Haven’t made an update journal since the September trip so I figure I’ll make a bit of a more complete picture of the last few months here.
I have a separate post I’m working on for the trip w/Darsen itself to share some art and stuff so I won’t go too much into that here, it was a good trip!
Unfortunately, around the start of the trip I had already been showing symptoms of a flare up of my bowel disease problems, I was struggling to afford the medication that month and had decided after 3 months of taking pills that were a bit hard on my body that I’d give things a bit of a break to see how symptoms would re-emerge if I was off it for a period.
For most of September I'd been doing okay, but it was around the day the trip started that minor flare up symptoms began to emerge with general pains and more trips to the bathroom. I don’t know if it was a particular food trigger or just low key stress of not knowing how the trip would go affecting me. But not having the medication around to curb the problems essentially put me at increased risk for problems.
After we got to Toronto, the issue got progressively worse, putting a damper on being able to fully enjoy that portion of the trip, but we still made the most of it. I started feeling lower back pain, likely all the constant= walking and strain but at the mid point of the trip something got me bad, every bowel movement was exactly like the week before I got hospitalized in May, just minus the blood. With a particularly nasty one in the middle of the week.
We didn’t end up going to the hospital there since I didn’t feel things were serious enough to worry about doing tests. Given we wouldn't be there long enough to get my medication sent to Toronto before we'd be gone, we just powered through the rest of the trip.
After getting home from it, I got really sick. All October I was constantly coughing and would frequently experience nausea and dry heaving, I resumed my medication but it wasn't alleviating symptoms like before. As the weeks went on it was clear I had caught some kind of bacterial infection similar to what they had to clear up with antibiotics at the hospital, to a lesser degree. I never got a confirmation on it but symptoms matched giardiasis, aka “beaver fever” which is a pretty common problem that could come from anywhere: drinking tainted water, poor food handling, or under cooked meat, etc.
It took about 6-7 weeks for that to start clearing up, which over those weeks having come back from the trip I was physically drained and mentally defeated.
My family had been very absent during all of this, they ignored and treated me like I wasn't even there. On arriving back my older sister was already self admitted to the mental institution, going through another mental health crisis, my grandmother was hospitalized and very sick. And my parents seemed to be suffering from a cognitive decline all month, to the point where my own mom didn’t remember that I've worn glasses for the past 3 years when she'd repeatedly seen me wearing them every time we've been out doing errands all that month. Feeling isolated and ill ultimately made eating healthy and keeping on my medication schedule very difficult, since family stopped looking after themselves entirely over the rest of the month and let all the messes pile up.
The stress from it all continued to drain on me, and as the month went on I finally got the MRI I’ve had an appointment for since June. I ended up throwing up during when I had to chug around 1.5 litres of cold water mixed with metamusil. It was even more frustrating that the MRI results came out obscured and blurry because they made me do small intestine scans on my stomach where I couldn’t lay completely still comfortably at such an awkward angle while holding breaths.
After around mid November, I finally got to see my specialist and the giardiasis had mostly cleared up. I've been back on the medication and have been taking supplements for iron and b12 deficiency. So I've been doing significantly better since then, I've just needed to sorely catch up on taking new commissions and finishing the older ones.
Before the trip I had intended to just finish that dog sequence, knock out more of the queue and then re-evaluate prices and do stream sketches from there, but being so tired and not having streamed in awhile had put me off streaming a bit. Mostly because of tablet and technical issues that kept returning while trying to set things up.
So I've started doing forms on a more daily basis, I may stream the forms occasionally but for now I just need a bit of a break from streams since family hasn't been doing well in general and it's hard for me to stream consistently without interruptions.
To wrap things up, I wish you all a merry holiday and happy new year if I don't post a journal around then. I'm getting back to things so once I'm -caught up- financially and with the queue, I'll try to start drawing more for myself again. I have been looking into a finding part time job, just for a more consistent side income source, but so far have yet to hear anything back.
Hope you all are well and stay healthy!