Category: Medical

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Medical Preparedness

Day 629 and Working in Chaos

If you have been following along for the past couple of days you may have noticed I’m at a wilderness medical first responder course. I’ve been soaking up an inordinate amount of information. Part of the reason I am here is personal enrichment, but equally I am here because I’m working to understand chaos driven industries and the opportunities they present.

And the class is not disappointing. As we’ve have absorbed more skills and are moving further into the course, the chaos factor is being ramped up. The particularly enjoyable aspect of the specific course I am doing is that it is not just imparting book smarts. It’s designed to be much more hands on.

If it were a business school class they would probably refer to the methodology as case studies. But instead of ruminating on what you would do if you were management you are reacting as if you were the actual first responder on the scene. And the cases are getting more and more complex.

We started out with with the basics. We were deducing issues and imparting stabilizing treatments. But as we got more comfortable with figuring diagnostics and rendering basic aid the complexity ranked up. At the end of the day today we were presented with a car accident and four patients.

As we ran (literally) onto the scene we had to not only unravel what had happened but also treat several patients in varying degrees of distress. One of our patients didn’t make it. There was nothing we could have done. But we didn’t know that going into the scene. When we arrived we had no idea what happened and had to untangle the triage ourselves.

I was surprised at how challenging it was to leap into action. As the chaos of the accident presented itself our group of first responders had to decide on organizing ourselves and our resources. But the instinct is to simply begin rendering aid.

And that tension between acting and organizing in a crisis never goes away. You just get better trained at how to approach it. Working in the chaos is the job. I honestly thought I’d be better at it. Taking charge and working in uncertainty is something I enjoy. But as with any new skill, it takes work and practice. A certain amount of pressure is the only thing that teaches you how to work in chaos. And I’ve still got a long way to go.

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Medical Preparedness

Day 627 and First Responder

My hands are stained blood red. Despite a good scrubbing, my cuticles definitely show that I spent time packing wounds today. Ok, fake wounds. And it’s fake blood. I am taking a wilderness medical incident certification course. And it is very hands on. Literally.

A firefighter packing compressed gauze into a femoral artery simulator

I got the opportunity to take a spot in a course that one of my friends teaches. I’ve got so much exposure to medicine after the last several years of health challenges that I’ve been yearning to upgrade my knowledge to something more practical than my own personal biohacking. So when Tom offered up a spot in his medical incident certification course for wilderness response, I said you know what fuck it I’m going to do it.

And I’m so glad I did. Not because I anticipate needing to apply a tourniquet in the back country of Montana. Or that I’ll be faced with packing a groin wound to stop someone from bleeding out when they are hours away from the hospital. Though I am glad I now know how. But because I think hands on experience with a rougher world is experience I need to do my job investing in an increasingly complex, chaotic and unstable world.

I was absolutely enthralled by the first day. It was me and a bunch of other much more experienced EMTs, paramedics and wildfire fighters. I also met a number of extremely savvy folks who special in fire and emergency incident response.

I was very much thrown into the deep end of first responder world and I’m not ashamed to say I “died” on the very first scenario test as I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. But I’m soaking up as much information as I can as fast as I can. Though not quite as fast as arterial blood gushes. Yet. Ask me on Friday if I’ve improved.

I couldn’t tell you precisely why I think this kind of hands on exposure to emergency response is so crucial but something deep in my gut says that I cannot possibly invest in a changing world without having some on the ground exposure.

The folks who are fighting our worst wildfires and responding to our most intense natural disasters know something visceral about chaos and the fragility of modernity that the rest of us do a lot to suppress.

Just casual conversations as we went through lessons and practice opened up my mind to new areas of opportunity. I found half a dozen blind spots I didn’t know I had. The world is much more chaotic than the media and our social channels let on. But it’s also possible to tackle them head on. We are not helpless. And it’s not hopeless. And I’m feeling fully empowered to deepen my relationship to chaos as I learn just when and where I have more agency.

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Medical

Day 625 and Shitty Day

I had a shitty day today. Not as in I had a bad day. Although it wasn’t great. I literally had a shitty day. I’m on a combination of medications that just do not agree with my gastrointestinal tract.

I am supposed to avoid fatty foods and also somewhat inexplicably dairy. One of the antibiotics I am on says do not take within an hour of any dairy product or something with a lot of iron.

