Tag: Pain

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
Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1730 and Steering The Titanic of Adult Habits When Icebergs Are Ahead

We are all us humans on the good ship Lollipop. I mean this as a stand in for Mother Gaia/Terra/Earth. We are all in this together right? Wrong? Who knows.

I happen to be on the America decks, so even if I can see the sea is perilous the orchestra is still playing. Maybe I’m rearranging the deck chairs. Is there anything that can be done to steer myself away from collision other than seeking a life raft?

It’s a kludgy metaphor but I am personally trying to move around several of my own ingrained adult habits with the hopes that I can change the direction of life for smoother sailing.

It’s hard to retrain your body after years of pain, compensating biomechanics and environmental factors beyond one’s control.

I’m putting on my life vest and trying to steer myself well so that I save myself and maybe in doing so save others.

If anyone has physical therapy videos they recommend I am working to retrain muscles that are compensating for my thoracic ankylosis. I also intend to go in person to physical therapy if possible.

And onto other topics less bleak than avoiding disasters, both personal and political, as you can indeed do more than you imagine to steer your own life here is some inspiration.

I enjoyed reading this piece on the rise of the online schizo and how to protect yourself as someone who is burdened with a strong case of apophenia. Worth a browse if you are concerned about your cognitive security online as no one wants to catch a Babylonian death cult meme virus.

Audrey Horne has a new substack called Secret Ballot where my friends and mutuals make some appearances and it includes a good calendar of social events in D.C if that’s your thing.

If you are following AI and eschatology (and really who isn’t these days) you may have heard about the Peter Thiel anti-christ lectures. I’d love to brag about being invited but I didn’t have the chance attend what with death and illness. However this two part interview with Thiel at the Hudson Institute covers the basics.

I spend a lot of time on artificial intelligence policy thanks to my advocacy on Montana’s right to compute law as well general interest in enabling more people to maintain the level of control and access they seem appropriate for their own lives. The right to repair movement is the seed for a wider right to compute movement.

On that note Alex is building automation into the sauna being built and has put the code up on GitHub if you are into that sort of thing. You have a right to build things and own them and no one is forcing you to buy convenience if you would prefer to keep your data on your own servers. Even if it’s the data for your air conditioning or your sauna.

We’re building a sauna and I don’t like anything at home connected to the cloud, so I’m building my own fully local controller
ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, even has RGBW LED controls
UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1724 and Being A Villain For Someone That Needs It

Being a victim in your own life is a choice. We get dealt a hand of cards and we have a say in how we play it even if it’s a crappy hand. The odds being what they are you probably got dealt some bad cards.

I’ve learned the most about empathy from the men in my life. It’s not always true for women but being raised to accommodate is part of being the weaker sex. One need not always accommodate in life though. Sometimes their problems just not about you at all. And that is ultimately alright. Everyone hurts including you.

I thought this captured the spirit of trying to give people the space to be hurt.

Of course it’s unwise to reinforce a victim mindset in people, but sometimes people actually just have been victimized, sometimes repeatedly and brutally, and lasering in on their small slice of responsibility just reinforces their pervasive sense of being totally alone. At some point you hope they look at their patterns and see if change is possible. But if they’re going to get there, it’s going to be because someone was kind enough to sit with them, believe them and hold space for them until they were ready. VividVoid

Letting someone see you in the way that they need to see you has its purpose. It’s a beautiful thing to sit quietly and let someone really blame you. Be disliked. Letting someone who has genuinely got shit going on just be furious at you is a form of empathy. Be their villain.

I’m learning to sit comfortably while being someone’s villain. If that’s what they need in their hardest hour I can be that. It’s not something you should give too freely but this is where boundaries are a blessing.

I’ve seen more men than women be capable of handling this kind of rejection. The empathy of not engaging. Let them be hurt. You can suck if they need it. I believe it’s a strength to cultivate comfort being the bad guy

Every parent learns to do it, anyone with responsibility for making a goal or a bottom line or a budget work knows that sometimes you just have to be the bad guy to make it work.

The parameters of all of that is hard and we are reworking our way through helping people overcome their hurt. We’ve let cultural expectations dictate so much.

Everyone is fighting their own hardest battle and if you let them be mad at you and don’t take it personally you just might help.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1719 and Biometric Fall Lock In

I slept rather poorly last night. I get anxious before medical appointments. Interfacing with America’s medical system can range from merely uncomfortable to actively hostile so I suppose some heightened vigilance isn’t irrational.

I wanted to get a fresh set of bloodwork after a summer of fairly involved medical intervention. It ranged from deep tissue infection discovered during a minor surgery to multiple rounds of antibiotics. I have experienced a lot of side effects at full strength.

I am also beginning a 40-60 session hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy protocol and I thought it wise to get the basic bloods for a before and after purpose.

I really yearn for an uptick in qualitative metrics I associate with higher quality of life like energy for my favorite physical activities (weightlifting and hiking). The fatigue and stress from the pain, and downstream side effects are constant reminders of poor health.

So I am looking for improvements in basic markers like my CRP and Sed Rate as those inflammatory markers should coincide with the qualitative improvements.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1718 and The Abyss Stares Back

The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.

We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.

The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.

I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.

Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.

Someone acquired a new piebald

Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.

The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.

I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.

I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.

What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.

Die unendliche Geschichte – 1979 Michael Ende

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1717 and The Beginning of My 40 Treatments of Hyperbaric Chamber Oxygen Therapy

An auspicious pair of numbers for today’s date and I started something new which has been in the works since January began today. Our long awaited hyperbaric chamber has arrived and been fully set up in our yellow barn.

