What's Been Going On: October 2021

The Bad News

To catch you up, since it's been a while: In February, we had a bad renovation thrust upon us by the apartment complex. It postponed dental surgery I was meant to have, shook up our lives for almost a whole month, and was sort of a traumatic experience for just how badly it was managed for us. The complex probably owes us at least $450-$900 for the food we were supposed to get during this time, on top of the ~$1100 that was raised by friends for the hotel they (the office) were supposed to pay for us to stay at.

While getting re-settled, my computer died. Seems like it was a bad HDD. Probably just got damaged in the move. In retrospect, I packed it in an electrostatic bag that may not have actually been electrostatic. As I was considering repair options, I was enlisted to house sit for a cousin for nearly three weeks, so I had to put it off. As I was getting ready for that, my Mom developed extreme back pain that the ER eventually identified as sciatica. She likely strained something during or shortly after the renovation.

She was in and out of the ER five times total, with them basically brushing her off and giving her medication (steroids to help her heal faster and painkillers) and told her to be patient. During this time, since she was in too much pain to get in and out of the shower, she developed a rash that turned out to be cellulitis. It's fairly common in old people and can be controlled somewhat easily.

Unfortunately doctors or no one would treat her or look at it, so it eventually got so bad that she was checked into a hospital room and put on IV antibiotics. They were apparently pretty rough with her, which resulted in them breaking her femur while trying to roll her off a bed pan. They were baffled why her leg broke, since the femur is the longest, strongest bone in her body. They ran tests for osteoporosis, found nothing. They ran tests for bone cancer, found nothing. She's very healthy for her age and it doesn't make sense why it broke so easily.

They broke her leg on August 12th and she woke up on the afternoon of August 13th, Friday the 13th, with a metal rod in her leg.

She entered rehab while she healed and has now been discharged to my brother's house where she's been staying for the last three weeks. Physical therapy nurses have been coming out helping her regain strength while her leg heals. The goal was to get her to go back home, but we live in a second floor apartment at the top of 16 concrete steps. There is no elevator. It could be a very, very long time until she's well again. I have moved in to my brother's, to help take care of her during this time, since my brother and his wife have to work. That means, combined with my brother's family, there are seven people living in what is normally supposed to be a three bedroom house. With one bathroom.

A day or two after we got here, my brother admitted he'd been having problems with tasting and smelling things, and had been battling cold-like symptoms. He took four sick days off of work. A few days later, his kids and his wife started showing similar symptoms, particularly his wife, who was getting hit with the worst of it. A few days after that, I also ended up starting to feel sick. About a week ago, she got tested for covid-19, and on Monday had her status confirmed. I assume she got it from my brother, which means his kids probably have it, which means I probably have it.

I am not going to get tested. My brother is... weird, about covid stuff, to put it mildly. We'll just say he's anti-vaccine and leave it at that. He is a man with a big heart, but also a bigger temper. He spent a significant amount of money getting my Mom all kinds of stuff to make her stay here comfortable (a wheelchair, wheelchair ramp, a bed, etc.), but it also means having to endure when he tries to start vaccination discussions that I personally do not agree with. I keep my head down and don't want to start arguments, both because he did nice things for our mom, and he's also because he gets very... passionate about his view.

The Good News

To start with, my mom is vaccinated, and I'm vaccinated. One of the reasons my dental surgery was postponed is because I wanted to get through the vaccine side effects before dealing with any painkillers they might prescribe me, since I've heard painkillers can interfere with the vaccine's effectiveness.

Though covid has hit his wife pretty hard, if I have it, it has never manifested in me as anything more than a basic head cold. I'm still not even sure what I had was covid, because it was so mild. I don't think I ever even had a fever. It started as a tickling cough deep in my throat, just above my collar bone, before graduating to a stuffy nose where it hung around for just under a week. I had maybe two total days where my nose was so plugged up I had to breathe through my mouth, but then my sinuses opened up and everything has been fine. Every now and then I get this brief tinge of "sick feeling" but it never lasts for more than a few seconds before going away. 

The worst part, and perhaps the biggest signifier I have covid, is that I have lost my sense of smell. I still have my sense of taste, but smelling food, air freshener, there's nothing. That's been slowly coming back, as every now and then a switch will flip and I'll catch a whiff of something. Today, I actually managed to smell the cup of ramen I made for breakfast if I stuck my nose all the way down in the cup.

My mom seems to be totally fine. She has never seemed even a little bit sick at all, but she has complained about food not tasting right. It's possible she also had covid, and just had it even more mild than I did. Plus, with me here to help her out with cooking meals and whatnot, she's been in very close contact with me, so if I had covid, she had covid. She was also in close contact with my brother around the same time I was, so again, if he had covid, I had covid, then she had covid, and had basically no symptoms whatsoever outside of saying food tasted a little funny. Get vaccinated folks, it can make a world of difference.

