Health update: leg feels dead to me

 In a surprising turn of events, I don't know if it's from my attempts at eating sweat potato powder and cabbage powder, or simply consuming too much 'organ meat' in the form of cod liver, but whatever the case, I have seen a return of ulcers to my legs which is the most obvious visual sign that something's wrong with them.

More importantly, there are some rather alarming developments. My right leg in particular has a lot of yellow on it. It's hard to see unless the lighting is bright enough, but normal power sunlight(haha we live in Washington State) should be enough to illuminate it. I haven't really noticed any yellow on my left leg. I'm going to guess that perhaps without my noticing it, walking around caused my leg to bruise all over and that bruising turned to yellow. I can't see through my own pants, so this is just a theory. In any case, I have some bruising that hasn't turned yellow, it still seems very fresh, and it's high up on my thighs and in the back where I normally can't see it, unless I use a mirror or some other sort of device, like a camera with my hand putting it into position.

The bruising is so massive that I'm surprised that I haven't been able to notice it sooner. Why wouldn't I check there you may ask? I simply wasn't being thorough. I wasn't feeling any pain there, so I had no reason to check. Or if I was feeling pain, it was a low enough amount that it was going ignored.

In any case, it seems clear that I should stop attempting to do things how i was doing them before. Current research suggests I am dealing with such things as Chronic Veinous Insufficiency and also Deep Vein Thrombosis. I have attempted to adjust my posture throughout the day but it seems to provide little comfort. It feels like my last days are finally upon me. It was not a fun 4 decades, and if i make it to 5 decades old, I am imagining that nothing new and interesting will happen in my life. So now I resonate more fully with Gustave from Expedition 33 "For those who come after" the man went on a mission determined to succeed but taking precautions so that even if he fails, others can learn/benefit from his experience. It was a simple sentiment, to live for others. And it looks like that is all that's left for me now.

I have been putting off writing a book for ages. My health is so bad I'm not even sure how practical it is for me to attempt something like that. But to not attempt to do so would be disrespectful to all who live I suppose. I feel a lot of pressure, and I don't think I can bear it alone.

Health update (new fat nutrition source highlight)

So I have been experiencing some changes to my diet that are influencing my body and mind for what seems to be the better. There may still be some issues with knowing what I can or can't eat, but it's much more minor than it's ever been before.

The biggest change in the diet might be the addition of cod liver as a daily or nearly daily insert into my meals. I get cans of the stuff and just pour it into the frying pan and sooner or later I end up eating it with a bunch of other ingredients. The recipe probably isn't important to the story.

I've been finding that my digestive system still has issues, compared to when I was much younger, but I think that maybe I have had more realistic dreams recently than I have ever had in my whole life. I don't know why exactly, but I'm assuming there's a medical explanation for this and that this is not simply spirits messing with my head. Because they are just ordinary dreams from what I can tell, apart from how indistinguishable they have become from reality compared to before.

In any case, I'm reminded of a phenomenon that I refer to as sensory playback. When I was living in Seattle, my brain would keep recordings of sounds happening while I was sleeping so that noises wouldn't wake me up while sleeping. It would then playback the sounds for me after I woke up. It was a daily occurrence after I fully 'got used to the loudness of the city'. In any case, for unrelated reasons regarding sleep I had to leave the city, and I haven't been back since except to visit but even then, not often. Another example that many more may be able to relate to is simply having a song stuck in your head.

I think what's going on here is when sleep is less disturbed, then dreams are stronger. I guess I have had some bad nights of sleep in the past and if there were signs that were noticeable or not, one of them that popped up was something I wasn't recognizing for what I now believe it to be. Back to the topic of music, if you've ever heard some sort of song remixing, it's some sort of idea someone came up with, what I believe caused this to happen is their own sensory playback. songs were 'stuck in their head' if you want to call it that, or rather playing in their head as accurately as if they were hearing the songs with their live ears. 

Although that detail is less important. The more crucial detail is that they were sort of using their brains to redesign whole new songs based on what they already knew. It is similar to how AI programs function in that regard from what I've noticed. AI has some various quirks that are a result of bugs in programming or at the very least faults with hardware, but that's hardly to be unexpected considering the difference between our brains and something we built.

I have also had this happen to me with vision too, it's not just limited to sound or even touch ( yes, I get that as well). And naturally that plays a big role in my dreams to make them seem more realistic when they do. It occurs to me that I maybe have went on living in this world 4 decades without knowing what having fancy dreams is really like. Sure, they're not anything special, but if a lot more people are having these on the regular, it could explain some things, and even if not, it's still an interesting thing for me to be experiencing and I look forward to it continuing to happen if I keep up my daily routine as it is.

