Tag: Illness

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1759 and Who Are We After Someone’s Death?

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.

The loss of my father on the last day of the summer was both expected and painful. As I have had to find my own way to grieving, without being part of his memorial, I thought a lot about what life going forward meant as I honored our past and let him go.

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?

How could I be sure I was being true myself in the challenges of my chosen life and true to the deep and complex relationship I had with my father. All these questions arise.

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.

I have even decided make a special offer founding members who join my first year as I wish share some of my own happy knowledge. For a nominal fee I’ll build a routine from my cosmetics library and decant and organize the perfect skincare routine optimized exactly for the life you are living.

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.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1754 and Do You Want To See Something Gross?

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.

When I first did my wilderness incident first responder training, I went worried I’d find the injuries we’d be treating emotionally challenging.

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.

For those who who are like “actually I want to hear all about getting your left butt cheek sliced open” to raise and normalize your testosterone levels by injecting tiny pellets of hormones though a steel dart gun via the scalpel entry point. Then it’s time to see something gross.

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

Now I am lucky enough to be an owner and finally user of my very own hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy. I wrote about it at length through trade wars and trips to Istanbul. We finally got the OxyRevo from China last month. I intend to upgrade to an HPOTech in our finished medical space (I believe HPOTech the best on the market currently)

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.

Categories
Biohacking Medical Startups

Day 1753 and Vibe Coding for Your Skin Health

Many moons ago, when I was first attempting to get a diagnosis for why I was always in pain and exhausted, I got a battery of allergy tests. I did the “gold standard of allergy testing” called patch testing which is a form of pin prick testing designed to pick up responses that may be delayed.

It was an awful experience. I barely made it through the 5 day trial between the 100 allergen pin pricks and final measurements.

I remember begging the doctor for a way to measure early. I asked if I could take some Benadryl to take the edge off. Alas the only way it would be accurate and covered by my insurance is if I gutted it out.

You are not allowed to shower, sweat, be exposed to UV rays (no going outside) or take immune suppressants that might subdue your body’s response.

I was struggling to breathe, my entire body itched and ached, and I had a migraine so bad I couldn’t see for the stars & dizziness. It’s possible I wasn’t stable enough to have adequately consented to the test but I did get my final results.

Out of 100 common allergens tested it was confirmed I was extremely allergic to 10 of them with another moderate sensitivity set of twenty or so that I should merely try to avoid as opposed to my firm “no go” list.

The dermatologist gave me a sheet with 75 different chemical names and formats that I might encounter in the wild from these core allergens:

Budesonide
Ammonium Persulfate
Benzisothiazolinone
Limonene
Oleamidopropyl Dimethylamine
Formaldehyde
Lauryl Glucoside
Methylisothiazolinone
Propolis
Thimerosal

I instructed to search ingredient lists for these names any time I purchased a household product, personal care item, cosmetic or other item which might include these ingredients which ranged from nail care to vaccines.

It was honestly quite overwhelming. And some of the above ingredients are in basically everything. I dare you to avoid Limonene for a month.

So my husband and one of our best friends did what any practical minded engineer would do and they made me simple Google sheet where all 75 varietals could be checked if I plugged in the ingredients from any item.

I used it for years. I’d plug in the INCI from every brand I encountered into the sheet no matter what. I gave away a lot of products to friends.

Today it occurred to Alex that we should probably vibe code the thing into a proper web application using Replit so other people could check ingredient lists for their own allergies.

Within two hours, most of which was waiting on the kindly AIs to do their thing, we had a fully functional web application.

You can set your own allergens or click a few buttons for common allergens and “clean ingredient standards” and run a check for an all clear.

It isn’t super fancy but it doesn’t need to be. It just needed to keep your data safe, be easy to log into so you can securely check and access your personal list and generally functional enough to change and set allergens. We’ve put it on our own little domain just to see how much this will cost to run (and we’ve set up alerts so it doesn’t go bonkers) but we figured this should be accessible and simple.

And while there are other options on the market, most are bloated, overly paranoid and designed for scaring California moms rather than quickly helping people with clear preferences for avoidance and actual tested allergies. So hopefully our pain can help you breathe easier.

Some options for chemicals and irritants you can select on our app.
My own settings of allergies and sensitivities
Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work Medical

Day 1749 and Some The Worse For Wear

Every time life gets intense I wonder to myself why am I speeding into the turn? And then I look back at the last almost half decade (which is easier than I’d expected as I’ve written every day) and I feel the achingly slow pace at which we tackle the challenges of our lives.

