It’s one of life’s truisms that we may wish for prestige, power and money, but none matter without your health.
“The first wealth is health” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
I don’t think it is self flattering to admit I have got some amount of respect, influence and capital. And yet every spare dollar and moment I have I spend trying to improve my health.
The other types of wealth I have don’t matter if I’m in too much pain to think or I am so regularly infected that my resting heart rate is in the mid nineties.
Yesterday I started getting what I call itchy and twitchy. It’s often the first sign of an infection that has broken through an altered window of immunity.
My entire body will itchy. Sometimes it will be accompanied by a rash like eczema. If the rash is bad enough to be opened through itching I can easily get a bad infection. The discomfort of all that makes me twitchy from the anxiety of it all.
I suspect I am itchy twitchy at the moment as I am in a city with polluted air from major construction and high air mold counts from the winter rains. It makes me want to hit the road immediately for dryer climates but I’ll take prednisone first.
That should make me very pleasant. Anyone who has taken the steroid knows it’s a joke as the drug makes everyone who takes it feel a bit crazy. And you get fat and moon faced for added insult to injury. So apologies in advance if I’m going to be a bit bitchy.
I don’t know how much to trust my Whoop or Apple Watch at the moment but they agree that I’ve not had very good restorative sleep for a week or more.
I’ve never been the best sleeper and I sleep poorly when I’m on the road. I’m in the single digits for both REM and deep sleep percentages at the moment. And I seem to be spending a bit more time than I recall being awake at night.
There is something strange about being told by some electronic device monitoring your every move that you were wide awake when you don’t remember even a little bit of it.
I’ve been changing hotels and Airbnbs regularly as I make a pilgrimage across a strong mountain towns, so it’s possible I am unable to feel safe and secure enough to sleep deeply. But I’m suspicious that I’m awake as much as either device claims.
These are some bleak sleep times and I swear I wasn’t awake for 30% of my night. If I was awake you’d have seen me futzing about on Twitter. Well, at least I’d have read a book till I feel back asleep.
There is something up with my rest that makes me feel like I need to stay put for a litttle bit and get in a proper night of rest. My Whoop is showing me going from a more typical 4 hour range of rest down into the “wide awake” range of the Apple Watch over the course of the week.
And the Whoop seems to think I was awake as much as the Apple Watch did last night so I might need to accept that my brain is stewing in some toxic mix it’s not flushing through the sleep process. It also thinks I was in bed for over 10:30 hours but got barely a wink of proper sleep. My wake time was 30%
I’m going to take a break from the road trip and stay in place till I get my sleep repaired a bit. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to manage.
I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.
This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.
Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.
I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.
I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.
There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.
I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.
Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.
It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.
I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?
Tis the season of “unwrapped” data round ups as technology companies owe remind us that they have very capable data teams without unnecessarily freaking out users.
The marketers get all the glory, as everyone figures it’s a few MySQL queries gussied up with a creative hook but I always wonder what happened to the great data and behavioral science fad of the early teens. We’ve moved beyond IFTT and Zapier into natural language vibe coding. It’s a time of incredible change in understanding the data we’ve lived inside for years.
I got my fifth year of Whoop end of year marketing when I woke up today. Which was a little annoying as I wanted to see my sleep from last night but who wants to rush through the end of year review right? Finding it again can be tricky.
I keep wondering what more can we get from the hardware that knows us best. I’ve given half a decade to Whoop and mostly what I’ve learned is Covid really took 20 points of my heart rate variability.
I’ve been frustrated of Whoop’s progress in the integration of a chat AI as it seemed like any commercial LLM could analyze screen shots of the Whoop as well as their own chat did with the data it already. But tenure counts for a lot and it’s still the tool we have all relied on for half a decade now. Or at least 2% of us have worn it everyday for that long.
Clearly the data l could be used in many more way more than the management team ever seems to enable their data teams to do regularly. And I’d like to get more out of my Whoop. So being reminded of the length of use makes me wish they would deliver on that future before another year goes by.
I’ve been on the move, and in wet, rainy, and polluted weather (in other words coastal cities) where I tend to do the worst.
It is frustrating to see nearly five years of work in my journals and tracking amount to very little in the face of wet moldy environments.
It’s not a terribly pleasant topic for day 1800 and makes me feel as if I’ve made little to no progress on moderating my immune system.
I’m particularly upset as it’s bad enough I chose a steroid course. I am too afraid of getting an infection. I loathe prednisone. It works so well. It is like a hammer on inflammation.
