vitorvilela

My Health - What happened? And what now?

Added 2024-09-11 04:20:50 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone! Hope you all are fine.

Writing this post after a long time without activity brings me mixed feelings: mixed because while I'm happy to write once again to Patreon, I feel very sad and awkward for being inactive for a so long period.

Health: some surgeries and the fight against obesity

WARNING: The next section I'll be talking about details of my health. It might make some people uncomfortable, so feel free to skip to the next section (go to "Recovery").

If you are been seeing my posts on X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/HackerVilela ), you probably know that my health wasn't very good in the recent years. In fact, since 2020 my health started to deteriorate, with my first acute cholecystitis leaving me to the hospital in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the first signal that something was going wrong and the crisis kept increasing until in 2023 I had to take an emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder. I already knew that this was gonna happen eventually, but the pandemic didn't let me do this sooner. The surgery was fine.

After removing the gallbladder, for unknown reasons I started having hemorrhoids crisis. It started like 3 days after the surgery and I still can't understand why. It's like that my body went in "you fixed one issue, so here is the next issue for you". The pain was almost every day and I visited many doctors that were told me that a surgery was very likely but I did all kinds of exams but none of them found anything. It's like that the illness was only visible during a crisis, but when it improved, no exam was able to detect.

But one thing caught attention to them -- I was very overweight. I confess that since I was born I was a little overweight. I used to weight about 105 to 110kg, but the pandemic, with me unable to leave my home and eating all kind of junk food made me gain about 35kg, making me weight 145kg -- that's a BMI (body mass index) of 45 kg/m².

The overweight combination with hemorrhoids crisis reduced my quality of life significantly. Even if taking all recommendations, I barely was able to walk (for some reason, walking made the crisis worse), to take exercises (I was getting tired very easily, combined with pain), to focus on my computer...

That eventually made me unable to do what I used to like: my hobbies, specially SNES work. I didn't have a lot of energy, so most of them was spent either in work (after all, I couldn't risk my employment specially in this condition) and watching TV (or some other activity that didn't demand me move or think too much)... and sleeping... that's it.

Eventually, after taking with a team of doctors (surgeon, endocrinologist, cardiologist), taking therapy and trying different diets, it was clear that my situation required a bariatric surgery. And that's surgery I took on August 16. The technique was a sleeve with transit bipartition. Stayed in the hospital for 2 days and since then I'm taking a special diet to adapt to my new lifestyle.

Recovery: hopes for the future

Since then things are been improving slowly. I already feel more energetic, I lost 15kg so far, the pain crisis already reduced by like 80%... I still need to keep a special diet for about 2-3 months and include daily exercises for ensuring that I can lose all the weight needed.

But I should admit that the obesity is a silent illness that kills you slowly and I wasn't realizing about that. I thought that someday I would lose weight magically. I thought that someday I would feel energetic and start working on all projects again. Someday that I would finish Super Metroid SA-1 because that's a "mental" thing, not a "physical" thing. But in the end, we are all a single body, everything is combined. If you are in pain, you won't be able to do anything. And I had to take this decision or otherwise I would never be able to do what I like ever again.

The worst part is not admitting that I was sick and I needed a treatment. I felt awkward, I felt guilty for that. If I had the knowledge about the consequences, if I had the access to the doctors earlier and if I knew that I would get so bad, I would have taken an action before. Thankfully, it wasn't too late and I'm already feeling much better and I have great hopes that in the incoming months.

What now?

Sadly, one of the most negatively affected projects was Super Metroid SA-1. I will focus on a future post what details are left to do, but for now, I decided to put a pause in the conversion, as I will have to start it pretty much from scratch again. The project is so big that with my current tools (specially after a while without doing anything), it's better to focus on a smaller project and then create improved tools for handling a big game like Metroid.

For this reason, I decided to pause Metroid for now and I'm now working on disassembling SimCity. It's a game that can receive a SA-1 upgrade (faster simulation and better user interface by having better maps/charts), a widescreen upgrade (bigger viewport for PC enthusiasts) and a mouse upgrade (improves user experience for both SNES and PC users). I have great hopes that SimCity can become the new entry point for a new Vilela Laboratory.

Of course, I'm not forcing myself. I'm taking small steps, respecting my body and my activities (such as the daily walk and exercises), but I'd like to start doing projects as I used to do in the past because as I like to say, I have at least 30 years of awesome SNES projects to work. And I hope you all are interested in knowing more about them!

That's all for today. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment. It will be a pleasure to talk with everyone once again.

And to finish, if you don't know, X/Twitter was suspended on Brazil. So if you would like to know what is going on, make sure to take a look on my other social medias: