On Friday the allergic and autoimmune symptoms were so bad I took 5mg prednisone. On Saturday they were no better and I upped the dose by 2.5mg to 7.5mg. I moved forward my absurdly expensive biologic injection by a day. I haven’t been able to convince my health insurance to get them more frequently so it’s a risk.
I’m doing better today. My pain is abated to an almost unnoticeable level at a 2. That’s rare for me. And it makes me want to rush into as much work, chores and activity as possible just to enjoy it.
I’m typically working with a 5-6 level of pain on any given day but I can work (with medication) up to a 7 within reason. Past 8 I’m in bed and struggling.
The downside is of course that prednisone just sucks. It messes up your appetite. You balloon up almost instantly with side effects like moon face. And your body develops a dependency quite rapidly.
Titration off of steroids like prednisone require a steady and slow discipline so you don’t get “blow back” as it can make your symptoms even worse.
I’ll have titration for a few days ahead of me. But maybe I’ll get to enjoy the lack of pain. Already I’ve cleaned for an hour, done laundry, checked off a number of small “to do” list items and I am blessedly free of the exhaustion that comes from working with moderate to severe pain that is my normal daily experience.
One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells1. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. Nature
Instead of Benadryl it was diphenhydramine. For a headache we used ibuprofen not Advil. Acetaminophen was the proper name not Tylenol.
She taught me what went into popular brand name medication like DayQuil and I learned the ratios of guaiphenesin to dextromethorphan. Always take the minimum viable dose she’d say. And if I only had a cough I didn’t a fever reducer.
America is lucky to have a thriving generic medicine market. If you are a Costco shopper you can buy thousands of tablets of every crucial over the counter medication at just a few cents per dose.
Take the time to read more on the issues as it’s been forty years of struggle for access and safety and we are experiencing shortages and supply chain risk that is unprecedented.
Apparently it gets harder to sleep well as you get older. I’m no spring chicken as an elder millennial but I have had pretty consistent sleep hygiene over the past few years.
Like many biohackers, I monitor my sleep on an Apple Watch as well as a Whoop (which incidentally I absolutely endorse) whose data I sync across a few other biohacking apps.
I wrecked my sleep consistency this week as I changed my schedule to overlap more with the East Coast and European markets for work. On Friday night I found myself absolutely wired and unable to sleep. I was what students of nervous system work might call “activated” and couldn’t get myself down to baseline.
Eventually, in desperation, after attempts as varied as hysterical crying, box breathing and reading 10,000 words on female homicide statistics, I took multiple types of downers.
And I don’t mean friendly things like melatonin or chamomile tea. I went for the dreaded Jordan Peterson nemesis the benzodiazepine. I needed to sleep.
And thanks goodness I did. I was out like a light till an almost 3pm. Whoop was thrilled with my sleep performance. Which I admit feels weird to see as no one wants drugged sleep to be good sleep but alas it was good.
I spent a third of my time dreaming which must mean I’m working through something. the activation of my nervous system clearly meant something. I got excellent rest and it was worth it. I overslept a lot and I hope that I’ll be right as rain for my sleep hygiene thanks to pulling the ripcord and getting sleep by any means necessary.
Maybe the intensity of sensory inputs is worse than it used to be, but I think of myself as being a sensitive person.
I have strangely acute hearing, I struggle with bright lights but in particular screens, and I am often unsettled by smells, flavors, and textures. Life feels like it’s having at 10x the density and clarity that I’d prefer.
It’s probably just the flavor of autism that seems to plague every other person on the internet.
Today I found myself focused on the texture of a pair of socks that I’d just purchased. It felt as if they were rubbing the top of my feet raw. But it all looked fine when I took them off. I applied moisturizer and put them back on but it still itches.
Sensitivity is annoying and I am chalking it up to fatigue. I’ve been excitedly putting in long hours for work so every input might simply be on raw nerves.
It’s always baffling to me when something that is supposed that is supposed to make you feel good makes me awful. And yet it’s a very consistent experience for me.
Every time I get bodywork done (massages, acupuncture, osteopathic spinal work, physical therapy) I feel like absolute shit for 24-48 hours afterwards.
I have an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis which is a fancy form of arthritis. It’s well controlled with medication and a healthy lifestyle but I am always looking for ways to increase my functionality as well as my capacity to tolerate stress.
This naturally leads me to want incorporate positive stress techniques like cold showers, saunas, and the thousands of other hacks to improve your capacity to tolerate stress.
I’ve tried supplements magnesium supplements to adaptogenic mushrooms and most major modalities of body work to even the whackiest of woo.
Yesterday I had an amazing osteopath work on my spine and yet today I feel about 10x worse than I did before I went in. The dip is just a misery of exhaustion, pain which leads to some anxiety from being tired and in uncomfortable.
I trust I’ll feel better after this dip and some progress as I recover from the good stress but at the moment I’m just miserable.
My assumption is that many things in life that make you feel better in the long term are uncomfortable. Delayed onset muscle soreness is a common issue for new weight lifters and pushes many out of their routines before they even get started.
It’s such an art finding the correct amount of stress to put your body under and I wish I had a more perfect intuition about how to do it. Until I do I’ll probably have to work through many types of dips.
I’m a little bit underfed at the moment. If I don’t have someone feeding me I basically don’t eat. And I didn’t eat much this weekend because I was alone. The joyful peace of solitude means I’ll skip every meal I can.
I don’t mind a little feast and famine because I’ve always found food to be at best inconvenient and at worst an actively hostile force that would make me an undesirable fat woman. Elder millennials had terrific culture for women what else can say.
I didn’t come from a family that had a strong culture of food. Scandinavian foods are kind of gross when filtered through American agribusiness. Happy family mealtimes and nurturing through food seems like the stuff of movies not real life. It certainly wasn’t my experience as a kid.
I’ve had years where I was able to look at food as fuel but those were mostly when I was very dedicated to athletic pursuits.
Alas that’s in the past for me thanks to age and disease. I’m happy I’m healthy enough to squat a few times a week and be out of bed for multiple hours at a time. And that’s still a struggle with my ankylosis.
I don’t crave food or have intrusive thoughts about it. I mostly just don’t like to eat and it has surely contributed to a genetic propensity to weight gain especially when it’s been combined with steroids to manage my autoimmune condition. If I were my body I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism either.
I better force myself into a meal right now because as tempting as it is to just not eat it’s a bad habit. But if someone just solves the problem of food I’d be the first person in line. Especially now that the American food system is beyond tainted. Like truly how can we have the fire to burn if our fuel is this bad?
We are living in the past’s version of the future. The Cyperpunk I read in my youth is now the stuff of my daily life. It’s not as sleek as in fiction but it’s hard not to feel like it’s William Gibson’s world and I’m just living it.
We are only now getting Idoru but we are veering towards Burning Chrome. Half the anime avatars in accelerationist e/acc chats are wearing Mirror Shades and everyone watches for crypto rugs. But we are getting our Mt Gox Bitcoin back right?
What about borderless corporate worlds and mass scale surveillance identity? That’s here too. When William Gibson wrote “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” I wonder if he knew it would be the nexus of the network state debate?
We’ve even got the LoTeks in a Luddite rebellion against a world connected by dubiously transparent artificial intelligence owned by actual Zaibatsu multinationals with more power than nation states. Fact and fiction spinning hyperstition better than Nick Land ever dreamed.
Snowcrash and Crash Override? It’s better. We got amazing memes and elaborate fakes of the Blue Screen of Death. It actually did suck for airlines and banks because regulatory capture is the stuff of systemic risk.
And lest you think we’ve got no biohacking in this Cyperpunk world after the pandemic we have a renaissance in systemic & holistic approaches to medicine. Suddenly everyone is aware of the risk in agribusiness. Seed oils is normie stuff. Instead of turning Luddite the Danish invented advance metabolic medicine to cope. Everyone is on GLP-1 agonists.
Mix in the rise of nicotine and THC and you’ve got a national post prohibition bloom of folklore cures whose research has been suppressed by pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies alike. Conspiracy? Maybe but just the sludge of industry.
And in that all of the is our founders are global citizens who have to manage anarcho-tyrannical borders with visas controlled by incompetent governments and live through the geopolitics of wars fought with drones and propaganda. The future is already here. It’s actually pretty cool. Just watch out for nervous system tics.
I caught a case of Covid at the very end of May that took me down hard. I’d been struggling with “long” symptoms
So I tried an experiment. A pretty crazy one at that suggested by my osteopath and supervised by a doctor.
I am using going to use a 7mg slow release nicotine patch (of the type made for smoking cessation) for the next 3-5 days to see if it impacts my over-stayed their welcome Covid symptoms. I started my experiment at 9am Saturday July 6th
Day 1283 Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs)
The principle was pretty simple but not proven yet in clinical trials.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology[1].
Please do go read the original post with lots of caveats as nicotine is an addictive substance and this is not something to try without consulting your doctor.
I was unable to do the full 7mg but cut the patches down to 3.5 to 5mg over the five days. The side effects included headaches for the first day or so and a persistent queasiness.
Within a day I was lifted out of my exhaustion (which you’d expect from something modestly stimulative even though it was a low slow release dose). By the end of the second day my persistent coughing lifted entirely. I’d been struggling with congestion and coughing after even modest exertion like a walk outside.
I was functional on the fourth and fifth day like I hadn’t been since I got Covid. You can see me go into the red on my first day (my HRV dropped significantly but my RHR was only up by a few BPM). I slowly felt better and saw better recoveries even while taking on a little bit more exertion. I pushed a little too hard and found myself back in the red on my last day.
I was really relieved to stop the patch by the end. The last day of treatment I had overextended myself so I was in the red and feeling it even as the nicotine pushed my system up. I wanted to rip it off and did eventually cave at the end of the day instead of doing it all night.
My symptoms seem to be at bay. I feel decent enough so days after wrapping even as I began menstruation this morning. I hate to report that it also improved my usually debilitating PMS which typically includes intense migraines.
I would do it again if I got Covid. I cannot imagine ever using a nicotine patch consistently. I didn’t not enjoy the extra push of energy except insofar as it got me out of the exhaustion of the illness. I feel like it would be too much if I were otherwise feeling healthy. I have no cravings or side effects after.
Honestly I’m still wrapping my head around how well this worked. A part of me is confused, indignant and angry that a substance I was taught to fear has therapeutic benefit. Updating your mental models around long held beliefs is an uncomfortable process. But it’s a heck of a lot better than long covid symptoms.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology.
I am doing alright with it. I was wary of keeping the patch on all night long (I am very sensitive to stimulants such that I won’t drink caffeine past 10am) so I removed it at about 5pm. That may have been a mistake.
Yesterday my Whoop recorded physiological stress. I wasn’t coughing, I had more capacity for exertion, and I felt generally less exhausted.
But I didn’t come down easily for sleep. I ended up taking a number of anti-inflammatory medications as well as an Ambien. My heart rate was stable but I felt “up” which I don’t care for at night.
And I did not wake up to good news. My HRV absolutely tanked. There are lots of confounding variables here in that I got good restorative sleep (medicine induced surely) but some strain has clearly been too much. 40% down isn’t a rousing endorsement.
I am also noticing a lot of chatter around addiction and whether or not it’s responsible to discuss these things. The fear that the average person is in fact prone so addiction and will have adverse affects. Which I’m sure is true. I don’t think normal people should take unnecessary risks and it’s good to have the minimum viable dose be none at all.
