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.
As I sat inside our hyperbaric chamber for my 26th sessions of oxygen therapy, my mind was on commitment. I like a routine and a plan and being locked in on my follow through.
I don’t recall when I was introduced to the concept of optionality, but it wasn’t something I recall being raised with. Despite being raised by hippies and yuppies,who themselves struggled with commitment, I never doubted that loyalty and stick-to-it-ness were crucial personal values. I don’t like to quit.
Maybe somewhere in my 20s though it became clear that many of the people I dealt with in “the big city” always had their eye on their next move.
Maybe it was campaigns like the World Economic Forum’s infamous “You will own nothing and be happy!”
Trends slowly put the meta structure of optionality as a construct into my mind. And it wasn’t too foreign to me.
We moved a lot as a child, and I never felt like I could get too used to anything because change was such a regular part of my life. I could reconcile being committed to always changing as the balance.
So the idea of always trying to add in additional optionality struck me as a little bit funny. Why would I always be looking for the door, or looking for my next move, or the next upward opportunity, when so much of what I longed for as a child was a basic sense of stability in my own home life?
Now, of course, the idea of optionality is baked into almost everything we do. Owning things is expensive, and financial challenges made the sharing of resources and assets like homes and cars seem perfectly natural to a millennial who had barely gotten by in the Great Recession.
But now, as I watch reality television like Love is Blind, a dating show designed to result in commitment, we see so much fear.
An inability to choose a path or to consider changing the path you are on to be with another seems to plague participants the further they take the franchise. Optionality is one thing but we’ve stumbled into a world where commitment is a foreign language.
They say you shouldn’t make any significant changes after a death in your family. Grieving is a process and allowing oneself to feel the range of emotions in loss is important.
You might not feel your grief if you jump into something new. Making a change could be hiding your grief from yourself. And so I am trying to sit with my grief.
I wondered about which parts of my history and my identity gave me my life. If I wanted to make changes in my future, or to broaden my horizons, what would it look like?
Somehow I am happy. I feel more love for myself as I see the ways I tried to love my father, and how he tried to love me as his child.
Being who we are, means seeing the child in ourselves who wanted to be loved for who they were, while learning as an adult that acceptance is up to us, not the generation who birthed us. The liberation of birth anew.
I hope the many experiments I’ve run with my biohacking over the last two months are helping me stay in my body during this process. I am on my 25th hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy treatment today. Which is fortunate as I am healing yet another skin issue as I try to find ways to have the strength to be myself in my very challenging body.
And so I wonder, am I the same without my father as I was with him? I am always searching for ways to become better, stronger, more informed, more capable, more successful and ultimately I fear those are all synonymous with finding ways to be more lovable to him? I couldn’t always tell.
I’ve found myself wishing to indulge a past professional calling with a side project. I’ve been writing a beauty shopping column where I go deep on my autistic special interest in skincare and the business of appearances. It’s been making me happy.
And so I ask does this count as a change? Am I jumping into something new, even if it is small, too soon?
All I know is that it feels right and like a joyful offering, even if there are parts of me that hurt. Perhaps there is a good kind of change to be had in endings with new beginnings. A personal passion once put aside, reemerges to serve others.
I think that is something my father would have liked to see me do. I have pursued so many of the things I know he wanted for me in this life. I do have a future full of technical change and a portfolio focused on the future of computing.
And yet here I am feeling freed to show that some aspect of who I am as a woman does want to serve others. If it is in the cause of helping be comfortably in your own skin that seems rather a positive thing to become after this life change.
My inner child finds the idea asking if “you want to see something gross” to be funny. Of course, I want to see.
Gore and violence don’t get this reaction from me. I dislike it in movies and in the real world. But to see gross and the weird in the real world. I get it. Maybe lots of humans thinks seeing gross things are cool.
I think it is a bit sweet. It is as a very human reaction go “ewww cool” when faced with non lethal wounds. Maybe it’s truer with boys than girls, but if a kid said “do you want to see something gross?!” in Colorado when I was a tween the answer was a rousing yaah! Gross things are cool.
Maybe it’s a type of survival mechanisms where if we can learn more about what is lethal, and lethal injuries look like, it then improves our Darwinian fitness. We judge risk more accurately.
Flesh wounds need proper care and do turn out absolutely fine. And boy have we improved on the science of wound care since I was a kid. We have evolved past the bandaid.
But even in a hard situation like a fire burn or the dermis getting sliced open, I still had a bit of that bravery of a little girl. That is cool! The bravado of a human who believes we can fix it
If you enjoy a story of plucky Rocky Mountain woman learning to do emergency care for herself and her community I’m glad we shared this time together.
