[The following is an excerpt from my nonfiction Novel/Memoir/Research Paper: RedactedScience. It is a bit odd, but I am revealing truths that can shake the foundations of medicine - might be worth a read. This portion comes right after the introduction. I added it today, because I think the reader needs a glimpse into how weird it is all going to get]

I shouldn’t be.

And yet… here I am.

By all accounts, this thing should’ve taken me out years ago. It wrecked my gut, burned through my skin, hijacked my hormones, rewired my thirst, drained my blood, and stole my gallbladder on the way out. I’ve lived in the margins of physiology. No textbook covers this. No protocol explains it. But I’m still here.

Why?

Two things…The Invader wants me alive, and because I knew just enough.

I stopped moving. The Article said that the subjects would self-limit. Yeah, it’s hard to walk far when your legs hurt and your joint don’t feel right. It wasn’t fatigue — it was deliberate. Movement burns fluid. Muscle demands volume. And volume is death when your system can’t hold on to it. So I stayed still. I conserved. [Read a lot of books] I rationed energy like a desert survivor counting drops. That wasn’t intuition. That was math.

And the fluids?

That was discipline.

I knew the thirst wasn’t real — or at least, not mine. So I just started limiting my intake. Like Grandfather said with his squished up face, “Water makes me sick.”

Then there’s fluconazole.

Three years, daily. Not a cure, but a leash. It held the line. Slowed the advance. Gave me a fighting chance to map the terrain.

But here’s the irony:

The condition wants you to sit still. It wants you calm, quiet, unmoving — not to help you, but to extend its window. It turns you into a vessel, not a fighter. Most people wouldn’t recognize that bargain until it’s too late. I did.

So yeah, I’m alive because I got lucky with a few insights. But what if someone had all the knowledge? What if someone walked into this with a blueprint?

How long could they live then?

Could they manage this for more than the three decades I did? A normal lifespan, maybe?

That would be almost evolutionary.

🧪 Here’s what they’d do differently: Fluids: Rigid control. Not just less, but timed. Fluids would be dosed like medication, tied to meals, electrolyte thresholds, and GI status.

Monitoring: Daily logs of urine color, specific gravity, volume, minerals we don’t normally measure, hormones — not for curiosity, but for regulation. They’d track everything: weight shifts, temperature, cramping, skin texture, mental clarity.

Diet: Small, repeatable, non-fermentable meals. Low residue. Bone broth. Protein fragments. Zero sugar. They’d learn which combinations feed the invader — and never touch them.

Posture & pressure: They’d manage vessel load like a pilot balances fuel. Sitting, reclining, even sleeping positions would be deliberate — all to keep pressure gradients from flipping.

Stacking antifungals: They’d rotate agents, time delivery, adjust based on symptom clusters. They’d never let the fungus settle.

External cues: They’d record emotional shifts, taste changes, sleep signal failures — anything that might be a fungal “nudge.”

Labs: Not for diagnosis. For trendlines. For puzzle pieces. They’d build a map the system can’t erase.

That person — the one with full knowledge — wouldn’t just survive. They’d become formidable.

And one day, they might look back, like I am now, and realize:

The Architect found the agent. And the agent found how to live.