Tag: Rest

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Biohacking Medical

Day 1375 and Titration

My joyful excitement over finally wearing a bathing suit I’d never worn? The peaceful swim in the salty sea ended in disaster within just a few days.

On Friday the allergic and autoimmune symptoms were so bad I took 5mg prednisone. On Saturday they were no better and I upped the dose by 2.5mg to 7.5mg. I moved forward my absurdly expensive biologic injection by a day. I haven’t been able to convince my health insurance to get them more frequently so it’s a risk.

I’m doing better today. My pain is abated to an almost unnoticeable level at a 2. That’s rare for me. And it makes me want to rush into as much work, chores and activity as possible just to enjoy it.

I’m typically working with a 5-6 level of pain on any given day but I can work (with medication) up to a 7 within reason. Past 8 I’m in bed and struggling.

The downside is of course that prednisone just sucks. It messes up your appetite. You balloon up almost instantly with side effects like moon face. And your body develops a dependency quite rapidly.

Titration off of steroids like prednisone require a steady and slow discipline so you don’t get “blow back” as it can make your symptoms even worse.

I’ll have titration for a few days ahead of me. But maybe I’ll get to enjoy the lack of pain. Already I’ve cleaned for an hour, done laundry, checked off a number of small “to do” list items and I am blessedly free of the exhaustion that comes from working with moderate to severe pain that is my normal daily experience.

I was sent a study in the journal Nature about a team who used CAR T therapies to achieve total remission in 3 patients. And I see hope on the horizon.

One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells1. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. Nature

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Medical

Day 1373 and Anaphylaxis Maybe

I don’t know what I did but I’m like 50% of the way towards an anaphylactic reaction. I was exposed to salt water, a sunscreen whose ingredients I didn’t vet as carefully as normal (foreign language) and a few environmental factors that could potentially have contributed.

I’d post a picture here but it’s not something I’d relish having a permanent home on the internet if you feel me. Imagine bee stung lips but not in the sexy cosmetics way. Then apply that level of red inflammatory tissue to my entire face, chest, arms and other delicate areas.

I sucked back 5mg of prednisone which I loathe but I’m in no position to be picky. I don’t have an epi-pen with me but my throat isn’t closing off so it’s probably overkill.

A cortisone shot would hit the spot though I’m sure. I also took 50mg of Benadryl. That’s why I’m posting so early in the day as it’s hard to say if this pharmaceutical combination will result in me having Trump on steroids energy or passing out from antihistamine energy

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Chronicle Travel

Day 1364 and Full Speed Ahead

I am in a good vibes places right now. I am a bit tired from some whirlwind pacing but feeling very good about how a number of projects are playing out from an amusing purchase to more serious matters of fundraising and deal management.

I do feel the fatigue that comes with running at full speed. I have been hitting it hard in writing and at work this week and it’s only Tuesday (not that I am one for weekends).

It’s the end of my workday as I’m on European time and I still have a few miles to go before I can be done so I’ll keep the post short. If you want to see where my head is at check the links as I did some good work this week.

On a housekeeping note, I’ll be in New York the second week of October and in Miami the last week of October if anyone is either city would like to meet up. I’ll be prioritizing LPs for chaotic as we are raising along with founders and weirdos of all stripes. Just hit me up on DM on Twitter. Or email me but I’m more likely to respond to DM.

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Emotional Work Reading

Day 1361 and Temporal Distortion

I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.

Perplexity Recap

Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.

Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?

We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.

It’s a rich space for science fiction for a reason. Edwin Abbot’s Flatland is a classic of geometry. As a child I was fascinated by the idea of a tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. A hypercube is a heady concept for a tween.

All this is to say, I was outside some slipstreams of time and I am slipping back in and seeing if I can flow with the tides.

Categories
Medical

Day 1352 and a Dry Cough

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.

Categories
Biohacking

1346 and Oversleeping

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.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1341 and Trade Offs

I enjoyed a long weekend mostly offline and with a group of interesting people. I enjoyed the extra elbow room of mountain remove as much as I enjoyed the atmosphere of a purpose driven community retreat amongst exceptional individuals.

I am however quite tired from the exertion of it. The danger of using a long weekend for anything that requires exertion from me feels ever present. I have so little room for error, and even with keeping my participation more limited than almost anyone else, it was still more than I could handle.

I even left a little early so I could have a full day at home without work to recover. I can feel my immune system overreacting and hope that this will be better by tomorrow. Anytime I feel flare symptoms I naturally get nervous. And frankly I’ve got a busy week ahead of me so I can’t afford needing more recovery time.

The busy season kicks off in earnest tomorrow and I feel sad that in reaching for a more demanding schedule to experience an important gathering that I’ve hurt myself in the process. Not going hurts in quite a different way. There is no winning with chronic illness just trade offs.

Categories
Travel

Day 1338 and Long Weekend

I am spending the weekend at a gathering that is a little bit off the beaten path. It is a group of pretty eccentric folks so it’s a double dose of remove from the real world. I’m looking forward to being offline and engaged in real life as I like odd folks in the wilds

It was a bit of a drive to get here but it will be worth it. I’m feeling the journey in my body as racing across American highways isn’t the most relaxing activity. Keeping focused tends towards tension building in my body. Add in a total lack of pit stops and I’m just coming down from the stimulus.

Cabin in the woods complete with functional typewriter

I’m now tucked into a cabin where all is quiet. To complete the remote retreat vibes there is a typewriter on the desk. One could imagine clacking away at it far into the night with a whiskey and a roaring fire.

I’ll be doing some writing I’m sure but I doubt I’ll be using a typewriter instead of my usual WordPress CMS. Maybe if the mood strikes I might write a little story. A cabin in the woods with a typewriter seems like the perfect setting for horror.

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Medical

Day 1331 and Reboot

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.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1323 and Dip to Progress

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.