2024-08-30 (Friday) — MRI Menu

It’s been a rough day.

This morning went down to the creek to think and what not. I spent some time listening to that pastor’s book… High Road Leadership.

Good stuff.

Felt like I would give it a go to try and talk to God again. Tried and… struggled to focus.

An hour later I was in the middle of the darkness… Super bad. A darkness where even the anger is gone, and it’s just sort of an apathetic hopelessness.

I’m so tired of trying, only to have things be worse.

I’ve lost all confidence that the efforts that I make will make any difference whatsoever.

My mom stopped by, bringing a bunch of documents to burn. Easier to burn than to shred.

We talked for a bit, and I told her that I don’t think I’m up for going on this trip we were going to go on.

I’m just totally flooded and overwhelmed all the time.

I guess I’m lucky that I am at a place right now where I don’t have to work because I’m just about non-functional.

I make little teeny tiny bits of progress. I have all these things on my to-do list that need to get done, and I just… It’s an ordeal just to get anything done, even the tiny things.

One of my brothers called, and I chatted with him for almost 2 hours. Grateful for him.

Then I talked to my other brother for about an hour.

Fed a bunch of Twizzlers to the fish in the creek.

The big species didn’t like it, but the other species, the one that’s the overwhelming majority of the fish, went to town. 🙃

I did finally get some pictures taken of my electric guitar and amplifier. Still haven’t listed them for sale, but at least I got pictures taken. I also called up the different equipment places, ordering parts for my Komatsu mini excavator and going to the bobcat dealer in Rogers and buying the seals that I found were missing when I rebuilt the hydraulic tilt bucket cylinder.

That was pretty much the only progress I made on anything important.

I started feeling a bit better by the end of the day, reconsidering going on that trip again.

Oh, one more important thing that I was able to get done, sort of related to the trip… I texted a little bit back and forth with one of my family members who’s a doctor, and he suggested that instead of getting x-rays for my back, that I just go get MRIs again.

There’s a company in Utah that does them for 400 bucks a pop–no doctor referral or authorization required. You can just walk in or go online and schedule an MRI of x place on your body.

I’ve actually considered starting a similar kind of business. Get rid of all the medical bureaucracy and ridiculous government crap, and you can drop the price of imaging services by 90%.

One of my brothers has used them before.

So I called them to learn a little bit about it, specifically wanting to know what machines they use, so that I was making sure that the equipment they use was capable of providing good imaging, and I think it is.

They’ve got three different kinds of machines, depending on which office you go to. St George has the open style that claustrophobic people can handle. Those don’t give as good of images as closed machines do. The rest of the locations, Farmington, Murray, and Linden, all have closed machines. The Murray one uses a Siemens Espree 1.5T. And the other two use a Philips brand, also a 1.5T.

It’s kind of challenging to find reviews and compare and contrast data for MRI equipment, but from what I can tell, I think the Siemens might be the better choice, so I’ll probably go to the Murray clinic if things do indeed go that direction, and I’m leaning that way, even if my insurance doesn’t even cover it.

I think the way to overhaul medical Care in the United States is both from the top down and from the bottom up. Top down, working on legislation and what not to remove some of the ridiculousness from it. And bottom up, doing everything we can to provide great service at Great prices with great technology as cheaply as possible.

I did a little bit of research into another one of the things that I want to do with my non-profit, And was happy to run into at least one organization that’s doing similar things to what I want to see happen, creating open source projects for people to design medical equipment, specifically MRI equipment in this case, that is super duper cheap, so MRI machines don’t cost absolutely massive dollars. Even a refurbished one is like a half a million dollars.

Anyway, that’s one of the things that I want to do. I bought a domain name years ago called wikiinnovations with the idea of it being a place where people could get together online and collaborate to improve society with open source ideas.

I’m pretty sure I let that domain name lapse and stopped paying for it, so somebody else probably owns it now. But just one more of those things that I want to do with the non-profit stuff.

So that was one more piece of little progress that I made, learning about and gathering information about the MRI stuff to try and get my spine issues at least diagnosed.

Time for gratitude.

I’m… I’m not looking forward to trying to figure out things that I’m grateful for, but it’s a good exercise. Positive outlook is only going to come from positive thinking. It’s mechanical and forced right now, but I am a believer in the “fake it till you make it” principle.

• I’m grateful to have good relationships with my brothers.
• I’m grateful for their kindness and patience and goodness.
• I’m grateful for my wonderful mother, who has shed far too many tears on my behalf, deeply pained as she sees me in pain.
• I’m grateful for so many great people in my life. So many wonderful family members, and a few good friends.
• I’m grateful that it was a little cooler today.
• And I’m grateful that even though ticks can survive underwater for days, it appears that the little baby ticks can’t, as I have noticed multiple times coming out of the creek that the ticks that were on me that I didn’t know about are dead. Or maybe they’re not dead. Maybe they’re just quickly going into their little underwater hibernation mode or whatever. Either way, they’re not actively trying to suck my blood.

Well, there you go. I’m going to call it a day.

Lift the world.

~ stephen