I am coming off multiple days of in-person interactions. It has been nice to go from Costco to committees to backyard bbq.
I am tired. I intend to rest and alas because I am doing things in the moment I have had too few moments for even a brief rest. It has been a good time.
My HRV and my RHR are way down and way up respectively. I need that to reverse so I’ll sleep it off.
I am older than my husband but only by enough (a year and change) to let me land middle aged jokes. We celebrated his birthday at Costco. We are spending Saturday grilling. We own a Subaru. I think the jig is up.
I’ve been fighting to restore my body to “factory settings” since we made the mistake of messing around with fertility treatment hormones. Sadly why our middle aged jokes don’t involve children. Our civic contributions and investments in founders tie us to our future for now
And in our ambitions to be prepared for giving that future everything we’ve got, we are doing more and more for our health.
I started an earlier as my body gave out earlier but we are both doing more biohacking. We are slowly building out a collection of treatments and devices that we hope will end as a medical spa serving our region.
The hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy we purchased in January l has finally reached American shores. More sauna and ice cycling might be in our future too. On a “in the red” day I’ve been known to hit my recovery with everything I’ve got. Heat, cold, and pressure can fix almost anything. Add in oxygen and we might just survive whatever the future throws at us.
On a bit of a whim, Alex bought “on the go” PEMF Infrared Mat from HigherDOSE.
This is the year of acquiring mechanical intervention medical equipment for us.
Yes as biohackers we trial a lot and some of it is less woo-woo than others. Treatments like hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy have significantly more clinical data than say pulsed electromagnetic field treatments.
It seems easier to send electromagnetic waves at different frequencies than create a sealed oxygen chamber but consumer is weird and the military and elite athletics tested HBOT whereas mere hippies played around with PEMF.
So it’s qualia only here on the good vibrations but I am excited to try it out. I can’t exactly feel the vibrations unlike in other clinical settings where I’ve experienced much more intense (it’s measured in gauss or Tesla) but infrared warmth is a nice experience even if the vibrations don’t do much. But I will report on it.
It’s a gorgeous breeze June Sunday in Montana. It’s the sort of day where you go to your favorite bakery for an exotic little pastry, maybe get lunch from a favorite restaurant and then go for a hike or a bike ride to marvel at the majesty in wonder.
As I am working through a new physio routine to improve compensatory pain in my trapezius muscles I was a little nervous. I wanted to adequately test that I’d found new corrective instincts without overdoing things.
I walked a favorite two mile circuit with a stead inclined of hills that eases back out into the flat valley. I felt terrific. The sun was shining but the breeze kept it cool. Truly paradise on earth.
And then within an hour or so I got an awful headache. Had I failed at reworking my compensation so badly? I checked fascia and muscle points and found my shoulders relaxed.
Then I checked my upper cervical spike and yelped. I had swapped one compensation for another and gave myself a killer headache in the process. But I didn’t have the same pain pattern or headache type and that is a win.
I would love to have something to say today. I have a migraine. My circulation seems odd. I’ve got on 2 pairs of wool socks on, two layers on top and I’m underneath two down blanks. And I’m still cold.
Complaining about one’s body is such an unappealing habit and yet when the pain comes for your attention it has the gravity of a black hole.
I don’t want to be a bore. I fear every time I am trapped in a bad bodily cycle I am boring myself and others. It’s been six years since I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and so much of it has been chronicled here.
And yet no matter how much I throw at health and wellness I still find myself cold, sad, hurting and without any kind of cure.
I have been contemplating “an ideal routine” as soon as I felt the pressure of showing up for first grade. How to manage the energy the outside world requires from you while making sure you have done everything possible to manage your body to produce adequate energy.
Morning routines, what’s in her bag, every day carry, and optimal packing strategies all derive from a need to see how others are coping with the demands of life. You can aspire to various ideals of fitness, nutrition, style and parenting if you could just get the right routine with the right tools. Right?
I’m aspiring to restart learning new toolsets for building …everything. From design to marketing software to muscles to my hormonal profile. Building the life you want is deceptively close if you can manage yourself.
Life feels malleable at the moment. And who is going to stop me? Maybe I accidentally fix a problem for myself and find I’ve got a tool or insight that might benefit you. The chaos of old ways fall apart means new routines and folkways must be built.
I don’t want to betray myself by overreaching and pushing as I am so often finding hard limits the hard way. I like to go hard and rest. But reality has become so much less reliable that I wonder if I must compensate even more for the chaos with steadying flows of my own.
I’m not sure where my mother picked up the slang “God willing and the creek don’t rise” but I had it regularly to suggest a thing shall come to pass a “if nature and God” are willing.