In any case lately I have felt more normal than previously, and I wonder if this whole dream thing is another little sign that I'm headed in the right direction when it comes to my health.

Summer is here and chives are back!

It's taken me some time but I've remembered things that I forgot about. Such as remembering that my favorite free bread that I got from a bakery that was offering samples was called Tomato Chive. After I decided to quit all nicotine foods(including potatoes and tomatoes but also cauliflower), I managed to remember that bread...how could I like that the most?... when there were a lot of other very good breads that they made, really fancy stuff, I don't remember near to them all, but there were a lot of tasty ones that I enjoyed. And it was all so many years ago. So I realized that I need to try chives again to find out if they'll be good for my body, and I ordered them and they've been great so far. I've also been trying other ingredients, like basil and dill weed. I don't really like dill weed, but basil is nice. I've been grinding up chives with sunflower kernels and putting it into the water for some dough. I've been so much healthier lately.

I've dared to drink lime juice again, and I'm even eating a little yogurt(I have to be really careful with this one because of sugar content, and ultimately I'm not sure if this is worth continuing to eat at this moment in time). I may stop eating cacao butter soon because I seem to have found a worthy replacement for it. Shea butter doesn't really smell better than it, but it is softer when not melted and is therefore a little easier to cook with. And it seems like my body is digesting it better. I'm not eating much meat. Every time I try it, I find it hard to eat only a little bit, and then I end up getting diarrhea. I think my pancreas(and who knows what else) is having a hard time handing all that. I am prepared to try and see if some medicine at the same time I take meat helps(such as lipase and protease).

My singing is getting back to normal, I can hear myself being able to sing at a good volume and clearly. It seems as though my dietary routine has been helpful in that regard. I haven't weighed myself lately but I wouldn't be surprised if I gained a couple pounds. I'm not in unheard of shape, but it's a reasonable level of health to be at considering my age and all that's happened before. I also got some ghee in case my body didn't like the shea butter, so I haven't tried it yet.

Fage is a brand of yogurt that I like because they have simpler style of yogurt making than other brands but I found it annoying to have to add lactase. Well now they have a lactose free version of their yogurt. It seems pretty good and my body isn't freaking out eating it but we are talking about more sugar than what I'm getting from lime juice or buck/hemp so I need to be careful how quickly I go through that. What I started doing is just putting it into a smaller container with a lid when I plan to eat it. This allows me to easily restrict my portion so I don't overeat it. I tried to do something like that with meat, but the method was a little off and my self-control wasn't there.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to keep eating yogurt or meat but if I am to eat these things I know it has to be in moderation. In any case, I have been enjoying my teff and/or buck herbal bread made from dough that I mix fresh every day and my body has been very thankful for this regular meal plan. There are a wide variety of ingredients I can put in, and I will cycle through different ones, depending on my discernment and guesswork and willingness to experiment. I want to eventually come up with some recipes so others can copy my food, but I'm not very disciplined with such a concept. I'm pleased that at least the shea butter has been very easy to cook with, so that might contribute a lot to my confidence in a recipe to be made.

Also wondering if I should maybe have 3 different recipes, one for teff flour, one for buck flour, and a third for both of them mixed together. That might be a good plan. But then I'd have to figure out what the various supporting ingredients should be. Might not be so easy to figure out. Even just cooking using different ingredients makes such a difference. For example, when I don't have buck in the dough, when I'm frying it all up, it all tends to break apart more quickly as I try to flip it, which leads to a lot of awkward flip-stirring that I normally don't have to do. Not sure what to do about that, there are some potential solutions, although I am not sure what they all are.

I've been drinking aloe vera juice daily as a way to make sure my digestive system has what it needs in case anything goes wrong, and it seems to help keep my skin in decent shape when everything's fine with the digestive system. I've cut back on the salt intake lately. I think I've realized that there's a chance that part of my fat absorption problem could be attributed to too much salt in my water IOW if I want to have water that's not diluting the salt very effectively then I need to make sure it's not around meal time, and that should in theory improve my fat absorption. That's the plan moving forward anyway. And over the past however many days it's been with me trying this, it seems like it might be making a good difference. It's hard to tell what's doing what with me taking in yogurt too, so I'm going to refrain from immediately rebuying yogurt when that's gone and see if anything changes for the better or for the worse after that.

