Healthcare followup

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Today I had a followup with my doctor after the cessation of gabapentin. My blood pressure is the lowest it’s been in years (118/75!) and she was really happy to see how much less stress I’m under. After discussing the current medication status we agree that I should stay on the nortriptyline for now, and she’s glad that physical therapy has been helping me a lot, as well as me getting better at mindfulness and other stress reduction things.

She also encouraged me to get going with a psychiatrist again so that I can possibly get back on Adderall or to try something else. I think before I do that I’ll see how well I tolerate caffeine. Which I’ve had a bit of over the past few days and it’s not been hecking me up at all, so this seems really promising.

Anyway she gave me a lot of words of encouragement and is also grateful that I’m taking such an active role in trying to make my own life better on multiple fronts. Hopefully this trajectory can continue.

Gonebapentin

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Thursday night was my last dose of gabapentin; I am now off it entirely.

Today I mostly just napped a lot, and had occasional dizzy spells when I was active. I feel no different in terms of pain levels. My blood pressure seems to reliably hover around 120/80. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

Between the physical therapy I’ve been doing and some lifestyle stress-reduction stuff I’m feeling pretty good. I need to just keep remembering to do my stretches and not let work affect me emotionally.

Two PSAs regarding IndieAuth

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IndieAuth is starting to get some traction in the greater Internet space, which is really cool! I’m glad to see a protocol finally emerging around distributed/federated identity, managing to get some traction where OpenID more or less failed (despite a few hangers-on still supporting it).

There are two issues that implementers of IndieAuth clients (i.e. websites which use IndieAuth for authentication) and endpoints (i.e. the things which do the actual authentication) should be aware of.

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Medication conflagration

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Gabapentin has been raising my blood pressure (and weight) pretty steadily since February, and it hasn’t actually been helping me with my pain issues. Back before I started on it my blood pressure was generally around 115/85, and as of last Thursday my rest blood pressure was 144/98. Which is, you know, pretty darn high.

So on Friday I decided to cut my dose from 200mg/day to 100mg/day, and see what that did to me.

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Sprung stuff

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I seem to be getting in conversations about Sprung a lot lately. I’ve definitely written about it plenty in the past but those blog entries are no longer available and probably not written with the sort of voice I’d like these days, so I figure it’s time to revisit what I worked on, 100 hours a week1, 16 years ago.

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