Brock’s Clock: What This Site Is About

Also see: State of the Brock: June 2020

I started this blog as a real-life person under the pseudonym of Brock Favors. As of March 2020, this blog is no longer anonymous. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and if you find any treatment, procedure, or idea of any kind on this blog to try on yourself or anyone else, I bear no responsibility for the results.

In the real world, I am Nikolay, a 34-year-old (2020) software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in Bulgaria, spent time living in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York, and fell really ill in late July 2016, soon after returning to San Francisco from the East Coast. I already had mild symptoms for 1–15 years prior, depending on where you start counting.

This blog contains a lot of information about my personal case, so that it is easily available to physicians or other parties I’m in touch with.

Of course, my primary ultimate goal is to be pain-free again and enjoy more of the things I used to enjoy, such as travel and music. But I’d also like to share some lessons from my journey, as health and time allow. Some of the topics I have in mind are of huge general interest to the general population, such as chronic pain.

There’s also a few that a few folks can benefit from, but greatly. Those subjects, for example, where advice has been incredibly difficult to come by, and the internet at large and the best-trained and well-meaning professionals I’ve been consulting have failed to provide adequate guidance, or indeed have occasionally contributed to a worsening of my symptoms.

My main symptom is debilitating and as of yet still spreading chronic pain. There isn’t a diagnosis that’s a good fit for my case, but some that have been brought up are chronic pelvic pain (initially), fibromyalgia, mold toxicity, and Lyme disease. I’m partial to the term “central nervous system sensitization”, which I’m not aware of being used as a clinical diagnosis in the US.

And finally, why “Brock”, and what’s his clock? Brock Favors is a Key and Peele character, a simple traffic reporter who probably wanted none of this, but who had to fill in for someone on board the traffic chopper. He’s terrified of the bumps they hit while flying above the freeways, but is doing his best to keep his composure and report from his unique vantage point. Watch and laugh here.

I don’t have the stats for fibromyalgia or related conditions of widespread pain, but I know that a large portion of patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis, a sister condition, are unable to work, many among them are bedridden, and unable to feel things like the touch of a loved one or the gentle breeze without severe pain. “Brock’s Clock” measures, metaphorically, the time I have to find good treatments before I’m no longer physically able to effectively use a computer. It also can be a symbol for the obsessive tracking and logging I’ve had to engage to have a shot at getting better. And finally, it rhymes nicely 😁.