just someone trying to survive. into research and experiments. data nerd. my follows ≠ endorsement. kindness over politics.
Toronto, Ontario
Joined May 2022
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Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Do you as a #LongCovid patient experience paradoxical reactions to meds? A compromised blood brain barrier could be behind it. Another excellent thread by Dara explains why, as well as sharing her personal, scary experience with exactly this.
The 1/4 Dose "Stress Test":
What Happens When a Peripheral Med Crosses a Broken Barrier
Yesterday
🦸 I finally built up the courage to trial Midodrine for dysautonomia. I made sure I had extra home support, and because it’s fast-acting, I knew that if it went badly, it would at least be temporary. I took just a quarter of a single pill.
At first, there were small, promising glimmers:
👉 ⚡ My facial muscles were working better.
👉 🔋 I felt a moderate bump in energy.
👉 🙆♂️ I could reach over my head even while standing without immediately getting symptomatic.
When Midodrine stays strictly where it belongs, in the peripheral bloodstream, it tightens blood vessels and helps get blood back up to the heart and brain.
But for me, the bad side effects outnumbered the positives at least two to one.
The Central Nervous System Cascade:
🫗Because my Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) is hyper permeable, the drug didn't stay in my peripheral circulation.
It leaked directly into my central nervous system, triggering a severe hyper adrenergic surge:
👉 🫨 Tremors & Internal Vibrations:
An intense, systemic humming that my support person could physically feel in my chest, legs, and arms just by laying her hands on me.
👉 🔊 Sensory Overload: Hyperacusis where I could hear "everything, everywhere, all at once," paired with extreme skin sensitivity and total loss of appetite.
👉⚡ Neuropathic Spread:
My neuropathy amped up significantly and began rolling upward from my legs into my pelvis.
👉 🫀 Cardiovascular Dysregulation: My heart rate spiked dramatically while doing almost nothing to help my blood pressure.
👉 🧠 Cognitive Shutdown:
I completely lost the ability to think straight or hold a thought.
Today, the after-effects feel like I ran a marathon.
It was reminiscent of my first tilt table test with atropine, the time they had to bring out the crash cart to revive me.
Thank goodness I was cautious enough to start with a fraction of a dose.
The Biology:
Why This Proves BBB Disruption & Elevated MMP-9
🛡️Midodrine is a targeted alpha-1 adrenergic agonist. In a healthy system, an intact blood-brain barrier keeps it in the arms, legs, and torso to constrict blood vessels.
However, when you have elevated MMP-9 (matrix metalloproteinase-9), an enzyme that actively breaks down the tight junction proteins protecting the brain, that selective wall is compromised 🚪.
☝️SC2 does this. This has been shown in many studies since 2020.
When Midodrine crosses a disrupted BBB:
👉 It binds directly to central alpha-1 receptors in autonomic control centers like the brainstem.
👉 Instead of quietly tightening leg veins, it signals the brain to fire off an intense, systemic "fight-or-flight" sympathetic surge ⚡.
👉 This central activation amplifies motor tremors, spikes heart rate, and drives severe sensory and neuropathic flares.
Ironically, this trial acted as an unintended "stress test" for my central nervous system.
It directly validates my elevated MMP-9 levels: my BBB is disrupted.
It’s a clear reminder that we cannot expect peripheral vascular medications to work as designed if the barrier protecting the brain is actively leaking.
This is why tests and proper diagnostics are so very important for patients with LC.
💥We are being given medications that should NOT be crossing into the brain. Major problems can occur wit many medications. 🧠💥
#Dysautonomia
#POTS
#LongCOVID
#TestsTreatmentsNow
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Canadian internet users may soon have their data handed to US authorities, with no Canadian judge involved and no Canadian court order required.
That is the core of what Bill C-22 enables. Canada is negotiating a cross-border data-sharing agreement with the US that lets American law enforcement request information about Canadians directly from service providers, bypassing Canadian judicial oversight entirely.
And it does not stop there. C-22 also lets the Minister of Public Safety order companies to build encryption backdoors, and mandates that telecom and messaging platforms retain your metadata for up to a year, regardless of whether you are under any suspicion.
Is this not a sovereignty problem? A country that cannot protect its own citizens' digital lives from foreign law enforcement is not in control of its internet.
The bill has passed the House and is now in the Senate. The window to push back is closing fast.
If you are Canadian, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a petition. Use it please before it's too late.