Prednisone crushes every inflammatory condition instantly. Red itching oozing welts in a matter of hours. But I can speak from hard experience that even though it stops a cytokine storm in its tracks, it leaves you crazy and fat in quite short order.
I am simply terrified of picking up a skin infection as I’ve had a doozy of a year dealing with them in areas delicate and unusual. It’s been horrifying to have issues with eyes, an incision site and abscesses in even more personal areas.
It seems safer to use the hammer before an area of open skin can be found by an invasive species just looking for somewhere wet and broken. I pray it was the correct choice.
We’ve not had any real snowfall in our corner of Southwest Montana just yet. It’s not unusual to get snow in September but it is now late November, and I can only recall a smattering of frost and a light dusting of snow. We’ve not needed to shovel the walkway, let alone plow out the drive.
The Bridgers are bare without even a hint of a snowcap. It has been 50 degrees and sunny for too many days. It just doesn’t feel natural.
Last night we set ourselves up for our idea of a wild Saturday night with sauna session after sunset. It was a balmy 180F inside our cedar sauna. Cooling off was a little trickier than usual though.
We set a sand timer for 15 minutes. When it finished we rush out with our felt hats and drop our towels to let the sweat evaporate. It is glorious to go from heat to cold shock.
Alas that doesn’t work as well when it’s in the mid fifties even in the November nighttime. Staring up at the stars, we could see the heat mist off our bodies and our breath but only just. It was twenty degrees too warm for that party trick.
Getting back in the sauna for round two was harder than I expected. The rush from heat to freeze to heat is part of the experience. Without the full range of our normal temperature change it just felt a little off. Stimulating but also a little scary. Where is our winter?
For someone with clear skin on my face (not even a humble brag), I spend what feels like irresponsible amount of time and energy on my skin health. The rest of my dermis is not as tractable as my face. I’ve been fighting eczema my whole life.
This year has been a particularly challenging, as my the IL-17 immune suppressant Bimzelx, I take for my ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis (it’s eczema on the inside), has left me almost catastrophically prone to skin infections.
I’ve had maybe 3 weeks without a disaster (and I traveled) though have still needed doxycycline so I’m optimistic.
I am hoping I can rack up a few more weeks or maybe even multiple months without needing to slice an abscess, manage a deep tissue infection, or get a subcutaneous skin infection.
I do have a new weapon in my battle to keep my skin healthy. I recently acquired a new deep infrared cosmetics mask from Beauty Pie that they are calling “medical grade” but mostly means it has one longer wavelength than their previous mask offering.
Medical-grade LED mask proven to improve the overall skin complexion
Using 1070nm – the deepest penetrating wavelength used in at-home LED devices to date – to reduce under-eye bags and puffiness, and smooth texture and tone
Helps the skin look fresh & hydrated. Using 830nm – supports the skin’s natural restorative and healing function – to boost circulation, improve blood flow, and increase oxygen
Skin looks plump & glowing. Using 630nm – enhances the production of collagen and reduces redness – to leave skin radiant and hydrated
I don’t know if it will do much but the longer wavelength is an improvement on their past mask which required something closer to 4 months of continuous use to see results and I was simply never off of antibiotics that interact negatively with red light long enough to get any results. Theoretically I should see results in a few weeks with the longer wavelengths.
I can’t recommend it yet as I just got it and I’ve only used it twice but I used it on my face, my neck, my left butt cheek where I had the infection from inserting testosterone pellets (long story if you missed that one) and on my scalp to see if I can stimulate some growth on my scalp as I shed a lot of hair this year from the stress.
That’s about 40 minutes of mask time so no joke but also pretty amusing. I hope I can use it enough between antibiotics rounds for a win as infrared is meant to do a world of good for pain and inflammation in addition to cosmetics so I’ll use the heck out of it while I can.
The days becoming shorter has hurt my attempts at getting out in the sun for a walk every day. This matters to me as I’d like to get regular readings of my V02 maximum and my heart rate. I rushed out without sunscreen to get in a mile.
I hit an important milestone in my current biohacking regimen this week. I made it to my 40th session of hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy or HBOT. I began on September 13th and did session 40 on November 20. I only traveled once during this period (a five day trip) so I could have fit it all in within a two month period but I was consistently doing two hours a day.
I intend to get bloodwork for comparisons next week, but in some ways this was a terribly experiment period. I had a small procedure to insert testosterone and estradiol into my left buttock which turned into a saga when I got a skin infection. Not the procedure’s fault and I’m glad I did it as my numbers are already better.
