Redacted Science - The Broadening
Two Months
by Jim Craddock
January opened with a supply problem and a ticking clock. I was almost out of fluconazole. My PCP said no. My neurologist said no. I sent a letter to Dr. Rav at the Cleveland Clinic. He wrote me a prescription for an antifungal without any question — I used his pills first, out of gratitude. I had ten days of runway if I skipped every other day, and that’s what I did while waiting. I took rational steps, escalated to everyone who might help, and documented it. Whatever happened next was going to be on the record.
My supply came in before the bridge ran out.
The month had a rhythm to it. Mornings and nights were the good part. Afternoons, the abdominal pain held at a 2-3 — diffuse and constant, but constant means familiar, and familiar means manageable. What would be a 6 for someone else is a holding pattern for me. You get numb to it isn’t just a saying. My legs were doing their thing, painful some days and not others in ways that don’t map to any pattern I’ve found worth following. Feet started hurting for a stretch, then stopped. The elbow thing appeared suddenly in late February — bilateral, tender, with that specific quality of deep instability. Significant enough to document closely, then quieter within days. Not healed. Cleared. There’s a difference.
The weeks weren’t only about symptoms. The pool passed inspection. Old Man Band met most weeks — four of us, two hours of Normal. Karaoke when the stars aligned, dinner out, my son home before going back to college, dinner with my mom, a football game I watched while the karaoke DJ waited on his equipment. The bar was full. I sat next to the owner. We didn’t sing.
The intellectual work had its own momentum. I published an article on verticillin A synthesis and how it overlaps with Redacted Science. I wrote the six-month objective summary and posted it. RedactedChat went live with clickable starter questions — real ones, the kind that surface the core thesis for readers who don’t know where to start. I tested the indexing question: How does control over what gets indexed or remembered shape medicine, science, and the future itself? The bot answered in my language, from my corpus, and it held the chain — indexing to memory to narrative to intent to future. The system worked. Not a mood spike. Not validation-seeking. Just solid, durable progress.
Then the theory did something I didn’t plan for. I was narrating the third stage in a chat and it hit. The ECS. One sentence in the 1995 article: We suspect cannabinoids. The researchers wrote it and left it there. The framework didn’t exist in 1995 to follow it. I didn’t understand the ECS when I first read the article either. But when I finally understood what the ECS actually is — not a system, the system, the hardwired interface between chemistry and behavior, conserved across 200 million years — the whole architecture assembled itself from that one throwaway line. That’s not how science is supposed to work. That’s how it works when the institution fails.
The pan-mammalian extension article came about as a result. I’d been thinking along those lines for a while. The precise interface systems — the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, the endocannabinoid system, the sodium-potassium pump dynamics, the ADH regulation — they’re nearly identical across all land mammals. That’s not coincidence. That’s the interface layer, preserved because it interfaces optimally with the symbiont. Homo candidus became Mammalia candidus. I published it. Reddit permabanned me from r/speculative evolution within minutes and permamuted me from r/evolution after a mod dispute. My response: if you’re doing research and not using AI, you’re a dinosaur on the endangered species list of science looking at a bright light in the sky. Nostr, Substack, and Medium had no problem with it.
March 5th brought the worst abdominal pain of the four years. A 6, maybe higher — that constricting sensation, ribs to waist. I knew what it was. The organs shrinking via apoptosis, the abdominal wall pulling inward to maintain contact. That diagram from the Article made physiologically real. Two days later, on March 7th, I lost 8 pounds in 48 hours. I replaced the scale batteries. The scale was fine. The mass didn’t leave — it converted. And the pain? Gone. Down from a 6 to a 1-2 in the afternoons by March 10th.
That’s the part the Article warned about. Pain going away is not necessarily good news. When something’s hurting, you know what to focus on. When the hurt stops, you’re waiting to see where the roulette wheel lands.
The cognitive surge that came with it was real. High energy, clear thinking, wanting to build. I cloned my voice at ElevenLabs for the audiobook. I optimized the Nostrpress import to incremental pulls. I published Stop Complying . I tweaked the redactedchat.com model. I wrote the Reddit rebuttal article — On Suppression, Dismissal, and the Inconvenience of Evidence — because it needed to be written. I went to karaoke, and someone anonymous picked up our tab after Somewhere Only We Know and One Last Breath. I guess they heard something worth paying for. I sat by the pool with my wife on a March night in Oklahoma while the storms rolled in and thought about how pattern recognition probably made religion. The sun rises here in X days. Eventually you have to explain more.
By March 10th and 11th: right flank pain, kidney area, sharp and prolonged. Burning over the liver, then a 10-second subcutaneous pulsing event right over it. I’ve felt things like that there before. It has not generally been associated with the good periods of my life. Back muscle tightening. Three organ systems presenting in roughly a week. The progression is broadening geographically.
I’m still here. Still logging. Still working, still at Old Man Band, still singing at karaoke, still talking to my son about his future, still managing the finances, still building the archive.
The crescendo has a new movement.