I don’t know what I did but I’m like 50% of the way towards an anaphylactic reaction. I was exposed to salt water, a sunscreen whose ingredients I didn’t vet as carefully as normal (foreign language) and a few environmental factors that could potentially have contributed.
I’d post a picture here but it’s not something I’d relish having a permanent home on the internet if you feel me. Imagine bee stung lips but not in the sexy cosmetics way. Then apply that level of red inflammatory tissue to my entire face, chest, arms and other delicate areas.
I sucked back 5mg of prednisone which I loathe but I’m in no position to be picky. I don’t have an epi-pen with me but my throat isn’t closing off so it’s probably overkill.
A cortisone shot would hit the spot though I’m sure. I also took 50mg of Benadryl. That’s why I’m posting so early in the day as it’s hard to say if this pharmaceutical combination will result in me having Trump on steroids energy or passing out from antihistamine energy
Instead of Benadryl it was diphenhydramine. For a headache we used ibuprofen not Advil. Acetaminophen was the proper name not Tylenol.
She taught me what went into popular brand name medication like DayQuil and I learned the ratios of guaiphenesin to dextromethorphan. Always take the minimum viable dose she’d say. And if I only had a cough I didn’t a fever reducer.
America is lucky to have a thriving generic medicine market. If you are a Costco shopper you can buy thousands of tablets of every crucial over the counter medication at just a few cents per dose.
Take the time to read more on the issues as it’s been forty years of struggle for access and safety and we are experiencing shortages and supply chain risk that is unprecedented.
For a woman raised in the Rockies and settled down in Montana, you’d think I’d be more outdoorsy. And yet I can spend days at a time in just one room with little trouble and even enjoyment.
Even with that wholesome “National Parks” backdrop, I was always a bookish and imaginative child. I was once derisively described as having “a particularly pictorial interiority” by a babysitter.
I don’t have the energy I once did as a girl when I’d spend my time at the barn and loved camping & hiking with my Outward Bound going army surplus shopping Eagle Scout achieving band of hippie environmental teens.
Setting aside the humor of a toking Austrian anthroposophy student projecting onto an elementary student, I am a long winded introvert who writes a lot. They really nailed me.
When the pandemic forced us all inside I had no problem with being home. I did a full three months without setting foot outside the apartment.
As a choice I make for health & preference, it’s a far cry from cultures where women are forced indoors. I’d prefer to be outside more when circumstances allow. They haven’t for quite a few days. But it’s ok, I like being an indoor cat.
I am in a good vibes places right now. I am a bit tired from some whirlwind pacing but feeling very good about how a number of projects are playing out from an amusing purchase to more serious matters of fundraising and deal management.
I do feel the fatigue that comes with running at full speed. I have been hitting it hard in writing and at work this week and it’s only Tuesday (not that I am one for weekends).
It’s the end of my workday as I’m on European time and I still have a few miles to go before I can be done so I’ll keep the post short. If you want to see where my head is at check the links as I did some good work this week.
On a housekeeping note, I’ll be in New York the second week of October and in Miami the last week of October if anyone is either city would like to meet up. I’ll be prioritizing LPs for chaotic as we are raising along with founders and weirdos of all stripes. Just hit me up on DM on Twitter. Or email me but I’m more likely to respond to DM.
It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.
I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.
Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.
The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.
As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.
There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.
Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.
If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas
It’s been a weird couple of days for me. It’s been a weird couple of days for just about everyone. At least all of my electronics are intact and no one has tried to kill me right?
I was hoping I’d be on the mend for this pneumonia like thing I’ve had for a few days. I took a Z pack on advice of my doctor. It’s a bit better but I’m still coughing. I’ve got my voice back at least. I keep hoping better medicine will arrive but I’m not getting my hopes up.
I’m going to lay low. I’ll keep it short. Maybe tomorrow I will have more to say and better lung capacity. I’ll keep it light. Lightening up. It’s better than lighting it up.
I am so grateful for the access I have to understanding my own body. It used to be considered quite rude to question doctors but as with any profession some are better at it than others.
