Where I've been
I'm sorry I haven't been around a lot, lately. I haven't been feeling very artistic. My father died in May, from COVID-19 complications. He had a heart attack. I hadn't seen or heard from him since the summer of 1996. It's been 24 years. Sometimes I've considered reaching out to him, to try and repair our relationship or build a new one, but every time I decided I'd rather he not know where I was, or who I was.
They listed me on his obituary under my deadname. They got my brother's name wrong.
I know in his own way that my father loved my brother and I, and even my mother still, very much. You don't stop loving someone just because they're not in your life anymore. But I also know that drugs and alcohol mattered more to him than we did. I know that he lied to me, again and again, and hurt me more times than I care to count, and I finally ran out of chances for him.
A part of me will always love my father in the heartachingly pure way only a small child can. But I am not a child. I am an adult woman, now, and the tears that I'm shedding as I write this are not for him, but for me. Because I am an orphan, because the two people who were supposed to be there for me each failed me in so many spectacular ways and left me damaged in ways I'm still struggling to comprehend decades later.
I know my parents' parents failed them, too. I guess all we can do is try to lessen the impact of our failures on our children, or in my case, refuse to have kids.
As some may know, I struggle quite a bit with major depressive disorder, and am physically disabled. When I am hurt, as I was in the wake of my father's death, my instinctive reaction is to make myself small, to take up less space and hold myself in a compressed little ball. I'm actively working not to do that, anymore, but it is still my instinctive reaction. It's something I've been doing since 2016, when my mother died, and I feel like I've been holding a clenched fist for four years. It's time to relax that grip.
Expect more art from me. I don't know when, because a LOT of my energy has been devoted to the BLM movement since the new round of protesting has begun. You WILL see more art from me, and I'm renewing my commitment to making inclusive art that showcases without fetishizing the beauty of diversity.
Frustration
I know you can’t force creativity. It either happens or it doesn’t. But I’m frustrated and I want to do another short story with illustration series and have NO ideas with where to go for it that actually seem feasible.
It doesn’t help that I’m feeling very weak and tired all the time. Had an appointment with the cardiologist yesterday and was basically told ‘we see something is wrong but it’s not with your heart and we don’t know how to fix it, maybe stop your HRT and see if that fixes it.
Never mind that these issues have been ongoing for a full decade or more before I started transitioning, and have only gotten worse, but were GETTING WORSE before I transitioned, anyway.
I’m frustrated and want answers but none of the diagnostics have come up with an answer. I go back to my neurologist next month for a follow up, and then see what sort of diagnostics HE wants to do.
The muscle twitching is getting worse again, and I’m really sick of people blaming HRT for it. I cannot find ANY cases of HRT doing anything like what’s wrong with me, and I’ve STOPPED it and felt no different in that regard, only more miserable.
Emergency Appendectomy
Starting on Sunday night, I began to feel really tender and, bluntly, gassy. I noticed I'd not been able to use the restroom as regularly as I normally do, and by Monday, it had turned into a serious pain right below my ribcage that was making breathing in any position but laying on my side quite painful.
Against my roommate's urgings, I ignored it until early Wednesday morning, when he rushed me in to the ER. Within an hour or so, the examination concluded I had a massively infected appendix, and by 4:30 that afternoon I was in emergency surgery, and out in an hour.
I spent Thursday and Friday moderately sedated and barely able to move because of a surgical drain I had as a precaution. I went home Friday evening, and have been resting and taking my meds but otherwise mostly sleeping.
It's now Sunday evening, and I'm very sleepy as I type this, but I'm healing. We had pizza today, and while I'm definitely tender, so far so good.
Hopefully I'll be back to a post every day or so, once I'm feeling a bit better, but in the meantime, know that I miss you guys and hope to write soon!
New Medication and Life Updates
Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome.
One of the diagnostic tests we ran involved monitoring my blood pressure while I was laying down, sitting, and standing. My heart rate jumped, but my blood pressure dropped significantly, on sitting and standing.
There are other diagnostic tests I'm going to have to endure in the next few weeks and months, but knowing that I have at least a partial answer is good. If it is POTS, that would explain why I regularly faint and black out.
Two days ago, I fainted while sitting down and watching Warehouse 13 with my roomie. I was laughing, leaned forward a little because it was turning into coughing, and literally blacked out and hit the floor.
I have a vague third person view of myself falling, since I know how it happened and woke up fairly quickly, but I don't actually remember hitting the floor.
I'm fine, just banged up my shoulder a little. I'm a bigger gal, and all that weight landing on my right shoulder wasn't conducive to art, so I've been resting it a bit.
Friday, I saw my neurologist, and we've started me on two new medications and taken me off one. We'll see how the new ones do over the next few weeks, but one of the side effects is supposed to be weight loss on one of them, so that could be nice. I love my curves, I just know carrying around an extra hundred pounds isn't good for my heart.
Expect to see a Pride picture soon!
Name Change!
I hope this doesn't confuse anyone too much.