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Join @Dave_it_up and I for a conversation with @dbdugger about viral persistence in long Covid.
We will discuss what parallels we can draw from HIV/AIDS and why ME/CFS conflation has been catastrophic to proper research into long COVID.
This is a follow up to this space recorded in July 26 linked below.
Come and bring your questions!
Set a reminder for my upcoming Space!
xitter.cf/i/spaces/1rGmqpy…
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
This is disturbing, and threats of violence are unacceptable.
Last night on October 24th 2026, I witnessed the man spearheading the Experimental Edogawa Protocol in Japan that costs patients upward of $60K threatening to have people skinned alive.
I awoke this morning to the tweet being deleted.
I am curious if @MaryBowdenMD requested that Kevin take the tweet down.
In any case, if it was simply "lost" nobody needs to worry, as I have preserved it for obvious reasons.
Does the Edogawa protocol in Japan work?
Data for 31 patients shows significant improvement in cognitive, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal symptoms after treatment.
IMO, this is the best treatment option available for the severely injured who have exhausted all other options.
@NIHDirector_Jay
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
This week, I received my first dose of Anktiva (N-803) for Long COVID as part of a clinical trial!
Feel free to ask me anything. I’ll be sharing updates on my progress and experience as time goes on!
@DrPatrick @Av8rLady @longcovidlabs @ImmunityBio @COVID19_disease
Smelling something putrid in the High Park area tonight. My whole bedroom reeks with the window open.
Particulate counts ok. Very strange.
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Since this post about wanting a CC partner is getting so much traction it’s time for….
A match-making thread!🧵 💘
If you’re searching for a CC partner, drop a comment or QT your general location & what you’re looking for 👀 😍
You can specify if you’re open to DMs or not
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Also I took my friend who literally needed accessible seating cause she can’t stand for too long and those seats were first come first serve which I thot was rly fucked. #makeaccessibilityaccessible
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
snooze topics. 😴
not interested in this post. 🙄
mute. 🔇
train the X algorithm to show you better content
eventually, it'll just show you your own posts
Been busy rebuilding my digital life away from big tech & fully into open source software, my own hardware for hosting, etc.
It's so consuming and exhausting. I feel like it shouldn't have to be.
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours.
And almost none of the traffic was human.
I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before.
The shape of the threat has changed.
When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name.
These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are.
The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up.
Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month.
In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day.
In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task.
A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard.
I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline.
What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge.
For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone.
An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired.
The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists.
I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out.
Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win.
But the small things still matter more than people think.
Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key.
I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered.
I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use.
If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes.
None of that stops the swarm.
It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too.
@mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully.
Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Most people hear “peptide” and immediately think of some foreign chemical being injected into the body.
But peptides are already part of how your body functions every single day.
WHAT PEPTIDES REALLY ARE
Short chains of amino acids that often act as biological messengers
Your body naturally produces thousands of different peptides
They help regulate everything from metabolism to immune function and tissue repair
Some peptide therapies work by targeting pathways your body already uses
YOU ALREADY MAKE SOME OF THESE
BPC-157: A synthetic peptide based on a sequence associated with a gastric protein
GHK-Cu: A naturally occurring copper-binding peptide found in your body
Thymosin peptides: Related to proteins involved in immune regulation and cellular function
HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE MISS
The goal isn’t always to introduce an entirely new biological process.
Sometimes it’s to amplify or mimic a signal your body already recognizes.
Is it just me or is every general purpose online thing genuinely being screwy lately?
Results not posting, emails not showing up or sending properly, payments posting late, logins not working, constant errors to troubleshoot...
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
It seems my worst fears have come true 😰
I guess it was Gavin's dad on his Telegram. He just msged me back & told me Gavin sadly passed away on Sept. 18 😭😭💔💔
Idk what to say. I'm completely devastated & broken. He was such an amazing person & friend...
Has anyone heard anything from or about @Gavtaraysin ?! He hasn't posted or been online since sept. 16, when he said he was going to the hospital. I'm getting so worried 🥺😥😪💔🙏🏻
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Still processing that Gavin is gone.
This illness and the lack of help = too brutal for words
Stealthy Jess 🇨🇦 💜 retweeted
Could detect as many as 100 airborne pathogens and harmful particles... This kind of device would change the landscape of HAI and disease transmission in schools.
Mayo Clinic is building an early warning system for airborne viruses, bacteria, fungi and allergens
youtu.be/eFfIzysR9xA?si=mFL_…
