Medicine

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A belated first post of the work week

I hope nobody was worried about me yesterday when I didn’t write a post.  I was out sick.  I had some kind of gastrointestinal bug, or perhaps some type of bad reaction to something I ate.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, it was unpleasant, as such things tend to be.

I often find myself wishing, in such situations and even less severe ones, that I didn’t ever have to eat at all.  Of course, if you see me, you’d know that I’ve tended to err in the other direction, but I would very much like to lose my sense of hunger, or perhaps more my sense of pleasure in food.  My current life is almost completely devoid of any real, reliable joy of any kind, and I am chronically depressed, so I unfortunately tend to go for biologically reliable sources of “feeling good”, however minor and evanescent, such as eating.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have any kind of drug problem, since I’d probably be stuck going to that for my diminishing returns of transient joy.  I suspect many people with drug problems do just that.  Actually, I often kind of wish that I did have a drug problem, because then I would be (a) more likely to be thinner than I am, and (b) might die of a drug overdose, which is comparatively faster and less painful than dying of a food “overdose” over time.  It’s a moot point, though.  I’m not the sort of person who could really manage an illicit drug habit; I would find the whole process stressful and irritating.  I didn’t even like taking opioids legally when I was given them for my chronic pain.

Alcohol, which is legal, has many drawbacks, not the least being that beyond a certain point, it doesn’t really do anything for me and exacerbates my chronic pain.  It can be useful as a social lubricant, and in that it can be very useful, considering how socially awkward I am.

But alcohol doesn’t make me feel much euphoria past the initial relaxation stage, which is definitely pretty good for short times.  However, one trouble with alcohol is that it impairs one’s judgement—it certainly impairs mine—and so when one feels a little relief from anxiety and a consequent bit of euphoria because of it, one falls into the cliché, “if some is good, more must be better, and a lot more must be great”.  Most of you probably have direct or indirect experience with how that line of “thinking” turns out.

Now, I will say that I took one medication a few times, in medical circumstances, that could probably become a problem for me, and that was diazepam (brand name Valium®).  I’ve written before about how, when I was given diazepam, even though the circumstances were far from pleasant ones—wisdom teeth extraction in one case, and a heart catheterization in the other—I felt tremendous.  I felt normal, if you understand the sense of what I mean by that—and even if you don’t.

Anyway, that’s a prescription med, and I’m not really interested in taking it.  I know too much about how rapidly diminishing are its returns, and about its long-term effects on cognition, and worst, about how tolerance to it tends to lead to increased anxiety between doses, so it pretty quickly becomes counter-productive.

This leads me to wonder if it might be somewhat useful to people with chronic anxiety to take medications or similar that increase their anxiety, and to stay on them for a while, then to stop.  It wouldn’t address any underlying issues, of course, but not all such chronic states are due to Freudian-ish causes in experience and upbringing.  Some of them are genetic or at least congenital.  Sometimes, a person’s biology can just give them an anxiety set-point that is significantly higher than average.  Some other people, of course, will have the opposite.  And most people will be somewhere in between.

This is the nature of traits in populations of sexually reproducing species (e.g., humans):  there is variability in nearly every attribute, as genes get shuffled and reshuffled, paired up with different alleles and other genes in the genome, reacting in highly complex ways, and providing the broad variation on which natural selection does its ruthless work.

This is what is largely behind the famous phenomenon of the moths that changed coloration in industrial age England compared to their pre-industrial age colors, matching the new soot-encrusted bark of trees.  They did not develop the trait or attribute de novo; there was always a variability in that physical aspect (color).  But in different circumstances, different colors were more likely to survive to reproductive age, and so they began to predominate when a persistent change in circumstances happened.

The same sort of thing surely has happened with humans many times, over and over, as civilization changes, and our own effects feed back on our natures and alter their own causes.  If people could step out of their little, provincial world-views, this would likely be obvious to all but the most benighted of souls.

How did I get to this subject/topic*?  I don’t know, though maybe it will become obvious while I’m editing.  Anyway, I’m going to draw this to a close just with the revelation that I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  Was there any difference between its style and that of one written on the smartphone, now that I reveal the fact to you only at the end?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I truly hope you have a good day.  And I really wish I could actually hang out with some of you or with someone today with whom I could have a comfortable interaction.  But I am not good company anymore, if I ever was.  So I will probably, and appropriately, continue to be alone, and will die alone, and hopefully fairly soon.

*I never really have been able to discern a consistent and sensible difference between these two terms, but people often use them as if they are two different things, rather than simply synonyms.  Possibly that’s just a function of pretentiousness.  But maybe I’m just ignorant.

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A plague on both your houses…especially the one by the beach in Florida.

Look, I paraphrased Mercutio in two of my headlines over the last three days!

I’m writing this blog post‒wait for it!‒on the desktop computer at the office, because I slept at the office last night.  I had stayed after work to do a Discord meetup with my youngest to watch some Doctor Who.  We watched the first two of the “David Tennant specials”.  Those of you who are fans of Doctor Who will recognize that one of the episodes we watched was The Waters of Mars, which is among the best episodes of the show.