Thanks to the work of the open internet and the tooling of artificial intelligence I cross check an astonishing amount of medical information. With a little work and the right questions and intelligent person can do basic differential diagnostics using Claude and Perplexity.
Networking together public papers, handy upper funnel content strategy of the Mayo Clinic, and the database of Drugs.com has been a real boon to involved patients who want to double check things.
Be skeptical of credentialism and gatekeeping in medicine. While everyone wants safe and responsible medical care there are plenty of well entrenched interests that don’t want you to do more for yourself. We deliberately keep the population of doctors limited in America. Professional organizations exist to protect themselves. But everyone deserves the tools to be healthier.
I am sick. I am unsure how I got it or even what it is but I’ve got an intense dry cough, I lost my voice (I’ve been pitching so it may be strain as it doesn’t hurt) and the pain in my left intercostal muscles and rib cage is so bad it making it hard to rest comfortably. It’s been an overstimulated kind of year.
My hope is that I recover enough by Monday that being ill won’t affect my work but I am throwing a Z pack at it in case it turns out to be bacterial pneumonia. I won’t get into the details but I’ve got reason to suspect staphylococcus infections.
If it’s viral then oh well but if it’s bacterial better safe than sorry when it comes to autoimmune patients. I’ll never turn down a chance to nuke my gut biome. Doxycycline is my preferred antibiotic but a macrolide antibiotic has its place.
Being stuck in bed and too uncomfortable to even move has at least giving me time to pick through my reading list and look over the remnant trends of the month’s cultural detritus. The human body may have autophagy but I’m less sure the body politic does. It’s all history repeating.
This New York Times trend piece covering stylized flat lays of TSA security bins insists on it being a fun new trend gaining prominence in the last six months. I find this “new” framing comical as it’s anything but new. Instagram launched in 2010 my wee Zoomer friends.
One of the experts quoted in the trend piece, Hitha Palepu (who is fantastic) was regularly featured together with me as far back as 2015 when I was something of a travel aesthetics expert myself as the CEO of a travel cosmetics brand.
Everything old is new again. I myself can barely manage the nostalgia riffs of Blackbird Spyplane let alone the regurgitation of a ten year old trend. I’d like us to try something new every once in a while. But I suppose we can’t even get a new presidential candidate so why would I expect Thursday Styles to have anything fresh.
I don’t know where I picked it up but the back to work and back to school season seems to also mean back to petty respiratory infection season. I’ve got a bad dry cough that is so intense I feel like I pulled a muscle in my left intercostal rib area.
I don’t feel terribly sick and all of my biometrics are within normal range. It’s just this horrible rough dry cough that seems to have tweaked my side so badly I’m contemplating wrapping my rib cage with a bandage.
I haven’t had a broken rib in sometime but this is as close to the feeling as I recall. I’d lost my voice a bit yesterday (been doing a bit more taking than usual as it’s fall) and pushing through it might have been a poor decision.
The other possibility is that the left intercostal pain is related to my inflammatory condition and it’s moved from its normal residence in my spine. I have very low pain in my spine at the moment so anything is possible.
I’ll lay low this weekend and hope it goes away on its own. Maybe the antitussive cough syrup will provide some relief.
I am changing the time zones I work as a few projects and founders work different hours than I do. So trying yo available across a bunch of different hubs is going to be the stuff of my next few weeks.
And I’m trying to adjust to London time and calculate out GMT+ N as time zone delirium makes wonder when it’s morning in Singapore.
Naturally I want some caffeine. The fatigue from bad sleep, a poor recovery and the constant pulling up of different calendars to double check times is breaking my brain.
I do a coffee in the morning as a part of my wake up ritual but caffeine beyond that is not quite my thing.
At any my lunch (early for Americans and normal time for London) I decided to get one of those charmingly small cans of Diet Coke. I had a choice of glass and tiny tongues to pluck each individual ice cube into the beverage.
I was not feeling awake enough for that sort of European singular cube nonsense. My American mind literally cannot comprehend. I’m not much for soda or caffeinated drinks but if anyone gets in the way of my ice I’ll be feeling much less bubbly.
