I asked the nurse this morning for a couple Tylenol because I woke up with a headache, presumably from bingeing TV until 1:30am (bad idea, do not recommend). When she brought the Tylenol it came with my daily vitamin D pill. And I mean literally _my_ vitamin D pill, i.e., it's from a bottle of pills I brought to the hospital from home. As per hospital policy, I had to turn it over to the pharmacy yesterday so they could dispense it during my stay. Srsly.
#PanCholLiveToot

I had another blood draw this morning, fortunately with only 3 vials rather than yesterday's 7 vials. And they managed to get what they needed with just one venipuncture, so that was nice.
#PanCholLiveToot

Those of you who were with me on this journey the last time around may recall that it involves collecting stool samples. That's happening this time as well, starting today (I got a free pass yesterday). The procedure hasn't changed from last time, so if you're curious you can read what I wrote about it before, at https://federate.social/@jik/113414002326890114 or https://blog.kamens.us/2025/09/04/panchol-clinical-trial-thread-unroll/#poop .
#PanCholLiveToot

The nurses are cool about it, but I have to say it's really weird to press the call button and then when the nurse comes in say, "Here, I have some poop for you!" and hand them the equivalent of a sorbet tub with poop in it.
As the nurse was leaving the room a few minutes ago after giving me the sample container to use, she said, "Thanks for your poop!" 😜
#PanCholLiveToot

ProTip, courtesy of @msokolov in https://fosstodon.org/@msokolov/115200828334719584: If you're going into the hospital and you'll be showering while you're there, bring a big, fluffy towel with you. Hospital towels are small, scratchy, and threadbare. You will be glad to have a nice one.
Here you can see (half of) the big towel I brought with me vs. a hospital towel.
#PanCholLiveToot

Also, if you expect to be spending a lot of time in bed in the hospital, then as @Adventurer (https://sfba.social/@Adventurer/115199676231327810) and @BonehouseWasps (https://mastodon.social/@BonehouseWasps/115199929810382931) suggest, consider bringing a comfortable robe. I personally did not bring a robe because I'm spending my days up and working, not lying in the hospital bed, and for that I prefer to be dressed in real clothes.
#PanCholLiveToot

Here's a #poll that's relevant to my experience in the hospital for this clinical trial.
Which would you rather have? A week-long vacation where you eat:
#PanCholLiveToot

Personally, there are few things I truly enjoy cooking, and I dislike washing dishes, pots, and pans, so I'd pick mediocre food cooked and cleaned up by others over good food cooked and cleaned up by me. That's why despite my sniping at Sodexo in this thread for not doing such a great job of running the food service at the hospital, I'm not actually all that worked up over it. Everything they've served to me since I arrived yesterday has been edible, which is really all I need.
#PanCholLiveToot

It's worth mentioning that a lot of the things that make people perceive food as "good", e.g., salt and fat, are less healthy. It's not _impossible_ to make food that's both healthy and delicious, but it's more work, and perhaps harder still in large quantities. So it seems like food service at any hospital, which is expected to serve healthy food to a large number of people, is going to find it challenging to make the food consistently delicious.
#PanCholLiveToot

On the other hand, a wealthy friend of mine whose children were born at a hospital in Greenwich, CT, a _very_ wealthy community, told me that hospital had a tradition of serving a steak dinner to the parents after every birth, and it was a _good_ steak dinner.
So I suppose if you're the kind of hospital that caters to rich people and charges fees consistent with that, you _can_ make the food delicious.
#PanCholLiveToot

Story time… There aren't many Boston area kosher caterers, so Jews here tend to experience the same ones over and over at weddings and bar mitzvahs. My wife and I attended many affairs done by "the expensive caterer," but then we went to the wedding of a _very_ wealthy friend, and the food—from that same caterer—was leaps and bounds better than ever before. It turned out there was a "how much it costs absolutely does not matter" level of quality we'd been totally unaware of.
#PanCholLiveToot

I mentioned earlier that when they took my blood pressure during intake it was quite high. That was also true when they took it again yesterday.
Furthermore, several times in the past week I've had unexplained minor chest pains.
I thought this was totally out-of-the-blue, and I was a bit worried, but I just realized what's going on.
I had a cortisone injection in my hip for the first time last Friday. It turns out they can cause elevated blood pressure for 5–7 days.
#PanCholLiveToot

They just took my daily vitals and my BP was at 120/75, a lot better than the 190/95 reading they got when I arrived on Monday! Perhaps the excess cortisone from the hip injection has finished working its way into my bloodstream.
I'm peeved the N.P. who gave me the cortisone shot didn't mention anything about it potentially elevating my blood pressure for a week.
I suppose she didn't know I'd be in the hospital three days later with people taking my BP daily. 🤷
#PanCholLiveToot

