($320, Budesonide/Formoterol). It could have been ignored if it had been approved by insurance, but it wasn’t, and I was asked to pay out of pocket. When I asked the doctor to prescribe something else, he prescribed the same budesonide/formoterol, but in some other form, and although the spray again cost over $300, this time the insurance paid two-thirds. I paid $100, which was unpleasant to do, but I decided to try it.

You can also just buy in the pharmacy. In the cough section, there are about 40 different medicines. But they all are a combination of guaifenesin (secretolytic, expectorant; also known as a substance to keep horses under anesthesia 😉) and dextromethorphan, which is essentially not a medicine but a symptom-removing agent (effectively, a cough center blocker in the brain). And that’s it, nothing more. A huge stand only of bottles and pills, where one of these two active substances is presented alone or both in various proportions. Everything else — only through a doctor.

In Russia, for example, Bromhexine (expectorant) is popular. In the US, it has no FDA approval. The FDA also did not approve Ambroxol. I tried to find acetylcysteine, it’s a mucolytic too. And there’s a problem — it was only available as “vitamins,” but now even that is not available (