Maybe it was the croissant. Perhaps it has too much butter. Maybe it was the splash of milk in my coffee. Or more likely maybe getting Chipotle for dinner last night sealed my fate.

Either way I spent the day getting close with porcelain. A lot of time was spent over heated and miserable on nice cool bathroom tiles. I prayed for it to let up but I had maybe six hours of misery

My tongue feels so dry it’s got the texture of a kitchen sponge. I am trying to rehydrate myself but I am still modestly afraid to do more than a few sips of a rehydration solution. What I wouldn’t give for an IV bag of saline salts and Zofran. But since I don’t I’m just going to curl myself around a coconut water and my rehydration fluids and tap out for the day.

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Medical

Day 568 and Upset Applecart

I’ve been in a bit of a mad dash to get in last doctor visits with people on my treatment team that are in Colorado. Bozeman being a much smaller city than Boulder or Denver isn’t rich in specialists.

Of course, a hammer sees a nail. So on my last visit to my primary supervising physician in Denver, he just has to prescribe some new shit. He’s a bit anxious about doing some things remotely so we jumped into a new treatment I’ll start in September and a course of antibiotics I started on last night for an infection.

I’m basically stable but I had some symptom flares recently with all of the travel and heat. So getting put on a new antibiotic to sooth my immune system, which is both reactive as fuck and suppressed by biologics seemed sensible. I had some infections that weren’t clearing because of the suppression and there is no sense treating deeper stuff with that going on.

But alas last night at around 1am I realized we may have upset the apple cart a bit with the antibiotic. Only modestly so, and perhaps worth it if the clean up gets rid of any bad apples spoiling the whole bunch. I can feel certain symptoms improving even as I am indignant about the side effects from the medication.

But I’ll be damned if this antibiotic doesn’t have some side effects I dislike. It makes me both woozy and a bit amped up. Which is a shitty feeling. It was clearly a bad idea to take at night but my doctor wanted me to have my first dose as soon as possible. I was absolutely Tweeting late into the night being the central nervous system effects.

It often feels as if there is always something new and stupid wrecking my body in the summers. And there is little choice but to upset the damn apple cart to deal with it. I know it is necessary and I’m lucky to have the help. But I think I’m entitled to dislike it just a little bit.

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Medical

Day 567 and Seasonal Affective Disorder

One of my Twitter mutuals blew my mind yesterday.

I’ve always been a dick to my SAD friends, but heatwave depression is right here, sitting on my lap.

Brent Cox

I’ve got a few friends with SAD or seasonal affective disorder. I had always thought of SAD as a winter disease. Lack of sunlight messes with your circadian rhythm and it can lead to depression (among other other physical symptoms) during shorter colder months. I’ve never had it personally. I thrive in the winter. Maybe it’s generics as my ancestry is Scandinavian.

It never occurred to me that there could be an inversion variant of seasonal affect disorder for the summer. But apparently SSAD exists. People can get summer season affective disorder. It’s rarer but it exists.

“What causes summer SAD? We assume it’s heat and humidity.”

New York Times

Which frankly makes total sense. It’s a fucking misery most of summer. Heat makes my pain worse. I’d assumed any dislike of summer was related to the increase in severity of my symptoms. But maybe it’s a more holistic issue.

Another seasonal challenge that could worsen with climate change — and play into mood — is pollen, said Teodor Postolache, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He said the immune response to allergens like pollen might create a cascade of changes in the body, including the release of biological compounds called cytokines that regulate inflammation and have been connected to depression.

I don’t think I am necessarily depressed in the summer but my mood is generally rotten. And if it’s from heat or pollen or humidity, the end result does seem to be I’ve got increased inflammation during the summer months and it’s uncomfortable as hell. I don’t know what I’ll do with this information (other than ask my doctor at my next visit) but it’s nice to know that I’m not crazy for feeling crazy in the summer.

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Medical

Day 553 and Itchy

Pollution in the air, chlorine in the tap water, and overflowing filters on struggling air conditioners have left me an itchy mess. Not all parts of European have clean air or water as it turns out. I’m on the Ionian Sea and let’s just say the history of close economies and socialist strong men have left a legacy of infrastructure underinvestment.

My eyes look like I’m high as a kite. I’ve got angry raised welts across my arms. I have a lymph node that got backed up and is now the size of a marble under one armpit. A few of the hives have struggled to heal over and now require antibiotics. I love needing a course of Doxycycline on the road because a sore couldn’t fight off some exotic invader. No wonder they put enough chlorine in the water to scent an entire Olympic size pool. It’s clearly not enough.

