September 25th, 2024 - My Semaglutide Journey

I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night. I wasn't hungry or thirsty. I was worried about needing to vomit. I wasn't even feeling nauseous. I was just worried that nausea would hit while I'm asleep, and I wouldn't make it to the bathroom fast enough. I also had in the back of my mind the notorious death of Bon Scott (lead vocalist for AC/DC) who choked on his own vomit in 1980. So I was nervous about nausea, though it never appeared.

I woke up this morning at around 10 AM after a night of tossing and turning. I didn't feel hungry even though it had been 19 hours since my last bite of food.

Breakfast: bowl of mixed vegetables, lightly salted, no oil or butter, no seasonings

Lunch: Chicken patty broiled in the air fryer 15 minutes each side (30 minutes total)

Dinner: Protein bar, Kroger brand, 190 kcals

Hydration: warm water in an insulated container that I could sip periodically.

I also had a 20 oz coffee, which I prepare with a small amount of boiling water, just enough to dissolve the Nescafe original instant coffee. I fill the rest of the 20 oz mug with unsweetened soymilk and heat it to taste. I put it in a vacuum insulated container and drink it over the course of an hour.

I have popcorn I can make if I start feeling a bit hungry, but I didn't make any today.

I learned more about how semaglutide works. It basically paralyzes the stomach muscles, so food hangs around in the stomach much longer than it normally would. It also suppresses the appetite, though I'm not sure of the specific mechanism. It doesn't paralyze the entire digestive tract, only the stomach, but it does slow the rest of it down. That means the bolus of food moves very slowly through the small and large intestines. Water is absorbed from the bolus as it travels through the system. The more dehydrated you are, the more aggressively the intestines will pull water from the bolus. So, if you don't have enough fiber and hydration, you could end up with bad constipation or even an intestinal blockage!

I also learned that the stomach has a special channel for water to flow through where it can be quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. That's why water quickly hydrates the body, whereas food has to sit around digesting, so blood sugar doesn't spike instantly after swallowing the food.

I also learned that fiber isn't just for keeping the bolus moving through the system. It also slows down sugar absorption from sugary foods, making sugar absorption into the blood stream more drawn out, leading to lower spikes in blood sugar. Because the blood sugar spikes are lower with fiber, your pancreas doesn't have to produce nearly as much insulin, and your body builds up less insulin resistance. Insulin resistance sounds good, but it isn't good. Insulin resistance is the cause of diabetes.

Today was actually a pretty good day. I probably ate less than 1000 kcals. I didn't feel hungry. Quite the opposite, my belly felt full. I didn't have a bowel movement today. I also didn't experience sulfur burps or gas, which is a common complaint by those taking semaglutide. I didn't experience any nausea. I did have slightly more brain fog than the background fog I live with since my brain injury.

I did have one moment of emotional struggle. I'm selling that awful tenant's belongings to recover the lost income and repair costs. I felt nothing selling her dressers and bookcase. But I decided to not sell the toys and toddler things. I donated them to a local battered women's shelter instead. The staff at the shelter eyed me with suspicion and insisted that I leave the donated items in the parking lot for later retrieval. I'm glad to be rid of those toys. Even though I don't particularly like kids, I'm human, so I don't want children going without. Why don't I like kids? Aside from the obvious (germs, smells, noise, chaos), gay men of my generation had to be very careful around kids so as to avoid ever being in a position where an accusation of misconduct could be made. I make it a general rule to stay away from kids, and I am only in their presence if the parents are there too. The excesses of the #metoo movement demonstrate my concerns are valid!

I only have a few things left to sell or haul off to the dump and I can close this chapter of the tenant from hell. The really shitty thing is, I could have avoided this whole thing had I not trusted the zillow background check. I always insisted on searching court records myself. But zillow said they do that for you. They didn't do a very good job. After all this crap started, I searched the state court records and found an eviction for this lunatic woman from 2009 in another county. I didn't make the same mistake with the new tenants.

I want to state unequivocally that no one pushed me to take this drug. I'm doing this for myself, on my own volition. My partner never asked me to go on the drug. And it certainly doesn't have anything to do with what that awful bigot tenant said about my body. I just don't want to die by 50. I certainly don't want my family and friends standing around saying that I ate myself to death. If I do die of a heart attack, I want to know that I fought hard against my eating disorder and didn't give up on life without a fight!