It’s it’s got a hint of Appalachia in its origin story and then tumbles over into a Johnny Cash cover of a Jerry Reed country tune (probably where my mother learned it as she loves Cash) before settling into a Spike Lee documentary about the water engineering challenges that have brought such misery to New Orleans.
It’s been pouring in Gallatin County all day. Our already high rivers are looking like they may cause troubles. Friends who fish were concerned the muddy headwaters weeks ago when I was caught in other unexpected spring showers in Colorado.
I am afraid the moisture is kicking up mold in our house. We’ve spent months remediating the problem so it weighs on me to consider the possibility. I woke up covered in hives and eczema.
I took antibiotics and Benadryl and it kept getting worse. I showered with nothing but unscented Castile soap hoping to mitigate the outbreak. That did more.
I have an event I’d like to attend this evening along with a houseguest who I very enjoy much enjoy so it frustrates me when the creek sees fit to rise against the banks that contain the river of my life.
I am in a lot of physical pain and I have been cranky about it all day. I just did not have the energy to self censor my discomfort either. I spent a lot of the day in bed popping off.
Because people are polite I only ever get rewarded for being spicy. I’m sure people harbor all kinds of uncharitable opinions about people who are mouthy, especially women. But I mostly find you can say quite a lot. Especially with your ingroup.
In fact being disagreeable is tolerated, and even celebrated, in almost all public forums. Hard truths, straight acts, unpleasant realities tend to be celebrated. Truth telling can become someone’s persona even when nothing is wrong.
But watch out for that dark path. If you care too much about broader opinions of yourself you can easily become what is called audience captured in which your persona gets adapted to what gets a response. Modeling your life as get it can go very wrong for people.
I felt for comedian John Mulaney who got typecast as the affable guy and absolutely hated being the bad guy for his various addictions and personal life complications.
In his special “Baby J,” Mulaney reflects on the burden of his public persona: “Likeability is jaaaaaaaail,” summary via Perplexity of a much better substack piece
In some ways, playing to type is just cognitively easier for everyone. A social contract if you will. Being able to show more than one side of yourself shouldn’t be shrugged off as people pleasing nor is being disagreeable always a sign of bad temperament. Humans contain multitudes even if everyone plays to type.
I am buzzing with energy as I spent my day touring the factory a hyperbaric chamber factory. I don’t want to get ahead of sharing details I haven’t cleared with them but I learned so much.
Istanbul is so far ahead on medical care delivery it is genuinely thrilling. There are 24 hour walk in hospitals. And
Which is good as the new IL17 inhibitor means to have a side effect of meiborn gland problems. In mere days I got another chalazion so I’d like that sliced out.
But my optimism about my immune systems capacity to operate functionally has taken a step towards optimism. That something so simple as oxygen and pressure has such significant benefits for our bodies is common sense.
How marvelous that the ingenuity of divers, doctors, athletes and under water workers to put together a treatment that is so effective it moved the biometrics of one of the healthiest men alive.
That only in the age of artificial intelligence did we get the inference capacity to show its efficacy is a real indictment of our academic and medical bureaucracy.
Over the winter we did a mold test on our bedroom after I had had a batch of sub-optimal bloodwork and flares in my autoimmune condition. We wanted to be thorough in assessing potential reasons for any issues from environmental to pharmaceutical.
I was suspicious that mold would be a culprit. Or perhaps I did not want it to be a culprit. Mold has always seemed like an excuse the professionally sick lean on like a crutch. You can imagine some worried well Goop reading white woman blaming mold.
I don’t know if this is engrained ableism on my part (lol) but no one wants to be that annoying sick woman with the litany of vague issues plaguing her life. And yes I fear this about myself because I do have to manage an autoimmune condition.
So I went into mold testing with some cynicism. It’s mike making a claim you’ve got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Sure both mold and fibromyalgia are real but I’ve learned from experience that you must avoid both lest you be seen as someone unserious.
Alas it has turned out to be serious. It took most of the winter to work through the breaking down the walls part but once Alex began pulling back the walls it was dramatic and easy to spot.
As it turns out the wall on my side of the bed has quite a bit of mold types growing happily. As best we can tell it must be some type of small leak in the pipes.
There’s a couple hydronic heater pipes right by the baseboards so the current theory is maybe one developed a tiny pinhole leak for a bit that sealed itself back up. Don’t ask me about that one as it’s on Alex.
His plan for now is to remediate it, patch things back up, fog the room and have the carpets steam cleaned. Which is a bigger job than we might like but much better than it could have been.