Anyway, after that, it was late enough that it made no sense to go all the way back to the house, since I was working in the morning (now today) and would just have to come right back.  The cats will be fine for 24 hours, and honestly, I feel rather pleased that the raccoons will not be able to come in and steal the “leftover” cat food.

Do raccoons deserve to eat any less than cats do?  Of course not.  But I don’t buy food to feed raccoons, I buy it to feed cats.  I wish I could take a cat in as a pet, but my allergies in general are already a pain in the ass‒well, more a pain in the head and chest, but that’s not the idiom‒just from living in Florida, where there is so much airborne life that if you stand still for too long, things will start to grow on you.

And I don’t figuratively mean by that that you’ll begin to become accustomed to them and might begin to like them.  I literally mean that you’ll begin to develop moss and algae and fungi and possibly even a lichen or two on your skin*.

If there ever is a cordyceps-style fungus that takes over human nervous systems the way some species hijack the nervous systems of various insects and other arthropods, it will probably start in someplace like south Florida.  Actually, maybe there already is such a fungus, but it’s not some rapidly growing, zombie-creating thing like in The Last of Us (or so I’m told).  Maybe it just makes people weird, particularly at the level of government.

That would make more sense than a fungus that makes people want to go around and, I don’t know, eat other people or try to infect them or something‒I haven’t played the game or seen the show or whatever, so I don’t know for sure what happens‒because fungi grow slowly.  Even ants can recognize the signs of an infected member of the colony and work aggressively to drive it out.  That doesn’t stop spores from spreading from the fruiting body that eventually grows out of the poor critter after it dies, and the spores get into the wind and go on.  But it does protect the ants locally.

Humans are rather cleverer about such things even than ants, believe it or not.  If there were a fungus that caused bizarre and violent changes in humans, and if it were significantly contagious, people would pretty quickly recognize the signs, once they saw what was happening.  Depending on how possible it was to cure, I think humans might well do more than just ostracize someone, at least if the disease was severely virulent, contagious, and madness-inducing.  They might just kill people who had the fungus and burn their bodies under high heat, or some similar process that prevents reproduction of the next round of spores.

The most successful pathogens among humans are ones that are not too dangerous (most of the time), not too obvious, and not too debilitating.  With the advent of any new pathogen, such as a new virus, the most rapidly or certainly lethal strains usually die out, or are selected out, relatively quickly, because if you’re a virus (for instance), you “want” your host to spread you before it dies, ideally for as long as possible, and they can’t tend to do that if they’re very sick or dead.

With a new disease, the tendency is for the most susceptible people and the most lethal pathogens to be selected out‒by each other, really‒early in the timeline of the spread.  That may be part of why the so-called Spanish Flu was so lethal in the early 20th century, killing tens of millions of people…and then became less dreadful over time, so now it’s just one of the strains of influenza that kills only (!) tens of thousands of people a year (in the US).

Maybe there’s a CNS pathogen that makes people get weirder over time and want to go south into subtropical, swampy, sunny and humid habitats, because‒I don’t know‒that’s where it needs to complete its lifecycle (or Peloton or whatever it uses for exercise, ha ha).  As Spock said, it would explain a great many things.

There’s so much I could go into about misunderstandings and misleading oversimplifications about pathogens and epidemiology to which even otherwise quite intelligent people fall prey (and then, alas, spread to others).  I could also discuss how various “ideologies” spread within and between human minds very much like mental viruses‒not exactly like, for instance, chronic hepatitides and HIV and HTLV and so on, but not all that different, either‒but there’s so much that could be said and, like the backrooms, I could just go on and on and on…

Even just sticking with more ordinarily biological pathogens, there’s so much misunderstanding out there; I have sympathy for some of it, but not for a lot of it.  But this is already a longish post.

I guess I will close with a minor public service statement:  Yersinia pestis‒the coccobacillus that causes “plague”, and about which there was some talk in the news after a woman in Russia in a plague research facility apparently died of an “unspecified pneumonia”‒has never been gone.  It’s not like smallpox.  It’s in the environment, it occasionally still infects people, and even more occasionally kills people‒probably fewer worldwide annually than the average flu deaths in the US, so, far from zero, but not exactly a major global public health crisis.

But plague, being a bacterial illness, is quite treatable by antibiotics!  And because it’s not everywhere all over the shop all the time, it doesn’t seem to be as prone to develop antibiotic resistance as quickly as the more common pathogens tend to do.

Certainly, if you start to develop bubos, you should get to the doctor/hospital, but it is not a death sentence.  You should pay more attention to newer viruses than to bacteria and fungi that have been around for a long time, and pay attention to older viruses (e.g., measles) that had been controlled by vaccines but for which that control is attenuating because people who don’t know their subject nevertheless feel free to pontificate about it and even to give advice to others.

You should probably stay away from Florida.

*This is an exaggeration to make a (slightly humorous?) point.

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Wouldst thou blog that which thou esteem’st the ornament of life?

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.

TTFN

Ha ha.  I’m just kidding.  It would be absurd for me to let you all off that easily.  Not that you don’t deserve to be let off easily; you probably do.  Whatever “deserve” means.

But it rarely matters in this world what you “deserve” or think that you deserve or have been told that you deserve.  Nature, physics, biology, the universe‒they don’t notice anything at all about what you might “deserve”.  They just do what they do, and if you don’t want to be ground into nothingness before your time, you’d better learn to surf on that chaos.

