The new normal

Sunday was the first day in a very long time that I didn't have an overwhelming desire to end my life. I'm not feeling quite as good today, but that's ok. I'm improving, at least I hope, in a long term sense.

I'm not looking for sympathy, and I'm not looking for anything in the way of giving me your thoughts and prayers. In reality, if anyone says anything to me in the genre of their "most heartfelt thoughts and prayers," I'm much more likely to tell them to go fuck themselves than to express gratitude. As it turns out, they're not the reason I'm depressed, and they're not the reason that I have felt like there is no point to life anymore. It's better to saying nothing to a depressed person than to recite an empty platitude. That's not to say that people who express true concern aren't welcome, as well as incredibly important. A friend of mine called me on Friday as I was dealing with a lot of this stuff--she's amazing. I lost touch with her at one point many years ago, but we reconnected a while back, and I hope I never lose touch with her again--she helped me to feel a little bit better and I'm very thankful for that.

The simple fact, though, is that none of any of what has been going on this year is normal, and it does a disservice to the whole world to pretend it is. I've sat through meetings at work with people in management spouting off how it's going to be so much better when we're back together in our physical offices (a return was said to be in October in this one specific instance), and I've rolled my eyes so far into the back of my head, I'm not entirely sure how they came back. I started working from home full time when everyone else did in March. We were so naive at that point. We all thought this would be a thing that would be a couple of weeks, or maybe a month, and then it would pass and we'd be back to normal lives. We worked in suboptimal conditions--perhaps my setup was better than most since I'd already been working remotely once or twice a week, but it wasn't ideal. I threw my back out from sitting too much. I ordered a fully motorized sit/stand desk, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, damaged, but usable. The replacement is supposed to get here this week. I started working on actually creating a usable office space, and all of those parts and pieces of furniture will probably arrive before the end of the month. If we had known better at the start of the pandemic, I would have set these things in motion sooner, but we kept living in the belief that there would be a miracle, that social distancing and masking would arrest the spread of COVID-19, and that we would go back to normal. There was talk of a new normal...there seems to always be talk of a new normal. Maybe there would have been a new normal if the United States had actually locked down, masked, and socially distanced, but that's an argument for countless threads on Facebook.

At what would turn out to be my last appointment with the psychiatrist I've had for the last few years, she suggested the possibility of electroconvulsive therapy, which might be warranted, or it might not be--I don't really know. What that conversation did do is it was the proverbial straw that broke my back. I've been dealing with a series of issues at work that made my daily life hell, and all of that was wearing on me. It was all eerily similar, though not identical, to the same set of issues that caused my crash a year and a half ago. In the few days that followed that, you could say I spiralled downward, you could say I crashed, you could say I snapped. The only clear thing that came out of it was that my mental health issues had become so severe that I decided I would be better off unemployed and broke than wired up to a machine that would literally fry my brain with electricity in the hopes that it would reset the processes responsible for mood and maybe not cause too many side effects. The procedure for ECT has evolved quite substantially over the years, and the incidence of severe side effects are much lower than they once were, but that doesn't change the fact that by doing something like this, you're entering into an unknown and it's an unknown that can't really be undone.

I had an appointment with my therapist, and he suggested that I should go out of work on leave for a couple of months, to give me time to recover. He also suggested that my psychiatrist be the one to actually put me on leave, presumably because that might be more prudent than to have a psychologist do the same thing. I'm not really sure about that, but she took me out of work last year, so it made sense to me. I called her, left a message with her office and dropped off the paperwork to start the leave process, but what happened next was utterly and completely unexpected.

