Tag: Biohacking

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Chronic Disease Internet Culture Reading

Day 1772 and No Signal

The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.

As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!

The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.

MAWP!

Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.

Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.

This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.

Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.

Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.

If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.

MAWP!

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1770 and Making Suffering Worthwhile

A long time ago, in a past life so foreign I can barely recall, I made some bad choices in the hopes that I was making good choices for the people I loved.

I froze eggs and embryos with my husband thinking that some day we’d have the money, health and stability to have children.

That day never came. And it’s unlikely to change. My health is what it is and I won’t ever be able to carry them. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to get me healthy enough just to go back to work and being healthy enough to carry just didn’t happen in time.

The high costs of surrogacy are daunting and the extra help I would require to raise them isn’t forthcoming. Being somewhat disabled means I’d need a lot of help and not the kind you can easily pay.

The extended family who does want to help and raise them (not blood family but nevertheless family) has never succeeded in getting a visa approved for so much as a vacation in America. So that route seems rather shut and has remained a small beacon of hope that seems ever less likely.

I could go abroad and raise children near them but that would be admitting defeat on a level on life in America that feels like dying.

My husband wouldn’t be able to come. We have a home and a life and careers in America. Funny how we don’t really have family in America that cares one way or another though all our existing blood relatives are American it’s the extended not quite family that seems to care most about family.

So a day after a socialist won the mayor’s race in New York City I have to ask myself how can we make the suffering of so many feel worthwhile? What did I achieve through my sacrifices? What did America achieve with our choices that can be seen as worthwhile? if those questions cannot be answered I don’t know where America goes from here.

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Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1768 and Maybe A Corner Is Being Turned or Maybe I Should Turn Back

I feel as if I lost almost all of October to combating a medical hard left turn from what was supposed to be a pretty simple procedure requiring no downtime and little healing.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Media

Day 1766 and Thursday Styles Theory Strikes Again: Testosterone for Women Edition

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.

It’s hard enough that Alex Danco believes it to be its own cultural movement and a force akin to past movements like modernism. Predicting the future is now an active part of living in the present for everyone.

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.

Frustratingly it is very light on specifics as to what constitutes a “high dose”, while framing the piece almost entirely around the wonders women experience from taking a higher dose of testosterone than what might be considered average. 5mg a day is roughly average, and the procedure I did lasts 4-6 months, so I am starting at an average dose after having been on a 3mg a day cream without getting an improvement in my bloodwork.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1765 and Hollowed Out

I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.

It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.

And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.

The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.

Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.

I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.

I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.

Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me

I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it

I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.

The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.

And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.

If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1764 and Not so Easy In and But Out of the Woods

It has been sixteen days since I confidently decided to insert testosterone pellets by tiny incision into my left buttocks. I was felt certain we’d checked all the appropriate risk factors and my tolerance threshold was met.

I felt I was making pretty decent progress on healing over five days as I had not only the benefits of HBOT but also read light therapy. I was pretty darn pleased and felt well.

And then it seemed I took a turn six days further on. Perhaps some trauma from the lidocaine and epinephrine induced enough of altered window of immunity that some bacterial weaseled its way in the wound and viola a subcutaneous infection called cellulitis.

I was put on two different antibiotics and we figured it would clear quickly. That was incorrect And it has been a slow healing process

Barely improving day by day. And I had somehow made the decision the night before the procedure that I would just waltz into a new beauty shopping blog as the holiday season warmed up. So that was perhaps bad luck on my part. And has slowed me down on something I was doing for some joy so I hope I didn’t let anyone down. I am muddling through.

Today I got an ultrasound on the wound after a fever spike and did a number of blood tests to see where my white blood cells and inflammatory markers were at.

The local hospital was having computer troubles which meant trouble scheduling an ultrasound but we managed to find another imagining clinic this morning.

Back at the hospital for bloods (they do walk ins for blood draws) they still appeared to be having issues with computers. “Your insurance isn’t recognized” was the verdict thirty minutes after using it at other lab. That made for a chuckle but we got it done.

The results are already in and we seem to be looking at healthy epithelial tissues and my CRP and Sed Rates were not elevated. Of course, half the reason I am worried is I take an immune suppressant for chronic autoimmune inflammatory condition.

It seems to manifest frequently as skin infections. My old drug wasn’t nearly as effective but it also didn’t have side effects. S

Hopefully slowly and with lots of protein and rest I’ll be healed and can spend my time on work and my pet beauty blog.

And tomorrow I’ll cross my 30th HBOT treatment mark so maybe it can make progress on building me up instead of dealing with a flesh wound. Which is actually just damned good luck on our part.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1761 and Give Me A Break

It has not been an easy year for me or my family. The struggle to find a path to a sustainable place of health feels harder than ever.

I am living in some type of thermodynamic hell. Everything I try comes with equally forceful reactions and I wish I could say more of them were positive.

Even when results look positive they have high costs that make me reconsider if I should have done it at all. Switching my immune suppression drug put my inflammatory markers in the best place we’ve seen them in years.

Alas it is so effective that I’ve had four major skin infections in 2025 of which four required going under the knife. And the fourth was caused by a small incision that was considered so safe and routine we almost didn’t consider antibiotics at all.