The notion of people deserving things has always been a bit strange to me.  It is nebulous and ill-considered in almost all situations.  What does it mean, for instance, for someone to deserve love?  How can you deserve something that is dependent on the judgment and emotion of another person or people?  You can’t have an innate right to another person’s esteem.

You can have a right, of sorts, to be left alone (as long as you’re not infringing other people’s rights) but not necessarily to be supported or admired or rewarded or what have you.

I suppose you can have a legal right, for instance, to health care (in principle), depending on the laws where you are.  But you can’t exactly have a moral right to it, because somebody‒a lot of people, really‒has to provide it, both the substance and the processes, the knowledge and the infrastructure.  You cannot morally own another person’s effort without a freely chosen mutual exchange for it.  Otherwise, you’re just enacting a form of slavery (which you’re only willing to do precisely because the service being provided is so important).  Think about the moral illogic there.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve come to the pretty strong suspicion that “universal” healthcare is generally very good for a society.  It helps make the life of those in that society more stable and more worth living, and I think it tends to help people be more creative and productive, ceteris paribus.  And it can be made a legal right, as I said.

But it cannot be a moral right, and it’s important for people to remember that.  Because when people start feeling truly entitled, they tend to become unreasonable, forgetting that in the real universe, everything requires energy and effort and understanding, and there is always some tradeoff somewhere.

Again, I want to reiterate, I think universal healthcare is generally a good use of resources, one that has a sort of money multiplier effect on a society, at least when administered well (which is not a low bar to clear).  But, again, it cannot be a moral right.  It has to be paid for by somebody, somewhere.  You don’t have a moral right to a particular bridge being built, say, or to cable TV and internet access, or to a luxury car…or to any car at all, really.

How could people have an innate right to a car, for instance?  What would that mean for the billions and billions of people who lived before cars ever existed?  What about air travel?

Heck, what about space travel?  In the future, space travel might become necessary for most people to be able to work, rather as cars are in some places and situations now.  Will that imply that there is and has always been a moral right to space travel?  Have we all had our rights systematically thwarted by the tyranny of linear time and causality?  Whom do we sue?

I think we should dispense with the notion of “deserving” things in general, except specific performance or products for which one has paid through mutual, freely chosen exchange with someone else.  In other words, if you made a contract and you held up your end of the bargain, it makes sense to say that you deserve for the other party to hold up their end of the bargain.

Everywhere else, the notion of deserving things tends to be subjective and self-serving, and it tends to turn people into entitled assholes who appear to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

Of course, physically, each person is the center of their own visible universe.  Congratulations, you are experiencing the phenomenon of a 3-dimensional horizon.  It happens to us all.  You are not special.

Well, you are special in some senses, of course.  You have various specific, local aspects and attributes that are not exactly duplicated anywhere within our visible universe.  This makes you unique.  Which, ironically, makes you just like everybody else.

Dash was right; saying that everybody is special is just another way of saying that no one is.  And, in fact, except from the highly parochial, anthropocentric, myopic, terrified point of view of the typical human, no one is special‒not from “outside” anyway.

Still, it’s okay to think that the ones you love are truly the most wonderful people in the universe, because‒in the universe of your mind and experience‒they are.  Unless you don’t think they are, but that’s a different sort of problem.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the concept of “deserving” things is that it is a powerful impediment to feelings of gratitude.  And that’s pretty pathetic, both for those around the ungrateful ones and for the ungrateful ones themselves.  If you think you’re entitled to many things, you’re likely to be miserable, because you’re unlikely to get all those things to which you feel entitled, and you’ll be prone to make the people around you miserable, too.

You don’t deserve to read my blog.  And I don’t deserve to have you read it, nor to have you like and share it (as in my song, below).  But I am grateful that you are reading, and would be pleased if you decided to spread it around.  I am lucky to have any good things at all, as are all people who have good things.

And now, for real this time:

TTFN

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“When the storm arrives, would you be seen with me?”

Okay, well, I will have set this up to post at about 8 am my time today, just as I did with yesterday’s post.  I have not yet looked at my stats for yesterday’s post, so I don’t know whether, so far, doing this has made any difference in my readership.

That’s fine, though, because it would be absurd to try to read any conclusions from one day of a slightly changed time of posting.  It’s not a statistically significant sample size, among other things.  So, it’s best to try it for a bit and see how it goes and only to draw conclusions after I’ve had at least a decent run of days.

I am still somewhat under the weather from yesterday, but I have to go to the office because it is payroll day, and that needs to get done.  I did leave the office at lunchtime yesterday, and when I got back to the house I knocked myself out with some benadryl and some CBD gummies with a bit of delta-9 and delta-8.  It did help me sleep, at least, though I’m sure it wasn’t an ideal sleep.  Still, beggars can’t be choosers, generally speaking, though I’m sure there are exceptions to that “rule”.

I did wake up hideously early, though, even for me, but I didn’t want to take any further sedation, because then it might affect my ability to do what I need to do today.

