I have had a lot of experience with doctors over the last few years. A chronic autoimmune condition isn’t the sort of illness that gets “better” like a virus. It can only be managed.
I have come up with endless ways of collaborating with people who far too often believe they are more informed, powerful and intelligent than me.
Sometimes they are even right about that perception. It’s a frustrating fact of life that doctors value their status occasionally more than their patients.
Today I went to a tourist hospital renowned for its extensive offerings and professionalism. My usual interpreter (it’s in a foreign country as many nations from Mexico to Turkey to South Korea serve American patients) had a number of procedures and visits organized for me. I felt confident I’d learn a lot and maybe find new pathways to healthcare management.
I happened to have an aesthetic elective treatment first. A plastic surgeon met with me to refresh some Botox. That seemed excessive given a nurse does my light work back in Montana but why not get a professional opinion while you have the chance.
I’d intended to spend the afternoon at the hospital doing a number of more productive activities than smoothing my fine lines. I’d set up rheumatology and immunology lines of questioning and I was excited to get some holistic work done including ozone and an IV infusion of vitamins and minerals.
Alas I was stopped in my tracks by a physician who simply would not approve the IV I had set up, the ozone work, nor would she approve the alternatives I suggested (an intramuscular B vitamin shot). I made my case with the interpreter and my AI.
The doctor wouldn’t budge. She even obfuscated suggesting that glutathione was illegal though backed down when it turned out to be a malpractice issue related to compounding pharmacies.
I very much wanted to buff up my immune system, especially having chosen something elective to go first, and I could not make progress. It shut down my whole afternoon. All that was left was tests and waiting.
There was no order the doctor was willing to give for short term immune improvements unless I committed to five weeks of procedures which given it was a tourist hospital seemed a little ironic.
I am demoralized but doctors will be doctors. I never seem to manage to convince them when I really need it. Doctor’s orders are not always for the benefit of the patient. Maybe no one wanted a woman sitting around hooked up to a vitamin infusion. Who knows. I probably would have skipped the Botox though.
I feel a ray of optimism emerging like a bulb who mistimes a false spring in late winter. I am in the dead of winter and I have the first glimmers of light.
“How you do one thing is how you do everything” is an aphorism about character that would take a natural born contrarian to engage.
I made a series of small decisions to keep myself still and make use of resources and skill clusters so I didn’t have to stress myself for a timeline that I didn’t make.
I took a few days to back off into medical tourism and longevity experiments. Nothing fancy or even novel. I wanted good sleep and a classic NAD+, Myers Cocktail, essential trace minerala, glutathione, Alpha-lipoic acid. Just good clean anti-inflammatory fun.
I want the good decisions about sleep habits and nutritional choices (sea bass, shaved vegetable salad, prawns and artichokes), the good exercise decisions (mobility and V02 max if I can’t push muscle too hard without impacting my my nervous system’s vagal tone).
I feel so lucky that this is a choice I can make. I need to be in fighting shape or the compounding choices of my health will have the wrong trend line. I want to see our future.
I am breathing slowly and watching a kind of lake effect whip up the water in the pool outside giving a fluid dynamics show to anyone who loves the movement of water and wind. That makes me want to live in our present.
As a woo child of the New Age 90’s era of music, I love listening to Enya in the bathtub. Pure Moods and a hippie mother set a tone for bathing for the remainder of my life.
Alas in Montana we do not have a bathtub in any of our bathrooms. We have a hot tub but the chemicals bother my skin so I only get to enjoy a bathtub when I’m traveling.
And you better believe I have Enya downloaded on Spotify for those occasions even though I’m certain at some point we probably owned all of her music on tape and CD.
While I love the classics (who doesn’t want to sail away?) I had Wild Child come up as I was soaking up magnesium yesterday. Which is not a bad checklist for becoming present in the moment.
Ever close your eyes Ever stop and listen Ever feel alive And you’ve nothing missing You don’t need a reason Let the day go on and on
Let the rain fall down Everywhere around you Give into it now Let the day surround you You don’t need a reason Let the rain go on and on
What a day What a day to take to What a way What a way To make it through What a day What a day to take to A wild child – Enya
I’m no wild child but I don’t need a reason to enjoy a bath or a day. Rest up and rejuvenate.
It’s one of life’s truisms that we may wish for prestige, power and money, but none matter without your health.
“The first wealth is health” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
I don’t think it is self flattering to admit I have got some amount of respect, influence and capital. And yet every spare dollar and moment I have I spend trying to improve my health.
The other types of wealth I have don’t matter if I’m in too much pain to think or I am so regularly infected that my resting heart rate is in the mid nineties.
Yesterday I started getting what I call itchy and twitchy. It’s often the first sign of an infection that has broken through an altered window of immunity.
My entire body will itchy. Sometimes it will be accompanied by a rash like eczema. If the rash is bad enough to be opened through itching I can easily get a bad infection. The discomfort of all that makes me twitchy from the anxiety of it all.
I suspect I am itchy twitchy at the moment as I am in a city with polluted air from major construction and high air mold counts from the winter rains. It makes me want to hit the road immediately for dryer climates but I’ll take prednisone first.
