Fifteen hours of sleep and a spa day does fix a week of disrupted sleep. I may need some more downtime of resting and recovery and maybe more water drinking before I have a cogent thought.
After seeing my sadly “in the red” recovery scores from my Whoop, I felt a bit of a cortisol mitigation effort was in effect. In other words, I took a little spa day.
When I was younger and living in Chinatown , my apartment was above an acupuncture and massage joint that specialized in pressure point work. Going once a week probably saved my life. It was affordable and close and good.
It was always packed with the working class of the area. The prison complex wasn’t too far away, we had a police precinct two blocks down, and the courts buildings system was a block away and enormous warren of humans. A lot of very intense people in tough, sometimes very physical situations needed to have it worked out of their. Kids.
By comparison, my body was easy work for a man who worked on hurt cops and stressed out prosecutors. White girl problems are easy.
So I’ve done a run of sauna and cold work. I’ve had a massage. I have stretched and done breath work and moved around to feel things reset their flow.
I should really remember that heat, cold, oxygen, movement and pressure really do solve most problems. Don’t forget to eat and drink.
I’ve had several day’s worth of poor sleep. My sleep debt had reached a good full night’s of rest at over 9 hours. And boy did I make it up and then some last night.
I wasn’t asleep all of those 15 hours according to both Whoop and Apple but it sure felt like I was in deep slumber.
With earplugs and an eye mask in, I felt dead to the world. And what’s worse is I’ve had an entire month of pooor recovery and sleep
Now on July 4th I have been liberated from a long month of poor biometrics and awful recovery scores. And it only took 15 hours of being in a dark cold hotel room and a build up stress, exhaustion, mistreatment and other sundry social frustrations.
Today really does feel like Independence Day for me. I’ve been freed from a body weighed down by physical realities and I am now free from it.
There is a poem that comes to mind anytime freedom and sleep arise to my conscience thought. A Sleep of Prisoners is a 1951 verse play by Christopher Fry
A SLEEP OF PRISONERS
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake!
His writing captures something in my imagination with turns of phrase like “the longest stride of soul we ever took” evoking a crossing to the harsh wakefulness of reality. And as he says “it takes so many years to wake, but will you wake for pity’s sake?”
I have been slumbering in both reality and in the metaphorical ties that bound me to others. And today is the day where all Americans ponder how our founding fathers contemplated the reality of waking to the dawn of a new experiment. The American experiment continues and we must remain awake to our role within it. I have many thoughts on this which may now soon flow having awoken from quite a sleep indeed.
I’ve got a comically large sleep debt to work off. My Whoop is screaming at me as it’s been 3 days of not quite getting in an adequate of sleep.
And it’s not as if I was enjoying great sleep for June. It’s possible my new Whoop hardware just has bee algorithm and set of standards as June was mostly dead.
First it was emotional “really in it feelings” that gave me a half night as I woke early as the upset remained.
Then the anxiety of preparing for a long trip while the aforementioned emotional impact hung unresolved (though I had cried it out) which made deep rest out of reach. Four hours is half of my usual needs.
The middle night between issues and my packing day didn’t get me much better sleep. It was a long day of logistics and I never quite came down.
And then I was on an airplane and trying to catch some Zzzzzs but barely managed under three hours. I feel great as I’ve just kept on swimming great white shark style, but I know I’ve got almost a full night of sleep dent built up.
Still it’s hard to feel too badly about things when you look down on the beauty of the world below.
The travel is the kind of stint that requires the logistics of being in perpetual movement across climates and time zones.
I’ve been moving for what feels like 24 hours straight as I did the dance of managing feelings, working to get across to other people, unloading and unpacking and then promptly repacking again as I’ll be on the road for a stint.
I had a shark phase as a child and the lore says the perpetual movement of this ancient predator is required lest it perish. I’d love to know how rest and sleep works in that sort of murky depth as I’d loved to know how we might incorporate it.
As it turns out of the 540 species of sharks only a handful have what’s called Obligate Ram Ventilation which means the faster they swim the more oxygen flows through their gills. If the strop meaning the oxygen drops and they literally die. Great white sharks are the canonical example.
When I am angry I consider the question of whether humans are indeed the apex predators of our environment and if it is in my nature to flow the oxygen and predate upon the wide world who crosses my hungry wrath. My own Christian faith asks for a very different answer and I obey. But the hunger is in all of us.
Somewhere along the way I leaned into my hippie heritage and stopped wearing bras. Don’t fret, I didn’t burn them. Nor do I view it as any sort of political or fashion statement. It was the pain that did me in.