I forgot to take some of my vitamins and stuff yesterday evening, including the lithium supplement that I’ve been taking.  I didn’t take that this morning, either, just to see how the dearth of it will affect me, if at all.  I know, I know, I’m doing too much haphazard starting and stopping of variables, and it makes it very difficult‒as well as potentially very misleading‒to draw conclusions about what effects these interventions are having.

But I have a difficult time being patient with this stuff.  Anyway, this was an accidental skip last night; I’m just continuing it for the moment.  We’ll see whether there is any noticeable change in my mood, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my affect by taking it, and it’s not supposed to have the same kind of delayed effect that the traditional antidepressants require.

So, yeah, with both of those things, we shall see how the outcome goes.  Or maybe we won’t, I don’t know.  There are no guarantees.  Even the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong, though it is unlikely.

I’m going to try to abstain from discussing my darker moods and thoughts here for at least a little while.  I’ve begun to wonder if ruminating on them and putting them out there in writing is making them worse rather than making them any better at all.

I guess I’m doing lots of little would-be therapeutic interventions for me.  Someone has to do it, and I’m probably the one best placed to take action, though I am entangled in the outcomes, which may confound things.  Still, I’m the only one who is going to do anything for me, so there are no other options.

I am in a very real sense quite alone in my situation.  I guess that’s not new, is it?  I’ve tended to be the one who helps other people, not the one who gets helped.  That’s just the way it goes, though.  Like Chris Cornell sang, “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”  These are words of wisdom, and not just for fictional super-spies.

I still haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than one little fifteen-minute interval over the last three weeks or so.  That’s an estimate, of course.  It is mildly worrying or at least disappointing how much I am losing interest in so many things that usually have interested me.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction, nor have I studied much new physics or biology or what have you, though I have hearkened to the computer science/AI stuff a bit, because at least that is somewhat interesting and intriguing.

Well, I will endeavor to persevere and even to improve.

You all, my readers, could in principle spot changes in my mental status before I even recognize them, myself, and I do hope, as well as request, that you do that.  It would be most welcome and potentially useful.  I thank you in advance.  In the meantime, I hope you’ve been having a good week, and that you continue to do so, and indeed, that each day is an improvement over the previous one.  Why not?  It doesn’t take much improvement per day, if it is every day, for truly impressive results to accrue.

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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday.  Please wipe your feet on your way in.

Just kidding.  It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.

I don’t have much to say today.  I don’t think I do, anyway.  Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know.  I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.

Let’s see…updates.  I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient.  I tend to be patient, at least about some things.  What’s a doctor without patience, right?

Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm.  I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.

It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried.  It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus.  I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.

If it had been like the first time they would have noticed!  That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted.  That was part of why they brought me downstairs:  a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.

Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness.  It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved.  I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm.  Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.

I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough.  I don’t think that’s the case with me, though.  I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.

Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment.  I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that.  “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.

I think I may try to do another audio post today.  The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one.  Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.

Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least.  They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats.  They just eat them both.  At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.

Cats are a little more persnickety.  There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite.  I would do that with eggplant.  It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.

Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment.  That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit).  That would be kind of lame.  I guess we’ll see.

I might as well do something though.  I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction.  I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org.  And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.

I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning.  My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier.  Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.

So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy.  I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.

TTFN

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Blog post after being out sick

I’m sorry about yesterday, everyone*.  I had some kind of stomach bug or had eaten something that was a bit off, something like that, and I stayed out of work, so I didn’t write a post.  Anyway, it was the sort of thing associated with nausea and vomiting, not really with much “lower GI” trouble, thankfully, but now it’s mostly worked its way out.  Certainly, I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up any more, at least not imminently.

It would be nice to be able to say confidently that I don’t think I will ever throw up again in my life‒if I could say so with good reasons‒but I don’t think it’s very likely that I’ll be able to say that honestly.

I need to stop “talking” about this, because it’s making me feel queasy again.

Anyway, I’m going to the office today, because I need to do payroll, and there will also be a bunch of crap on which I will need to catch up from yesterday.  That’s part of the reason I hate staying at the house from work even when I don’t feel well.  There’s always so much catch-up work after even one missed day.  And catch-up is too sweet and acidic for someone who has an icky tummy (ha ha).

I’m really not doing well, overall, in case you haven’t been able to tell, or in case you’re just new here, which is not impossible.  In my ongoing quest to try to correct some of this, I recently began encountering videos and some articles about low-dose lithium‒which, in non-low doses is used to treat bipolar disorder among other things**, as you may already know‒being beneficial for things like depression and even for preventing or curtailing certain forms of dementia (and, potentially, slowing aging, though that seems more speculative).

You can’t get the medical form of lithium without a prescription, which is probably good, since in those strong doses it can have significant toxicity, and people using it need to be monitored.  But there are other forms that one can get as supplements, and I ordered some recently (from a supposedly reputable brand).  They arrived yesterday evening, so I took one dose before bed‒thankfully they don’t appear to be irritating to my stomach‒and then one this morning.

It’s no big surprise that lithium is available in many forms.  It is the third most abundant element in the universe, having been created (in comparatively tiny amounts) when hydrogen and helium*** were made, in the aftermath of the Big Bang (technically we are in the aftermath of the Big Bang, and we could even say that we are in the ongoing process of the Big Bang).

