Project Try Everything

10 years of baffling chronic pain

Project Try Everything is a newsletter about my long-term mission to truly “try everything” to recover from a strange, painful illness — which is now much easier to describe, because “it’s like Long COVID.” But with extra pain!

After decades of odd symptoms, and then the Great Worsening of 2015, this is a last-ditch effort to save my ass… and document the quest.

I’m best known for my work on PainScience.com, a successful independent publishing project where I was writing about the science of chronic pain for many years before I ironically succumbed to it myself. On the bright side, I can now relate to my PainSci readers all too well.

I also have a casual, eclectic personal blog.

~ Paul Ingraham

If you’re new to the newsletter, start with the main intro post:

Project Try Everything

It’s like Long COVID

Seven years ago, in the spring of 2015, my wife and I got really sick. It was a memorably nasty respiratory infection, and we struggled. We will always remember, six weeks in, struggling to walk up a small hill together, a couple blocks from home — whipped by a slope less challenging than a couple flights of stairs…

Read more

3 years ago · 13 likes · 11 comments · Paul Ingraham

Other key posts from the project so far

• All the diagnoses: What the hell is wrong with me anyway?

• All the symptoms: “Hugs hurt” and many other miseries, from poopageddon to muscle madness

  • The worst symptoms in more lurid detail

• The ignominious failure of Tracking All the Things

• Sneaking past exercise intolerance

  • Sneaking past exercise intolerance: a happy update