My Semaglutide Journey

Like most people, I gained weight during the COVID lockdowns. I had been going to the gym 3 times per week, but that stopped when SARS-COV-2 started spreading in my city. I've been on so many diets, and my BMI has fluctuated between 25 and 40. Over the last 20 years, I've gained and lost over a thousand pounds through diet, exercise, and various weight loss drugs and programs.

I'm a gay man in my mid 40's living in suburbia. All told, my life is pretty good. I have a partner who loves me and dog who adores me. We own our house outright and own two rental properties. I have surrounded myself with small-L liberals (not loony progressives or woke racists), and live in relative safety and comfort.

The last two years have been a bit rough though. I fell off a ladder and ended up with a pretty bad TBI (traumatic brain injury). I lost my job at a major tech firm because of the TBI. My mom (paternal aunt who raised me from 8 and adopted me at 16) died. Her impending death led me to find that she never really accepted me for being gay, and as a result, I was being given unequal treatment in the inheritance. I never wanted anything but love from her, but this was like a punch in the gut.

More recently, I had a tenant from hell who harassed me. Her boyfriend had cheated on her (with a female prostitute), but she somehow managed to convince herself that me and my partner were sleeping with him, and that we had all conspired to do various things to her. Needless to say, she has a few screws loose. She sent emails and text messages making awful comments about my body, and obscene remarks about what she thinks me and my partner do sexually. She signaled her intention to squat after her boyfriend moved out, despite the fact that she had already moved into another apartment in a neighboring city. She left some belongings in the house, consisting of a few dressers and toys belonging to her toddler. I finally got rid of her, but it took a massive toll on my mental and physical well-being. I got shingles and a cold sore from all the stress. I gained 30 pounds. The sad thing is, state law doesn't protect the landlord from a harassing tenant. If I had harassed her, the law would have protected her, but not when she harassed me.

My health deteriorated so much that I genuinely started to prepare for an early demise from health-related illness. My hope was a massive heart attack that would take me quickly, not leaving me a burden on my family.

The other day, I was just sitting in my car with my dog, and I realized how stupid it is to be preparing for an early death when I could fight for my life! I realized I didn't want to leave my partner grieving and my dog having lost her bestest human.

So, I called up a friend who runs a weight loss clinic and asked for help. I had a consultation, and received injectable semaglutide in the mail this afternoon. I also found a support group on Facebook, more on that later. If you're reading this, don't ask for advice on where to get semaglutide. My friend runs a very small clinic, and cannot handle any more patients.

I'll try to make daily posts, specifying how I feel, any side-effects, and what I'm doing to mitigate side-effects like nausea, constipation, dizziness, etc.

Trump fanned the flames of Russiagate, then cried foul when progressives took him seriously

It was July 27th, 2016, at a news conference, where Trump asked Russia to intervene in our election to "find the 30,000 emails that are missing". Trump later claimed it was a joke, saying he and the audience laughed. Typical of a Trump lie, it was easily exposed as a lie by examining the cspan footage of the entire press conference. But he has so much contempt for his supporters, he knows they won't check.

As you may recall, conservative media was having a field day criticizing Clinton's use of a private email server instead of government servers, and the fact that many emails were lost in an alleged backup debacle. They benefitted from Clinton's mistake, however. Without that mistake, Guccifer would likely have been unable to hack Sidney Blumenthal's emails, which provided a lot of political treats for Republicans and conservative media over Benghazi.

Anyway, back to Russiagate. He claimed that, as a candidate, he had no connections to Putin or Russia. When the Mueller report was released, it documented many links between close family and campaign connections to Russia and the Russian government.

Now, the conservative media is pretending Russiagate was a fever dream of progressives suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. I might add that self-styled patriots had a similar derangement over Obama.

The Mueller Report speaks most plainly about the collusion between the Trump campaign/family and the Russian government and its proxies. But, in a typical Trump move, he had his lap dog Attorney General, Bill Barr, put out a press release essentially lying about the contents of the report. Again, the contempt Trump has for his followers is galling.

It's true that the Mueller Report was not the smoking gun progressives had hoped for. It was enough for thinking people to realize Trump had played the media and his followers like a master playing a perfectly tuned Stradivarius.