But the lithium atom (the ion, really) is the active part in those various available compounds.  It is chemically quite similar to sodium and potassium (having that one electron in its outer shell, like they have) which are ubiquitous and essential electrolytes for numerous bodily processes.  Like them, in elemental form, lithium is a soft, light metal (indeed, the lightest metal), and like them it is highly reactive.

Anyway, enough of the chemistry trivia.  The point here is that I am trying to use it to treat my chronic dysthymia/depression if I can, which has been a difficult and long task at which I have been far from successful.

Probably part of that, or maybe even all of it, is related to my ASD, and so it may not be amenable to the same kinds of treatments that often work for others, and can be quite intractable by ordinary means, since the root problem is very different.  I don’t know how often I’ve had severe depressive episodes in the past in which it’s actually been autistic burnout or shutdown or related stuff.

There is growing data that things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which has relatively good results for neurotypical sufferers of depression, may actually be counterproductive in those with autism.  Autistic people tend already to analyze their thoughts, often too much, and to be disconnected from their feelings, though they have them and they can be overwhelming.  Analyzing it all just seems to increase that disconnect.

So, yeah, I’ve had very limited benefit from therapy, and similarly limited response to various kinds of antidepressants.  But maybe lithium will help.  I guess I will find out.

I would really like to try therapeutic psilocybin therapy, because based on the state of the science as I understand it so far, it works via entirely different mechanisms involving the “default mode network”, a series of brain areas/modules that are associated with self reference and the like.  But there is no legal use of psilocybin in Florida except in clinical studies.  (Thank you, Tricky Dick et al; may you and your ilk rot in Hell for as long a consecutive time as the length of misery to which you’ve contributed in so many others.)

The only places psilocybin therapy is legal in the US include Oregon (a very long way from me) and, ironically, DC.  So I don’t see how I would be able to avail myself of it in the current state of things.  And my brain is not my friend, so I am very leery of using psychedelics without supervision.

But I have to do something, or I’m pretty sure that pretty soon I am going to kill myself.  There is very little that holds me here day to day, and the very kind and good people who remain in my life are people I feel‒indeed, I am all but convinced‒would be at least as well off without me around, and probably better.

Have a good day, though.

*However many that may be.  It’s probably not a huge number.  Then again “everyone” can refer even to one person, so I guess it’s a tolerable pronoun, even if it might be slightly misleading in its usual connotations.

**It’s also pretty good for rechargeable batteries, and when added in the right proportions to deuterium/tritium can enhance the yield of thermonuclear weapons, because neutron capture leads to it decaying into tritium and…something else, another fusion product or some such; I need to review the specifics.  It’s never been my primary field of interest.

***Most helium currently on Earth is not helium from that early “elementogenesis” or whatever the official term is.  Rather, it is the product of radioactive decay of heavy elements, which often produces “alpha particles” which are just helium nuclei‒two protons and two neutrons‒and which can pretty readily grab electrons from the world about them and turn them into atoms.  This is why‒so I understand‒helium gas pockets are often found near concentrations of uranium ore and the like.

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Migraines, after-effects, lesser evils, and greater goods

I’m a bit wiped out this morning, so I may only write briefly.  For those of you who may not know it, I developed a migraine headache yesterday.  It started with the surprisingly rapid onset of a “classic” migraine aura, which is to say a deficit in one’s visual field, marked by apparent, weirdly twinkling, almost rainbow-like lights.  It is not as lovely to see as one might suspect if one has not had it.  This first time it happened to me, way back in my early teens (while I was caddying), I worried maybe my retina had become detached.  Weirdly, this concern did not lead me to panic, nor to seek help, nor even to stop in the middle of that golf round‒work is work, after all.

The classic migraine, which is what this migraine with twinkling lights is called, seems to begin with a rapid, spreading depolarization of cells in the brain cortex, particularly (in this case) in the occipital lobe (thus the visual aura, because that is the region of the vision centers of the brain).  It spreads from there, and as part of its spread it seems to lead to vascular swelling and pressure in the meninges, which causes some of the pain.

The science has probably improved since the last time I studied it, so some of this description may be inaccurate.

In any case, as soon as I realized what was happening, I took steps to head things off.  Although I had taken a naproxen that morning, I popped three ibuprofen right away.  After a few minutes, as the aura progressed, I added two acetaminophen (extra strength) as well.  This was probably not ideal for my body‒kidneys, liver, and to a lesser extent, stomach come to mind‒but I didn’t really hesitate, because I have experience with migraines, and not just with treating them.  I also made sure to drink lots of water.

Anyway, I did get some dull pain (as well as just dull dullness) centering loosely on the left side of my head, but the Motrin™ and Tylenol® seemed to have done their work well, since I took them so quickly.  I did have pain, but it was not nearly as severe as it usually is, though I took one more ibuprofen a bit later when it seemed to be increasing.

With migraines, though, the pain is more an effect than a primary part of the process.  In a way‒and only in a way‒a migraine is a bit like a slow-moving seizure.  As such, it tends to cause quite a lot of fatigue in one’s central nervous system, and I certainly felt that yesterday and continue to feel the after-effects today.  For instance, I am making many more typos than I usually make right now.