Fortunately HBOT is renowned for healing soft tissue infections so if I was going to suffer for having compromised immune health across my skin biome, then at least I had the state of the art treatment available.
We didn’t purchase the HBOT for its skin benefits. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d be have skin immunity issues. They began with my new IL-17 inhibitor which I started in January We’d acquired the HBOT around the same time but I had no idea how challenging Bimzelx would be. It could have gone worse.
We had originally acquired the HBOT as several of our friends and acquaintances had succeeded in managing impressive inflammation rate reductions as well as progress with a slew of autoimmune issues from long COVID to mold toxicity. The kind of troubles we only test in fancy labs with extreme athletes or the enterprising technology brother.
My wound has mostly healed save a small lump, my V02 max has improved despite virtually no exercise (hard to do much cardiovascular exercise with an infection in your posterior chain) and I have overall found the balance of improvement in my energy and pain to be significant.
Thanks for noticing Whoop
If I could just get a month without a health crisis where I have enough energy to workout consistently I just might make some progress. So if I disappear for a bit that will be what I’m doing. Once I’ve got bloodwork I will share obviously.
I feel like I got quite a scare and yet you’d think I’d be used to it, as this is all downstream of the interleukin-17 inhibitor that I changed onto at the beginning of the year for my autoimmune condition.
Every single quarter, and in some cases every other month this year, I have had some bizarre skin infection resulting from otherwise pretty benign situations. An infected gland in my eye (twice!) an abscess that turned into a deep tissue infection, and a tiny incision that allowed in a subcutaneous infection all rocked my world.
As much as I am thrilled to see all of my inflammatory numbers rolling in to baseline normal, I just don’t know if I can sustain having a health crisis this frequently for a medication that is supposedly working. It’s working at an extremely high cost to my sanity and body.
And you might say, “Well, the numbers don’t lie.” And I’d agree. But there are many other factors I have to consider, not the least of which is that healthcare access in America is so bad that I have managed two of the four crisis points with medical tourism abroad.
I am going to give my IL-17 inhibitor a full year as dosing on and off biologics is no easy matter and the compounding effects are quite real. But I do very much wonder if in order to go forward I must turn back.
One of my long standing theories, and a personal coinages, is the Thursday Styles Problem. It’s a theory of knowing directionally what is coming, but never being quite sure of when.
The New York Times publishes its “styles” section on Thursdays and Sundays. If you work in media, public relations or culture, you are aware of the general trends that will emerge on Thursday ahead of time. If you know “what everyone knows everyone knows” ahead of time, there is a lot of money to be made.
Predicting the trends sounds easy when I put it this way, but the timing of it requires quite a bit of foresight, and considerable planning.
The trend piece is researched and reported over months. It requires the editor to be familiar enough with the trend to approve the writer taking time & resources. That means other upstream media has to have covered the topic in the niche which requires its own planning and coverage.
And while hype cycles have shortened, culture still takes time. And really important cultural trends may even require years to be relevant enough to be Thursday Styles worthy.
And can you afford to wait for the cycle to run? Breaking news happens and a piece gets pushed. A hotter trend might push the piece for weeks or months. If your business can’t survive the long game of becoming a Thursday Styles trend, being first hardly matters. Being right doesn’t matter as much as being right on time.
There is an art to this. Publicists play long games. They seed articles with a long arc in mind. Prediction markets place bets on the likelihood of something occurring, but with many actors you can’t really control when and how a thing happens.
So naturally when something I am doing happens within a month or so of me doing a thing, I tend to feel smug. When Albania was on the front page of the styles section while Alex and I were vacationing there, I gloated. I’d been hip to the forgotten European country for years.
Today I got a push notification about women taking testosterone. It had the full ugly animations of a thirty minute reporting on a full blown phenomenon.
We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100). Day 1754
I have been very open about my dosing, my own bloodwork, and what went into why I chose to do it. Which, I’m glad, as the New York Times sure isn’t telling. Being very honest and open about details seems important as I have the privilege to experiment and I want others to benefit from that.
Because of minor complications, I’ve been attempting to be entirely transparent with those as well. The treatment itself is not dangerous and is tolerated very well, but I have had unusually high incidences of skin infections due to the IL-17 inhibitor I take for my chronic inflammatory condition, which led to a longer recovery than I’d have preferred.
Now that this is a full blown trend I promise to report back as I heal and as my blood work begins to show results. Until then, if you want to know what other trends I think will hit big and want to get ahead of the pack, remember I am just a message away. And I keep a shopping blog as well so you can buy what I buy before it shows up with a rave in the New York Times.