Me to room service rep: "Please tell me the total calorie count for the meal I ordered?"
Room Service: "The system doesn't tell me that."
Me: "Everyone I've ordered food from since Monday has been able to tell me. I need to know the calorie count for my meal."
RS: "Oh, I don't know how to do it. Please hold, I'm going to transfer you."
*hold music for ~a minute*
RS (same person, not transferred): gives me the calorie count for the meal
Problem solved, no harm done, but still, 🙄.
#PanCholLiveToot

They came in this morning and mopped the floor of my room and the connected bathroom. On the one hand, sure, I guess it's important to keep hospital rooms clean. On the other hand, there ain't nobody here but me, and I'm not exactly tracking in dirt from the outside, and I'm only going to be here for a week, so it seems a bit much to mop the floor while I'm here. 🤷
#PanCholLiveToot

Regarding yesterday's poll <https://federate.social/@jik/115216580243925705>, which there's still time to participate in if you haven't already 😉, I just want to say there's obviously a third option I didn't offer in the poll because everyone who doesn't _love_ cooking would probably have picked it: "good food cooked and cleaned up by others".
Indeed, my definition of a perfect vacation is a week of good food cooked and cleaned up by others.
#PanCholLiveToot

Today's adventure in computing while trapped in a hospital for a clinical trial…
My computer at home, which is also my SSH jump box and the backup server for my home network, appears to have crashed. D'oh!
I'm going to have to walk my son through rebooting it this evening, which is complicated, because I brought its keyboard with me to the hospital, and booting requires a long encryption password which is normally provided by the YubiKey that's on a chain around my neck.
#PanCholLiveToot

My #PanCholLiveToot friends, I just got some very good news!
No cholera vaccine bacteria were detected in yesterday's sample. This is good for me personally and for the #PanChol vaccine in general.
For me personally, it means there's a good chance I'll be able to go home before the weekend. If today's sample comes back clean tomorrow, then they'll probably start me on prophylactic doxycycline tomorrow and send me home Friday.
(continued)

And while I'd be happy to go home before the weekend, I'm even happier about what this might mean about the efficacy of the vaccine.
If there's no detectable vaccine bacteria in my samples, that likely means the antibodies my body created in response to the original vaccine dose I took last November successfully killed off the booster vaccine bacteria I drank on Monday.
(continued)
#PanCholLiveToot

In other words, THE VACCINE WORKED.
At least, it did for me; it's important to note that two others who preceded me through this trial phase had vaccine detected in their samples so they had to stay longer.
(Now I am wondering if COVID may have something to do with this. We know COVID damages the immune system. I've only had COVID once, but anybody else going through this trial who isn't as COVID-cautious has probably had it multiple times. Will that mess up the study? Hmm.)
#PanCholLiveToot

OK, so, with my son's help as my eyes and hands at home I've figured out why my home computer dropped off the network and fixed it so it won't happen again. This is a crossover #PanCholLiveToot / #TechIsShitDispatch post.
Apparently at some point in the last ten years, the US and EU enacted power-saving regulations for computers which essentially require them to sleep by default when no one is using them.
Because of this, Debian is configured by default to sleep after 20 minutes of idle time.
…

I'm typically logged in all the time on my computer, and I have GNOME configured never to sleep, so this isn't usually a problem. However, earlier today my GNOME session crashed (that's the first shitty tech thing), and twenty minutes later, the GDM greeter put my computer to sleep.
The second shitty aspect of this is that there's no user-friendly way to prevent this from happening. There's literally been a GNOME bug ticket open about this for 7+ years.
Ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/22
…

I dug around a bit to figure out the non-user-friendly way of preventing this from happening again. I ended up making two changes, either one of which is probably sufficient by itself, just to be extra-paranoid:
1) I modified /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults to disable sleep from the login screen.
2) I completely masked all the sleep and hybernate targets in systemd to prevent them from ever being invoked: `sudo systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target`.

I know y'all are really here to read about the bad hospital food, so…
Last night and tonight I ordered pre-packaged kosher meals instead of meals cooked by the hospital kitchen, so I could have some meat and because I wasn't interested in the entrées on the menu.
Last night's pot roast was decent, but the meat portion was too small.
Tonight's chicken dinner (pictured below) was terrible. The potatoes were disgusting, and the meat serving size was even smaller than last night's.
#PanCholLiveToot

I've been eating pre-packaged kosher meals for decades, so I can say with confidence that this is shrinkflation in action. They've dramatically reduced how much food they're putting in these meals, and I'm sure they haven't reduced the prices to match!
According to Sodexo, my meal had only 390 calories, certainly not enough for an adult. So this isn't just an economic issue, it's also a health issue.
#PanCholLiveToot

