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.
Apparently it gets harder to sleep well as you get older. I’m no spring chicken as an elder millennial but I have had pretty consistent sleep hygiene over the past few years.
Like many biohackers, I monitor my sleep on an Apple Watch as well as a Whoop (which incidentally I absolutely endorse) whose data I sync across a few other biohacking apps.
I wrecked my sleep consistency this week as I changed my schedule to overlap more with the East Coast and European markets for work. On Friday night I found myself absolutely wired and unable to sleep. I was what students of nervous system work might call “activated” and couldn’t get myself down to baseline.
Eventually, in desperation, after attempts as varied as hysterical crying, box breathing and reading 10,000 words on female homicide statistics, I took multiple types of downers.
And I don’t mean friendly things like melatonin or chamomile tea. I went for the dreaded Jordan Peterson nemesis the benzodiazepine. I needed to sleep.
And thanks goodness I did. I was out like a light till an almost 3pm. Whoop was thrilled with my sleep performance. Which I admit feels weird to see as no one wants drugged sleep to be good sleep but alas it was good.
Whoop data readout on a long “day” of sleep with five hours of restorative rest after sleeping through to the afternoon
I spent a third of my time dreaming which must mean I’m working through something. the activation of my nervous system clearly meant something. I got excellent rest and it was worth it. I overslept a lot and I hope that I’ll be right as rain for my sleep hygiene thanks to pulling the ripcord and getting sleep by any means necessary.
Yesterday was a bad day for me physically. Unexpectedly awful pain caught me off guard. I went to a doctor today. It’s always hard to say what anything is about with bodies.
I am sleeping all of it off today. I figure no matter how overwhelmed one might be physically, if you can sleep it’s bound to help.
It’s two days in row where more than the basics of putting down a few paragraphs is a struggle. If it comes to three days I’ll probably have to dig in on it. I don’t want to write nor do I have much to say. I want to feel better.
I’ve been on a very steady health trajectory for the last six weeks or so after I kicked my lingering Covid symptoms from an infection I picked up at the beginning of the summer. Alas today I found myself with a significant pain flare.
I can barely focus on simple tasks like writing the pain is so forceful. Usually I have some warning with pain as it’s a symptom of an autoimmune inflammatory condition. If I over stress myself I’ll have consequences a few days later just like a regular person.
But today I went from working out to flat on my back in bed taking the highest doses of medication I’ve got. And I still at a 7 or 8 pain wise. I don’t quite know what to do about it expect as I’m not comfortable taking more medication.
I’m hoping it’s an anomaly and I’ll feel better tomorrow. I wish I could provide a better accounting of the sudden misery. But honestly the pain is so bad this is the best I can manage. Please no one worry as I don’t have the capacity to respond right now. I just can’t think clearly enough to write about anything but the pain so I’m stuck with chronicling it. And I’ve got a habit to maintain here where I write every day.
It’s always baffling to me when something that is supposed that is supposed to make you feel good makes me awful. And yet it’s a very consistent experience for me.
Every time I get bodywork done (massages, acupuncture, osteopathic spinal work, physical therapy) I feel like absolute shit for 24-48 hours afterwards.
I have an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis which is a fancy form of arthritis. It’s well controlled with medication and a healthy lifestyle but I am always looking for ways to increase my functionality as well as my capacity to tolerate stress.
This naturally leads me to want incorporate positive stress techniques like cold showers, saunas, and the thousands of other hacks to improve your capacity to tolerate stress.
I’ve tried supplements magnesium supplements to adaptogenic mushrooms and most major modalities of body work to even the whackiest of woo.
Yesterday I had an amazing osteopath work on my spine and yet today I feel about 10x worse than I did before I went in. The dip is just a misery of exhaustion, pain which leads to some anxiety from being tired and in uncomfortable.
I trust I’ll feel better after this dip and some progress as I recover from the good stress but at the moment I’m just miserable.
