AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Blood oxygen? What’s the current figure?

It was averaging 97% over the day, a year and a half ago. It’s now averaging 94%.

I went in for a “full respiratory workup” last December. It took four months to get the appointment. The doc listened to my chest with a stethoscope and had me blow into a tube. He didn’t even bother with an SpO2 check or a blood draw for oxygen level. We kept calling to get the report, and they kept stalling, until two months ago they told me it had been moved to “storage” in another state, and I’d have to fill out a form and mail it to them to get a copy. My wife handled most of that since I was… ticked. The report finally came in a few days ago; they sent me the medical records of someone with the same first and last name, but who lives in Florida. The *only* identifying information on the documents is the name. I smell multiple HIPAA violations, but all I want is the damned report, even though I probably won’t trust it much.

I have one of those “volume meters” hospitals give surgical patients, that you blow into to measure lung capacity. A year ago I was blowing 1900ml. I’m now blowing 2600, which is supposed to be normal for my age, but pulse Ox is way down.

Mine went down a little when I was overtraining. It’s normally around 97%.

94% is on the low side. How do you breath normally? You probably know this already but you can increase your blood oxygen levels by breathing differently. There’s a tendency in people these days, especially if we are often sedentary, to breath just with the upper chest and rarely take a full breath. But you can experiment with breathing to find out how it effects your levels.

In the same way, you can reduce blood pressure by relaxing or meditating.

So far, everything I’ve read on breath training focused on using the abdomen to do the work. Well, technically it does anyway, but I’m pretty limited there due to the hernia and the belly band to retain it. The increase in lung volume measurement may be related to the weight loss; I’m able to breathe better without stressing the hernia as much.

Just like the knee replacement, nobody local will work on the hernia until my BMI numbers meet whatever figure their “professional association” pulls out of its collective ass. That’s another 115 pounds or so, since I weighed 287 the other day. That’s 60 pounds down from November, so I’m a third of the way there.

That leaves you with two points of attack, avoiding mouth breathing and chest breathing where you can feel the ribs move. One useful thing can be to place a hand on each breast with the fingers pointing in and interlacing. When you breath it’s potentially easier to feel the movement and work on increasing it. Once you know what it feels like, you can do it without your hands.

wrt nose breathing, mouth tape works. It’s a habit and so it helps to do something that keeps you nose breathing even when you’re not focused on it. Nose breathing is generally healthier and it can increase your oxygen levels.

BO-RINGGG…

I split my miscellaneous notes into separate files by year, then ordered them to make them more useful, and now I’m adding up each day’s readings for systolic and diastolic BP, pulse, and subtracting the diastolic from systolic for “pulse pressure.” I feel like an old-school accountant. So I’m typing each day’s averaged readings into the spreadsheet. Fortunately the sheet can average its own columns.

“Everyone loves to collect data, nobody loves to analyze it” strikes again.

I feel like an old-school accountant, perhaps at The Crimson Permanent Assurance…

Do they bill monthly?

Commercial accounts are often billed quarterly. It simplified tax calculations back in the days before computers.

Of course, if a company decides to go out corporate raiding, it can just raid the ccounts if it can get away with it.

I went by Harbor Freight yesterday and noticed the “lift belts” as I walked down an aisle. They came in various sizes, and “XXL” ranged from 56 to 65 inches. The largest “proper” weight-lifting belts stop well short of my equatorial dimension, even though I’m down 10 inches in girth from last year.

At the rate I’m losing weight I may only get a couple of months out of the XXL belt; big deal, it was only ten bucks.

It’s Inmate Orange with matching suspenders and reflective panels, but it looks like it will do the job.

I picked up a 2” ID steel ring at the hardware store to adapt my neck ADS harness to a side-pull harness. The 2” ring just barely fits over the smallest bell I have. While it is possible to put the ring on first and then the bell and sleeve, it’s so much easier to just slip it on afterward that I ordered a 2-1/2” ring. While I was at it I upsized the thickness from 6mm to 10mm, even though I wasn’t being pinched by the 6mm ring yet.

The 2-1/2”x10mm ring is impressively larger than the 2”x6mm ring. I hadn’t expected that. I’ve already rigged it onto the harness; I’ll see how it works tomorrow.

So, this morning’s mail brought a recall notice for my testosterone… twenty minutes after this week’s injection. Hooray.

Apparently the manufactuer (Sun Pharmaceuticals) had “impurities” in a couple of lots. The letter went to great pains to state that the recall affects only distributors and pharmacies, and not end users. Which makes no sense, because it’s the end users who are ultimately affected.

