I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.
As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests
It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.
There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.
Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.
I’m OK To Go
I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.
Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.
When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.
The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.
Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”
I slept rather poorly last night. I get anxious before medical appointments. Interfacing with America’s medical system can range from merely uncomfortable to actively hostile so I suppose some heightened vigilance isn’t irrational.
I really yearn for an uptick in qualitative metrics I associate with higher quality of life like energy for my favorite physical activities (weightlifting and hiking). The fatigue and stress from the pain, and downstream side effects are constant reminders of poor health.
So I am looking for improvements in basic markers like my CRP and Sed Rate as those inflammatory markers should coincide with the qualitative improvements.
An auspicious pair of numbers for today’s date and I started something new which has been in the works since January began today. Our long awaited hyperbaric chamber has arrived and been fully set up in our yellow barn.
A lazy boy lounger and oxygen under two atmospheres of pressure.
It feels good to begin a positive focused wellness activity after what was otherwise a chaotic week of travel, geopolitics and violence.
As expected, it is not fun living through my own investment thesis. So you better believe I test my theories on myself. I want to survive the Jackpot.
Before Trump’s inauguration, we decided to purchase a hyperbaric chamber after one of our mutuals told us about his HBOT trial at a conference in the fall. It went very well for him and the research is promising for inflammatory conditions.
Over the winter break I happened to be in a city where I could test HBOT cheaply and was very impressed with the results in only ten sessions during a flare in my autoimmune condition. Crimping from Bryan Johnson
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) involves breathing pure or nearly pure oxygen (95-100%) in a pressurized chamber at anything above atmospheric pressure (2 ATA is equivalent to being 33 feet under seawater).
The increased pressure enhances the lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen, boosting oxygen levels throughout the body. The therapy aims to promote rejuvenation by increasing oxygen concentration in tissues, supporting healing, cellular repair, and vascularization.
This sent me down a rabbit hole as I did a bunch of deep dives, got some text books and came to a simple conclusion after a lot of medical papers that it’s pretty simple.
It’s almost philosophically the way of life in the mountain west. Oxygen and pressure work on the biomechanics of a functional body. Alas getting my basic market model to Montana ended up being a cluster fork of issues. We placed the order in January.
For months we waited for what we’d been told would be a 6-8 week process. Alas all hell broke loose. We had tariffs uncertainty with the importer and the OEM.
I have now, in September, after a long journey but a simple set up process, begun my first intensive protocol for autoimmune diseases on our own hyperbaric chamber.
Love your body enough to put it under pressure and take a deep breath.
I will complete a minimum of 40 sessions (5 sessions weekly) at 2 atmospheric pressures, in a hard chamber from OxyRevo with each session 90 minutes while breathing 100% oxygen for 20 minutes separated by a 5 minute break.
If you are interested and see strip mall options note that these are not consumer grade machines. The protocol requires a hard chamber to achieve that pressures. It’s quite a bit higher than soft chambers on the market.
There are risks associated with HBOT from correct pressurization issues to impacts like tinnitus. The more prepared you are to adapt to changing pressure with breathing techniques and equalization (looking to divers for these protocols) the happier your central nervous system will be.
I like to manage my days with buffers around my routines and obligations. I find tight schedules to be tiring and unhelpful as I manage my energy, pain, and workload. A packed calendar raises my cortisol.
I believe I am easily stressed by shouldering too much, but I also fear I am on a downward health trajectory which will require more time, energy and effort. I am beginning to contemplate reworking my style of effort management as conditions on the ground change. Can I schedule my way out of a spiral down? What is my Pareto optimal plan here?
My 2025 has been significantly worse than my 2024 and an almost entirely different realm of issues than I faced prior to that. As I compare, 2022 and 2023 were entirely different worlds than my 2025. I thought I was pretty sick then but improving my inflammatory markers has nuked my HRV & stamina.
The stress of a permanently lowered baseline of biometrics makes me feel despair even as I have new tools at my disposal to mitigate them.
Will my whole life be dedicated to the care and feeding of my broken body? Is that something I can live for instead of simply living with?
I just don’t know how much effort will be put into managing this new baseline and what the effort to reward ratio looks.
Is there a Pareto principle I can apply to permanent disability which I can, and maybe even should, emotionally accept? Or do I soldier on hoping that my middle aged body may repair itself if I do absolutely everything right? And what am I doing all of that for?
It just seems as if no matter the time management, advanced medical care, constant research and daily effort I only get worse. I’ve been under a scalpel three times this year.
Each time I think I have found a new drug or treatment modality I am quickly slapped with second order side effects. And then those side effects have new side effects as I treat them.
