… commence Lonely Island filk.

I got the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine this afternoon, so I'm pretty psyched about the possibility of having a summer that doesn't revolve around my living room.

The experience of getting the vaccine itself was pretty painless. Walked from my house to a pharmacy, filled out a form, sat around for ( Read more... )

A couple weeks ago I had a really stick neck, tightness in my jaw, and pain in my ear. I'm certain that all three of these were related, but I'm not sure which was causative. I'd spent a long weekend in a hot spring at the end of April, and my right ear had felt like it had water in it for a while after that, so I figured that might be involved ( Read more... )

I've been weighing myself a couple times a day for seven months. The first three months feature a slow decline as I would have days where I couldn't get enough food in my body and was then unable to recover. Then there was a rise as I had a drug that let me eat food (and also triggered water retention). Then a drop after surgery and I was on a ( Read more... )

It's my body's half birthday and my new swallowing mechanism is five weeks old. Sounds like a good time to check in. If you're just tuning in, I had surgery in February to address achalasiaAs previously reported, I took the week of surgery off from work. This was a really good move: even though I was feeling a lot better than I'd expected (and ( Read more... )

Surgery was a success, and recovery has been smoother than I had imagined.

On Monday, I had a laparoscopic Heller myotomy and fundoplication. It was performed at Swedish Medical Center in Englewood by Dr. Reginald Bell, Nurse Practitioner Kate Freeman, and an anesthetist whose name I very quickly forgot.

My almost eery sense of calm about the ( Read more... )

With all the tests and specialists visits last year, I accumulated quite the list of diseases and ailments that I don't have. I can now happily add Chagas disease to The List, which is pretty comforting because "your esophagus is a little too big to squeeze things" is hard enough on its own without "… and your heart might get too big to squeeze ( Read more... )

The last time you heard from my esophagus, dear readers, it was freshly diagnosed with achalasia, a condition wherein the lower esophageal sphincter doesn't relax to let food into the stomach and the esophagus doesn't effectively squeeze to push food down. The result was that food would often build up at the bottom of the esophagus until it ( Read more... )

I spent the last three months trying to eat, trying to figure out why I can't eat, and trying to get through life without many calories ( Read more... )

I sent the following message to folks who are coming to Thanksgiving to (attempt to) let them know what I can and can't eat. This is the first time I've written this all down, so it seems worth documenting for posterity. Hopefully I won't have to refer people to it for too many more months ( Read more... )

One benefit I had not anticipated from wearing a wedding ring every day is that it gives a tactile warning when I'm dehydrated because it's loose and slides around more.

The danger is that when, say, I'm doing yardwork while dehydrated, there's a danger that the ring will slide off my finger into a big bag of dry leaves.  Good thing I love playing ( Read more... )