Surgery Status: OMG
Amazing results.
Exec Summary: Doing great, way better than expected, thanks for the support that permitted me to get through this. And I might have gotten extraordinarily lucky.
Details:
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat for a while post surgery so I began experimenting with fasting on June 23rd. And suddenly my occasional “looks like normal adult sleep hours” became a lot more consistent. This remained true to a degree even during the last week of Norco induced fog. I stopped eating at 2100 on Monday, June 30th and finally had lunch on Saturday, July 5th.
I needed to lose thirty pounds, and as such, once glucose is depleted at the 24 hour mark, I have just enough body fat to produce the roughly 2,000 calories an adult male needs. I had vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes - never really felt hungry. I was 206 at the pre-op, 198 a few minutes ago, according to my flaky new $15 scale. I want to get back to that 176 I had the month the pandemic began.
I asked for and received about $100 in ride share assistance … but my neighbor brought me home, and there was nothing wrong with my legs, so there’s still $90 in there. It’ll get used up for a couple appointments later this month. There’s no exercise/fun in these steps, that’s just grocery, pharmacy, package pickup.
Advancement:
I planned to just binge watch, but instead I ended up reclining in bed, messing with Claude Desktop. One thing led to another, I built myself an AI expert system, focused on my health, and it turned out to be extraordinarily helpful. Over the years I’ve learned I can’t have gluten, corn syrup, lactose, and anything with a gum emulsifier in it is bad news. The popular term for this trouble is “leaky gut” but its apparently been commandeered by grifters, so I’m not sure what to call it.
Anyway, I fed Claude a bunch of papers from PubMed Central, then started asking questions. I added a simple Sqlite3 database to the memory and sequentialthinking functions, and the benefit I got was that it could hold much more information than I can in my working memory. After a couple days of entering data, exporting stuff from Garmin, giving it my blood work, a recommended set of supplements fell out. This is a thrice daily thing that’s aimed specifically at gut lining health. Having this is possible thanks to a couple people who piled up a couple hundred in Amazon gift cards in my mailbox. Thanks.
The last component, the L-glutamine, arrived earlier, so I just began the “full monte” the evening of the 8th.
Serendipity:
I learned that there’s a name and abbreviation for my aversion to wheat - nonceliac gluten sensitivity aka NCGS.
I’ve known for three years that there is something histamine related in my digestive troubles. I read a paper about histamine producing bacterial species connected with long term antibiotic use, decided I’d try Benadryl, and it made an obvious difference. When I had the black mold encounter that forced me to move last spring I tried Allegra for the first time and this newer H1 histamine blocker was a revelation. Gut troubles declined precipitously when I took it.
Poking at Claude with all these factoids yielded this paper from PubMed Central:
Histamine Intolerance: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Beyond
And inside I found this infographic:
I have been telling doctors for ten years that when I eat I get congested, and sometimes my heart rate zooms and my blood pressure crashes - this is reduced with the OTC antihistamines, and I’m left with something that mimics narcolepsy type 2.
And now my pain has a name:
Histamine Intolerance
I was utterly astonished to learn there were a variety of solutions for this and that none of them were terribly expensive. I had just enough left in Amazon to order a small bottle of this Histamine Blocker stuff, which provides 10,000 Histamine Destroying Units of Diamine Oxidase.
I was really excited about this, given the symptoms match, told some friends, and another Amazon card promptly appeared - there’s a vegan neutron bomb version of the least cost pig derived stuff, it’ll be here the day after the little one.
Tonight:
When I was at the grocery store last night I grabbed a half pound of candied walnuts - delicious, and absolutely guaranteed to knock me flat without a heavy dose of Allegra. I’m going to take one 10,000 HDU capsule and then dinner will be just this desert.
My last Allegra was the evening of the 8th, this will be purely a biological vs. known problem test. Since I’ll have thirty of these small capsules available I’m going to do experiments until they’re gone, then settle into using the milDAO.
Conclusion:
If all that happened this month was resolving the mechanical problems I had I’d have been delighted. Making some progress on sleep cycle and the gut permeability issues was the sort of thing I hoped might happen.
But this last thing … “Histamine Intolerance”, if that’s really one of the cornerstone problems … I may just get my “back to normal sleep and into the workforce” wish fulfilled.
And this could not have happened without the generous support of you, dear readers.