The shilajit has been cheaper in recent months than it had been in the past, which is nice. I think it has helped me keep going in general. I don't know how much help the green tablets have been (chlorella and something else I forgot what) but I repurchased the reishi mushroom powder and it seems just as snack worthy as before. Believe it or not, I didn't finish the last bag because I lost it, but the other day after I already started to eat out of the new bag, I found the old one. I don't know if I'd call that a coincidence. Is this stuff helping me feel more energized or motivated? Maybe...

About the nicotine thing, in case I didn't mention it already, I was a big fan of corn chips and salsa for a long time. I also liked lots of different potato dish ideas, and I was even messing around with various potato soup ideas myself. I was the kind of person that would eat an entire pizza and back before I knew that gluten was bad for me, it was something that was very problematic. And yet I felt like I wasn't appreciating the long-term health effects of the wonderful potato soups that I would make. And I didn't really know why. I think it's because I went through withdrawal symptoms with them(Yeah, if you get headaches then isn't something wrong? So why would you feel worse after having amazing soup?). If I wasn't constantly eating these kinds of foods, then my body would freak out. Consider this, after I had quit eating potatoes for some time(maybe I was careful because they have small amounts of sugar in them) I was not getting headaches, but relatively soon after I would eat something with potatoes in it, I would get headaches. It was consistent. It even happened when I tried this sour cream alternative product that was really fancy that had a little bit of potato in it(to be fair it was so tasty I went through most of the container quite quickly) and it even happened with that! After that I knew, it was definitely a withdrawal reaction. So, even though I don't think I was getting that kind of withdrawal symptom from cauliflower, I decided to stop eating it anyway just in case! 

And so eventually I figured my foods needed a little something to replace the cauliflower, something vegetable-like and eventually I came up with the idea of trying chives. I don't know why I didn't buy chives sooner, they've been great for me. They smell so good, they remind me of onions(they are both alliums), and they help make crushing the sunflower kernels easier(they less frequently try to jump out of the grinding bowl) when I'm trying to grind them while the kernels likewise help to slice up the chives into smaller pieces. It's funny how Amazon stopped selling sunflower powder wasn't so bad a thing to happen to me since now I can just cut up chives at the same time I'm grinding the sunflower into a powder(granted it's not as fine as it probably should be, but generally good enough, especially as I get better at it and have enough patience for it).

I am currently trying to do this thing where I eat meals twice a day now. I'm hoping it will work out and who knows? Perhaps in the future I could make the meals grow in size if I think my body can handle that change and that could lead to me gaining some weight. I am not an expert at gaining weight and I've heard a lot of ideas for how you could do that but obviously not everyone is going to find such a thing easy and what works for other people may not work for a large percentage of people. In any case, I'm trying to listen to what my body wants and try to work in harmony with it, rather than trying to mold ideas from impressive people into my routine when I can instead help my body do better by appreciating its differences.

News - I previewed 2 games this winter and also...

 I was a playtester for Stormgate and a new game based on Faeria. If you are not familiar with either of those, Stormgate is a RTS game based loosely off of StarCraft 2 + Diablo + Warcraft 3 and a variety of other non-Blizzard games, and Faeria is a turn based strategy game that uses a dual player constructed board and cards. The new Faeria game is meant to be a 4Ex(a genre of game based off the 4 step process of exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating) version of Faeria and looks quite interesting but it is a long way off from being completed so I can't really tell details. I don't really like any game in the genre yet(unless you count old Civilization 1&2 and Master of Orion 1&2), but this game may be the first.

 In any case, being able to see the early progress of such games is great and helps me to further identify with my new title of Spy. I am not about to do anything illegal like talk about details of games that I'm not authorized to talk about of course. In the meantime, I'm continuing to review games that I play and I thought now and here would be a good place to mention a new website.

 I'm going through and updating my games played listing to include links to reviews from me(whether on Steam or through some other means) and if you're wondering where this games played listing is it, it's a website called 'rankone' that was linked to me from a peer and here's the link to my profile. I don't know how long it'll take me but I think this site has a nice presentation and as long as they aren't censoring my 'thoughts about the game' sections then it should be fine.

 Moving forward, the latest game which I finished was Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and I have an overall positive feeling about the game. But I'm not ready to review it yet. Please be patient while I prepare something. In the meantime, if you want a spoiler video, you can check out a new YT video that I shipped recently. If you want to watch something a lot shorter and with more action, feel free to check out my successful attempts through GreenOne's vertical LeveLHead course.

 In case I didn't link it from here before, the 'advertisement' for my Super Mario 3D Ray World has been the channel trailer for my YouTube channel and I might replace it as the channel trailer soon, so I might as well make sure it gets 'shouted out' because it's a fine one of many examples of my creativity in recent years.