I just so badly want something to work in a way that doesn’t come with staggeringly high costs. Normally I’d link around to all the relevant posts but I just need a break so I’ll leave it as an exercise.

But can you imagine anything more depressing than having an infection on your ass? I sure can’t. I am stuck trying to keep pressure off of it while working on all the various projects of life and I am a slow healer.

I don’t even get to see if the HBOT is doing anything for my main concerns, as if it is we are only going to see it when I clear this crazy infection.

I suppose the good news is that one of the best treatments for high risk wound care is actually hyperbaric oxygen therapy so the positive and the negative are at least balanced.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1757 and Best I Can Do

I’m a bit hard up today as my recovery from my latest adventure in biohacking has had more twists and turns.

I am incredibly prone to subcutaneous and deep tissue infections from even modest and safe procedures. It seems this will simply be my reality permanently if I stay on the very effect anti-inflammatory medication.

I keep hoping I’ll adjust to the Bimzelx and the skin infections will be less of an issue but I’m on my 4th skin trouble of the year and I’ve only just reached what’s considered a full loaded dose.

I really don’t know what to do about it as it’s a major full year long process to change a biologic and adjust to the dosing so I may have to live with it. My inflammatory markers are the best they have ever been it’s just that I’m constantly getting some new skin issue.

So I’ve switched up the antibiotics to be extra careful on this healing but my brain is beyond fuzzed, I’m in pain, and I’m quite tired so I’ll just have to let today be what it is and pray the new antibiotic gets me to a better tomorrow.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1756 and Oops I Did It Again

Oh baby baby! So it seems as if, in my infinite wisdom, I did not pay enough attention to the early warning signs from my Whoop biometrics and I did indeed need to worry about the fun and games of a subcutaneous tissue infection.

I swear that this IL-17 inhibitor drives me nuts. Despite its impressive effect on my inflammatory biomarkers, it leaves me very susceptible to skin infections. And I have to be constantly vigilant to the first signs of an issue.

I’ll be fine. I did in fact catch it before it turned into anything serious. Where I am at it’s easily treatable with a short antibiotic course that may formerly be prophylactic. My wound area had not shown any signs of spreading nor was I running a fever or otherwise exhibiting other signs of serious infection.

I just had crappy HRV numbers and high resting heart rate three days in a row and it’s not worth risking it. I threw back some basic antibiotics last night and woke up with a normal heart rate again. My HRV is coming up just a little more slowly. Glad I didn’t wait as this isn’t worth any amount of risk to me.

I comforted myself by working on my beauty blog where I’ve got routines coming along for founding subscribers and a fresh post about Shrinkflation at Sephora and a minimalist men’s routine on sale at Amazon.

Retailers are a bit twitchy and everyone needs to be shopping early is the message we are getting everywhere. It’s a weird time. Or at least the retailers need to encourage the top 10%. So if that is interesting to you go subscribe as I’d love to have you in my strange beauty shopping blog meets the business of appearance.

Or if you are feeling adventurous for an honestly embarrassingly low fee I’ll put together a custom routine for you from my sample library or go full autistic and decant you the perfect mix of potions and lotions to meet you precise lifestyle and budget. My autistic obsession is your gain. It’s so much for me for and your skin will look amazing.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1755 and Slow Healer

I am on a TMI roll this week so you will have to excuse this old blogger. If my n-of-1 experiments help even one woman struggling with her health, it’s worth it to me to embarrass myself in public by sharing the real details.

I’ve come consider this blog not just a personal experiment in daily writing, but my contributions to training the artificial intelligences of our future. I shall write women’s health into the Akashic records, even if I have to write every single day. Oh wait

Today I am moderately concerned about mg pace of healing and if I have contributed negative to it by increasing my strain modestly.

Yesterday I wrote “want to see something gross” about how maximalist approach to healing the incision site where we placed testosterone pellets.

I thought it was going pretty darn well and I had physical evidence with photographs to prove it. I did however have two days of poor biometrics which I had thought was a result of pushing myself physically a bit too hard while in my two days of menstruation. I

have rip-roaringly bad luteal phases (hence the exploratory hormone therapy to bring my testosterone to a normal baseline) but I have blessedly short menstruation that hits hard but doesn’t stick around. Aunt Flow knows she gets a weekend, and it ain’t a long one, before she has overstayed her welcome.

Now I’m going to show you something a lot worse than gross pictures of an incision site. I’m going to show you embarrassingly bad Whoop metrics. And now that I see them laid out I realize I probably should have asked my doctor earlier if I needed to go back on a prophylactic antibiotic just in case cellulitis was lurking. Like my god my HRV and heart rate are god awful right now.

Now they were a bit wonky this month but this is some danger Will Robinson territory. I honestly didn’t feel bad enough that I took it seriously.

I thought “eh Whoop has been sucking” for me. I thought this is just adjustment and the high heart rate is the testosterone is kicking in and my low HRV is just adjusting to finally having some energy. I feel genuinely energetic for the first time in years.

But today at a check up with another doctor they noted that I was at higher risk of developing cellulitis given my history over the summer with the abscess surgery and the panniculitus it had revealed. The side effects of the immune suppressive called Bimzelx I use as an inflammatory dampener seems to mostly manifest in skin infections. So either I’m just a slow healer and being paranoid or I’ve got to rock on with some amoxicillin to get the ill’in to stop.