Hopefully you never need these emergency skills. We take learn the risks and practice for them so we may never experience them.
So if you don’t feel this way, I’m giving you your ticket out of here. Stop reading now. But if you want to see something gross stay on.
This is my wound on Wednesday morning after I had the procedure. It’s much bigger a slice than I’d expected but first time practitioners (I asked for the experiment) and while the treatment is safe across most vectors, I was a nervous immune compromised patient who prepared for the worse.
So this a real 10/10 “let’s see how it goes from here” experiment especially if the returns it delivers are real. I hope for the energy, pain tolerance and healing benefits the average patient sees
So I am using a 90 minute full 2 atmosphere protocol already as I go went this treatment. I had also begun testing the GLOW stack from a peptide spot where I trust the owner. I’m helping him test. And this is the recommended stack for recovery.
.01 of the GLOW stack which is a regenerative peptide therapy with three peptides—BPC‑157, TB‑500, and GHK‑Cu—it was made to promote healing, tissue regeneration, and collagen production,
So I am absolutely throwing the gold care package at this. I am taking collagen and biotin, we’ve got the local food and the lack of seed oils, we’ve got the best current standard for peptides on injury and surgical recovery.
And somehow I am still scared. I never heal well or easily. I bruise easily and badly. I was so slow this summer to heal from an abscess surgery. I took a risk and I worried.
But I woke up this morning and my open wound has closed and the bruising has retreated in just five days to this. I’ll be in the scar mitigation territory in no time, and soon it won’t even be visible to the naked eye.
Day 5 of recovery from testosterone pellets
Progressively, the wound has moved from acute bruising and erythema toward decreased inflammation and resorption of bruising, with steady wound closure. Monitoring should continue, but the pattern suggests healthy tissue repair
So I hope you enjoyed seeing something gross. As it is keeping less and less gross by the minute.
I am pouring far too much autistic enthusiasm into my pet beauty shopping column that has a roughly half and half ration “theory of appearance culture in Protestantism” and half “specific routines at different price points” but I am enjoying it.
The heavier lift is going to be the work I am putting into the individual routines for the founding subscribers who have paid good money for help and I intend to give them my absolute all. I admit I’ve put way more thought than is probably necessary into each one but it’s a joy to track down specific products and geographic needs. It’s a shame that market editor was never a well paid enough job at a fashion magazine as I am pretty good at it.
Like, of course, I have opinions on the German drugstore market and its cost effective actives lines versus the old school naturals brands and where to acquire them. I don’t have quite as extensive a sample library of the market staples on hand but you know I spent hours browsing the grocery and retail shops when I was living in Frankfurt.
And on that note I’m going to bed early as I’m healing from my various biohacking experiments and I’m exhausted even with all the effort I’m putting into wound healing it still takes a certain about of rest to actually knit things together no matter how much time I spend with HBOT or what peptide stack I’m taking (it’s a spicy boy on the way in I’ll say that much).
You might want bring towel though, as our handcrafted Finnish sauna will need some use before the cedar is completely smooth. Yes, that’s right, the MilFred family Yellow Barn now has a sauna. And she is a beauty. Just check out the view we picked for her.
Alex and the wonderful family who built the cedar sauna structure placed her under the back awning of the big yellow barn today. Wiring and electronics are underway as I write.
We’ve been slowly but surely turning our barn into our ideal wellness center both for our own use and eventually for the wider community as well. We are privileged with skills, capital and loads of very expensive personal experience with chronic illnesses.
So naturally as geriatric millennials it is always our instincts to turn our pain into something useful and also if we are lucky pay back the expenditures and turn a profit. Which we can then reinvest. It’s the circle of life for a generation who found the circle of life to be a tad more inflationary than expected.
The man of action putting the finishing touches on the electronics. We don’t have anything in our home systems connected to the cloud, so he built his own fully local controller with ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, RGBW LED controls UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit. You can snag the code on GitHub
In true MilFred fashion, we are building and testing everything all on ourselves. An n of 1 is good, an n of 2 is better, and if you’d like to test it out hit us up while it is a work in progress. Build in public and beta test with your friends.
Tucked under the awning of the barn so one can easily pop in from gym, HBOT or cold plunge to warm cedar comfort and mountain views
We’d like to ultimately build a space for healing, relaxation and training for those who prefer time tested modalities like heat, cold, oxygen and pressure.
Friends and family can come and test out our now very impressive range of equipment as we build this all out.