A lazy boy lounger and oxygen under two atmospheres of pressure.

It feels good to begin a positive focused wellness activity after what was otherwise a chaotic week of travel, geopolitics and violence.

As expected, it is not fun living through my own investment thesis. So you better believe I test my theories on myself. I want to survive the Jackpot.

Before Trump’s inauguration, we decided to purchase a hyperbaric chamber after one of our mutuals told us about his HBOT trial at a conference in the fall. It went very well for him and the research is promising for inflammatory conditions.

Over the winter break I happened to be in a city where I could test HBOT cheaply and was very impressed with the results in only ten sessions during a flare in my autoimmune condition. Crimping from Bryan Johnson

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) involves breathing pure or nearly pure oxygen (95-100%) in a pressurized chamber at anything above atmospheric pressure (2 ATA is equivalent to being 33 feet under seawater).

The increased pressure enhances the lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen, boosting oxygen levels throughout the body. The therapy aims to promote rejuvenation by increasing oxygen concentration in tissues, supporting healing, cellular repair, and vascularization.

This sent me down a rabbit hole as I did a bunch of deep dives, got some text books and came to a simple conclusion after a lot of medical papers that it’s pretty simple.

It’s almost philosophically the way of life in the mountain west. Oxygen and pressure work on the biomechanics of a functional body. Alas getting my basic market model to Montana ended up being a cluster fork of issues. We placed the order in January.

For months we waited for what we’d been told would be a 6-8 week process. Alas all hell broke loose. We had tariffs uncertainty with the importer and the OEM.

Then Liberation Day looked dire which led our machine in a Chinese port hold which launched a trip to Istanbul to source the finest HBOT machines money can buy. I still intend to acquire on.

I have now, in September, after a long journey but a simple set up process, begun my first intensive protocol for autoimmune diseases on our own hyperbaric chamber.

Love your body enough to put it under pressure and take a deep breath.

I will complete a minimum of 40 sessions (5 sessions weekly) at 2 atmospheric pressures, in a hard chamber from OxyRevo with each session 90 minutes while breathing 100% oxygen for 20 minutes separated by a 5 minute break.

If you are interested and see strip mall options note that these are not consumer grade machines. The protocol requires a hard chamber to achieve that pressures. It’s quite a bit higher than soft chambers on the market.

There are risks associated with HBOT from correct pressurization issues to impacts like tinnitus. The more prepared you are to adapt to changing pressure with breathing techniques and equalization (looking to divers for these protocols) the happier your central nervous system will be.

Take control
Categories
Travel

Day 1715 and My No Good Horrible Very Bad Transit Day

As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.

I was leaving Europe just as Poland closed its airspace after a Russian drone attack. Tensions were already high as Israel had attacked Hamas inside Qatar’s capital of Doha. Greyzone war that blur attacks on national sovereignty through target or weapon choices make everyone twitchy.

It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?

In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.

I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.

In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.

The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.

It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.

Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.

Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.

I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.

I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.

Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything

As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.

I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”

I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.

Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.

As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.

A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.

The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.

Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1708 and Calendaring Pareto Optimal Care on a Worsening Trajectory of Biometrics

I like to manage my days with buffers around my routines and obligations. I find tight schedules to be tiring and unhelpful as I manage my energy, pain, and workload. A packed calendar raises my cortisol.

I believe I am easily stressed by shouldering too much, but I also fear I am on a downward health trajectory which will require more time, energy and effort. I am beginning to contemplate reworking my style of effort management as conditions on the ground change. Can I schedule my way out of a spiral down? What is my Pareto optimal plan here?

My 2025 has been significantly worse than my 2024 and an almost entirely different realm of issues than I faced prior to that. As I compare, 2022 and 2023 were entirely different worlds than my 2025. I thought I was pretty sick then but improving my inflammatory markers has nuked my HRV & stamina.

I’m back to the bleak bottom quartile biometrics I had when I was first diagnosed with my complex chronic inflammatory diseases case.

I fear I never recovered from my two Covid cases including the one which eventually turned into a brutal pneumonia.

The stress of a permanently lowered baseline of biometrics makes me feel despair even as I have new tools at my disposal to mitigate them.

Will my whole life be dedicated to the care and feeding of my broken body? Is that something I can live for instead of simply living with?

I just don’t know how much effort will be put into managing this new baseline and what the effort to reward ratio looks.

Is there a Pareto principle I can apply to permanent disability which I can, and maybe even should, emotionally accept? Or do I soldier on hoping that my middle aged body may repair itself if I do absolutely everything right? And what am I doing all of that for?

It just seems as if no matter the time management, advanced medical care, constant research and daily effort I only get worse. I’ve been under a scalpel three times this year.

Each time I think I have found a new drug or treatment modality I am quickly slapped with second order side effects. And then those side effects have new side effects as I treat them.

It’s the pimp my ride recursion of biohacking, but instead of liking a thing and adding it to my car, I’m adding more and more mitigation measures to manage the results of the biohacking.

Pimp my biohacking

Now I have a new load of emotional stress and grief weighing on me as father died this weekend. I don’t even know what that process will look like, especially given the challenging modern family situation I have.

Any positive aspects of my year (passing the right to compute bill into law, progress in my startup portfolio) seems pale in contrast to emergency surgery, slow burdensome recovery and the arrival of mortality. I’m only at the halfway point of life (and a little bit past that for the year) and I feel done in completely.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1706 and Leaving It In The Past

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.