It’s the pimp my ride recursion of biohacking, but instead of liking a thing and adding it to my car, I’m adding more and more mitigation measures to manage the results of the biohacking.
Any positive aspects of my year (passing the right to compute bill into law, progress in my startup portfolio) seems pale in contrast to emergency surgery, slow burdensome recovery and the arrival of mortality. I’m only at the halfway point of life (and a little bit past that for the year) and I feel done in completely.
Lots of good suggestions made up the conversation and I’ve tried all of them. Supplements like magnesium and Oxytocin. Theories of mind like the pathless path, jhanna meditation, somatic release, nervous system work, Alexander Technique, and even coaches like Joe Hudson. So many other modalities that I also use were there.
One of the one-shots mentioned was “unclenching” which has been doing numbers. I myself am trying to “do less” and even “no effort” as part of the minimum coercion effort as let’s be real my HRV (also a one shot) has been a little low.
Isn’t it delightful to be inside a set of good and positively reinforcing memes that make your obstacles disappear. I guess we should all be one-shotting so we can speed run reduced suffering.
If none of that is legible then consider poking about as it has made my life better and maybe it will make yours better too.
American medicine failed me but Istanbul has excellent medical if you are motivated enough to travel to fix intractable problems. And I most surely am motivated.
Add in the daily guidance of consumer grade LLMs taking input from myself and my family doctor and I managed a pretty miraculous recovery. Yes the bots are friendly but my physician agrees. It’s a very successful clinical outcome.
That’s Perplexity if you are curious. I like their mobile application and model choice options. Though pity any poor hacker who gets in as they are going to see some gnarly pictures if they make that bad decision.
Alas I am noticing the folliculitis troubles flaring again just as I’ve begun a fitness recovery protocol. Which you will notice in the image if you read the above image closely.
Alas progress is never a straight line. The flare up is bad enough I’ve opted to start another round of antibiotics (my fifth in this process) so any remaining bugs of the MSSA varietal cannot manage any retrenchment.
I’m showering with the scrub up washes surgeons use, I’m swabbing my nasal cavities with muciprin, and I’ll do a Cephalexin course.
Having fully passed through the onboarding loading dose regimen of Bimzelx with significant side effects, I need to see if it stabilizes. All this suffering will be for nothing if I give up now. But I must get to a place where I’m not constantly fighting infection and it can maintain lower inflammatory biomarkers. How this goes is anyone’s guess.
One of my Twitter mutuals recently published an artificial intelligence prompt for making an adaptive fitness coach which works inside any of the major large models.
Being failed rather regularly by doctors over a decade of chronic illnesses has made me skeptical of the institutions in American medicine. But having one doctor (a dermatologist) miss a glaringly obvious differential really shook me.
Her dismissal of the details and particulars wasn’t malice, but a function of the systemic inability to put enough attention on the details of the person in front of her. Attention really was all she needed ironically.
I’m sure she didn’t set out to be that kind of doctor, I’d bet she hates that it’s all 90 second visits and Medicare coding and making money for the private equity group who owns the clinic. I feel for her. She surely wants to get back to doctoring.
No one can spot every detail and retain the complexities of every case. Especially one like mine. But a computer has a much better shot at mimicking Dr House than I do at finding a Dr House for myself. And it certainly has a better chance than someone who let the system dominate them into breezing over the details.
So I am using my mutual’s prompt to see if I can outsource a very slow and adaptive return to fitness after my month off from exercise to recover from surgery. I like what I’m seeing from all models that I’ve tried it on but I imagine I’ll have all the same “me” problems with overdoing it and pushing too hard. But who knows, maybe this aspect of wellness is better handled by machine than by me.
One of the most unsettling aspects of having a deep tissue infection surgically removed is watching the hole fill itself back in from the bottom up. It doesn’t look like normal tissue as it regrows.
When deep tissue wounds heal from the bottom up, the new dermal tissue appears white because it consists of immature collagen fibers and lacks proper vascularization during the initial stages of repair. Via Perplexity
I happen to take a collagen supplement which is looks like tiny little white balls in a capsule. Collagen is a hot aesthetic supplement for making your hair and nails grow but it benefits your fascia as well. It’s a popular supplement with biotin for overall health of one’s tissues.
I am aware of a number trends in the space to generate and promote the growth of collagen as I happen to follow the arc of Korean plastic surgery as it led to many successful cosmetic products. Collegen became popular in America through aesthetic practices and social media.
