Scary Movie

I'm currently in northwest Phoenix, staying with an old high school friend who had an empty guest room and a big heart. In a good but complex way, she was able to arrange for me to have some very inexpensive hyperbaric oxygen therapy close to her home.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) basically means breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber. The extra pressure lets a lot more oxygen dissolve directly into my blood—not just carried by red blood cells, but actually in the plasma itself.

The idea for long COVID is that some of my symptoms might come from inflammation, poor oxygen delivery in tiny blood vessels, possibly from microclots, or cells not producing energy efficiently. HBOT may help by pushing more oxygen into those areas, reducing inflammation, and possibly helping the body repair damaged tissue.

It’s not a cure, and the science is still evolving, but some people report improvements in things like fatigue, brain fog, and oxygen levels. So I’m trying it to see if it helps my system recover.

Think of it like forcing oxygen into parts of the body that aren’t getting enough—kind of jump-starting healing where things have been sluggish.

So far, it's been promising. What science there is suggests that it might take 50-60 sessions to see improvement, and of course no one is talking about a cure, just improvement. But improvement has been a fantasy for a long time.

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That's the general news. Different state, new treatment, lots of hope but cautious.

The absurdity of this situation is probably only in my eyes, but it's there all right. I have no business doing this, trying to fix my life when I lack some pretty basic human skills now.

And I can't explain. I've never been able to adequately describe, to anyone, what's happened to my brain. I'm really good at covering it up, as you probably would also be. I can also sit down and write, and occasionally even see flashes of familiar phrasing and construction. It takes freaking forever, but it can be done. Eloquence can always fool you.

Don't be fooled. My short-term memory is a disaster; often nothing at all is sticking, and I end up wandering away from tasks and wandering back all day long, always trying to remember. I have a very shaky connection to the past, and if there's a heightened emotional overlay then boy, I don't know what to tell you. The past is awfully fuzzy, and I'm not all that sure how I ended up in Arizona.

We now toss around the term executive functioning the same way we do brain fog, so that it now means whatever you want it to mean.

But to me, executive function is basically my brain’s ability to organize and manage things—like keeping track of steps, staying on task, and finishing things. Now that system’s real glitchy, so even simple things can feel more complicated than they should. It’s not that I don’t understand things—it’s more that the "manager" part of my brain has trouble keeping everything lined up. So I might lose track of what I’m doing, skip steps, or get overwhelmed more easily.

So I'm trying to shake things up, re-write what I saw as a dismal future, still manage my relationships and life details – and I'm not qualified in the least, now. For what feels like the first time in my life, the solution to my problems can't be left at my doorstep, because I can't do it without help.

I can flail without help, trust me. But it's not pretty.

I'm doing things. I've had roughly 20 HBOT sessions and I have more energy; I'm not buzzing around, but it's better. And I've been tracking my blood oxygen saturation since the beginning of this Covid adventure, and it's finally now looking like a normal person. Not a fit person, by any means, and nowhere near where I was, but it doesn't really look like I have COPD anymore.

I've been desperate for metrics since the beginning of this, and blood O2 has been the only one I've had; it's truly been the one thing I've held onto as evidence I wasn't imagining the whole thing. Sometimes it worked.

I also joined the retirement community here for a very reasonable fee that allows me to use all the gyms, pools, etc. I've been going to the gym a lot, trying to see what I can do, knowing that resistance exercises are a good idea in some cases, but not all. I'm just trying and waiting and watching.

I've learned some things; one of them was that I should avoid upright exercise (e.g., walking) to eliminate the resistance to gravity, so I've switched to a recumbent stationary bike for cardio. I've done 15 minutes a couple of times, and it kicks my butt, but so far I haven't slipped backwards.

I have friends and family in this state, and they check in. My friend Lori has five kids and is very close to all of them, so I've become unofficially part of that clan, too. I already threw up in one of their bathrooms, so.

I mean, I'm okay. I'm a bit better, I think. I'm more optimistic, although I get more discouraged as I try to do more things (shopping is still barely tolerable for 10-15 minutes tops, and I had a great/miserable time going through the Phoenix Art Museum on one of their free days, walking like a drunk bobblehead and having to sit a lot). I'm not as alone, but it's still solitary a fair amount because it's hard to be active. People have lives that don't revolve around sitting in one place.

But it's still a life, and I'm trying. It's confusing, and I feel lost a lot. Most people in my life have left me alone for the past two months, either upset with me for making this decision or...I dunno. Honestly. I mean, I'm still sick, you know? Just trying to stay alive here.

Part of that might be writing more, so that's what's going on here today. As always, I am very unreliable these days so maybe this is it for another six months. Or maybe this will be my mornings, now, trying to sort this out the way I always have.

And as always, I'm grateful you're reading.