Every time life gets intense I wonder to myself why am I speeding into the turn? And then I look back at the last almost half decade (which is easier than I’d expected as I’ve written every day) and I feel the achingly slow pace at which we tackle the challenges of our lives.
We’ve had really big wins and really glass chewing teeth grinding bloody inch by inch progress that barely feels like a win at all.
Some pain has given me relief and some has been so heartbreaking it crushes me that it’s beyond my control. Bodies and borders are often beyond the control of mortals.
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.
My immediate family is in poor shape. Health troubles across almost everyone along with varying degrees of emotional stress.
One tries to responsibly pursue “restorative” activities that give you back energy like meditation, light exercise or movement, and if you happen to be lucky like we are some supplemental oxygen.
The various efforts of relaxation techniques like non-sleep deep relaxation. Box breathing to interoception still has the baseline stress metrics you’d expect of a serious illness or a loss.
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 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.
American medicine failed me but Istanbul has excellent medical if you are motivated enough to travel to fix intractable problems. And I most surely am motivated.
Add in the daily guidance of consumer grade LLMs taking input from myself and my family doctor and I managed a pretty miraculous recovery. Yes the bots are friendly but my physician agrees. It’s a very successful clinical outcome.
That’s Perplexity if you are curious. I like their mobile application and model choice options. Though pity any poor hacker who gets in as they are going to see some gnarly pictures if they make that bad decision.
Alas I am noticing the folliculitis troubles flaring again just as I’ve begun a fitness recovery protocol. Which you will notice in the image if you read the above image closely.
Alas progress is never a straight line. The flare up is bad enough I’ve opted to start another round of antibiotics (my fifth in this process) so any remaining bugs of the MSSA varietal cannot manage any retrenchment.
I’m showering with the scrub up washes surgeons use, I’m swabbing my nasal cavities with muciprin, and I’ll do a Cephalexin course.
Having fully passed through the onboarding loading dose regimen of Bimzelx with significant side effects, I need to see if it stabilizes. All this suffering will be for nothing if I give up now. But I must get to a place where I’m not constantly fighting infection and it can maintain lower inflammatory biomarkers. How this goes is anyone’s guess.
I’ve been using it for a week now as I needed a recovery plan for the fitness losses that came with a month of bed rest recovery after my surgery in July.
Not to suggest I was in terrific shape before the surgery as it discovered a deep tissue infection that went so deep and so rogue I’d likely been suffering from it for sometime despite my attempts at preventative care.
It’s upsetting seeing your resting heart rate go from mid 80s to mid 60s. Realizing your high resting heart rate isn’t because you are a lazy fattybombalatty who doesn’t do enough cardio (real thing a physical therapist has said to me) but because you have a chronic deep tissue antibiotic resistant bacterial infection. Ain’t chronic disease a trip?
Anyways, I’m healing and trying not to overdo things in the process as I’m a bit stupid when it comes to wellness. More is always better has been my mental orientation for much of my life and it’s a hard habit to kick.
Workaholics Anonymous needs a subgroup for those of us who can find ways to over do literally everything. And I do mean everything. I did a stretching and mobility routine last night that had my heart rate at 150BPM doing seated spinal twists. Did I stop? Nope. I finished the 30 minute program. My adaptive training programs response?
Complete rest – no negotiations
And who am I to negotiate with an AI who has no emotions involved in the process of putting together a recovery training regimen. It’s not going to moralize at me.
One of my Twitter mutuals recently published an artificial intelligence prompt for making an adaptive fitness coach which works inside any of the major large models.
Being failed rather regularly by doctors over a decade of chronic illnesses has made me skeptical of the institutions in American medicine. But having one doctor (a dermatologist) miss a glaringly obvious differential really shook me.
Her dismissal of the details and particulars wasn’t malice, but a function of the systemic inability to put enough attention on the details of the person in front of her. Attention really was all she needed ironically.
I’m sure she didn’t set out to be that kind of doctor, I’d bet she hates that it’s all 90 second visits and Medicare coding and making money for the private equity group who owns the clinic. I feel for her. She surely wants to get back to doctoring.