The first vials I got were Pfizer. Most of the rest were Sun. A few were Perrigo, and what I have on hand is Perrigo; so if I had any of the contaminated Sun stuff, it would have been used up a month ago. The packages went out in the trash then.

Looking up Sun, they’re a multinational based out of India, and their testosterone is likely manufactured at Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Halol-Baroda Highway, Halol-389 350, Gujarat, India.

Looking things up on the web, it looks like Sun started recalling its product in India on January 11… 2021. It doesn’t say why. The US recall, a year and a half later, may be unrelated; the reason given in the notice I got in the mail is “contamination”, the article in Businesstoday.in says the FDA got involved due to “incorrect lot number on packaging.”

Ri-ight…

I’ll be keeping an eye on this, though I expect it to drop completely out of the news, as is normally the case.

Perrigo is based out of Ireland. They have some manufacturing in the US, the box for my current vial says it was made in Michigan. Perrigo is interesting; they’ve been in trouble for tax evasion and screwy financial reports for years, somehow staying in business despite investigations and huge fines.

Pfizer, of course, is mostly concerned with “Vaxx for everyone!” at the moment.

I’m not getting a warm fuzzy from any of these suppliers. Due to the way my medical insurance works, I don’t really have a choice as far as picking a supplier. I guess I should put most of my effort into hoping nothing I’m shooting up with is counterfeit. I’ve read some fairly scary articles about counterfeit drugs and how they enter the supply chain.

I don’t get a warm and fuzzy from any pharmaceutical company. To many scandals over the years. Profit before people is what all companies follow but it just seems completely fucked when the company is supposedly trying to help people.

At least they recalled? Maybe a sign they follow some rules?

The recall only affects wholesalers and pharmacies. If you’re an end user, too bad, so sad.

The Harbor Freight belt works just fine. I had to cut the suspenders off; they were too short, and it wanted to ride up under my ribcage instead of down where it needs to be. Apparently the manufacturer was visualizing a wearer 5 feet tall and 5 feet around.

“Work smarter, not harder.”

When I started keeping a medical log I had to decide between using my text editor or a spreadsheet. I chose the text editor; it’s fast, simple, free-form, and the files are plain ASCII. A spreadsheet would take longer to input data and it would be a hassle making random notes or changes. I persuaded myself I’d never need to do any processing of the numeric data, and went with the text file.

Which worked, for five years or so, when I needed averages of various figures to put into a spreadsheet for the doc.

Well, fooey.

So, add up all the values for, say, systolic blood pressure, cursor over the numbers to count how many, divide, type in the average. El sucko.

I found a really interesting calculator called Speedcrunch. It’s like… sort of like a word processor for numbers. It’s just a text screen, and you type numbers into it. Up and down arrows scroll through the history. Left and right arrows let you edit the current or historic lines. And it has various functions, including one to average a string of numbers. ‘average(90;83;102;111;94)’ will do it.

I was doing that for a while, but each *day* of readings required entering 50-ish numbers into Speedcrunch. Surely there’s a better way.

Hm. I’m using the ‘average’ function on the spreadsheet to average daily entries to monthly. Can I cut numbers from the text file, paste them into a spare column, and average them using the spreadsheet as a scratchpad? Not with my default editor, which dates from 1986 and runs in a DOS emulator that doesn’t support X Window cut and paste operations, but I loaded the file into a GUI editor, cut a column of numbers out in block mode, and pasted it into the scratch column… yes!

Not perfect, but much less hassle than before. And I finally finished moving all the numeric data to a set of spreadsheets, 2016 to 2022.
I didn’t record anything before 2016.

The reason for the long columns of numbers is I have been watching my blood pressure and pulse rate bounce around like a Superball; systolic pressure will range randomly from, say, 95 to 145 in the same day. My doc doesn’t see any problem with that, but it bothers me enough that I’m still collecting the data and will get a second opinion sometime. I don’t see how the usual “blood pressure at the doctor’s office twice a year” schtick has any useful purpose if it’s normal for BP to move around like that.

Collecting less data will simplify things, but that’s at least a few months off.

…and all this started because I wondered about the relationship between my pulse, BP, and O2, and thought some graphs would be handy…

I like having all of each day’s data and notes in a nice block in my editor, but I’m probably going to have to start entering the numeric data directly into the spreadsheet, then copy it over to the text file, which keeps track of everything else.

Microsnot used to gibber about how you could embed a spreadsheet into a word processor document with Office; it turns out you can do the same thing with LibreOffice. But I don’t like LO’s word processor much; it looks and works like Microsoft’s, which means clunky, slow, and dain-bramaged.