u/Leighgion

Been posting about my progress, but rather than link to the old posts I'm just recapping.

I've had a patch on my neck that's been on again, off again for near twenty years. There was a brief period when I was clear, but then it came back.

Around a month ago, I had the worst flare I'd ever had. Sprouted a second patch on my neck with pustules and a palm-sized patch on my waist. I ended up clawing the pustules raw and they got yellow crusty awful infected and even the old patch got really scaly again. Hypochlorous acid gradually helped the old patch, but was not enough to get it under control. I went to the doctor at my wife's insistence.

After one course of antibiotics combined with hypochlorous acid and vaseline, the infection cleared, the raw skin healed and overall my neck got much better.

Followup visit to the doctor got me prescribed a second course of a different antibiotic and steroid cream. I was specifically ordered not to use anything else topically except the most basic of moisturizer with no perfume. No HOCl. I reluctantly complied.

It's about a week into the second round and, knock on wood, things look really good. The patch on my waist has mostly cleared and my neck is better than at any other time. Not only is there currently no scaling or cracking, the texture of the skin is starting to feel more natural, if the skin barrier has actually started to recover, which hasn't happened since my skin cleared for a time like around fifteen years ago. It's still discolored and kind of wrinkly, but damn, so much better.

Let's see how things go when I'm off the medications.

Temperatures weren’t even that extreme, but the kid bit off more than he could chew.

Europe is one of the fastest warming places on the planet. I have lived in the Spanish capital for over a decade. These are some of my observations on how things are developing and how resilience the city and people are.

Madrid Heat Waves Mostly Break Length Records, not Temp Peaks

An interesting phenomenon specifically in Madrid is even during the peak of the worst heatwaves in recent years, the highs in the city have not actually exceeded the highest temperatures the city can see. Where we break records is for the number of days these temperatures are sustained. I remember a couple years ago a ten-day streak of 38-39ºC (100-102ºF) highs and 22-25ºC (71-77ºF) lows. It royally sucked, but the temperature wasn’t something we weren’t familiar with or equipped to handle. I’m very grateful for this and knock on wood, hope we don’t suddenly get slugged with 45ºC/113ºF like poor Cordoba.

Traditional Passive Cooling Architecture Continues to Protect Us at Zero Energy Cost

When Spain developed, air conditioning was a niche luxury that only a tiny few might have access to. As a consequence, the architectural designs and materials were all planned around being able to keep people safe in peak summers where the temperatures regularly would soar above 40ºC/104ºF and the sun would beat down from cloudless skies.

Some major points:

1. Construction is mostly very thick concrete, stone or masonry. A ton of thermal mass that doesn’t heat quickly.
2. Buildings in the city are stacked right up against each other and many residential streets are narrow, one-lane affairs. This combination severely limits the amount of direct sun exposure.
3. The standard apartment building in Spain is a hollowed out square or rectangle with an empty shaft in the center that goes from the ground level to open air. While this reduces square footage in the apartments, it allows another side to have exterior windows to provide cross ventilation.
4. Almost every significant residential window in Spain is equipped with integrated exterior roller shutters so sun can be blocked out at will and it never touches the window glass.
5. Floor layout of apartments is generally long and narrow, which limits the amount of natural light that comes in. It makes for darker apartments, but in the middle of a Mediterranean summer, this is a feature, not a bug.

Not every building is created equal, so some homes are much better protected than others, but the cumulative effect is that most Spanish citizens are able to ride out high summer temps without resorting to mechanized cooling because, provided they’re not members of more vulnerable groups, even if it’s 38ºC/100ºF outside, it could only be 27ºC/80ºF inside. Not fun, but safe, especially if you got a cold drink in hand.

Americans and East Asians often shake their heads at how low residential air conditioning penetration is in Europe. I believe in Spain it’s only around 40%. Even among those who have AC at home, I joke that it’s the national pastime to resist turning on the AC because you don’t want to pay the increased power bill. The thing I think people miss is that the Spanish can afford to be this stubborn and frugal because even in peak summer, most of them are still pretty safe without the AC. While there are certainly many more excess deaths during heatwaves and there’s room for improvement, imagine how well a city like Phoenix would survive with only 40% of homes with AC.