We have one of the few hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers available outside of hospital use in the region. You can pressurize to 2 atmospheres and set a range of parameters for a range of treatments. I use it for my inflammatory condition while Alex is treating the remains of long covid. You’d be shocked what pressure and oxygen can do.
Our hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber
If you want a work out get in some squat reps in our power cage, take a swing at the punching bag or lengthen your spine on our Pilates reformer. You can even climb around on the rock wall built into the the barn ceiling (not even kidding that is the work of the previous family).
If you are looking for a spa day you can have a sweat in the sauna, do red light therapy on your face, chill out on a PEMF mat, and hopefully soon take a dip in a cold plunge. Though if you are ambitious you can sprint across the front pasture and jump in our pond but I’ll warn you that the ducks might not love it.
The pond is fed by a creek that comes from the canyon above our house
The point being that we are building by hand and through personal experience something that improves our lives and others and that’s a pretty hot thing to do. Don’t worry, we will provide towels and robes if you do indeed take off all your clothes. Just come on over and try it out.
Maybe it was taking a Fluconazole after my doctor notice some tearing “downstairs” at my annual physical when he was checking out my surgical scar from July.
Maybe it’s that I am on my seventh session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and the results starting to compound. Protocols say it takes about ten to feel a difference and my full protocol will be sixty so I’ve got a ways to go.
Maybe it’s just the absolutely gorgeous fall weather filtering in the perfect amount of light for that ideal temperate middle ground of low heat and humidity that makes being outside a joy.
Maybe it’s just a fluke. But today I feel almost human again.
I felt joy in being the adult responsible for running the household today. I managed loads of laundry, housekeeping, a proper grooming session of my own body, a grocery run into town, a decent workout, and of course, time in the hyperbaric chamber.
My husband is still struggling mightily with whatever combination of infections, stress, and post-viral damage is ripping up his immune response. He is usually the one caring for me. But today I was able to care for us both.
My husband and I are both sick. It’s the kind of “not quite respiratory, not quite sinus, not quite right” viral infection that always seems to take twice as long to clear as you expect.
Aging and stress is part of it but so is the damage we both have from covid-19 infections that turned into pneumonia. We’ve never been the same.
The good/bad news is that everyone we know seems to have the same basic set of physical degradations that we do. Varying levels of impact are met with varying levels of healthcare and wellness routines. From peptides to hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, no one is taking this shit sitting down.
I was already chronically ill before the world changed forever. It’s now common to have a flavor of autoimmune inflammatory chaos. I feel both less alone but much more frustrated at the crisis in American healthcare.
My medical billing codes as ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis in my spine) and psoriatic arthritis (psoriasis but it’s inside your body and it hurts!) but the tldr is constant pain, occasionally losing the capacity to walk, and the persistent exhaustion of chronic inflammation.
As we both cancel travel plans (for a charity event we’ve supported for years) and struggle to manage food and medication, I am reminded of the grief we are all carrying around.
As the world goes on with the “before times” as l memory for older generations, and the idea of any kind of positive “before” is unimaginable to the young, the grief comes and goes. The elders we stopped civilization to keep alive are dead or dying and our youth are distraught.
I remember being so angry and afraid for him when he left for cruise as lockdowns went into effect. I begged him to cancel the trip. I was afraid he would get sick or die.
He didn’t share those fears. He got stuck on the boat for an extra week or two, as no port would let them dock. He had the time of his life. I was locked in an apartment in Manhattan.
I don’t think he ever got Covid. For which I am grateful. I know far too many who did. I know many angry Zoomers grieving lost high school and college years.
Housing went up by 50% as we printed to survive the crisis. Strange times for us all and now we face the Great Ravine where the choices we made catch up to us.
My investment thesis of an increasingly chaotic world was novel when I first began and now it’s the same pitch every Tom, Dick and Harry espouses. What was once unclear is now the consensus. I am I am alive to see it and find no satisfaction in being right. The grief is all around us. Grief is for the living.
My immediate family is in poor shape. Health troubles across almost everyone along with varying degrees of emotional stress.
One tries to responsibly pursue “restorative” activities that give you back energy like meditation, light exercise or movement, and if you happen to be lucky like we are some supplemental oxygen.
The various efforts of relaxation techniques like non-sleep deep relaxation. Box breathing to interoception still has the baseline stress metrics you’d expect of a serious illness or a loss.
I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.
As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests
It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.
There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.
Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.
I’m OK To Go
I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.
Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.
When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.
The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.
Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”