Travel has always been a challenge when you are disabled. The indignity of finding yourself with seeping weeping yellow teardrops isn’t very relaxing. My travel pharmacy is working overtime as I carefully mix doses of Benadryl, Hydroxyzine, and Cortisone creams. And my travel cosmetics simply cannot fix the deep sunken blue eye bags that have developed from rubbing in antihistamines and spritzing in eye drops.

I really hope that no one at customs decides to get too curious about why I look so utterly fucked. I’m not entirely sure “I’m sensitive to pollution” is that believable to someone for whom this level of irritants is normal.

In less than a month I’ll be moving into the homestead in Montana. I’m dreaming of the clean air and sparkling rivers. I hope I can stay out for sometime. If I never have to leave “the last best place” on earth I’ll be happy.

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Medical

Day 545 and Stretched Time

Time has never acted like it is linear in my observation. It extends and stretches when you wish it could speed by. And it slows and circles back when you would most prefer it go quickly. Time is relative is a good joke, but also might be more related to a curse.

As I was waiting for a food delivery order today I could feel time unspooling. It stretched on into two episodes of some engaging but fundamentally disinteresting Netflix show. My head began to hurt. I remember taking an aspirin and getting a snack. I recall a phone call made to the delivery service order. And then my sense of linearity starts to fray. I’m not sure what happened next or in what order.

I think it was clear a migraine was coming on in the middle of this first act of swollen stretching time. But I couldn’t tell you for sure. Once pain hooks up with time it requires a Buddha or someone enlightened on the ways of Jhana. Still I tried to push myself out of the path of this time. Why not ordered a pizza as a replacement meal. That might be quick? I blamed the blooming migraine and it’s sister nausea on a lack of food. But in reality I was past the point of being helped. I was simply trying to avoid the oncoming path of the migraine.

I recall a pizza arriving but not the original delivery order. I made an attempt to eat. But I was in the grips of the time expanding migraine now. I took an Imitrax. I had some CBD. Perhaps terrapins and triptans could convince my mind that the moments of pain were short and fleeting. That was my best hope for experiencing the migraine in a positive way.

I put on a face mask. I sunk into a mindfulness practice. I noticed and turned over the kinds of discomforts I found myself in one by one. The emotional fears that I wanted distance rose up. The pain that bubbled around my body tightened, giving me a rationale for not wanting to being touched. A mind that wanted to drift far from others overlapped with my normal mind, this mind wasn’t forced to endure the noisy input from the world. All those experiences rose and burst forth and dissipated. Pain, distance, and fear came and went.

Consciousness seemed possible again. I had the sense that I could articulate some of what happened to me over the past three hours. That perhaps I could codify it in writing. It wouldn’t be as vivid but it would be there. The fear and failure and disprovals still existed but less acutely. The pressure on my mind had become less swollen. Time wasn’t threatening to extend out any other direction but forward. And maybe I could finally enjoy a bite to eat again. It has been five hours total since the migraine began.

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Medical Travel

Day 529 and Close My Body Now

Menstruation is mostly an exercise in pressure changes. Cramping and bloating make for a good reminder that we are ugly bags of mostly water. Or if you prefer meet popsicles. But I don’t recommend flying while menstruating as the pressure changes, aka jet belly, that wreck havoc on your lower intestines don’t really need the extra help.

I’ve got a theory that shorter flights are worse for jet belly because all the fluids and gases that are rumbling about inside you have less time to adjust. If you’ve never noticed that your lower half is bloated and rumbling after a flight, well, lucky for you. But I’m pretty sure you are also lying.

Our flight got put in a holding pattern over Denver as we waited for a thunderstorm to clear out. I could not have asked for a better metaphor as my cramps kicked into high gear. My chatty seat mate kept trying to engage in conversation and all I could think was I’ve got to shut my body down.

And then as if being crampy and bloody wasn’t embarrassing enough I started humming a twenty year old techno tune from Madonna. Yes, I remember the lyrics to her James Bond song.

I’m gonna destroy my ego

I’m gonna close my body now

This turned into a mantra as the pain and discomfort threatened to kick my stress responses into a cortisol spiral. I began a series of breathing exercises and kicked myself into a meditation so deep my poor husband couldn’t reach me. Madonna might have had a point. Ego destruction and closing down your body has a place during intense pain and discomfort. It only has to hurt if you let it.

