PhoneBoy Says

A couple weeks ago, I posted I was going in for a CT Angiogram to get a Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) Score. The CAC score, which is a measure of how much calcium has built up in your heart, can be anything from a zero to over 1000. Generally speaking, the higher your CAC score, the higher the risk that you'll have a heart attack.

When combined with something like the MESA Risk Calculator, which only takes into account things the kinds of things a doctor can assess in their office, the CAC score is significantly associated with the occurrence of major cardiovascular events, which includes all-cause mortality, cardiac mortality, and nonfatal myocardial infraction.

Knowing your score, as Ivor Cummins says, really helps you understand your risk of cardiovascular events. He covers this quite succinctly on a recent episode of his podcast. While he publishes his podcast in audio form, I highly recommend watching Episode 12 which includes all the graphs.

I finally got the results of the test today. The result: a CAC score of zero. Based on that score alone, my risk of a cardiovascular event over the next couple years is less than 2%. I still have elevated blood pressure, and technically a diabetic, so my risk is a little higher according to the MESA Calculator—about 3%. Which is still pretty low in the grand scheme of things.

More importantly, it means I don't need to take a statin, which my doctor has been trying to get me to take again in light of my higher than normal cholesterol. With my risk profile and a CAC score of zero, statin use is not warranted.

When trying to import the last couple of blog posts into Medium, I discovered that Medium couldn't parse the posts since 10 Centuries went to version 5. Instead I wrote a new, single post that summarized the last couple, since they are part of the same thought process.

I noticed when I created this post that Medium is now actively encouraging writers to put their stories behind their paywall, which is a $5/mo subscription. Even without a subscription, you can typically read 3 stories for free per month. You can read a lot more than that by using an Incognito browser window, so it's not that strong of a paywall.

Aside from funding the service, the subscription pays writers who "earn money when subscribing members read or applaud your work." Also, Medium "may" promote these "behind the paywall" posts, so you may get more readers.

This is a lot like what's going on with podcasting right now, specifically all the attempts to create "networks" and "exclusivity." For example, Gimlet Media and Anchor were purchased by Spotify, and then just today, something called Luminary is attempting to do the same thing Medium is doing with written content.

As Adam Curry has said numerous times, and experienced when he was running Podshow/Mevio, you can't monetize the network. This lead to him and John C. Dvorak pioneering the value for value model with No Agenda, which has been going strong for 11 years funded solely through listener support.

Personally, I don't write blog posts for the money. I'm not sure I want to feed efforts that are ultimately doomed to failure, either, whether it's content or my eyeballs.

When I posted I was going in for a CT Angiogram, a few people made the snarky comment that I didn't have a heart. Turns out, I do, and while the amount of calcium I have in my heart isn't a concern, the diameter of my aorta is.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to my doctor about this yet, or the vascular surgeon my doctor has referred me to, so I've consulted Doctor Google, which turns up works like aneurysm, when left untreated. I suspect it's part of the overall damage that has occurred due to past lifestyle choices, not my current ones, which allowed be to drop my A1C down to non-diabetic levels and more than 100 pounds.

That said, even with the positive changes, my blood pressure is still a bit elevated. I'm not taking meds for this currently and I fully expect this will come up in the conversation with my doctor again. I'd rather understand the underlying cause of this rather than medicate the symptoms, so I definitely need to do a bit more research on this.

With the changes made to the 10Centuries service recently, I scrolled through the "archives" of my posts here and realize: the nature of "blog posts" have changed.

Prior to the invention of microblogging by Twitter in 2006, if you wanted to post anything on the Internet, large or small, you had to post it on your own blog. Now, with Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social media, you have…many choices.

Of course, a blog post can still be whatever you want it to be, but it seems the only thing you see on blogs now are…longer posts. Is that a good thing? Not sure.