Evaporative Cooling is Viable

While by no means broadly popular, Madrid’s bone-dry climate makes evap cooling very practical and effective. You see basic unit for sale in department stores, there’s an active secondhand market and you see small and large businesses use more commercial-sized portable units for cost-effective cooling. Merca Madrid, the biggest wholesale fish market in the country, converted completely to industrial-level evaporative cooling and the management says since then, they get some complaints it’s too cold during the summer, which they consider a mark of how successful the conversion has been. Regulars here know I swear by my portable evap coolers at home.

Green Spaces are Available

Madrid does not have the most hospitable climate or soil for vegetation, but the city has a very respectable amount of trees and green spaces everywhere except in the heart of downtown.

Public Water Sources are a Thing

While not universal, it’s fairly common in Madrid parks and playgrounds to see a free water tap the public can use to get drinking water or refresh themselves. Children make liberal use of them in the summer to fill squirt guns and water balloons.

The city can certainly do a lot more, but as places go, Madrid is not badly equipped to face rising temperatures.

My first round of antibiotics for crusty infected eczema went well. Combining that with hypochlorous acid healed up the damaged patch almost completely in around a week. Just at the end of that round, we went to the regular doctor for a followup at my wife’s insistence as I still have plenty of discoloration and scale.

I was prescribed another, different antibiotic plus a steroid cream. My wife, who has no faith in my homemade hypochlorous acid and is inclined to blame it for whatever, brought up it at the doctor. The doctor took a very conservative stance and told me not to put anything on my patches except the steroid cream and maybe a very neutral cream with no fragrance. Vaseline was specifically ruled out. I was very skeptical, but I promised my wife I’d go along with these directions for the ten day course.

It’s around day three now. Things have improved, no mistake, but itch management is much more difficult and I am not at all convinced I wouldn’t be getting better faster with supplemental use of HOCl, but a promise is a promise. Wish me luck that it doesn’t all rebound and blow up in my face the moment I finish the course of antibiotics and steroid cream.

Around a week into the lovely European heat wave.

It's currently 33ºC/91ºF but was 35/95 earlier. RH 21%. "Only" 11ºC/19.8ºF above seasonal average.

The room I'm in, with blinds drawn and western exposure, is around 27ºC/80ºF.

My crappiest evaporative cooler is by my desk and pushing out 24.5ºC/76ºF air, which isn't stellar, but good enough for my personal cooling.

One of the jumbo coolers is keeping the wife and second born comfortable with a stream of 23.3ºC/74ºF air.

These numbers may not sound impressive, but a stream of moving air, they keep things very comfortable.

Continuous spray fine mist bottles (kind used by hairdressers) are my new best friend for cooling in the field. I'll try to take pictures and post separately about that, but it's been low key revolutionary for surviving being outside for extended periods of time.

I've had a very bad time with my eczema the past few weeks. It's been worse than it's been in twenty years. I sprouted a secondary patch on my neck next to the original patch behind my ear. The new spot had pustules and another patch appeared on my waist where I never had it before.

Hypochlorous acid and borrowing my daughter's steroid cream helped a little, but the pustules stubbornly kept coming back. Mostly they didn't itch, but when the itch came it was savage. I ended up clawing the pustules raw, and that area turned into a raw, oozing, yellow encrusted infected mess while the original patch got scaled and cracked again. Hypochlorous acid alone wasn't doing the job, which kind of made sense since it can only attack bacteria on the surface of the skin.

I caved and went to the doctor, who took one look at me and said he was referring me to a dermatologist but in the meantime wrote me a prescription for oral cloxacilina, a modified penicillin antibiotic. It's a hard thing for me to give in and take antibiotics, but it was time. My own methods weren't working.

It's been two days on the pills, three times a day. I put Vaseline on to protect it while I sleep and during the day I spray liberally with hypochlorous acid as it helps keep the itch down and promotes healing. The 150ppm HOCl I was using before burned the raw patch, but mixing down to 100ppm solved that. Over those two days, the scale and crusts fell away, a flatter scab formed over the clawed out pustule spot and the old patch is now mostly healed with skin that's still discolored, but much smoother.

