Tag: Life

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1552 and Mold Updates

Over the winter we did a mold test on our bedroom after I had had a batch of sub-optimal bloodwork and flares in my autoimmune condition. We wanted to be thorough in assessing potential reasons for any issues from environmental to pharmaceutical.

I was suspicious that mold would be a culprit. Or perhaps I did not want it to be a culprit. Mold has always seemed like an excuse the professionally sick lean on like a crutch. You can imagine some worried well Goop reading white woman blaming mold.

I don’t know if this is engrained ableism on my part (lol) but no one wants to be that annoying sick woman with the litany of vague issues plaguing her life. And yes I fear this about myself because I do have to manage an autoimmune condition.

So I went into mold testing with some cynicism. It’s mike making a claim you’ve got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Sure both mold and fibromyalgia are real but I’ve learned from experience that you must avoid both lest you be seen as someone unserious.

The wall next to bed.

Alas it has turned out to be serious. It took most of the winter to work through the breaking down the walls part but once Alex began pulling back the walls it was dramatic and easy to spot.

The bedroom getting ripped apartment.

As it turns out the wall on my side of the bed has quite a bit of mold types growing happily. As best we can tell it must be some type of small leak in the pipes.

Gnarly white spores

There’s a couple hydronic heater pipes right by the baseboards so the current theory is maybe one developed a tiny pinhole leak for a bit that sealed itself back up. Don’t ask me about that one as it’s on Alex.

His plan for now is to remediate it, patch things back up, fog the room and have the carpets steam cleaned. Which is a bigger job than we might like but much better than it could have been.

Categories
Culture

Day 1551 and Jokes On Us

April Fool’s Day is just the worst. Practical jokes were much more enjoyable when telling the truth was still a widely accepted social norm. Our moment is one of a thousand falsehoods.

Our commitment to the truth and a shared sense of what separates truth from falsehoods has never felt shakier to me. It’s one strategic lie after another from all our institutions and leaders.

If you are living in our era of lies, half truths, and various flavors of misinformation & disinformation the idea of dedicated a day to falsehoods seems perverse. I don’t want to be on the Internet or a part of discourse on a day when deliberately lying gives you social capital.

Alas this is an ancient human custom in many places. The Indian festival of Holi, medieval Feast of Fools, and the Roman Hilaria are all early spring celebrations of pranks, jokes and foolishness. The prevailing theory dates to France and the change to the Gregorian calendar.

April Fools’ Day back to 16th-century France. In 1564, King Charles IX adopted the Gregorian calendar, moving New Year’s Day from late March (around the vernal equinox) to January 1. Those who continued celebrating the old New Year date on April 1 were mocked as “April fools” and became targets of pranks, such as receiving fake gifts or being sent on “fool’s errands.”

– Via Perplexity

I rather imagine that the religious traditions mentioned above all valued truth as a foundational virtue. To know the truth of the world and the truth of your soul are the twin ambitions of human life.

Perhaps I’m being too sensitive. Or too rigid. Humans are evolved primates and we play status games that involve deception in the entire primate family. But I’d still prefer that we communicate true information to each other as both a norm and as an aspiration. That’s not a joke.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1548 and Future Perfect

Back in my distant Williamsburg hipster past I lived in a loft above a furniture store called Future Perfect. I am lucky enough to have acquired a couch from them but that’s a different story.

I didn’t envision exactly the kind of Future Perfect that I and the aforementioned coach would come to inhabit. Both the couch and my current life would have seemed crazily out of reach to me in the middle aughts.

This isn’t to say that life turned out perfect but it feels closer than I might have imagined. Many aspects of the future I was hoping to live seem almost comically small in their scale compared to what’s actually possible.

I hope this remains true for the future perfects that are yet to come. I see the rapid change in technology and I feel hopeful. Then I remember human nature and I have more trepidation. Either way, all I can do is take good care of myself now.

Categories
Medical

Day 1541 and Mycotoxins

One of the more exhausting problems that arose over the winter was mold contamination in our master bedroom and adjacent rooms.

It’s taken six weeks to get in the right folks for testing and assessment. We’ve not been able to start remediation as the best option for the job isn’t available.

Alex has been able to negotiate access to the various necessary tools to begin but it’s quite a bit of work to DIY during which I’ll need to be out of the house.

Working through cleaning all of the clothing and other sundries in the closet is also a massive project. Our dry cleaner is going to make out like a bandit.

However the worst bit of this has been the anti-fungal course of antibiotics my physician recommended prophylactically as during all of this we’ve been suppressing my immune system (with some negative side effects) as part of a medication protocol change.

I swear I can feel whatever mycotoxins may exist in my biome fighting the drugs. I’ve had an astonishing array of negative intrusive thoughts that don’t feel like my own. You have to wonder if my ride-along mycelium simply don’t want to lose their host.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1538 and Reason About the World

There is a pet theory that I ascribe to that precious few changes their minds without experiencing a failure in social consensus. Being pushed outside of culture lets you map it more accurately on the way back in.

There is nothing more valuable than your ability to reason about the world. We sense-make with all kinds of inconsistencies and have so little incentive to step out of what we think is true about our world. Go along to get along is how humans stay alive.

I have had a wildly inaccurate model of the world in the past and I’m confident I’ll say that same soon in the future.