She called, and was angry. She spent what might have been twenty minutes scolding me over the phone. She made it evident that she didn't remember the details of the alterations to what she had prescribed me over the past year, which isn't too surprising since she probably has more patients than it would be feasible to remember. The bigger problem was that she also made it obvious that she hadn't reviewed her notes prior to calling me, and as she dug through them while I was on the phone with her, that she hadn't even recorded my history correctly. I'm not at the top of my game right now--my thought process is clearly running slower than normal. I tried to respond. I tried to figure out what she wanted to do to treat me better, to fix this problem. She got it in her head that I was against psychotropic drugs, and she was not going to let me change that opinion of hers. I haven't had any bad side effects to adderall, and I've remained on that, but she made it very clear that increasing that drug would not help my depression, and then went off on this tangent that she apparently believed that I demanded to get off of my antidepressant against her advice. The reality is that she supported my gradual taper off of wellbutrin earlier this year, and also when I stopped it entirely. In retrospect, that phone conversation should have begun and ended with a statement something like "It was a mistake to get off Wellbutrin, let's put you back on that." Instead, she spouted off that I should double my dose of adderall, taking me up to the daily maximum, and wouldn't respond about why that was directly contradictory to what she just said. She seemed to have forgotten that she said I should be on antidepressant, so I asked about that. She hesitated. She was angry. I still don't understand why, but eventually told me to resume a low dose of wellbutrin. I hung up the phone and didn't know what to make of all of this.

The next day, it settled in how fucked up that encounter actually was. Wildly inappropriate? Yes. Unethical? Perhaps. Rude and unsettling? Without a doubt. The only thing that made sense to me was that she no longer wants to treat me as a patient, and instead of just saying that, she concocted this story of me being a non-compliant patient. Going forward, her attitude basically said that she wasn't going to try anymore, and I came to the conclusion that any treatment I got from her would never again be what is best for me as a patient. It would never be her expertise in the field that she works in guiding her decisions with information provided to her by me about how I'm doing to help her make those decisions. She actually screamed at me "What do you want to do?" at one point on the phone, in relation to trying to determine what drugs are working and what drugs are not.

I effectively fired her. I asked her office to pair me with another psychiatrist, and I don't yet have a new doctor as a result of that, but having a bad psychiatrist is often worse than having no psychiatrist at all. In the meantime, I've tried to piece together this whole mess, and I've decided that I won't bump up the adderall--she contradicted herself, and anything that came out of that phone call has to be treated as suspicious. I happen to know that adderall in high doses can actually exacerbate or even cause depression, which is not a risk I want to take. I will have to work that out with my new psychiatrist, whoever that is and whenever I can get in to see them, which is weeks away, if not months. Hopefully, I will find a way to bridge that gap, however long it may be due to increasing demand in the field of mental health these days.

None of this is a "new normal" and nobody should be in the position that I'm in. This isn't about accepting the reality of the pandemic--this is about not being able to cope with my life in the context of the pandemic. The idea that we can all suddenly start working from home and be locked down with minimal interaction with others and not have it impact the quality of our work, the timeliness of our work, or the severity of difficulty we have in dealing with opposition is laughable. The idea that society can somehow go on normally without normal support structures in place, and without normal activities is preposterous. We all need to admit that this is just fucking abnormal.

Your kids may be unhappy about having to learn remotely, and I'm sorry. I know it sucks. They may hate it, and they may start crying, or they may have a temper tantrum about it. Let them. They need to express their emotions, and so do you. No one wants to be where I'm at right now, so talk about it, and learn what the signs are for a more serious problem, and please get professional help if needed. If it does get bad, earlier treatment is better than allowing whatever those issues are to pile up--you don't want to snap, and you don't want to be on a downward spiral.

My marriage, my work, and my friendships are all suffering now, and I'm sorry. I can only hope that people can find a way to forgive me.

My life as a scientist

We're at a rather strange place in American society--I don't need to belabor recent current events, but the idea that any of us can be in the kind of physical shape we have been in the past has fallen by the wayside in the midst of this pandemic, as it should.  The primary goal everyone should have at this point is getting through the pandemic as safe and as healthy as they possibly can.  So, my blog post today isn't about triathlon or exercise--I'm out of shape, but I'm doing what I can to limit how out of shape I am.  Today, however, I'm writing about the pandemic.

I watch what's happening and live through what's happening with my own unique perspective of this time, out of what must be countless unique perspectives from everyone else in the world.  I think we all have something valuable to add to this discussion. I'm a scientist. I live almost exactly on the border between a very liberally-biased LA County and a very conservatively-biased Orange County, in the middle of what is one of several hot spots of this pandemic in our nation.

I had a discussion this week that centered around the concept that the ideals that precipitated the birth of our nation are potentially going to be the things that cause the unraveling of our nation.  We were born a nation of people that fled from an oppressive government.  Our constitution contains wording that is meant to keep that kind of oppression in check, even if it is imperfect in preventing it entirely. We are a nation of citizens that is taught to question authority, in particular when that authority creates a situation that puts our freedoms at risk.