She seems to be recovering about as well as we could hope. We figured 6-12 weeks for her broken leg to mend, but given the metal rod they had to insert, it's more like 6-12 months. Still, we have home care nurses coming out to my brother's place to help with physical therapy and bathing her, and they keep hammering home how good she seems to be doing. My Mom is a fiercely independent woman; she raised both me and my brother as a single mom in the 80's and 90's. She's one of the strongest people I know emotionally, and this whole year has really beat her down a lot. I saw her cry more in the last six months than I ever have in my entire life. She has been legitimately traumatized and had a lot to work through, but she's slowly getting back to a normal head space again. The other day, one of the nurses told her "you're doing a lot better than you think you are" and that really seemed to lift her spirits.

Then, yesterday, we went to the neurologist. They'd been trying to get her to see a neurologist since before they broke her leg, just in case her sciatica caused long term damage. The doc took a look at her and decided there was pretty much nothing wrong with her. Which is to say, she's healing very well, and he doesn't want to talk big, invasive treatments right now because she might not need those. He was going to prescribe us painkillers, but it was basically all the stuff we already had plenty of, so he just sent us home and wants to check in on how she's doing in a month. It was the closest thing to a clean bill of health as she can get right now and the messaging was just "keep doing what you're doing, because it's working." 

Which mirrors everything else we've been hearing. Basically, everyone we've spoken to in the last week has said she'll make a full recovery. We just have to be patient and take it one day at a time. This will be a gradual process and it won't just be that one day she'll wake up and suddenly be able to walk again. Rebuilding muscle is a slow process. But she's feeling re-energized and has started pushing herself really hard to get strong so she can go home again.

It's hard because of how full this house is, but one of the home care nurses called our apartment office today and lit a fire under them to transfer her to a ground floor unit. They've been giving us the run around over the last two months about us being "on a waiting list" that could be 4-6 months long, but it sounds like we're going over there tomorrow to sign the paperwork to get transferred to a ground floor maybe in the next couple weeks. Which will be a lot of stress and pressure off of everyone.

Since this year has been so chaotic and we wanted out of that apartment soon anyway, most of our stuff is still packed, even. So if it's true, and we're moving into a new unit in the same complex sometime in the next couple weeks, it'll literally be a case of just moving a lot of still-packed boxes from one unit to another. The most that will need to be packed is kitchen stuff and maybe my bedroom, and I'll take extra-special care to move my PC this time.

Which, speaking of: it does seem like it may have just been a bogus HDD. A few days before I came up here to my brother's, I got the new HDD put in and Windows reinstalled and the system seemed to work just fine without bluescreening or anything. It remains to be seen how much can be rescued from the previous drive, since I'd like to get all my FL Studio presets, Vegas presets, music library, and whatever else back. I just didn't have time to start investigating that before I left.

The Future

2021 isn't over yet and there are still a lot of ways it could continue to be the worst year for us. But things are looking up, and me and my Mom have been doing a lot of talking about me living with her. I think I opened this Patreon mentioning how lucky I was to live with her, and this has definitely shaken things up in my life.

Talking with her, and based on conversations I had with friends months ago, it seems like I should probably throw myself into Youtube. I'm not a nobody, I'm not allergic to work, it's just been spinning my wheels because of some fear of "selling out" or whatever. Well, if there was ever a time where selling out made sense, it would be after an event like this. The time has come to stop playing around and just go for it. This means that the format of future videos may be changing a little. I know you and I value high production quality, but when it comes to getting videos out in a timely manner, something's gotta give. I don't know how that will manifest yet, but I'll be playing with ways to speed up production time.

This won't affect the NiGHTS Documentary or maybe even the Sonic Forces videos. Those will be on track to look like you've come to expect from me. But after that, we'll see. I've been building a roster of "show ideas," some of which are very old, some of which are somewhat new, and some of which are things I'm already doing but have held off on -- again, out of a fear of "selling out" or some kind of pride over being a perfectionist. I can't let myself do that anymore. I have to go for it, and I have to go for it hard. This could be the dawn of something new and exciting. I just have to stop holding myself back and believe I can do great things.

A few days before coming to my brother's, I also finally got approved as a Twitch Affiliate, because I was streaming a lot of Fortnite from my PS4. Which means there is now a financial incentive for me to stream more regularly. Expect that to start as soon as we can get back to a home of our own (and I'll stream more than just Fortnite!) In tandem with that, I will also be opening a Discord soon, so that Twitch subscribers can use my emotes in whatever channels they're in. I've actually been slowly chipping away at parts of that while I'm here at my brother's, getting channels organized and writing the rules. It's almost ready to open right now, but I don't have any moderators and I'm not available to moderate it for myself right now. One fun feature the discord has is I've employed MonitoRSS, a bot that plugs into RSS feeds. The Discord will make it the easiest way to keep track of what I'm doing on the internet, as MonitoRSS will automatically post about new blogs, new videos, new music, and more.

All this means that my game development stuff might fall more to the wayside, but I genuinely love making games, so I still want to find room to tinker with games and maybe finally get a proper version of OverBite out on Steam. We'll see what the future holds there. I know a lot of people have been asking me about my Bubsy project lately, too.

So yeah! That's everything that's been happening around these parts. Fingers crossed that the dark clouds are finally lifting over here. I'm super excited to get everything back up and running again as soon as possible. See you when I see you!