But I’m comfortable falling out of social consensus if it clashes with the model of the world that I work within. I’m not saying I’m smarter than anyone but I do know that I regularly weigh my faulty priors even if it’s embarrassing. I’ll keep searching for people who can reason about the world. We can see better together.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1536 and Backward to Move Forward

Much as the winter has been hard on everyone in my close circle, I don’t particularly want spring to arrive. I’d rather have a pleasant winter follow the unpleasant one instead.

I woke up to fresh snowfall this morning after a hard night. Some previous stressor is making my hair shed. Pain has wrapped itself tightly around my intercostal as it radiates from my thoracic spine. I feel as if I’m fighting a light infection as I ran a fever yesterday and today.

I only have a few days till my next loading dose of my new biologic drug Bimzelx which is a new type of IL-17 inhibitor for my ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis. Bimzelx targets both IL-17A and IL-17F, while my previous protocol Cosentyx targets only IL-17A.

Changing medications is a whole thing that introduces way more unexpected problems even with the best of planning. See for instance getting my eyelid sliced open twice to manage an infection. Neat right?

Oh and don’t forget the mold issue. Figuring a solution to our master bedroom and downstairs mold issues means we’ve got some destruction and renovation that we probably can’t accomplish before the summer.

Which is a bit of a bummer as our guest floor isn’t as well air conditioned. Add in the late evening light and I expect the next two seasons will be challenging to make progress during. But sometimes you have to go backwards to fix existing problems in order to move forward.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1535 and Telogen Effluvium

In what has become a real persistent mood this winter, I have another dumb problem. I am losing my hair. Literally.

As it turns out stress can trigger hair into mistakenly going into what is called a rest phase. Perplexity tells me this is a temporary condition where significant stress pushes large numbers of hair follicles into a resting phase, causing shedding within weeks to months.

I have a lot of hair so it’s only really noticeable to me but I am tired of unexpected problems this winter. Obviously I have been under some stress and it feels like punishment.

Thankfully virtually all people diagnosed with it recover once the underlying stress has passed. It’s commonly associated with giving birth but it seems any significant or stressful event can trigger it.

Hair regrowth typically begins within 3–6 months. In most cases, up to 95% of acute TE resolves completely without long-term effects on hair density.

My vanity is pleased this temporary. I can certainly take it easy and pull back from unnecessary stress. Plus it’s a great reason to overspend at Sephora on new haircare. There is a bright side to everything.

Categories
Startups

Day 1534 and Certitude

I’ve been busy with a founder who is running an astonishingly competitive seed round. Let’s just say I’m glad I wrote the first check.

I back founders long before it’s possible to have any certainty. I have accumulated enough signal and taste over twenty years to feel like I know when someone has what it takes to try their hand at a startup. It doesn’t mean it will work but I always believe in their capacity to do the work required.

Proving that out is probably the work of millions of pages of business school papers. No wonder we are complaining about the lack of builders. Wouldn’t it be better if we just put those resources into starting actual businesses instead of theorizing?

I’m a huge fan of always being a bit entrepreneurial. The much maligned “side hustle” that millenials and zoomers maintain out of necessity has its upside.

I like all scales and all kinds of business. Alex and started dating thanks to a swap on an Airbnb rent arbitrage. I’d let someone book dates for my apartment when I was supposed to be out of town. Trip dates change. Alex offered his apartment up if we split the profit. We’ve been in business ever since.

I’m working through a new local business plan we think will have community benefit (both in terms of job creation and service offering). Am I certain it will work?

Actually more certain than you’d expect this small scale that we can boot something up. Startups are much harder to judge than an existing business model with a new offering.

Incidentally if you are in Montana and looking for a medical grade hyperbaric chamber oxygen treatment we should have ours in a month or so.

Categories
Community

Day 1532 and Friendly Service

Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.

Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.

Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.

We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.

We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.

So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.

Categories
Medical

Day 1531 and Dumb Novel Problems

I personally find I’ve got an adequate number of problems in my life. I’d rather not go searching for new ones. And yet they keep cropping up no matter one’s hopes.

I’m at the eye clinic at the hospital for a two week checkup on an infection that felt like it literally ballooned my right eyelid. It was either a cyst or a chalazion, the doctor was like eh treatment is the same.

Not to upset those with weak stomachs but the treat is slice open your eyelid and squeeze out the pus, blood and scar tissue. It isn’t as painful as it sounds.

After two weeks of diligent hot washcloths, antibiotic eye drops and doxycycline my eye has reduce the lump to a small pea or large lentil. My body was trying to move it out but it needed a bit more help.

So she sliced it open again seeing if we could get anything else out. Alas the tissue scaring was most of the volume so there was less ooze to be pushed out.

She said I could wait it out but it takes months to move it naturally or we can do a steroid injection and reduce the swelling so it clears more easily.

I’m not a big fan of prednisone when I’m taking it internally but a little localized dexamethasone shot into the eyelid seemed like a good plan to me.

I’ll say that it’s a bit scary trying to stay perfectly still while someone holds a scalpel to your eyelid. Having someone inject a needful of steroids is much worse from a base animal terror perspective for me.

I’m safely through it though now my eye is all puffy again. I’m likely to have a black eye for a bit so I’m excited for all the jokes Alex and I will make about how he hit me. Nothing more awkward than a wife with a black eye.