 If any of these news paragraphs intrigue you, feel free to comment on them or ask questions about them on my Twitch channel where I broadcast some of my game playing and sometimes non-game related stuff as well.

update note

 Just a simple message to mention that today I changed my display name here from Doctor A. Ray to Spy A. Ray. Although my notes here are often of a medical nature and I'll continue to use this blog spot to post medical concerns, I would rather reference my newer title(self-given both) here.

Attemping to master my health

 So I have been attempting to master my health and I've been doing a lot of things right but I may have to go try shilajit again. It's super expensive but it seemed like it was helpful. Right now I think it would be a good timing to buy it again, I've purchased some of it twice and at the moment I'm actually doing very well but the one thing that's bothering me more than anything else right now is my digestive system keeps serving up diarrhea. I'll take diarrhea over constipation but there's got to be a way to put this down and I'm just not sure what it is. Anyway, I might come up with some more ideas later but for now I think I'm going to try the black goo.

 One thing I had been subjected to that took me by surprise was I scratched my cornea. Now I might have done this in the past and simply been less sensitive to this and not understood what was going on and really the healing duration that the body needs for this condition is so relatively short that I expect lots of people may do this to themselves without realizing it. I figured out that a way that I can avoid this happening to me in the future is to hold my head down when I clean the outside of my eyes after my body has been trying to get me to sleep(the body does this so you can properly engage REM sleep I think, whatever the case, it can happen theoretically if you're tired but not sleeping but it's generally irresponsible for you to clean your eyes before sleeping first because then you're draining your body of something it's just going to produce again anyway soon). Anyway, I seem to be getting sleepy more often than I would prefer and part of this may be attributed to my body's inability to process various foods correctly. 

 Part of me wonders if indeed we will have new ingredients for foods created during that 1000 year reign while Satan and his demons are in the abyss. It would potentially help us attain perfection faster like that's a long time but we are also so far from perfect we are going to need all the time we can get. I'm also wondering if it's going to even be normal for us to eat as much or sleep as much, that kind of thing in the future. Imagine just pooping more than we do today, or less for that matter. Or will we even just have full control over our bowel movements? I mean nobody does today right? Certainly there are people out there with superior control over their bowel movements compared to others but nobody has full control, do they? I don't know, that's not exactly an every day conversation in our culture.

 In any case, my worry over my pathetic control over my bowel movements is precisely why I'm worried about my ability to get and keep a job. But what's more frustrating than anything else is just not getting a chance to have some minor form of emotional validation from working at a job. Right now the only thing I can do is preach informally or show off videos games... I need to either find other things to occupy my time to get some more emotional validation or I need to figure out a way to get back my professionalism. 

Changed my Twitch TV alias!

 I am now found here as I have changed my alias to Spy Andrew. As a spy, it is my job to investigate games and report back on discoveries I made while playing them. This may include recommendations and reviews as well as analyses of game developer view points.

 My health has improved considerably in recent times. I am not very confident in what I can do but I do not struggle with the simplest task of every day life anymore, diet. A common vegetable, cauliflower helps keep my digestive system feeling good, and various other ingredients that I cook with are providing some good feelings.

 The weather is improving my condition now as well, with winter firmly behind us in this area. I took a much lower-than-usual temperature shower this week. I would like the opportunity to work again but so far it has eluded me. It has been more than 10 years since I had a paying job. I didn't think it was possible to even last this long without a job, and I also had no idea that physical recovery would be so difficult. 

 If not for my older, spiritual sister who has now perished, I may not be as healthy as I am now. She gave me a chance to live on my own without too much interference from toxic personalities. My family has been a great disappointment for me as my mother has admitted that even she is a source of disappointment for me in my life. But it doesn't stop at family! So many people are caught up in their own needs that they don't acknowledge mine.

 And I might just be part of the problem. When was the last time I asked someone if I could help them with something? I know so many people that I might or might not be able to help them with something, and what am I spending my time on? Playing games that most of them really don't care about in the slightest. I'm never busy doing anything, I'm just available and never get asked to do anything. I want people to ask me to do things. But perhaps my status is just too unbelievable for others.

 I suppose moving forward, my goal should be to change the minds of those around me, and prove that I am a valuable assistant. Because I really want to help others. I know I need a lot of help and I'm not getting it, but that doesn't mean I can't provide help to others that are willing to accept my help. It's a strange realization for me. That my time is not over simply because I have this willingness to do more. So what comes next? I can't tell you, it's undetermined. But I hope it happens soon.