My waist isn't improved much, but I can't complain as isn't current at its worst, and it doesn't both me as much.

I believe the antibiotic is beating down an infection, which is allowing the hypochlorous acid to promote healing of the damage.

Stay strong, folks. Bad this month has been, I know a lot of you have it much worse than me.

There's a notable number of new visitors to this subreddit all asking variations of the same question:

"Why do I feel so sick after being out when it was hot?"

The answer has been out there for years, but the "hot is good" culture doesn't wish to accept it: Too much heat harms us, that harm can be long-term, and it takes less heat to do it than we like to believe.

I don't know how, but as a people, we need to let go of the notion that "summer is good, summer is hot and sunny, therefore hot and sunny is always good because it's like summer, which is good."

Spain here, tucked under our heat dome along with the rest of the majority of Europe.

Last week highs were no more 22ºC/71ºF.

This week they've shot up to 34ºC/93ºF.

I don't think I've ever deployed the Swamp Cooler Army in such a short time. While I already had a couple units out, they weren't in full use, but one day I got home and immediately went to storage to pull out the last of the big three. While it's not quite critical to run them at night yet, they're standing by.

Thanks to classic Spanish architecture, interior temps are safe and manageable even without mechanized cooling, but the car is in the shop so I'm taking daily twenty minute walks to get my kids to their activities. This is after a subway ride and while the subway cars are (mostly) air conditioned, the majority of stations are not.

Continuous spray bottles are proving their worth in the field since this place is dry as a bone. These are the style used by hairdressers that deliver a very fine mist at a very good volume and rate and because of the more complex mechanism, pumping the lever builds up pressure so it doesn't only spray while you're pulling the trigger. You can lay down a light layer of cooling mist on yourself almost like be spray can of paint.

Stay safe out there, fellow heat domers.

My daughter is training seriously as a dancer, but despite the objective seriousness, costume budgets are, shall we say, sub-optimal. Tomorrow she's taking part in a public performance and the provided leotard is way too big. Not for the first time, my wife is doing her best to damage control the costume, but capable and determined a lady as she is, the wife has experience sewing by hand, not so much by machine, and this is really a job for a machine.

So, I was off to the storage room to bust out the sewing machine we bought a couple years ago, but never got to do a lot with and don't have the space to keep in place. It was already past midnight and my wife told me I had to be the one to refresh and setup the sewing machine because she had no brainpower left.

Fortunately, I actually have sewing machine experience as my mother had a sewing machine in very active use and as a boy I was interested in the gadget and my mom was happy to show me how to operate it.

That was more than thirty-five years ago, and I don't think I've actually sat down to do machine sewing for over thirty.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of what I learned from my mother remained topical on this much more modern sewing machine. I had to supplement with the manual for details, but the bobbins worked 100% the same way, just with a different hatch design and threading the machine was only slightly different. I had the thing up and running in less than fifteen minutes and that including winding a fresh bobbin with the right colored thread.

My mom's no longer with us, but I get a warm feeling that her passed down knowledge is helping out her grandchild.

So dads, it's good to learn all kinds of shit, because you never know when that shit is going to come up and save the day.

EDIT: I wasn’t clear, but my wife did the actual sewing. She might not know sewing machines well, but she knows dance costuming way better than me. What she wasn’t up to was setting up the machine.

My girls are 8 and 11. They love their weekly movie night, but we’ve gone through almost the obvious things and they don’t have much specific on their minds lately. Last Friday, I decided to show them “The Day After Tomorrow,” because they handle a variety of more mature movies (last week was “Interstellar” and they loved it) and I thought they should see at least one disaster flick, which is one sub genre we haven’t covered.

They enjoyed things well enough, but the standout was later my 8yo said to me that the girl who got cut should have put hypochlorous acid on her cut, then she wouldn’t have gotten sick. I laughed and said she was absolutely right (the kids know hypochlorous acid very well as I make it at home). It sparked a good conversation about how even without hypochlorous acid on hand, that the NYC library would have had first aid kits with other antiseptics.