Sure, the pandemic’s homebound nature gave me the freedom to let loose. But it was the pain in my middle thoracic spine that sealed the deal. It’s at its worst right at my bra line.
I simply could not tolerate the pain from the pressure of even the most forgiving fabric bralette. No bra fitter in the world (not even the famed Orchard Corset of the lower east side) could get around the physics of an inflamed spinal and intercostal condition. My breasts would have go free.
I do have some sense of propriety about the situation. I lock the girls up firmly for business and conservative occasions, but even then if I can find a way to style myself such that I can hide the lack of brazier I do it.
It’s long been hippie lore that the pressure of the straps and clasps of lingerie prevent lymphatic drainage, which can lead to any number of problems. The most feared outcome was breast cancer. Though I do not have any family history of the disease, I did not care to increase my chances as my health waned.
And as I pack for a summer camp out in which I will be socializing with some very conservative people indeed, I found myself humming a crass tune from my maternal grandmother’s third husband’s family.
It was a 4th of July tradition in the raucous La Flair clan (a flavor of French Canadians who oddly settled on Long Island) to host a talent show. The well endowed Boomer women of the clan, who wonderfully possess no shame, had a chorus line dance they called “Bounce Your Boobies!”
I won’t be dressing or dancing in the manner of this fantastic clan but it’s quite likely my boobs will be doing a bit of bouncing for the rest of my life.
I went to bed yesterday around 3:30 or so. Oops. I could barely write a post as I was struggling to stay awake at all. I did three short paragraphs and tagged it and said good enough.
My sleep was not peaceful or restorative but at least it was long. The night before I was up late (ok 10:30pm or so) and I struggled to fall asleep.
Alex’s birthday party on Saturday was enough to wipe me out so badly that on Sunday I couldn’t stay up past mid-afternoon. Pathetic yes but not surprising.
I recently did a big round of bloodwork and was thrilled to see my inflammation is down significantly but I have something called inflammatory anemia. So maybe a contributing factor to my exhaustion. There are a number of odd areas that need some attention especially in my endocrine system.
The Bimzelx switch is in its 4th month so almost through the loading dosing. I have had awful side effects but the code biomarkers of CRP and Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR) are significantly improved.
I still have all kinds of weird pains and compensatory biomechanical problems but I’m feeling moderately optimistic. The next steps are around the corner. And hopefully I get more deep sleep and REM sleep before I tackle it.
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.
Today is my husband’s birthday. He genuinely is a very low key guy and when his birthday falls on a weekday he isn’t into big to-dos. But he said he’d be up for a Costco date.
No surer sign of enjoying middle age than loving the finest buyers club values of Cost. But to be honest we’ve both always loved Costco. And you can really get into Costco when you have a multiple barn freezers and backup power so no apologies for our love of a practical Costco date.
Though it didn’t go entirely to plan. If it means anything to the pulse of America the Bozeman Costco was a chaotic in a “concerning operational decay” way.
Now we noticed a lot of categories completely out. No lemons. Several steak cuts we’d been hoping to get for a birthday dinner. Produce in general was pretty bad. Enough to make you wonder if they were affected by the United Natural Foods hack.
But other things were off. Staffing wise you had to wonder if they fired half the staff or no one planned for managing checkout flow for June in Montana high season? Nothing is as predictable as tourists going to Yellowstone if you’ve got a manager with any tenure or common sense. but maybe they don’t. I have a Twitter mutual who burned out on a Costco job so two strikes guys. Talent is part of the Costco brand.
Alex works New York hours so we got there around 2:30 or so which you’d think would be quiet but is not in midsummer in southern Montana. It was summer high season traffic you’d expect on a Saturday though.
We walked every aisle and there was a lot of fun oddities. Japanese toilets, water bottle drying racks, sound absorbing wall panels. And there were some less fun selections.
There was a disturbing amount of slop packaging products and rapidly prototyped TikTok trends follow ons. Dubai chocolate ice cream bars? The zoomers will enjoy their summers up here I’m sure.
Lots of grouchy Boomers and exhausted families were looking for basics in the middle of the store as we perused the sides of the store for fun. Everyone is in Montana it seems. As we waited checkout I heard discussion of how JD Vance meeting with the Murdoch family at their ranch in Dillon.
We had intended to go end it with a hot dog and pizza slice respectively but it was so intense at the checkout area we didn’t even try. The lines were unmanageable which is how we got so much gossip. Montana isn’t so big that you can fly Air Force 2 to Butte without chatter about which ranch you are visiting.
I hope Costco has made some margin on selling gold bars to happy men like my husband. We also found a few other things
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.