I do seem to have slept slightly more than usual last night.  Tiring one’s nervous system by internally, directly causing the hyperactive discharge of whole populations of neurons seems to lead to slightly deeper sleep, no doubt because for the nervous system, it is something of an emergency and it must be cleaned up.  Trust me when I say, while the slightly longer sleep is nice as far as it goes, it is not worth it.

Even though I was able to prevent the worst of my migraine pain, the other effects were still quite palpable and unpleasant, and their after-effects remain.  They aren’t good.

This is not to say there aren’t many, many worse things in the world, and certainly when one has only two choices, one should choose the least bad of the two.  For instance, I would choose many migraines over a kidney stone.  The lesser of two evils is, mathematically, the greater of two goods.

If this fact is confusing‒I don’t know why it should be, but apparently it is, and that confusion has been consequential on large scales‒think of the old grade-school level number line, centered at zero.  If you have two negative numbers, such as negative two and negative twelve, you can certainly say that they are both negative.  But that’s a function of where you put the origin (where the zero is), which you can shift and put anywhere else, given the infinity of the number line and its inherent symmetry.

But even if you move the origin 100 places to the left, so that you now have 98 and 88 instead of -2 and -12, the distance between the two numbers, and their mutual relationship based on that, is unchanged.  One of the numbers is still less negative than the other.  And if that number measures the usefulness or the desirability of something, and if one has only the two choices, then one should pick the less negative one, which is by mathematical definition the more positive one.

A billion is less negative than a million.  And negative a million is less negative than negative a billion.

I’m not sure how I got from migraines to here, but that’s okay.  I’m sure it will make at least some sense during the edit.

Anyway, I hope that my mental fog will clear a bit today.  It would be nice to be able to sleep better without requiring general neurological, pathological exhaustion.  But then again, many things would be nice that are simply not so.  By which I mean they aren’t real, that they don’t exist, that they aren’t the case, not “many things would be nice that are simply not nice”, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

If wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in horse shit.  And then we’d probably wish for it to go away, which would just produce more horse shit.  Alas.

I hope you all have a good day.

[PS:  I tried to do a brief audio recording on the way to the office from the train, while walking, because a thought had occurred to me and an occurrence had gotten me thinking, and I also wanted to “experiment” to see how well I’d be able to compensate for the noise of traffic and (to a lesser extent) wind.  It was unfortunately something of a disaster, and to correct it all would have required many hours of audio manipulation that may be beyond my skill.  So I just deleted it.  But I thought I would at least mention it.]

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I buprofen, you buprofen, we all buprofen…

I feel that there’s something important about today’s date* (it’s August 7th in 2026 CE, but the year is not what feels familiar, it is the day and the month).  It’s not coming to me yet, but I think it will.  If it doesn’t, I guess I can always look it up, but that would be a shame to have to resort to that.

Please don’t think I have anything against looking things up; that would be quite untrue!  I’m a huge fan of looking things up, especially in ways that can lead one to learn about unexpected things while seeking the answer to one’s initial questions.  This is one of my big problems with LLM-assisted searches; they don’t tend to lead you to unexpected and tangential knowledge, or even to see a nearby entry in an encyclopedia that’s on a different but interesting subject.

But if I already “know” something, and sense that I know it, I feel that it’s a shame not to exercise my powers of recall.  We shall try to do that today.  Or, well, I will try to do that.  Y’all can do what you please.

It’s a weird morning for me, and if I seem stranger than usual or more incoherent (or less) than usual, try not to be alarmed.  Something rather remarkable happened to me last night:  I slept nearly six hours without any (remembered) awakenings.  I may even have slept slightly longer.

This did not just happen, though.  There was a series of circumstances that‒I strongly suspect‒led to this outcome.

Yesterday morning, I felt so crummy right from the start of the day that I took a CBD/Delta-9 gummy** first thing in the morning.  It made me groggy to some degree but at least it suppressed some tension.

Then, of course, I took some Tylenol and some aspirin in reasonable amounts, and they did whatever they do for me, which isn’t terribly much, but there it is.  Anyway, I felt kind of crappy and sleepy and low-energy and just miserable, even for me.

I also wasn’t sure that the curtailment of NSAIDs had actually been making any difference in the symptoms (signs, really) that had led me to stop them.  Anyway, I have a bottle of Ibuprofen (actually, I have two) at the office, and I finally gave in to pain and general stiffness and soreness and mental fatigue and just took three of them.

Not long after, I found myself getting pleasant chills all over my body, as well as a general feeling of relative euphoria, and I realized that it was the Ibuprofen fighting my inflammation‒or whatever specifically was having the effect I was experiencing‒and making me feel physically alive and rather well for the first time in a while.

Unfortunately, ibuprofen doesn’t last as long as naproxen.  I took another dose (of 2 tablets this time) later in the day, and then two just before I went to bed last night.  I can only conclude (provisionally) that it was at least part of what led to my relatively sound sleep.

This is, of course, immense, but it is also ever so slightly worrisome.

You see, I stopped using ibuprofen a while back when it seemed to start being associated with occasional palpitations (consistent with premature atrial contractions).  This was not at all certain.  They might have been related to something else I was taking or perhaps some interaction (the palpitations were real, in that they were not merely sensations but were associated with slightly irregular heartbeats; I checked my pulse).

