AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Harrumph. I didn’t think to re-measure my waist after the break. My pants got noticeably tighter there, so I know where some of the 9 pounds went.

Yesterday’s mail included a postcard from a local hospital. They were offering the opportunity to sign up as a lab rat for a research study on an experimental “respiratory syncytial virus” vaccine.

Uh, no.

But…but that complimentary $10 coupon for Olive Garden. How could you give that up?

There is that. Ten bucks is ten bucks…

I just spent six hours putting lab results into a spreadsheet. My brain hurts. Libre Office is just as counterintuitive as any other spreadsheet software I’ve tried; I kept having to go to the web to find out how to do even simple operations. Apparently there’s no way to prevent it from swallowing leading zeroes, and the suggestions for ways to keep it from swallowing trailing zeroes were complex enough to not bother. I don’t care if that’s the way Excel does it; in a lot of cases those zeroes *mean* something, and Excel is broken, I don’t care how many people use it. I did finally manage to find a way to turn off the spell checker, which was freaking out over the medical terminology, and the mad random capitalization. No, you idiots, you do NOT change the text in an entry field from what the user put in. Like with zeroes, sometimes caps have meaning.

No wonder I hate spreadsheets. I’m still feeling a bit twitchy.

Anyway, I put the tests names, allowed ranges, and units in the leftmost columns, then nine columns with the labs; 2022, 2022, 2022, 2021, 2021, 2021, 2021, 2021, 2016. Yeah, I made it five years without having to see a doctor…

The lab the doc uses changed its report format along the way, and the lab the endocrinologist used had an entirely different report format. Some of the abbreviations - not the same between them - caused some consternation; I had to do some web searching and look at the suggested ranges to make sure they were all talking about the same thing. Incidentally, the “suggested ranges” are noticeably different between the two labs.

The main interesting thing was, there’s a basic blood lab that was common between them all; about 25 tests. The others are sort of random; a lot of things were only tested once. Some of the visits were follow-ups for the same original problem; I would have expected he’d have the same test done each time. I’ll ask, next time I talk to him.

C-reactive protein: range, <0.5
05/14/2022: 27.9 <—
06/09/2022: 1.3

creatinine: range, 0.80-1.40
09/26/2016: 0.89
07/20/2021: 0.93
05/14/2022: 1.92 <—
06/09/2022: 1.33

blood urea nitogen: range, 8-23
09/26/2016: 17
07/20/2021: 19
05/14/2022: 33 <—
06/09/2022: 20

Some of the other stuff was off a bit on 05/14, but for some reason it wasn’t re-tested on 06/09.

The only “lipid profile” (cholesterol) tests were done this last time; they’re mostly whacked. The web says that keto can affect that, but I was two weeks off keto when they took the blood. I guess I need to read up some more on that.

Another day, another blister by the meatus. I used to get them regularly when using the vacuum ADS in the straight-up position. I took it apart and re-rigged it as a belt with a steel ring at the base. I wore it a couple of times for short periods. Today I wore it for two hours, which is still short by ADS standards… and got another blister by the meatus. And tension was only 12oz.

This is the same bell that works *just fine* as a vacuum extender with 1kg of weight.

I’ve noticed some ADS users will put a some folded gauze of a piece of T-shirt in the bell, presumably to prevent this very problem. I don’t see how I could keep a loose bit of cloth in place while positioning the bell and unfolding the sleeve, but I guess I’ll give it a try…

Sorry to hear about the blister Andy. I had to give up the vacuum chamber as an attachment device when extending for that reason. I do think blisters can be dodged for some through technique, but it will take some trial and error, or should I say, trial and blister:-(

Do you put any tape on?

No. Like almost everyone else, I’ve been trying to avoid that evil day as long as possible.

When it heals I’ll try a different cap.

Arr, arr, arr…

It only happens when I use an ADS harness, even though it’s less than half the tension I use when hanging. It’s just plain annoying, is what it is…

I have never not taped so don’t see it as evil, I don’t see it as much bother at all. Maybe try a toe cap?

I have a pointy torpedo shape, the toe caps/glans covers are either impossible to install or just slide off quickly. I’ve always been shaped that way, but the extra shaft girth I’ve gained with PE hasn’t extended to the glans, which is pretty much the same as it always was, which makes the shape even more exaggerated.

> I don’t see it as much bother at all.

There was apparently some minor nerve damage from the staph infection a few years ago. It has never felt right since, and touching it in certain ways is painful. “Removing the tape” is close enough to one of those ways to make me pause. It is getting better, but very slowly. I suspect PE aggravates it to some degree.

I’ll have to do it when I finally join the ultrasound gang. But that has to wait until I can get consistent measurements.

Doesn’t sound great, good luck with that

Hey, a couple of years ago it was bad enough that I would have agreed to a penectomy just to stop the pain. And now I’m 95% pain-free, plus I have a bigger dick than if I’d gone the surgery route. I’m not complaining.

“…it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I’d noticed a few things looking at my health logs.

weight: going down
blood pressure: going down
pulse pressure: getting narrower
heart rate: going up
blood oxygen: going down

Hm. I wonder how closely those track each other. It would be nice to have them all charted neatly in a line graph. But my logs are plain text files, and formatting has changed as I’ve adjusted things for clarity, so writing a conversion script would probably take as much time as keying the data into a spreadsheet by hand. So I’m keying data… except I didn’t bother making average of pulse rate or SpO2, so I have to add columns of numbers for every day.

[sigh]

This is likely to take a couple of weeks.