It’s wise to remember that I am not at all living in average circumstances nor do I have average medical conditions so I am not necessarily who you should be looking to for health advice. You should do the basics like eat more protein, lift heavy things, sleep an adequate amount, be in the sun and move around, and manage your baseline health metrics first.
Never one to take things laying down, I started a crazy “n of 1” experiment today. My family doctor prioritizes keeping up on literature. We’d chat about anti-inflammatory research in reputable journals.
But I am on week seven of Covid symptoms simply not clearing. I’ve been coughing when under stress or exertion, my seasonal allergies exacerbated the issue, my reconditioning of my cardiovascular system wasn’t going great and I was exhausted.
At a visit with my osteopath who helps with my chronic autoimmune issues in my spine (I’ve been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis) I mentioned my ribs felt tender and constricted from Covid coughing.
She asked me if I was familiar with the research coming out about Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and Covid-19 treatments. She’s casual like that.
In a joking “don’t try this at home” way my osteopath said she’d seen folks use nicotine patches for a week to shorten their Covid symptoms to some success.
Now for some caveats. In any type of crazy self treatment it’s important to consider your risks and consult a professional. Don’t do anything without your doctor’s input. Every medicinal treatment has risk and side effects.
I am using going to use a 7mg slow release nicotine patch (of the type made for smoking cessation) for the next 3-5 days to see if it impacts my over-stayed their welcome Covid symptoms. I started my experiment at 9am Saturday July 6th.
I am treating this as a “kitchen table” science experiment in which I am clearly an N of 1 from which you can only take anecdotal evidence. But maybe one data point becomes many and with the network effects of social media maybe we push forward other experiments.
Here is what I know so far thanks to searches from perplexity AI but I encountered some of the papers through mutuals on Twitter, some on forums, others I’d discussed with physicians, some were just raw dogging Google Scholar.
The AI synopsis I’m sharing isn’t meant to be conclusive just to give interested parties a starting place to see why I believe this is an experiment I’m comfortable running on myself.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology[1].
Nicotine and other nAChR agonists could modulate inflammation and the immune response, offering therapeutic benefits[2][3].
Given that I’m working with inflammation as my primary issue which is not modulated even without Covid, I was obviously quite curious to learn about this cholinergic system and potential for up regulation. I’d seen discussions as early as 2020 about the curious fact that smokers had experienced some protection from Covid infections.
This all clicked in my head as being testable on my own without significant risk. Gwern had significantly reduced my concern about nicotine usage where previously as a child of the drug wars I’d put smoking nicotine in basically the same category of dangers as injecting heroin. It is not.
It seems it is possible we’ve got an explanation for why smokers didn’t catch covid at the rates you’d expect and they did better with the infections. We may even have things to learn from it to improve treatments.
Nicotine agonists could potentially be used to prevent inflammation in COVID-19 patients by modulating the immune response. Nicotine, a cholinergic agonist, has been shown to inhibit the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which could help mitigate the cytokine storm associated with severe COVID-19[1][2][3].
The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, activated by nicotine, suppresses maladaptive inflammatory responses, suggesting that nicotine or similar agonists might offer therapeutic benefits in managing COVID-19-induced inflammation[3][4][5].
I do want to reinforce that I am aware nicotine is addictive. I’ve had to take drugs that form chemical dependencies in the past. I’ve used Prednisone in the less controlled phases of my spinal condition and tittering off that steroid is a nightmare. But it can be done. It is doable with a plan, careful monitoring, and supervision.
All evidence suggests this experiment isn’t long enough for me to develop a dependency let alone an addiction. I am thankfully free from any genetic predisposition to addiction in my family.
I plan to do a B3 Niacin flush at the end which is meant to help tittering. I will also be monitoring my heart rate as Nicotine has a tendency to raise your BPM so if I don’t like what I see I’ll lower dosage or stop usage.
With all that said, let’s see if it helps me out. I’ll post because it is in my nature.