But there are many other medications available, so I decided to switch to naproxen for regular use.  I usually didn’t take the maximum dose, because in my clinical experience, naproxen tends to be a bit more toxic than ibuprofen (possibly related to the latter’s relatively shorter duration of action).

So, anyway, yeah, I think that’s a big part of why I slept last night better than I’ve slept in a good while, or at least longer.  I don’t expect that to continue, necessarily (though I am unlikely to complain if it does).  After all, my rest has probably been quite a bit worse than usual these last ten days or so, because of the eliminated anti-inflammatory medications, so there’s some degree of making up for extra exhaustion, which temporarily overpowers whatever processes lead to my insomnia in the first place.

We’ll see, I guess.  Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  If so, I’m sure I’ll let you all know.

In any case, I’m going to be paying attention to my liquid waste elimination systems, just to be sure I’m not experiencing major difficulties.  I’ll also keep a weather eye on my heart rhythm, but I need to try not to pay too much attention to it, since palpitations can be subjective.

Also, let’s be honest and clear, premature atrial contractions are generally benign, and are not associated with degeneration into worse rhythm disturbances.  I’m sure that I have some scar tissue in my heart‒I mean, I did have open heart surgery for crying out loud***‒and so I’m probably prone to some slight irritability in the conduction system from time to time.

I guess we’ll see what will happen.  I haven’t taken any ibuprofen yet today; despite the euphoria I felt yesterday, I don’t expect it to entail any addiction risk, because that “rush” was a rush of relief, not of intoxication.  But I need to be aware of the kidney and cardiac effects.  Of course, I also must keep protecting my stomach, but I’ve been doing that for a long time (and probably engendering some chronic issues related to the meds needed for it).

We’ll see how well I can engineer the workings of my body, I guess.  I’m pretty good at it, but the tools available are still blunt ones, and PPE for them is limited.  Hopefully, I will at least get a few night’s worth of relatively good sleep this weekend.

Speaking of which, I hope you all have a good day today and a good weekend, yourselves.  I expect I will next write a blog post Monday morning‒as always, exclusis improvisis.

*The more I think about it, the more I think that it might be the birthday of one of my best friends from when I grew up, named Andy Tabar.  If I were still allowed on Meta-related services, I could check, because I followed him on Facebook and Instagram, but alas that is no more.  If it is his birthday, and if any of my readers are in contact with him, please wish him Happy Birthday from me.  Thank you.

**Perfectly legal, OTC, hemp-derived.

***Actually, it was for an atrial septal defect, one that wasn’t discovered until I started working out for NROTC and running fairly long distances.

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The Emperor of Silence reaps no relief from pain…or something like that

Welcome to August, everyone.  For today is August 1st, 2026 (AD/CE).  How exciting.  Huzzah.  Yippee ki yay motherf…

…or goodness sake, we certainly have a rather Roman day today, don’t we?  The month is named after a Roman emperor (the first “official” one, though I wish he’d just kept the name Octavian, since Augustus has too much of a try-hard vibe), and the day is named after the Roman god, Saturn.  Sailor Saturn is also my favorite sailor soldier*.  Though, that last thing doesn’t have anything to do with Rome.

I’m working today, just to confirm what would probably be your conclusion if you were even thinking about the question.

It’s not an absolute correlation, by any means; it’s possible, and not even unreasonably unlikely, that I might write a blog post but not go to work, or that I might go to work but not write a blog post.  The latter has happened more times than not (by far) throughout my life, but we need not worry about that likelihood, since it is ruled out by the fact that I am indeed writing a blog post.  You can tell, because you’re reading it (albeit not while I’m writing, as far as I know).

I am still quite sore all over, especially in my thumbs, back, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, middle back and right side and flank***.  So, yeah, I don’t feel very great.  I also still have some residua of my apparent middle respiratory inflammation, but I think that’s improving.

Maybe it will be good for me to go through a bit of time with basically no NSAIDs in my system‒they’ve been there a lot, for a long time, and cannot fail to have had unintended effects.  We’ll see how the lack thereof even for a few days impacts my health.

On the other hand, NSAIDs can reduce some kinds of depression, and I think they did at least some of that for me.   Still, I am using Tylenol, and that seems possibly to help not merely with physical pain, but also with psychical pain (a little bit).

Weird, right?  And it doesn’t do that by decreasing inflammation in the brain, as NSAIDs appear to do.  It definitely works differently than NSAIDs, though it is not entirely unrelated.

It’s interesting how modules in the nervous system became repurposed (or added-purposed) for later mental functions in larger brains and especially in social animals.  The mental processes associated with physical revulsion and disgust/avoidance toward potential toxins and infectious materials became tied to our moral emotions of judgement, condemnation, and contempt.

Physical processes of fear became connected with anxiety about social opprobrium‒though, in a species like humans, social ostracism really was a serious danger to one’s life in the ancestral environment, to say nothing of being a rather obvious impediment to reproduction.

Anyway, the point is, it shouldn’t be too very surprising that a substance that attenuates physical pain can also ease psychological torment, at least a bit.  We know that opioids do this as well, and to a much greater degree than acetaminophen.

