I’m going to survive and my BP meds are getting adjusted

Part of the laundry list Mrs. the Poet wanted me to talk about with the doctor was my foot on the injured leg changing colors from what it was like before to more shades of blue now, and I also wanted to share what I had learned from the guy studying Superpowers IRL, of which surviving getting hit by cars 3 times is a primary example. My super dense bones are the result of wonky calcium metabolism and I have grown calcite crystals during bone rebuilding after a break. Well part of my wonky metabolism is an overactive calcium channel which makes my blood pressure high. Now that we know that my meds include a generic Calcium Channel Blocker amlodipine, to go with the diuretic which doesn’t help much with my BP but I do need to prevent kidney stones.

Now all I got for the Smurf-colored foot was a suggestion I go to the local clinic for Parkland Health Systems to have them figure out what has changed since I got killed and came back. Before when I had problems with the foot it was shades of red, not blue, which was expected and I was told to watch for. Now I don’t know what happened, but I can pinpoint the day it happened. Remember the DVT scare a couple of years ago? Before that day my foot was shades of red, after that day shades of blue-red from lavender to dark purple to I Stepped On A Smurf. But I have to go to the local clinic for Parkland and see what they have to say.

Other news, I gave away most of the expensive bikes that people have given me over the years. I kept the ones I bought or built including Frances(is) or however I used to spell it. They were non-binary anyway and swapped the vowel depending on how they felt. Anyway, I gave away the Stratus, the Blue Fusion, and the Zenetic 700 to a guy that drove all the way from Springfield MO and brought 2 cans of Beaver Nuggets, the Dark chocolate covered ones this time instead of the milk chocolate ones my daughter gave me. Anyway, the combined retail value when new was almost $4k, but since I can’t even get my leg over the two crank forward bikes they only have sentimental value to me. I still have a garage full of bikes, just 3 fewer than I did yesterday.

And how was your week?

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There are no words

There are no words to describe how bad I feel right now. First of all I spent about 2.5 miles on my feet today running around and generally getting nothing done. I was supposed to get my kidneys imaged for the surgery next week, but when I got there none of the paperwork had been sent. I found out that over the weekend the study had been defunded, and I would have to go back on daily meds to control my hypertension. The few people who got their operations done are doing great with normal blood pressure.

All that running around has given me a headache and also aggravated my back. I’m thinking the headache is from the problems with the study, my cell getting shut off because I didn’t pay the bill on time, and Mrs the Poet injuring her face and knee tripping over stuff in the dark after deciding to not come to bed when I told her I was turning off the lights and she would probably be more comfortable in bed than on the couch. She took a big hit to the knee in the fall but her face looks worse than her knee. She says the looks are deceiving, her knee is the worse hit. Anyway, we are both in some degree of pain tonight.

I have to go get my new anti-depressants tomorrow. The big problem was finding one that had a low incidence of sexual side effects but was available as a discounted generic and wasn’t too similar to the one that had just quit working on my depression. I don’t know what I’m getting yet, but I was asked about how that Zoloft trial went several years back when they were looking for interactions between anti-depressants and a certain BP med.

I have been checking and my 3.8l engine was one that had a 10 cc dish in the piston and roughly a 9.8:1 compression ratio. That means I have a stock combustion chamber of roughly 55 ccs and don’t need to take too much off the heads to get the ~45 cc combustion chamber I need for the 14:1 ratio for running E85 at best efficiency. I have been repeating the mantra for getting best efficiency out of E85: high compression but remove all possible sources of preignition by removing sharp edges and polishing the combustion chamber.

And I feel like cold excrement (fancy words to slip by censors) so I’m taking more pain pills and going to bed now.

Almost recovered from yesterday

I don’t know what I did yesterday but it was literally a pain. I used to get pains in my lower back way back when I first started walking after the wreck which is how we discovered the short leg issue. This pain is highly similar to that, but I can’t trace why it came back after so many years. I ditched the lifted shoe over a year ago because it had failed to alleviate the pain when I was walking barefoot part of the time, and part of the time walking with the lift. I think a big part of my problems is the amount of time I sit with my pelvis level and then walk with the tilt.

There wasn’t much heat to deal with as there was a heavy cloud cover and spotty showers all day long. I got more moisture from showers than I did sweat. And most of the places I went to had AC turned way too strong so whatever slightly over-warm I experienced was countered by cold AC shortly thereafter.