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Biohacking Medical

Day 522 and Tracker Jacker

I started an experiment with one of my tracking apps called Gyroscope at the beginning of the year. I took pictures of every single meal. For $150 they analyzed all of my meals assigned me a virtual coach to help me improve my total health scores across all categories including food, exercise, sleep and mood. A few days ago my husband physically took my phone away from me and canceled it. The experiment was a failure and it was it Gyroscope’s fault.

Personalized healthcare is a bit of a noble lie. They do give you advice that is somewhat personalized to you as long as your body is within the baseline of what we recognize as healthy. If you are within one standard deviation of the mean then it works great. These tools improve your health. Just remember most of our baseline data is from healthy, young, white, men. This isn’t a woke thing. That’s just the population with the most data.

It’s hard to give someone like me health advice. The basics are designed for otherwise healthy people that need to improve their activity, weight, sleep, and basic nutrition so they don’t become sick in the future. Maybe their biggest issue is being a bit overweight and sedentary. Most people do in fact need to move more and eat less and go to sleep on time. Chronically ill people, or those coping with an acute viral infection, still need to eat good nutrition but beyond the basics it gets more complex what we should recommend.

The coaches at any health app I’ve ever used have kept trying to give perfectly sensible guidance about activity and nutrition quality and lowering stress levels. I am sadly an extremely weird edge case so shit like walk more can actually be bad for me sometimes. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is actually what someone with my medical history needs. And tracker apps have a tendency to go berserk when I need two or three weeks of bed rest. They go full red alert trying to make me get some exercise when my doctors are tell me any exertion is bad.

The straw that broke the camels back on the $150 a month experiment was getting influenza in May. It completely imploded all of my metrics. As a serious viral infection tends to do. I couldn’t get in any steps as I was basically bedridden. My food intake got weird as I was in Montana with friends and house hunting when I got sick. I had one perfect week of high protein and vegetables and then as I got sicker and sicker it was anything I could be coaxed into eating. There were two meals of milkshakes from Five Guys and that was considered a lucky break. Coughing and exhaustion sometimes means sipping a high calorie frozen dairy product through a straw is as good as it’s going to get.

As my metrics got worse from the flu and tracking food become a pointless exercise, I gave up on even trying to walk my very nice coach through it. There was nothing to be done on assigning me any health activities for weeks. I couldn’t exercise. Meditation did nothing to improve core metrics because I was fighting a massive infection. My sleep was shit because again fighting an infection. My nutrition was hit or miss as my throat hurt and my stomach struggled with new medications.

The renewal snuck up on me. I had wanted to say good bye to the coach. To let her know she tried. To reassure the Gyroscope teammates that my failures didn’t say much about them and how they coached people into healthier behaviors.

I’m a woman with overlapping chronic conditions that got an acute infection and there was no real way to come back from it in a short period of time. But I was still so exhausted and couldn’t bring asking Gyroscope for a pause (a sick break for fitness apps would be a killer functionality though). But my husband remembered the auto-renew date. So he just canceled the entire thing. Boom gone. Fuck off.

I opened the app for the first time in weeks today to at least turn back on the basic tracking so I didn’t lose any data history.

I like how the app does data visualization. I have no clue if I can track nutrition on the base level of product on Gyroscope. Whoever does their pricing tiers has changed it so much I’ve lost track. In the past I found it impossible to input nutrition into their tracker. It was amazing to have the app do it automatically. I relied on their team doing the macros not because I can’t do it myself but because I couldn’t figure out how to physically input it into the app. So I’m a little sad about that. But not sad enough to pay $150.

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Medical

Day 503 and Halftime

I really thought I’d kicked the flu this Monday. I drove back from Montana and I was feeling amazing about my life and my decisions. And then yesterday I just straight up crashed back into symptoms again.

I managed to both write and correctly tag and post while I was riding a modest fever high. Which is pretty fantastic. That’s how you know your habits are good. I was able to maintain my writing schedule on the strength of the rhythm alone. My husband who got tagged in yesterday’s post on Twitter was impressed that I was actually coherent. Practice really does make perfect.

I’m a bit annoyed that the flu had a halftime show. Now I’m fighting out the second half of the game and I probably didn’t take advantage of the respite of having a decent day or two. Now I’m back in the storm, to use an entirely different metaphor, and I’m upset the eye has passed.