When looked at it in this context, it's fairly easy to see how a story that COVID-19 is a hoax gained a foothold, and the way our local and state governments are reacting to it is rooted in oppression and governmental overreach, and that became an accepted storyline for people to advance.  They were trained to question heavy handed edicts from government.  They were trained to stand up and voice their opinions when their freedoms were being taken away.  They were trained to scream bloody murder when what went along with the government's actions resulted in taking away their livelihoods. They were trained to think for themselves, and that is not a bad thing.

From when I was very young, I gravitated towards math and science, and ultimately spent my formal education in aerospace engineering, and went on to spend 20+ years (and counting) of my career working as an astrodynamicist.  I spent my younger years learning about the scientific method, studying what giants who had come before me had discovered, and enthralled by the knowledge of the universe.  While my degrees are not in virology, or public health, or any form of medicine for that matter, one of the things that binds the scientific community together is a deep respect for how the process works across all of our fields.

We all learned early on that nothing is certain.  The great truths are things that are theories, and those theories evolve over time, when more evidence is discovered that either bolsters the theory or casts doubt on it.  That great story that we all learned about Sir Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree and discovering gravity led to an entire branch of science referred to as Newtonian Physics.  Years later when we got a little older in school, we learned about Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, and how that theory actually pokes holes in Newton's work, but only for specific scenarios.  The great revelation you're supposed to have when learning this is not about the details of either Newton's work on gravity or Einstein's work on relativity, but how even theories that are well accepted and assumed to be facts of the universe may have to evolve.  There's no shame in that.  Nobody discredits Newton for not discovering what Einstein did.  It was simply more information.  We know that modifications to Newtonian physics have to be made when objects approach the speed of light, but Newton's equations are still very much in use for everyday scenarios.  If you need to predict the path of Mercury around the sun, relativity matters because Mercury is going really damn fast.  If you want to predict the path of Earth around the Sun, it doesn't really, so Newton's laws apply.  It's just a modification to a really robust theory.

I grabbed a few texts for reference while
working from home during lockdown.  They
really don't have any relevance to this post, but
 the book by Prussing and Conway has a really
cool word in it:  syzygy.  Look it up, use it at
brunch, if we can ever go to brunch again.

In this process of becoming a scientist, you read...a lot.  Over time, you become comfortable with never knowing for sure.  You learn that the most important thing you can do is to never have a preconceived conclusion that you're looking for evidence to support.  You learn to treat all of the evidence equally.  You learn to revise your conclusions based on the evidence, and you learn to accept it if you thought you were right but you weren't, because it isn't about who's right and who's wrong. It's about finding the solution, and there is no greater impediment to a solution than an arrogant scientist who can never be wrong.

Over the course of a lifetime, you also become skilled at reading and understanding work you are unfamiliar with, and applying what you do know to the context of those topics. My topic-specific knowledge of what's important about the Earth's geopotential for determining the path of satellites really doesn't apply to the pandemic, just as my doctor's topic-specific knowledge of how my kidneys function doesn't apply to me writing software for my job.  But members of either of those professions would certainly be adept at determining what's important in studying a problem.  They can certainly tell when things are flawed, when scientists created a study with an invalid set of assumptions, or when ideas are just ideas, and they are not bolstered by evidence.

As scientists, we're all comfortable with the idea that things have to change as you learn more about them.  Perhaps that's why the evolving guidance on face coverings for limiting disease transmission doesn't seem at all shocking to us.  Scientists sometimes get things wrong, and sometimes they get things just not quite right, which is what is happening with these face coverings. At the start of the pandemic, the general public believed that if you didn't wear a face covering at all times, you would most certainly encounter the virus that causes COVID-19 and be infected by it.  But the guidelines that were issued were that masks were not effective at preventing you from getting infected, unless the mask has a highly effective filter (an N95).  As time went on, this guidance altered to reflect the situation at the time and the growing body of knowledge on the topic, which is that in geographic regions that face coverings were required to be worn at all times had lower incidences of viral spread, and were more successful at arresting their outbreaks.  The guidelines in the United States changed from no recommendation for a mask to a recommendation to wear one.  However, with a cloth face mask, air leaks out of the edges toward your ears and toward your eyes and nose.  Anyone who puts one on knows immediately that all of the air they're breathing outward does not pass through this mask.  They also know that all of the air they're breathing in doesn't pass through it.  "Mask Deniers" latch on to these things as "proof" that masks don't work.