On the Lab Rat Keeper front I’m in a new study for 3 years. The most I can say under my NDA is they are working on a surgical cure for hypertension (high BP), and I will get an overnight hospital stay after the surgery. Then spend the next 3 years getting poked and prodded and periodically drained of blood. Right now I’m in the washout period where I get rid of all the medication reducing my BP. Then tests to “qualify” my blood pressure, then schedule the surgery, then the procedure, then 36 months of monitoring for effectiveness and side effects.

On other things tomorrow I get to pay my phone bill and buy the replacement stones for the hone, and get a little walking in. And maybe grab a burger from Whataburger. I can still handle a cheeseburger or a pizza without getting hit by a lactose gut bomb gas attack, so I’m going with my favorite Bacon Cheese Jalapeño Whataburger. And fries and a Coke Zero in the combo.

On the TGS2 I’m getting the replacement stones for the hone like I said in the previous paragraph, which means I can get the kingpins installed on the spindles and the spindles on the axle, and another thing off the list for building my car. Then I can get the exact measurement for the tie rod and get started on building it. I’m still deciding on steel tubing or carbon fiber, one is quick and cheap, the other is light and just as strong but expensive even if you build it yourself. Either way I will use the threaded weld bungs to provide an attachment point for the rod ends. With the carbon fiber I would use a EPS core and extend the carbon fiber over the bung right up to the threads. With the steel tube I would just weld it in and metal-finish the joint to make it look like a single hunk of metal that had been whittled to shape like I used to do building bikes. Then I used brass brazing rod as a filler and filed the brass down and painted over it. That’s how I won my class in the car show many years ago. The carbon fiber tie rod would get a UV absorbing clear coat while the steel one would get matt black epoxy or powdercoat.

And since I have stuff to do tomorrow I’m gonna put this one to bed.

The meds are working

My antidepressant in particular. My body is starting to get acclimated to not being depressed which is reinforcing. As I get used to not being depressed I feel less depressed, which makes me feel better so I feel less depressed… A virtuous circle rather than the vicious circle. And I’m actually getting other emotions that aren’t depression or anger. Some of them seem unusual to me, like fear, real compassion instead of the intellectual compassion I felt in the past.

Speaking of my body becoming used to not being depressed, my BP has changed. The systolic is still up there, but the diastolic, the measurement of how much my heart relaxes between beats, is the lowest it has been in over a decade. My body is remembering how to relax again. Even when I’m upset and there has been a litany of things to be upset about the last two weeks at Casa de El Poeta, I’m still mostly relaxed now. My heart is working more efficiently, it is having to beat less because every beat moves more blood with a more complete relaxation phase between beats. That is one of the big things happening as my body adapts to not being run by a depressed brain.

On the bike pump front I have been approved for a refund, contingent on my returning the broken pump by 3/31/17. Here’s where the problem is on that: I have to print a return label for the box they shipped it to me, and I don’t have access to a working printer. I have a printer but it doesn’t have any cables to connect it to my laptop. Some time between my youngest getting the printer for herself and putting it in her garage because she never had to print anything with it and giving the printer and a bag full of printer cables to me for my birthday the cables for that printer went bye-bye. So I’ll take any assistance I can get on that one.

On the hot rod front I found the actual weight of the Mopar 3.8L pushrod V6 – 413 pounds compared to the 545 pounds for an iron head SBC or 458 for the LS. The 41TE transaxle splits the difference between the TH350 and the 4T65E at just under 200 pounds by one source or between 150 and 200 from several sources. So for weight comparisons 3.8L/41te Mopar just over 600, 350/350 Chevy 675 plus 120 pounds of rear axle or just shy of 800 total, and the LS3/4L70E combo come to 625 plus that 120 pounds of rear axle for about 750 total. So assuming the 1700 pound dry weight for the Speedway kit is accurate my mid-Bucket will hit the scales right at 1500 dry.

And I’m running on 3.5 hours sleep because someone (coughmrsthepoetcough left the bedroom door open and Clint came in to snuggle about 90 minutes before I had my alarm set. I have been falling asleep all afternoon/evening even while I was trying to write this, which might explain the disjointedness of the composition as I was in a different frame of mind every time I woke up. I fell asleep 3 times typing the paragraph prior to this one.

Night-night, Opus the Unkillable