So proud.

It's been two months since my last update.

Since then, probably due to stress on the job front, I've had a major patch of eczema develop on my left side at my waist and my secondary pustule-ridden neck patch fought me very stubbornly. I had crusty weepiness like I never had before. Even my main patch, which was showing improvement under 200ppm hypochlorous acid spray, kept trying to fight back and get worse.

Things are finally looking up in general. This is what it took:

1. Steroid cream. I don't like it, but I had to give in and borrow some of my daughter's prescription 0.1% methylprednisolone aceponate (MPA) cream. A few days of daily application helped my primary patch, didn't help with the pustules so much, but is now helping the patch on my waist. Fingers crossed the improvement on my waist continues. It's been around four days.

2. Hypochlrous acid bath. You may have heard of bleach baths. I went for a hypochlrous acid bath, which is much easier on the skin. It was something I had thought of but not imagined I'd need, but I decided to try because it'd allow me an easy way to expose my patches to HOCl for a more extended time than is possible with sprays, which dry off quickly. I used NaDCC tablets which, full disclosure, were sold as a cleaning product, but chemically they aren't different than water purification tablets and all my research indicated the traces of cynaeauric acid from the tablets was perfectly safe, so I went for it as it was the fastest and cheapest way to get enough HOCl for a shallow bath. I didn't very strictly measure the HOCl concentration I was getting, but did some rough napkin math and found the max was probably 100ppm, but in practice probably much lower as the tub probably contained a good amount of alkaline residue that would partially neutralize the HOCl. I did do one test strip and got around 50ppm once, but that was after I'd already been in the tub, so I'm sure it was higher at first.

3. Calamine lotion. I used this on my pustules to help dry them out. The one I bought was not ideal as it had too many additional ingredients, but it seemed to work.

4. Hypochlorous acid spray. Kept it up between everything else.

5. Sunflower oil balm. My own stuff that's only organic sunflower oil and beeswax at a 3:2 ratio. I use it as an occlusive moisturizer after the HOCl.

I only started the bathes and calamine around a week ago, but the results have been rapid. My pustules have shrank, mostly healed over and the crust & most of the scabbing is gone. The calamine I only used for around four days. My waist patches are smoothing out and seem to be in what's hopefully a phase of healing peeling.

Wish me luck. I really want to get back to at least just having an ugly, but mostly flat patch on my neck that needs regular moisturizing.

Our personal sense of grossness (SoG) has value. Ultimately this sense is more what drives our hygiene habits more than science as a visceral feeling is an easier guide than constantly recalling the details of how different pathogens work in different circumstances. When SoG and science are mostly aligned, then things work out okay.

When misalignment happens and we don't check ourselves though, the problems begin.

I don't have to tell anybody where there's a lot of cases of SoG becoming too liberal and we end up with people who don't ever wash their towels or don't wash their hands after wiping. That's a problem I think that's well understood.

Less appreciated though, are the cases where SoG is in overdrive, which creates its own set of different, but no less serious, problems. Unfortunately though, the so-called self-proclaimed "germophobes" are much more tolerated even as they destroy their skin biome and breed resistant bacteria by throwing quaternary ammonium-based "disinfectant" products at everything.

So please, for your health, take moments to pause and reflect on if your sense of grossness is reasonable. Too much is not better than too little.

Doom and Richards are stripped of all their special powers and equipment and dropped on opposite sides of a vacant city.

They have nothing but the clothes on their backs. Reed has his unstable molecule costume and Doom is wearing a nice suit that would be acceptable at diplomatic functions if he dressed like a normal head of state. They are told by a disembodied voice that they must battle it out and the winner will be sent home. Leaving is not possible, no matter what they might cobble up. They're trapped in the city until one wins.

Round 1) They are in Ancient Rome. Totally intact, but no people.

Round 2) The town is Tombstone, Arizona, 1881, when the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral happened. Totally intact, but no people.

Round 3) The city is modern Los Angeles, again intact but no people.

Round 4) The city is Neo Tokyo at the beginning of the events of "Akira," intact but no people.