We’ve had really big wins and really glass chewing teeth grinding bloody inch by inch progress that barely feels like a win at all.

It’s easy to focus on the bruises when they aren’t a metaphor like yesterday’s adventures in scalpel driven hormone treatment. But the the wounds that are more emotional are just as easy to spot.

Some pain has given me relief and some has been so heartbreaking it crushes me that it’s beyond my control. Bodies and borders are often beyond the control of mortals.

So I’m just rushing headlong into fun things like shopping columns and biohacking and my portfolio companies and my political engagement and hopefully we find the money and solutions to all the bottlenecks which range from family and pain to visas. And yes the bruise on my butt is literal.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1746 and Processed Pizza Hangover

Yesterday was my birthday and we celebrated it in grand style and semi- tradition by spending two hours walking every single aisle of Costco.

Now you might think all that walking around would leave your body feeling invigorated, and honestly it did, but we finished our grand tour by eating at the Costco food court. Now there are probably ways to eat healthy there but not how we did it.

We went for the classics including the dollar fifty hot dog and soda combination (a bulwark against inflation that has stood longer than seems possible) a slice of pepperoni pizza, a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate chip cookie. I had the pizza, some of the smoothie and half the cookie while Alex had the hotdog, a root beer, the rest of the smooth and a little bit of the cookie.

Our mutual and biohacker in chief Bryan Johnson gifted me a birthday roast of this meal. Which was not only hilariously funny but absolutely true.

Happy Birthday.

We didn’t feel immediately worse but we woke up today with what I’d qualify as a hangover. We can enjoy the above roasting as we generally don’t eat junk food and when we do it’s in more of the local beef category than the hyper processed and hyper preserved category.

Before you think this is a show of virtue, this preference never did anything for my aesthetics or metabolism, it’s just that it always makes me feel bad.

I am quite sensitive to preservatives and refuse to eat most forms of American bread and most varieties of prepared meal. No matter how good the ingredients are, the preservatives just do not agree with me.

It’s not that I’m a healthy eater naturally so much as hyper palatable foods are often hyper preserved foods and that sends my histamine response soaring into cytokine storms. So it’s no wonder I woke up feeling hungover.

I did real damage to myself as Bryan pointed out. We had a lovely time and I like to think the joy and happiness reduced our cortisol enough to bring us some balance. But it was easy to quit drinking for the same reason as it is easy to quit fast food. You feel like shit afterwards.

One of the most amusing fights I recall my parents having was my father taking my kindergarten class to tour a Carl’s Jr kitchen. They gave us a kid’s meal at the end, and while I turned up my nose at the burger, I did eat the french fried potatoes. My very crunchy and wise mother was not happy. “Now she will have a taste for French Fries!”

And damned if she wasn’t right. I still haven’t ever eaten a fast food hamburger. The idea of it is revolting to me and I’ve no clue how that came to be programmed in me. I may be one of the few people in America who has never eaten a Big Mac. But I love french fries. And good potatoes fried in a decent oil never leaves me feeling awful. But bread that doesn’t go moldy? That gives me a hangover every time.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1732 and It’s Getting Hot In Here So Take Off All Your Clothes

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.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1728 and In Which I Jinxed Myself With Yogurt?

I must have jinxed myself yesterday by commenting on having signs of an upward physical trajectory. Whatever infection Alex has been battling for weeks hit me. Either that or my attempt to eat a yogurt to begin rebuilding my gut biome went very badly.

I woke up feeling decent but sore everywhere. Maybe it was delayed onset muscle soreness from the light yoga I did? I drank lemon water and meditated and got some sunlight. Still all calm on the western front. I had a coffee. I was feeling well enough that I thought let’s get in 20 grams of protein and go do some squats.

Within fifteen minutes my heart was racing, I was congested, and all the areas of my skin which had healed up so beautifully from HBOT sessions went from normal to itchy and red.

Had I accidentally introduced some intolerable form of lactobacillus or either supposedly friendly probiotic by eating a popular but high end brand of skyr? There is no way it’s the yogurt right?

It kept getting worse. I took my temperature. 99F. The actual fuck. My Whoop had noted my skin was warmer than average when I woke so maybe I should have seen this coming but natural fever seemed extreme.

Naturally I asked a friendly artificial intelligence to give me some input and apparently probiotic recolonization after extended antibiotics courses are not in fact regarded as a universally beneficial approach and can even be harmful. So I’ll let my my gut biome reboot without the introduction of any commercial probiotic packed processed yogurts.