My assumption is that many things in life that make you feel better in the long term are uncomfortable. Delayed onset muscle soreness is a common issue for new weight lifters and pushes many out of their routines before they even get started.
It’s such an art finding the correct amount of stress to put your body under and I wish I had a more perfect intuition about how to do it. Until I do I’ll probably have to work through many types of dips.
I caught a case of Covid at the very end of May that took me down hard. I’d been struggling with “long” symptoms
So I tried an experiment. A pretty crazy one at that suggested by my osteopath and supervised by a doctor.
I am using going to use a 7mg slow release nicotine patch (of the type made for smoking cessation) for the next 3-5 days to see if it impacts my over-stayed their welcome Covid symptoms. I started my experiment at 9am Saturday July 6th
Day 1283 Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs)
The principle was pretty simple but not proven yet in clinical trials.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology[1].
Please do go read the original post with lots of caveats as nicotine is an addictive substance and this is not something to try without consulting your doctor.
I was unable to do the full 7mg but cut the patches down to 3.5 to 5mg over the five days. The side effects included headaches for the first day or so and a persistent queasiness.
Within a day I was lifted out of my exhaustion (which you’d expect from something modestly stimulative even though it was a low slow release dose). By the end of the second day my persistent coughing lifted entirely. I’d been struggling with congestion and coughing after even modest exertion like a walk outside.
I was functional on the fourth and fifth day like I hadn’t been since I got Covid. You can see me go into the red on my first day (my HRV dropped significantly but my RHR was only up by a few BPM). I slowly felt better and saw better recoveries even while taking on a little bit more exertion. I pushed a little too hard and found myself back in the red on my last day.
My Whoop recovery and strain chart for the five days of experiment beginning on the 6th and ending on the 11th of July
I was really relieved to stop the patch by the end. The last day of treatment I had overextended myself so I was in the red and feeling it even as the nicotine pushed my system up. I wanted to rip it off and did eventually cave at the end of the day instead of doing it all night.
My symptoms seem to be at bay. I feel decent enough so days after wrapping even as I began menstruation this morning. I hate to report that it also improved my usually debilitating PMS which typically includes intense migraines.
I would do it again if I got Covid. I cannot imagine ever using a nicotine patch consistently. I didn’t not enjoy the extra push of energy except insofar as it got me out of the exhaustion of the illness. I feel like it would be too much if I were otherwise feeling healthy. I have no cravings or side effects after.
Honestly I’m still wrapping my head around how well this worked. A part of me is confused, indignant and angry that a substance I was taught to fear has therapeutic benefit. Updating your mental models around long held beliefs is an uncomfortable process. But it’s a heck of a lot better than long covid symptoms.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology.
I am doing alright with it. I was wary of keeping the patch on all night long (I am very sensitive to stimulants such that I won’t drink caffeine past 10am) so I removed it at about 5pm. That may have been a mistake.
Yesterday my Whoop recorded physiological stress. I wasn’t coughing, I had more capacity for exertion, and I felt generally less exhausted.
But I didn’t come down easily for sleep. I ended up taking a number of anti-inflammatory medications as well as an Ambien. My heart rate was stable but I felt “up” which I don’t care for at night.
And I did not wake up to good news. My HRV absolutely tanked. There are lots of confounding variables here in that I got good restorative sleep (medicine induced surely) but some strain has clearly been too much. 40% down isn’t a rousing endorsement.
I am also noticing a lot of chatter around addiction and whether or not it’s responsible to discuss these things. The fear that the average person is in fact prone so addiction and will have adverse affects. Which I’m sure is true. I don’t think normal people should take unnecessary risks and it’s good to have the minimum viable dose be none at all.
It’s wise to remember that I am not at all living in average circumstances nor do I have average medical conditions so I am not necessarily who you should be looking to for health advice. You should do the basics like eat more protein, lift heavy things, sleep an adequate amount, be in the sun and move around, and manage your baseline health metrics first.