The most troubling aspect of the Trump phenomenon is how easily he lies about easily verifiable things. Remember his claims about his inauguration turnout? Why would anyone believe him when the same lying, vindictive swine says the election was stolen?

Uri Berliner Exposes Ideological Capture at NPR

The Free Press just dropped a piece from Uri Berliner, where he lays out how NPR has been ideologically captured. Setting my watch for 12 hours for the world to see the collapse of NPR as leftist activists hack away at the pillars of this once great American institution.

I used to be an almost rabid NPR listener. My last car proudly spirted an "I heart NPR" bumper sticker. I once had an argument with an elderly man who, upon seeing my bumper sticker, made a snide remark about communists.

Little did I know, he was right. I just hadn't noticed yet.

This was in my first year living in the Seattle area. We had moved from the frigid midwest to the warm and green pacific northwest. We moved because wanted to be sure our state government would never use our tax dollars to enshrine second class citizenship for gays into law.

In the Midwest, I had joined my local Occupy group as I was irritated by the bailouts of banksters and the fact that no one went to jail for the massive fraud that tanked the economy. I was immediately shocked at the nastiness and vitriol lobbed at anyone who dared question the consensus condemnation of what was being called "late capitalism". It was clear I had not found my tribe.

That's the kind of liberal I was.

When we moved to Seattle, we thought we were moving to the liberal utopia. Our enthusiasm was short-lived.

First there was the degree snobbery. I never had the privilege or money to go to college. Hell, I barely could afford the fees to take the GED test. That caused me to have long stretches of unemployment, punctuatedby minimum wage jobs. In the Midwest, I was the CFO of a small technology company. 

Then I noticed the intolerance of the locals. I once made the mistake of saying, at an atheist meetup, that I quite liked not having an income tax at the state level. The organizer politely asked me to leave.

I recall the exact moment I stopped my monthly contributions to KUOW. They had started referring to pregnant women as "pregnant people", and the station started uncritically quoting election material provided by the city council's own socialist bomb thrower, Kshama Sawant.

So, I'm starting my stop watch. It will be hours, if not minutes before Mr. Berliner is hounded out of his job by activists pretending to be journalists. Even the union will turn on him.

The moment he starts a substack, I'll join as a paying subscriber. I did the same for Cliff Mass, a local meteorologist, who was canned for not toeing the line on climate change. 

Leftist Podcast Implosion

I used to be a fan of a podcast called Opening Arguments, until I had a disagreement with one of the hosts over email.

It brings me so much joy to see the podcast has imploded in a leftist witch hunt over, obviously "sexual misconduct". Isn't it always?

And the atheist leftist community went absolutely apeshit.

I love watching political zombies eat each other's brains. 

I Voted for Nikki Haley

I'm a Washington State voter. For POTUS, I've voted democrat since 1996, the first year I was eligible to vote.

I've voted for candidates from both parties. I voted for Kim Wyman and Andy Hill. I would have voted for McCain, but he brought as his running mate a Christian dominionist idiot.

My hand shook a bit when I marked republican on the declaration box. I did it to vote for Nikki Haley. I know she's anti-choice, but I think she's actually quite moderate. She's also the daughter of Indian immigrants of the Sikh religion. They are the warriors of India, and some of the most industrious people alive today.

So I set aside my concerns over abortion rights and voted for her. I hope she makes an independent run and moves to the center politically.

It would be my pleasure to see a Desi woman be the first female POTUS!

GO NIKKI HALEY!

Grieving Alone - Distraction Provided by Television

After Mom died, my partner was called away to take care of his own parents. I almost immediately got COVID-19, which has dragged on for over a month. I've been grieving my mom's passing by doing little projects around the house (when I have the energy), but mostly I watch television from my youth.

First, I turned to Roseanne. I grew up in a working-class family, and my biological parents were the working poor. There was something comforting about watching select episodes. I know Roseanne Barr said some horrible things, and she has become politically unhinged, but I choose to remember her for the headstrong woman who used to hit her husband with a frying pan for laughs. In some ways, my mom was like Roseanne from the '90s. She was a hard-working boomer who worked her fingers to the bone taking care of her daughter and taking in two homeless kids. Something about re-watching Roseanne helped me remember my mom for the best parts of her unique being.