That’s one issue they have.  If a person has a lot of psychic pain‒and many of us do, which is predictable given that we are creatures adapted to hunting and gathering in the savannahs of Africa but are now living in the nightmare/fever dream/bad acid trip that is the modern world‒and has no better, more available, way to assuage it, they’re going to be tempted to reach for the tools they have, however blunt.

If we can figure out better ways of easing those pains, ones that are available and usable by everyone who needs them and which have acceptably few side-effects, that would be nice.

Okay, well, I don’t know if I’ve written anything coherent here, but I’m going to keep this relatively short, because I am still feeling poorly.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the weekend.

*Not counting Sailor Moon, who has the same unfair advantage over the others that the Beatles have over other bands.  Sailor Saturn is my Radiohead**/Pink Floyd sailor soldier.

**Heck, on one of my favorite songs by Radiohead, No Surprises, the chorus is followed by the invocation, “Silent.  Silent.”  And Sailor Saturn is the sailor soldier of silence, wielding the Glaive of Silence, with the power to end the world and bring about…well…silence.

***This makes me nervous considering my urinalysis strangeness, but I haven’t yet checked that today.  It feels like it is improving.

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You’re in analysis, or something like that

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  As you may have guessed, I did not work yesterday, because I was out sick.

I think I mentioned the apparent URI I’ve had.  Really, it’s more of a middle respiratory infection, like bronchi to bronchiole level, but the acronym for that would be MRI and that might be confusing.  This is one of those issues with acronyms; when you shorten things enough, the code becomes ambiguous.

Anyway, I also had some weird urinary signs (not symptoms) that made me nervous that all the NSAIDS I’ve been taking have been starting to catch up with my kidneys.  So, I’ve taken a temporary NSAID sabbatical apart from aspirin.  I’m still taking some Tylenol (and CBD, which does at least some good).  Unfortunately, my pain level overall has predictably increased, and that certainly contributed to the fact that I stayed at the house yesterday.

Anyway, I’m trying to make sure to get lots of fluids and whatnot, and that process at least seems to be doing its thing.  I’ll do another UA today‒I have my own test strip bottle*.

Okay, enough of all that stuff.  I’m sure that nearly no one has any interest in reading about my adventures in analyzing my own bodily fluids.

Of course, I don’t have a lot else clawing its way out of me at the moment‒oh, those lazy xenomorph embryos!‒so I don’t know what I’ll use to fill the rest of this blog post.  But I do expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since the office should be open tomorrow, so maybe that will contain something interesting.

I guess today is the last day of July‒at least the last one in 2026 AD/CE.  Tomorrow will therefore be the first day of August in 2026 (AD or CE).  We go from one month named after the nominal first “emperor” of Rome to a month named after the first “official” emperor of Rome.  After that we start up with the ordinally named months, but they’ve all been pushed back two months because of the two dead Romans, so the nominal seventh month‒September‒is our official ninth month.

It would be slightly interesting if, when the calendar was changed from the Julian to the Gregorian, the month had also been changed.  Imagine if the months went May, June, Gregory, August, September…  That might be kind of funny.  Certainly there’s no less of a reason to give old Pope Gregory the Peccary (or whatever his official indicator was) a month named after him than Julius Caesar.

Okay, admittedly, Caesar was a more pivotal historical figure, but one feels (at least, this one does) that he was more a vessel for things that were happening through him and others rather than being the true author of any change.  And Shakespeare didn’t write any plays about the Pope, but then, he lived in Elizabethan England, so that was just a non-starter.  Imagine trying to write a play about a Pope during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter.

Also, Shakespeare and Gregory the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine were more or less contemporaries.  It’s hard to write popular plays about people who are still or were very recently alive, especially when they were part of a religious schism with one’s own country.  Whereas Julius Caesar was all but the stuff of legend by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century CE/AD.

It’s too bad Shakespeare didn’t really know anything about ancient Egypt or any of the other ancient civilizations (some of which were as ancient to the Romans as the Romans were to the British of Shakespeare’s time).  He wrote about Antony and Cleopatra, of course, but imagine William Shakespeare’s Ramses the Second (the Great).  Or perhaps consider The Tragedy of Xerxes, Emperor of Persia.

Well, I’m not going to write any plays about them.  I’ve written plays (of sorts) before and have started others, and I have written some (very bad) screenplays and such, but it’s not my area of best creative work.  I’ll just make passing reference to historical figures here, more or less randomly, and maybe someone out there will write a play or show or movie about them, inspired by the reference.

Hey, they keep making movies based on the works of Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpson).  Mind you, those works are highly fictionalized, if not entirely fictional; you can tell by the presence of things like gods and sirens and nearly invulnerable warriors who gained their protection by being dipped in the river Styx.  Achilles might as well have been bitten by a radioactive spider, for how realistic a figure he is.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Sorry if it’s weirder than usual.  Or, on the other hand, I’m sorry if it’s not weirder, but my blog is always this erratic.  I’m not sure about which of the two I ought to be sorrier.

Oh, well.  Please have a good day and a good weekend and a good month of August (but only once August starts‒if you try to have a good month of August on the last day of July, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure).

*It’s really more of a screw-top can, since it’s a cylinder, but because of the association with preserved food, it feels weird to say that I have a can of urinalysis test strips.