And yet with working in cosmetics and taking it as a supplement I hadn’t ever experienced a chunk of tissue growing back personally. It’s all been, well, literally cosmetics. And now it’s growing back and it’s really anything but attractive.
I am also concurrently bringing a hyperbaric chamber to Montana so we can do hyperbaric oxygen therapy protocols for ourselves and for the community. I am interested in their benefits for chronic issues but they have also proven themselves in the treatments of skincare wounds in diabetic and burn patients.
Ironic that I should have immature collagen fibers lacking vascularization at this moment and will soon have access to state of the art treatment for it but I have to heal this one the old fashioned way.
It’s my hope that we are going to improve our treatments for chronic issues in the future but in the here and now my acute issue is being handled the old fashioned way with lots of care and research and rest.
When I got the pathology report a week later, learning it was an MSSA antibiotic resistant infection so bad it reached my deep tissues made me even more afraid.
A deep abscess around a horizontal ingrown hair that was “probably just an inflamed lymph node”
I was lucky my surgeon was quite talented. The single stitch she was able to use has been absorbed. That was the hardest part. I could manage the draining pustulence and the pain just fine. But the only visibility into the wound’s healing process are only via secondary diagnostic clues. It’s a waiting game that requires a strong dampener on your disgust reflex.
As the stitch fell into the wound and curled up I felt panic. It looked like a ringworm infection or the gestation of a Xenomorph. If I had not had access to artificial intelligence diagnostic tools I don’t know how I would have managed if I’m very honest.
Your brain sees things and the limbic response invades your dreams. A stitch mimicking the infamously hostile endoparasitoid from Aliens is a bad time. I relied heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor its progression.
My phone is now cluttered with images of the wound’s progress. My varied AI applications accepted me uploading progress pictures after some experimenting.
I was uploading “Georgia O’Keefe/Not Georgia O’Keefe” imagery. The models were playing Cunt/Not Cunt for those who need a less polite euphemism for machine learning classifiers.
I’m certain special interests will eventually seek to keep these tools away from patients. We will be scared into letting them. But I know I got better care from a large language model than half the doctors I encountered.
All this cost me most of the month and around four thousand dollars. Which isn’t bad for transit, hotel, and a surgery in Istanbul.
The losses I can’t quantify are harder. A number of people who deserve responses from me probably won’t ever get it.
An in-group drama, ironically over usage of artificial intelligence, was paused by me not because it was resolved but because I could no longer find the fight in me to insist on apologies and reciprocal support while on Cipro in a hospital bed. It’s not fun to learn who is and isn’t your friend through medical emergencies.
My apologies to an offline gentleman who was the unwitting irritant who triggered said social wound. Maybe I should have excised any social obligation to them just as the surgery excised the infected tissue.
Either way, August can’t come soon enough and artificial intelligence deserves the credit for keeping alive through July.
Perhaps that should be considered in the complaints my counter parties had over the utility and need for artificial intelligence. It’s no god or anti-Christ, but it’s a damn fine diagnostic tool. No wonder the stakes in that fight are so high. Everyone wants a cut when you get cut open.
I really feel the weight of month of July today as I am just now getting the sense I am making a recovery. I did not have post surgical wound care for an abscess on my list of “to do’s” for the month but here I am.
Nor did I expect to work through a pathology report on my own while cobbling together the best blend of infection coverage through a globe spanning set of physicians and sub specialties.
I didn’t know what a sub dermal panniculitis was or how to treat an infection where that was a proximate side effect. But I learned and I managed my care to a much better result. I had real consequences from disinterested burned out doctor and I had to step up.
Frankly I’ve spent more time on artificial intelligence projects doing differential diagnostics on myself than I ever conceived was possible. I owner my own data and inputs and I could make inferences while corroborating it with physicians who are more interested in my care.
I am a slow healer and there is a high cost associated with immune suppression biologic drugs for chronic autoimmune conditions. I have no choice but to be active in my own care and tools as simple as a deep search on Perplexity take you so far.
There is a high cost to healthcare in America and it’s not getting any better. That I can now reliably use any number of commercial AIs to break down lab and pathology reports is a huge boon to all of humanity. Real miracles are happening because someone used AI to double check blood work and symptoms.
Healthcare gets rationed by price or by time and we’ve never really known an abundance of trained doctors in my lifetime. But we might have an abundance of intelligence about healthcare in our lifetime.
Part of put quandary with care in America is regulatory capture by organizations like the American Medical Association and others of its ilk. Of course they prioritize what works best for keeping their continued privileged position on care.
I lost a lot of time this month to health but I gained more than I realized. We are seeing changes in a system that has only ever known scarcity. And we know it’s not good enough.
