The Day That The World Broke Down

Four! Four years! Ah ah ah.

Yeah, it has been that long. New record I suppose. And a lot has happened(but hey, it’s been four years) since I wrote some stuff up here and decided to post something. So, not expecting anyone to read this.

But yeah, some things that are on my mind, LARP, Home, Sickness, D&D & music(obviously).
I’ll touch those in the order I want, but music will be at the bottom(as always) and feel free to turn them tunes up while you read the rest.

Oh, and this one will be a read more thingy, just so my frontpage isn’t YUUGE 😉

Edit: I made a playlist with the ‘featured’ music, so you can enjoy some tunes while reading. Click here.

So, first up. Let’s start with the big swinger: Sickness.

Oh! Warning: Dark Humour ahead! (no seriously, I found that’s the way to handle this shit, but it is really dark at times)

I’m not one to really talk about these kind of things online, but I want to talk about it so here goes(and hold on to your pants, it’s a nasty ride, but all will end well, promise).
So… let’s see in May of ’17 I got a phone call from my sister. She doesn’t usually call me(like, at all) so I knew it was something important. It sure was. She called about the fact that the doctors had found a big ol’ tumor. Inside her head. And that they were now scrambling to get a team of surgeons together to operate on it within the month. Or something along those lines. I can’t really remember much past that line, my world had started to crumble.
I’m not one to talk to my sister much(or family for that matter) but I am still an older brother. And that was the moment where I learned that I could not protect my little sister against everything nasty in the world.
A few days(I think) after that I got more details and the next month was a big blur. The risks were high, the tumor was on the end of her spine right below her Atlas(c1) and had saturated her bones. But, as far as they knew it hadn’t spread any further throughout her body. The procedure was risky(as said), because the list of things that could go wrong ran from ‘soreness’ all the way to ‘Death’ with some sprinkled in ‘quadriplegic’. But only one thing was certain; she would get 4 metal rods inside her head to keep it upright as they had pretty much have to remove some of her cervixes.
And so it happened. We brought her to the hospital and said our goodbyes. She was going to be in surgery the next day and it would be a long operation(we had no idea just how long). I haven’t slept since we dropped her off until the end of her 27(yes twenty-seven) hour operation, I was devastated.
She made it, and with very little side effects. A mild complication with her brain fluids and a half paralysed tongue was all. She was stubborn(she even went to the toilet on her own after being graduated from the ICU, mind you, she had a Feeding Tube that she simply pulled out because it was in the way. Yeah, my little sis is a bad ass(a feeding tube is about a meter(about 3ft in freedom units) in length)(and being very drugged up at the time probably helped). But she made it. So yeey! And at the time of writing(almost 2 years later) she had another surgery a few weeks past because they thought they found another bit of tumor, but that turned out to be a pocket of fluids, so yeeey! It seems she will be completely fine(you’ll only notice her tongue when she’s tired).

But wait! That’s not the end of this part. Sadly, it is roughly the First Act(quite literally). After this the issues for me started to happen. As you can probably imagine I wasn’t in the best of shape and sure enough I cracked a few months later. I was sitting at the busstop finding myself unable to move. Work seemed like this enormous mountain that I just couldn’t climb anymore, but the way back was even harder(not even 100 meters to my house) and so my mind collapsed. A colleague I called somehow talked me back to home, where I proceeded to sleep all day and weekend(safe for food runs). The monday found me at the same point, just no energy and not wanting to get out of my safe space(aka bedroom and study) if I could avoid it. I was still utterly miserable there, but at the least I was alone. I could cope(ish). Keep my panicking mind occupied. By the time I went to the GP I had slept for a week or so, so not feeling to bad. He couldn’t quite pinpoint it, but either depression or burnout. And so I was referred to the in house expert on that.
We had a few sessions and at one point I was send to a different practitioner to get me tested for other things. Now, since I was at home doing nothing most of the day I was feeling pretty great at this point. and I made the mistake to think this was all I needed, just this referral and I could get back to normal, back to work, back to health(mind the normal part). Boy was I wrong. Because of how the system worked the sessions with the current practitioner would stop until the intake and diagnosis at the other one where done, so basically no sessions or whatsoever for about 3 months or so(in hindsight, at the time the estimation was maybe 2, but you know, I wasn’t suicidal or anything, so no high priority) and this was at the end of October, so by the time I had any contact with a shrink(like) person was just before the holidays. And then there were some priority cases and mail got lost, so unto February we go! He said without enthusiasm.
Now, all the while I have failed to mention(on purpose, I’m a dick like that) that one of my close friends had Intestine Cancer diagnosed while my sister was on the ICU, and at this point it became clear that he wouldn’t live through it(not to me, because he wanted to protect me and thus kinda shielded me from this news by not telling). He died the 15th of March 2018 by euthanasia to not live through the last months in sheer pain. He tried to hide it from us, but I saw the amount of morphine he had going through him and knew he was in deep. (You see, my sister makes me learn things by doing. Like her being in the ICU and I learn to know what the values should be and all that)
But still, somehow, I had no clue that it was that close, although I knew it in hindsight, when I could say that I was kidding myself and just hoping I was wrong. It still irks me that I hadn’t visited more, that I could have done more… etc. I am coming to grips with myself on that, because I know why not. Not that that will stop my brain. (You really are your own worst nightmare.)