It would be really easy to say that:  "Masks don't work. I breathed in air and it didn't go through the mask.  Next."  But that's not at all where this story ends.

The problem is that what it takes to be infected by a virus is much more complicated than having to inhale one copy of that virus. Because of the way the human body works (because of things that are way the fuck over my head), it takes a certain amount of virus to infect someone, and that amount of virus has to enter the individual within a certain amount of time for it to accumulate enough to infect a single cell, and then enough to cause a person to be infected.  Mask wearing doesn't prevent all the virus from reaching you.  It reduces it, and based on the science and the observations, it reduces it enough to prevent a lot of infections. 

Masks reduce the amount of virus reaching a healthy individual by a number of mechanisms starting with a very straightforward, "This spitty-talking person no longer has a path that his saliva can directly enter my mouth when he's talking to me."  Additionally, masks on infected people reduce the amount of droplets they project when exhaling, causing them to either be caught by the mask, or simply drop to the ground more quickly because their velocity is reduced by the mask. Most significantly, it is now believed that the primary mechanism of transmission for COVID is through inhaled aerosolized particles, which are simply smaller droplets that float in the air longer.  When an infected person wears a mask, the barrier causes the air to collect at their face for a longer period of time and more of those droplets fall out of the air rather than being spewed into the air an uninfected person might breathe.  Aerosolized particles still happen--they just happen less.  Masks on uninfected people reduce their chances of becoming infected, but they are far from perfect.  Because of aerosolized virus, and the fact that the masks are not effective at removing aerosolized virus as you breath it in, spending time in an enclosed room with an infected person may result in an infection, regardless of whether those peoples are using masks.  Give it enough time, with two people breathing the same air, and eventually the uninfected person is going to inhale enough of the aerosolized partices that were not trapped in the infected persons mask.  This is why being outdoors is preferable--the aerosolized virus can't build up, but inside, there isn't ventilation to change out this air, at least not anything near the ventilation that occurs from being outdoors with even the slightest breeze.

Wear a mask.  Have fun with it.
Make a statement.

I've gotten used to modifying my understanding over time, and adapting it to new information.  I can completely understand how people might get really pissed off over the changing mask recommendations from the government and simply declare that this is a bullshit governmental overreach that's forcing them to do something that doesn't work.

However, it does work, and you should do it.  It's just that the science about masks evolved based on the fact that countries like China, Germany, and many other nations that required them early on successfully reversed their outbreaks.  Scientists didn't blindly accept these things and push them forward.  They understood the mechanisms that leaky cloth masks actually do remove virus from the air, and the real world results in those countries back up the understanding of those mechanisms.

I'd like to understand why people are so against this simple step, but at the same time, I get it that when people scream at me, "The virus is a hoax," that they're saying something much larger than calling a disease a hoax--they're saying they're fed up to the point that they won't entertain the possiility of a modification to their belief.

That's the real problem that we have.  People need to seek to understand.  I do it every day.  I believe our experts--our virologists, our epidemiologists, our frontline health care workers.  I'm sorry, but I do not believe the mask-denying guy the other day who said "The virus faithful are strong in their conviction" and "Throw away your mask and live life."  These are the words that immediately put you into the bucket of "conspiracy theorist" and "science denier."  Don't be that person.

Though, if you can back those words up with facts and data, as well as a valid theory, my ears and eyes are wide open.

Hugs

It's now been over 12 weeks since I spiked a fever and then spent 2 weeks laid up in bed hacking up all sorts of crap until my lungs finally cleared. I returned to work for 3 hours before I got sent home to work from there until the danger of this pandemic subsided.

I'm not dealing with it well.

There is no doubt in my mind that I've lost all sense of what it means to be human, and what it means to live your life.  We all knew that this was going to be inconvenient.  We knew that there were going to be sacrifices that would make life more difficult for a period of time.