Look, I'm not saying I just ate the whole 8 ounce block of cheese I brought from home to the hospital, and I'm not saying I _didn't_ just eat the whole 8 ounce block of cheese I brought from home to the hospital, but there's an empty cheese wrapper sitting on the tray table next to me, so draw your own conclusions.
#PanCholLiveToot

One trivial and one significant update…
Trivial: Breakfast this morning was OK. I ordered a double order of pancakes and they were decent.
Significant: Yesterday's sample came back positive so I'm stuck here through Sunday. 🫤
#PanCholLiveToot

This was lunch today. "Forest mushroom pizzetta" with basil, sauce, roasted wild mushrooms, roma tomatoes, baby spinach, and shaved parmesan cheese. It's one of the weekly specials. It was GOOD.
In related news, it took until my ninth meal order, this morning, for the rep on the phone to mention, when I asked for the calorie count, that I could ask the nurse to add a flag to my chart to have calorie info printed on my meal receipts. Wish they'd told me on Monday!
#PanCholLiveToot

Today I learned, from a study doctor who stopped by to check in on me (which they do daily), that there's a separate food service menu reserved for patients who are having trouble gaining weight, e.g., people on chemo. It is _very different_ from the menu I get to order from (think high-fat, high-sugar).
I suppose I'm a little jealous, but obviously I'd rather be stuck with the regular menu than have to go through chemo. The folks on that menu have earned every delicious bite.
#PanCholLiveToot

In other news, though I'm only required to "capture" one stool sample daily, I forgot that I already did today's sample early this morning and just buzzed the nurse and tried to hand her a second collection tub. She was like, "I don't need that, you already gave us a sample today." Woops, D'oh! and all that jazz.
#PanCholLiveToot

More good #PanCholLiveToot news this morning.
Yesterday's sample was negative again, so (a) that's confirmation that the vaccine is definitely working better for me than it worked for the two people who went through the booster phase of the trial before me, and (b) me getting out of here Saturday instead of Sunday is back on the table.

Furthermore, I've just been told that even the people before me in this phase who didn't have completely negative samples DID have significantly reduced levels of bacteria compared to the previous trial phase, so all the data they're getting back so far is showing that the vaccine is at least somewhat effective for everyone. Though, of course, the sample size is still very low, so more data is needed.
#PanCholLiveToot

I am looking at the hospital food service menu trying to decide what to order for dinner tonight, and I see that the vegetarian option on the weekly menu for today is "baked lentil shepherd's pie".
I will not be fooled again: https://federate.social/users/jik/statuses/113408574762529783
But that means I still need to figure out what to order for dinner. *sigh*
#PanCholLiveToot

A few days ago when I ordered pancakes for breakfast, I asked the rep on the phone, "Do they come with syrup and butter?" and she said, "Yes, of course," and they did.
So when I ordered pancakes again this morning, I didn't mention them, and "of course" I ended up with no syrup or butter. Apparently she meant, "Yes, of course, _because you asked for them_," so maybe she should have said that.
Fortunately I had a syrup packet left over from last time. No butter though. 😞
#PanCholLiveToot

Last night I started the doxycycline I need to take for a week to purge any remaining vaccine bacteria from my system. This morning I took the second dose. Doxy can cause nausea. It didn't last night, but did this morning. Weird.
In other news, one of the study doctors just stopped by and confirmed my sample from yesterday was negative again and I'm being discharged today! Time to get dressed and pack up my stuff.
#PanCholLiveToot

Discharge paperwork completed. Door propped open for the first time since Monday means I'm free free to walk out whenever I want. Mask back on because I'm leaving my safe enclave!
#PanCholLiveToot

I was going to take a Lyft home because I didn't want to deal with my big-ass suitcase on the bus, but then I walked out the front door of the hospital and discovered it's a beautiful day, so I opted for the bus (two buses with a transfer, actually).
P.S. #GenX folks, remember how when we were growing up suitcases didn't have wheels on them? Now that's a technological advance I can support without reservations.
#PanCholLiveToot

#PrinceOllie and #Merlin greeted me at the door to inspect my suitcase and get pets, but they refused to be photogenic about it.
My son also greeted me at the door to ask if I would be resuming responsibility for Merlin's insulin and to tell me that his bedroom smoke detector is malfunctioning. He did not say hello or welcome me home. Teenagers. 🤷
#PanCholLiveToot #CatsOfMastodon #Caturday

My wife is several hours away in NH through tomorrow morning. Now that I've been discharged from the hospital, do I hop on my #motorcycle to go find her, a romantic gesture she may or may not appreciate since she presumably has already figured out how to spend the time, or stay home and see her tomorrow when she gets home?
#PanCholLiveToot