And with that we stumble/cry into part three of the mess. This time I am going to hog the damned spotlight, cause I don’t think I quite cranked it to eleven just yet. Now, this part is the most vague because of reasons I wasn’t quite all there for all the things.
By this point I was talking with work about reintegrating again, things were truly looking up. The irony here wasn’t lost by my body and my body thought that it would be a really nice dick move to crap out on me. And so it did. I developed an acute skin infection within 24 hours and become really sick. Of course, it did such a marvelous job that I was apatic for most of it. And I truly cannot remember anything for roughly 2 full days. In those 2 days I somehow had transported myself upstairs to bed(last thing I can remember was getting off of the couch searching for the phone in my hand in the fog(Spoiler; there was no fog, this was a delusion because of the fever/sickness) and the first thing after that was me staring at the ceiling which was obviously not mine and thinking ‘Fuck, hospital’.
I didn’t learn until much later(I am sure the staff told me this a million times, but especially at the ICU where I woke up I wasn’t. exactly. clear of mind, shall we say) that I had barely missed Death. (I am sure I waved at the fucker as I passed him by)
As I understood it; I had a multiple Organ failure brought on by loss of moisture in my body. Which was (amongst other things) brought on by a very acute infection in my lower right leg. Which translated to me being able to peel off dead skin from my gums and having to lug around a massive lower right leg. I’ll save you the pictures(even the mental ones, am I not nice?) but suffice to say my leg had swollen up to about 4-6 times it’s normal circumference and was bright red.
Most of the other time in the week I spend on the ICU is very foggy to me(including how the leg looked, but pictures). Between the medicine I got and the trauma/shock I had not remembered a lot, a deal me and my brain are still renegotiating to this day.
I had a lot of tests, but the one my sister(yes, that one) can laugh hardest about was either when a) they had to tell me about the horrid knot they tied in my hair or b) when i came back all loopy from the MRI and could not shut up about the things I had apparently seen whilst in the machine and my mother was trying to get me to eat something(which did not really work I believe).
I took quite a while to get back from that one, I may have been fired from the hospital after ~2 weeks(I think), but I am still suffering some side effects(like the aforementioned negotiation about remembering things) that haven’t seen fully gone yet.

All this while I had a very distressed girlfriend whom could barely hold it together, she somehow managed but how I am still uncertain off.
Which brings us to a nice segue into the next subject:

Love.

I have found this awesome girl after meeting up for a game(Chronicles of Elyria) about 2 years back. Well, actually, I had met her way before that, on LARP. But until then never really talked to her or said more then hi. Hadn’t given her much more thought than your average nice girl. But running up to that meet we got to talk about the game, and then other things. And then on the meetup I met this gorgeous angel in a yellow sundress(in the colds of early april). I’m not sure I managed to peel my eyes off of her for more than 10 seconds at a time. I was smitten and after that we talked more, and more. Even through the hospitalization of my sister(where she graciously offered her and her then-boyfriends couch, which I stubbornly refused as I didn’t want to be a bother(…)) we talked. And we had full nights with chatting via discord, with or without friends. But I didn’t make a move as she had a boyfriend. In November we went to see Thor Ragnarok and she slept on the couch(even though I insisted I slept there). Then in February she wanted to visit Tom in the hospital but didn’t want to go alone, so I offered to come along(wanted to see him, and her and it was on the way there) and so we went, and I felt elated. I was going to be close to her for a while(the train trip was still a solid hour from my city) and she was going to stay over afterwards as the trip back was a tad bit far. So we visited him and we went back to my place. We ended up both not sleeping and she asked the question. Turned out she had been as nervous as I was all this time and she basically waited all night for me to make a move(something I was nervous to try, as I most certainly didn’t want to lose her).
I had also missed some very obvious signs from her side(according to her).
So things progressed and we matched hard, very hard. The hospital thing I went through really pulled some hard strings on her side, but eventually we decided to live together at the end of that year.
Oh? The boyfriend I mentioned… yeah… ’bout that. I will not say everything about that, not fair to him nor my laundry to air, but let’s keep it that he was less than supportive. Their relationship was an open one(which, turns out, helped my paranoia about my partners at bay) yet he didn’t seem to like that he was with someone else. That turned sour(amongst other reasons) and they split somewhere in that year, some while after my hospital visit(don’t ask me when, I forgot, the whole remembering package).
So, that is still going strong. Heck, I even asked her(apparently already in the hospital when I was drugged out of my mind) to marry me(and she said yes to that).
But, (sadly there is one) our story ain’t over yet! On to Part 5(?)!

The Aftermath.
So, physically my body wasn’t in to bad of a shape, yea, I needed support stockings for my leg but other than that I was good. Prices have to be paid though, and so it turned out that I forgot to read the fine print of the Rememberance Package healing deal. While they took good care of my body, my mind had a mind of its own. and I soon started to experience worsening mental issues aside of the not being able to remember what was said in that conversation the day before. They turned to full blown panic attacks almost a year later(to the day), since that time I have been on and off work with me sitting in my chair at home being suspended and under therapy. Stuff ain’t fun but I’ll manage, I have gotten my lovely fiance to enjoy.

music
Rolf Lóvland – sleepsong