What we didn't know was exactly how nebulous that timeframe would be.  Let's face it--after a couple of weeks of writhing in agony while dealing with a fever, working from home for a couple of weeks, or even a month or two was a welcome change.  Now, that time has turned into an eternity with no firm end date in sight.  That's probably the hardest part of this to deal with.

The other hard part is that there is no joy.

My days have turned into a series of chores that bring me no joy.  I wake up.  I eat, not because I enjoy eating, but because I know that if I don't eat, I'm going to be distracted and tired, and even more run down than if I do eat.  I've tried working out in the morning before work.  I've tried working out at lunch.  I've tried working out in the evening.

I just don't fucking care anymore.

It brings me no joy.  With the city pools closed down, I've tried swimming in open water.  It is not the same, even once I got past the fact that I can't see my fingers in the murky water here.  It simply doesn't bring the same feelings of solace that a well done workout in a pool does.  Maybe it's the constant fear of death.  Maybe it's the constant fear of sewage in the water, or the fish, or just drowning for no good reason.  Maybe it's the constant fear that I'm not far enough away from whoever is next to me, or in front or behind me.  Maybe it's the fear that I'm going to die and nobody's going to give a crap.

Maybe it's my job.

I can't really talk about my job here.  Whatever.  You probably don't need those details to conclude that it's my job.

I miss hugs.

Maybe it's the lack of hugs.  It's the lack of close contact.  Zoom calls are frustrating, but necessary.  I'm uncomfortable staring at people on a screen, so I look away a lot.  I miss out on any of the body language that might be present there.  It's just gone.  Zoom calls are to friendships what porn is to romantic relationships.

I am simply empty, in need of a hug.

IGLA 2020 in Melbourne is here!

Just my travel companion reminding me to pack my swim stuff

I haven’t been writing very much. On some level, the heavy dosages of drugs I was on to fix myself following last year’s breakdown and deal with the stresses of returning to work when I hadn’t quite recovered, seemed to have killed off any sort of creative capability I might have had, and anytime I sat down to write would turn into this horrible, mechanically dry, SAT-passage-like event. Would you like a multiple choice question following this paragraph, complete with answers that make you wonder what the hell you just read?

Bondi Beach and the path are beautful.  Go there.

I’m off on an amazing vacation now, coupled with a swim meet in Melbourne. IGLA is here in February for a summer down under, and I’m looking forward to getting up and competing again, and having a little fun doing some races. It’s a hard time of year to be in shape, since it comes on the heels of the holiday break, in the middle of an upturn in work at my job, and at a time when I felt like I needed a little change from the long distance work I’d been doing, and I will be doing (a lot of) in preparation for multi-sport worlds in September this year.

So I entered the sprints, which is a bit of a double-edged sword for me. Previously in my life as a masters swimmer, I have steered away from any and all things having to do with the events I’m swimming this weekend. The risk of comparison to my former self as a swimmer in high school and college was too great, but I think I’ve gotten past that. It’s too easy to think about what my best times were back then, and be disappointed about the large chasm of difference between that and what I’m capable of now, but the reward for getting past that bit of “stuck-in-my-headness” is so much more important. I can’t swim a hundred fly for crap anymore, and that’s ok. Maybe it’s because of the multiple abdominal surgeries I had a decade ago—maybe it’s because the focus on my training has been about very long events, taking hours instead of minutes—maybe it’s because I just don’t have the time to put the hours in the pool that I once did—or maybe none of that matters.

Loved the Opera House salt and pepper shakers!

I’ve joked about how, since I’m not in very good shape right now, I entered the sprints because “If things are going badly, at least they’re only going to go badly for a short period of time.” I suppose that’s not even what it’s about. It’s about separating performance from satisfaction. I can get up, swim hard and have fun, and it doesn’t matter what the clock says, or what the place says, as long as I can enjoy the day.

I often wish I were better at doing this, at soaking in the moments of life for what they are, as opposed to what the preprogrammed agenda says they should be. It doesn’t stop here. It doesn’t stop when I get done with this meet that I’m now swimming off events that were previously best events. It’s the same thing when I get in to the 6 hour bike rides I will be doing to get ready for worlds in the fall. It’s the same thing when I’m buried in a quagmire of engineering hell to fix one problem after another at work. It’s all about letting myself love what I’m doing just because. It’s about letting myself love myself.