No one can spot every detail and retain the complexities of every case. Especially one like mine. But a computer has a much better shot at mimicking Dr House than I do at finding a Dr House for myself. And it certainly has a better chance than someone who let the system dominate them into breezing over the details.
So I am using my mutual’s prompt to see if I can outsource a very slow and adaptive return to fitness after my month off from exercise to recover from surgery. I like what I’m seeing from all models that I’ve tried it on but I imagine I’ll have all the same “me” problems with overdoing it and pushing too hard. But who knows, maybe this aspect of wellness is better handled by machine than by me.
In discussing with our cadre of friends taking time off this week we all realize it had been many varying years where we had multiple days in a row, in the same place, with nothing planned.
For me it’s a playlist and a certain kind of pulpy paperwork. For others it’s a Mexican beer in the sand, another a meandering walk though a hotel property looking at all the options for lounging.
Bouncing from one hotel to another can be a lot of fun then you are driving. A new novelty is over every range and the switch road back slowly brings you to something magical.
Sightseeing and activities have their own merit. I am always asking to see ruins and museums. Some folks are foodies. Others like nightlife.
But we’ve got a few days of staying in the same place ahead of us and any desire to seek novelty is entire up to us. I’d post some pictures from the travel but I prefer to do that afterwards. Just as a precaution even as I share so much.
As we transit desert scrub looming above us in mountain terrain, we are riding high over sea level as we gain and lose altitude. From that vantage we see coastal towns and mountain set backs. From sea to sky on one set of switchbacks.
The car sickness makes an enjoyable roller coaster of views and the focus on the ride helps you avoid the annoyance of slow traffic. A little sick and a little scared and a little excited. A layered set of feelings for going on vacation mode.
The accelerationist types must be feeling smug as the disorientation caused by so much of the world speeding up is a persistent feature of life now.
I’m trying to organize a fairly elaborate vacation that I should have nailed down the details on at least a month ago. I am alas doing it what is functionally last minute and I’m panting at the effort of coordinating preferences, availability, timing and the thousand other logistical details.
We have a range of preferences to accommodate and it’s driving me a little bit nuts and I have no one but myself to blame. I cant manage more than three hours in a sitting position in a car or airplane without hurting. Standing helps but it’s really laying down and relaxing my spine that helps.
The other preferences are more of the one person likes fine dining and Michelin caliber restaurants and another likes delivery and Netflix.
We have to balance intensive activities in hot weather like hiking and sightseeing against the desire to lay out in the sun near a body of water. Really all the classics of different strokes for different folks.
I don’t want to be too ambitious about any of this as I am really just barely out of the woods from July. And I’m being vague about when and where, as I’ll like pretend like we have some amount of operational security. Writing is all about the specific but the best I can do is say it will involve driving and water.
I had a very indoor July which I was not expecting. One of the joys of Montana in the summer is relatively temperate conditions until you hit the end of July and into August.
Obviously freak heat waves come when they come (a lot more than I expected these days) but generally you enjoy low humidity comfortable sixties and seventies temperatures with full sun and the occasional afternoon thunderstorm.
We enjoyed some cabin camping in June but because of my absolutely out of left field emergency surgery for a deep tissue infection I’ve been an indoor cat for the remainder of the summer.
No sweating, no swimming, no excessive movement and lots of rest. Some classes of antibiotics come with very specific warnings for sun exposure as well.
I was meant to be in bed resting and frankly work was almost impossible during some of the worst of the antibiotic transitions as the pain from systemic stress was hard. Which is atypical as I’m almost always able to work through pain.
But as I am almost finished with the last round of antibiotics and I’m seeing good progress on the wound I went outside today and even broke a little bit of a sweat.
I didn’t do anything crazy just some groceries and errands but I walked two miles in the process and I’m doing pretty well. I was feeling so optimistic I bought a sun hat. We’ve got some much needed vacation activities planned and I’d like nothing more than being outside in the shade with my family.
