Tag: Medical

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1786 and 40 HBOT Sessions Later

The days becoming shorter has hurt my attempts at getting out in the sun for a walk every day. This matters to me as I’d like to get regular readings of my V02 maximum and my heart rate. I rushed out without sunscreen to get in a mile.

I hit an important milestone in my current biohacking regimen this week. I made it to my 40th session of hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy or HBOT. I began on September 13th and did session 40 on November 20. I only traveled once during this period (a five day trip) so I could have fit it all in within a two month period but I was consistently doing two hours a day.

I intend to get bloodwork for comparisons next week, but in some ways this was a terribly experiment period. I had a small procedure to insert testosterone and estradiol into my left buttock which turned into a saga when I got a skin infection. Not the procedure’s fault and I’m glad I did it as my numbers are already better.

Fortunately HBOT is renowned for healing soft tissue infections so if I was going to suffer for having compromised immune health across my skin biome, then at least I had the state of the art treatment available.

We didn’t purchase the HBOT for its skin benefits. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d be have skin immunity issues. They began with my new IL-17 inhibitor which I started in January We’d acquired the HBOT around the same time but I had no idea how challenging Bimzelx would be. It could have gone worse.

We had originally acquired the HBOT as several of our friends and acquaintances had succeeded in managing impressive inflammation rate reductions as well as progress with a slew of autoimmune issues from long COVID to mold toxicity. The kind of troubles we only test in fancy labs with extreme athletes or the enterprising technology brother.

My wound has mostly healed save a small lump, my V02 max has improved despite virtually no exercise (hard to do much cardiovascular exercise with an infection in your posterior chain) and I have overall found the balance of improvement in my energy and pain to be significant.

Thanks for noticing Whoop

If I could just get a month without a health crisis where I have enough energy to workout consistently I just might make some progress. So if I disappear for a bit that will be what I’m doing. Once I’ve got bloodwork I will share obviously.

Categories
Chronic Disease Internet Culture Reading

Day 1772 and No Signal

The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.

As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!

The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.

MAWP!

Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.

Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.

This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.

Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.

Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.

If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.

MAWP!

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1770 and Making Suffering Worthwhile

A long time ago, in a past life so foreign I can barely recall, I made some bad choices in the hopes that I was making good choices for the people I loved.

I froze eggs and embryos with my husband thinking that some day we’d have the money, health and stability to have children.

That day never came. And it’s unlikely to change. My health is what it is and I won’t ever be able to carry them. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to get me healthy enough just to go back to work and being healthy enough to carry just didn’t happen in time.

The high costs of surrogacy are daunting and the extra help I would require to raise them isn’t forthcoming. Being somewhat disabled means I’d need a lot of help and not the kind you can easily pay.

The extended family who does want to help and raise them (not blood family but nevertheless family) has never succeeded in getting a visa approved for so much as a vacation in America. So that route seems rather shut and has remained a small beacon of hope that seems ever less likely.

I could go abroad and raise children near them but that would be admitting defeat on a level on life in America that feels like dying.

My husband wouldn’t be able to come. We have a home and a life and careers in America. Funny how we don’t really have family in America that cares one way or another though all our existing blood relatives are American it’s the extended not quite family that seems to care most about family.

So a day after a socialist won the mayor’s race in New York City I have to ask myself how can we make the suffering of so many feel worthwhile? What did I achieve through my sacrifices? What did America achieve with our choices that can be seen as worthwhile? if those questions cannot be answered I don’t know where America goes from here.

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Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1768 and Maybe A Corner Is Being Turned or Maybe I Should Turn Back

I feel as if I lost almost all of October to combating a medical hard left turn from what was supposed to be a pretty simple procedure requiring no downtime and little healing.

I feel like I got quite a scare and yet you’d think I’d be used to it, as this is all downstream of the interleukin-17 inhibitor that I changed onto at the beginning of the year for my autoimmune condition.

Every single quarter, and in some cases every other month this year, I have had some bizarre skin infection resulting from otherwise pretty benign situations. An infected gland in my eye (twice!) an abscess that turned into a deep tissue infection, and a tiny incision that allowed in a subcutaneous infection all rocked my world.

As much as I am thrilled to see all of my inflammatory numbers rolling in to baseline normal, I just don’t know if I can sustain having a health crisis this frequently for a medication that is supposedly working. It’s working at an extremely high cost to my sanity and body.

And you might say, “Well, the numbers don’t lie.” And I’d agree. But there are many other factors I have to consider, not the least of which is that healthcare access in America is so bad that I have managed two of the four crisis points with medical tourism abroad.

I am going to give my IL-17 inhibitor a full year as dosing on and off biologics is no easy matter and the compounding effects are quite real. But I do very much wonder if in order to go forward I must turn back.

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1765 and Hollowed Out

I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.

It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.

And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.

The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.

Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.

I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.

I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.

Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me

I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it

I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.

The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.

And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.

If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1764 and Not so Easy In and But Out of the Woods

It has been sixteen days since I confidently decided to insert testosterone pellets by tiny incision into my left buttocks. I was felt certain we’d checked all the appropriate risk factors and my tolerance threshold was met.

I felt I was making pretty decent progress on healing over five days as I had not only the benefits of HBOT but also read light therapy. I was pretty darn pleased and felt well.

And then it seemed I took a turn six days further on. Perhaps some trauma from the lidocaine and epinephrine induced enough of altered window of immunity that some bacterial weaseled its way in the wound and viola a subcutaneous infection called cellulitis.

I was put on two different antibiotics and we figured it would clear quickly. That was incorrect And it has been a slow healing process

Barely improving day by day. And I had somehow made the decision the night before the procedure that I would just waltz into a new beauty shopping blog as the holiday season warmed up. So that was perhaps bad luck on my part. And has slowed me down on something I was doing for some joy so I hope I didn’t let anyone down. I am muddling through.

Today I got an ultrasound on the wound after a fever spike and did a number of blood tests to see where my white blood cells and inflammatory markers were at.

The local hospital was having computer troubles which meant trouble scheduling an ultrasound but we managed to find another imagining clinic this morning.

Back at the hospital for bloods (they do walk ins for blood draws) they still appeared to be having issues with computers. “Your insurance isn’t recognized” was the verdict thirty minutes after using it at other lab. That made for a chuckle but we got it done.

The results are already in and we seem to be looking at healthy epithelial tissues and my CRP and Sed Rates were not elevated. Of course, half the reason I am worried is I take an immune suppressant for chronic autoimmune inflammatory condition.

It seems to manifest frequently as skin infections. My old drug wasn’t nearly as effective but it also didn’t have side effects. S

Hopefully slowly and with lots of protein and rest I’ll be healed and can spend my time on work and my pet beauty blog.

And tomorrow I’ll cross my 30th HBOT treatment mark so maybe it can make progress on building me up instead of dealing with a flesh wound. Which is actually just damned good luck on our part.

Categories
Politics

Day 1763 and Baumol’s Cost Disease Accelerationism

Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.

This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.

Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune

So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.

About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance

Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.

For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.

How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez

Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.

There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.

And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.

As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.

So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.

Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.

We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.

So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.

I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.

The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1761 and Give Me A Break

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.

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.