I then moved on to Star Trek Voyager. I grew up on Next Generation, but I have gravitated to Voyager more as I get older. In this time of grieving the loss of the matriarch of my family, Janeway provides some comfort. She's always headstrong and tough, while also being warm and feminine when required. I also see my mom in her character as well.

I then watched the Vicar of Dibley. The lead character is played by Dawn French, and is a newly ordained female vicar. The show takes place shortly after the Church of England started to ordain women. To me, Geraldine Granger represents a woman who broke through a glass ceiling while endearing the stodgy, conservative men around her with a quick wit and a hilarious disposition. My mom broke through many glass ceilings in her life. She faced many challenges, yet she always found a way to smile.

At the moment I'm re-watching Queer As Folk. It will come as no surprise to learn that I also found a character in this show that reminds me of my mom. Two of them in fact. The first is Michael's mom, Debbie. She's a headstrong, bossy, charming woman who always works hard and smiles. That's where the similarities end though. Debbie is a proud PFLAG mom, whereas my mom took many years to accept that I'm actually gay, and not just "being a pervert". She knew gay men, and she accepted them, even if she didn't exactly understand. She just didn't accept that SHE had raised a gay boy. The other character that reminded me somewhat of mom was Justin's mother, Jennifer. She's a fairly conservative housewife who discovers her son is gay, and struggles to understand and accept her son. She ultimately comes to accept her gay son, and it happens fairly quickly in narrative terms in the show. My mom took a lot longer. It wasn't until I brought a doctor home that my mom really started to accept me as her gay son. I still think she harbored some hesitations to the end, but she was too much of a lady to say anything.

Part of my grieving has had to do with inequality in how the inheritance will work. I was told by my step-father and my adopted sister that my mom wanted to cut me out of the inheritance entirely, but that an attorney suggested that might lead to a legal struggle that would cause problems. So, as my adopted sister and step-father narrate it, my mom agreed to give me 20%, while her daughter got 40%, and my step-father's daughter got the remaining 40%. There was a will written up in 2001, which laid all this out, but my mom never signed it. This is all hearsay, as I have not seen the will. If this is true, 2001 represented the low point of my relationship with my mom. In 2003, I met my partner, and things started looking up. By 2006, when we moved to Atlanta for my partner's residency, my relationship with mom was far better than her relationship with her biological daughter.

It hurts that they took a snapshot of the comparative relationships at the time when my stock was lowest with mom, and used that to give me an unequal share.

In some ways I feel bad for feeling angry about the unequal treatment. From my adopted-sister's perspective, it should have all been hers. She was always told the house was hers, and mom even went as far as putting my sister's name on the title of the house. Of course, after she got married, she wanted to put her new husband's name on the title, and my sister INSISTED on being paid a large sum of money to sign off on the change. In order to pay, mom cashed out her 401(k) retirement fund.

From my step-father's perspective, it should have been split evenly between his daughter and mom's daughter. He and I never had a good relationship. It was only in caring for mom that we really started to forgive and forget some of the things that happened shortly after they got married.

I'm ok. At the moment, I'm unemployed. I have my small side-gigs that keep me afloat, except for this damned virus keeping me from working for over a month! I still sometimes feel a pang of grief when I overhear a proud mother praising her son. I tear up a bit thinking how I'll never again hear her voice and see her eyes light up when she looks at me and says "that's my boy!".

I miss you mom. It was hard watching them put the veil on you and close your casket. It's hard knowing you're laying there in the cold ground for eternity.

At least I took the time to go see her as she was fading at the end. I held her hand and she opened her eyes and looked at me. She couldn't talk, but she smiled a bit and squeezed my hand before closing her eyes. I spent a few more minutes listening to her breathe. I kissed her on the cheek, told her I love her, and I left. I knew that was the last time I'd see her again. I'm so grateful to have spent that time with her. I miss her, but I'm also happy she isn't suffering anymore. I knew being locked in that memory care was hard for her. Still, as she always did, she made friends with other residents, and could still light up the room with her smile.

She did the best she could. She took in 2 homeless kids and gave us a home. Any mistakes she made in her future parenting were nothing compared to the kindness she showed with that first act of selfless kindness.