That should make me very pleasant. Anyone who has taken the steroid knows it’s a joke as the drug makes everyone who takes it feel a bit crazy. And you get fat and moon faced for added insult to injury. So apologies in advance if I’m going to be a bit bitchy.
I’m not new to the boom and bust cycles that have defined not only technology startups, but American herself. Most millennials have opinions about their malign status in an economy designed to borrow from the future for a dubious present.
Much of the world is in a state of panic over “the churn” of the old rules changing and the new ones not being quite clear. But it’s really not clear what happens next.
I enjoy speculating as is the fashion. Do I think corporate debt financing of data centers is some time bomb in private credit? Not really, no. I think it’s way more likely that don’t understand the full demand case for coordination in a mediated world.
I don’t know if we can meet the demand to be perfectly honest. I will say I am way more worried about us not meeting the moment. Changes to our cultural environment are as hard as our material ones.
If I had to read sentiment, I’d say that everyone is absolutely sick of having their attention used like a fiat currency. We cannot inflate our capacity for focus as easily as we can inflate the dollar. And we will demand simplicity by any means necessary just to exist. And artificial intelligence will smooth our world to manage with what we’ve got.
I think running a decentralized world will prove to be far too complex for most humans and it will be mitigated by layers of choices in governance that will probably not always maximize for the freedoms we’v come to expect from the liberal world order.
And yeah I think we will need a lot of data centers for that coordination effort. That the state might be the ones with the most demand seems a little rich though. Every individual on earth will want to be on the right side of the ratings. That’s more network state than state and it will be a longtime horizon.
I know it doesn’t sound great on its face. And yet I think it has had upsides. The demand for real businesses that operate in some world of efficiency has never been higher.
And to some extent, I believe that was always the entire point of computing. Make things so much better and cheaper we move on to bigger projects.
Giving you video games and porn might have been a weird way to get to Mars but medicine is as driven by vanity as much as survival so I don’t judge reality. I just want us to get more nuclear power. I don’t ask for much.
We didn’t want a legion of information processing professionals. We wanted to change the material conditions just as the Industrial Revolution did. The invisible hand is a strange thing.
I expect we will see quite a bit of opposition to the people believe that we need more energy, more industry, and more science. The future and its enemies are legions. I always did find it funny that fashion critics had a better read on the future than anyone else. Virginia Postrel and William Gibson both have good taste.
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.
We may have some room for improvement technique with it so I am encouraged if the is as bad as it gets. I am not seeing any benefits from it yet and ugly bruising and a bit of an opening on an incision isn’t so bad.
A lot will depend on how well I recover and how much the hormone actually helps when I’m not healing. I’m also in the luteal horrors phase where my hormones are most ridiculous so I’m curious to see the curve.
The best part of this remains that I have a world class treatment for skin wounds on hand. Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy’s best research has been in wound management from burns to slow healing diabetics. So if I have to nurse a wound doing it with oxygen at pressure is actually pretty baller.
And to make it even more on theme, I spent most of my time in there writing out a column on skincare and the Great Male Renunciation of Appearances as part of my beauty shopping column and excuse to write about the secret history of appearance and its power.
She had had teeny tiny testosterone pellets placed into her subcutaneous fat and had remarkable results in terms of energy and focus. This and that happened, and the summer was a mess, but today was the day I finally followed in her footsteps.
Vials of compounded testosterone
We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100).
We’ll aim for labs at 4-6 weeks after insertion which would represent peak levels. We will repeat dosing at 3-6 month intervals. We will check levels at 4 months or so, or earlier if I feel the effects waning.
Do be warned that within a paragraph or so, there will be images of needles, scalpels, and some blood. So feel free to not scroll down further.
Part of the difficulty with dosing this stuff is that the pellet doses are wonky and frequently out of stock – estradiol comes in 6mg and 10mg increments so 8mg is impossible.
Naturally, we’ve made surprisingly little progress when it comes to women’s health, particularly as it relates to hormones.
Prepared and ready to go
But as I am happy to be a guinea pig and my luteal phase is a mess of migraines and misery I figured I had little to lose and much to gain. I was the first patient my doctor has done the procedure on so if anyone in Bozeman is interested, you can confidently give it a go with him as I’ve survived it.
These cool tubes don’t actually go inside too far but sort of shoot the pellet into the incisions
I was given a local numbing agent with epinephrine. I needed a surprising amount of it but I was a bit nervous. Once I was just able to feel pressure and no pain it was time to make a small incision with a scalpel and in popped the tiny bit of hormone on the left butt cheek.
No big deal at all.
But if you don’t want to see it going in don’t scroll.
Just giving you space to turn back.
A tiny incision in my goose bumped bum with the little pellets easily tucked in
I am all bandaged up and still riding the cortisone of it all but I feel alright. I’ll be adding in progesterone orally to temper the estrogen as that’s another matter. I’m excited to report back on it as if I have even a fraction of Cate’s experience with it I’ll be quite happy. Also it’s about $70 a month so not cheap but not at all expensive for something that could potentially mitigate some long term issues I’ve struggled with for years.
I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.
A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.
Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go
Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”
Before you go off the deep end, and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.
This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.
While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.
It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.
And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.
The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.
Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room
I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.
It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.
I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.
A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.
The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.
And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.
Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.
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.
