In Which Agrippa Once Again Overshares

So, some of you may be a bit miffed at me dropping cryptic references about something going on with my life that’s making writing harder than usual. There’s a reason why I haven’t gone into specifics, and it’s that, some time ago, I was told by a former subscriber that they had gotten tired of things constantly happening to me, and that’s why they’d left.

Other than the somewhat tactless wording… they were right.

Almost every single time I tried to make one of my weekly schedule posts, no matter how much I qualified the tentative nature of such, somebody would unsubscribe after my explanations about what had been going on and how I’d failed at meeting my own goals. This makes far more sense when one does (unlike me) contextualize such claims within the broader sphere of online creators seemingly getting health problems constantly and out of nowhere once they reach a certain level of wealth and comfort.

The thing is? I’m nowhere near that point of comfort. You all see just how much money I make off the Patreon, and the rest is only via commissions, which I can’t write on plenty of months due to the Patreon always taking priority.

(There’s a slight side income coming from Amazon sales. This month? It’s €13.04.)

The situation isn’t as dire as it sounds due to me being a social parasite—by which I mean living in an apartment owned by my parents.

Which neatly segues into what the Hell I’ve been alluding to for the past few months of lessened productivity.

(Stop reading if you don’t care about my circumstances and are already getting irked at me for wasting time on this rather than posting the next Haruno chapter.)

So, last year I wrote about the ordeal that was my father getting a double lung transplant, all the highs and lows of the situation, and how stressed I was at missing deadlines due to being mostly stuck in the hospital waiting for the other shoe to drop. The succinct summary is that, despite quite a few scares, things went miraculously, unprecedentedly well.

Then months went by, and he was doing better. He was still overweight for the lifestyle he’d been prescribed and about as allergic to getting exercise as he’s ever been, but he took his medication very seriously and… Well, he no longer needed his wheelchair.

Nor his oxygen mask.

It was a relief. A lung transplant is something that’s never done without near immediate danger of death because transplanted organs have a very short life. Getting to ten years post-surgery is quite an achievement.

Last January, his lung capacity had dropped by 20%.

It was time to panic.

The doctors took their sweet time (violating protocol, if what I’ve found on my own is reliable at all), and it wasn’t until March that they started taking the situation seriously, given his continuous decay. They started doing the proper tests and found no sign of the possible cause.

At one point, I was told that there were no signs of organ rejection, and I breathed.

Then more tests came and, on the day before he was scheduled for his first meeting with the radiotherapy team, he got a lung biopsy.

An almost lethal one.

Something went wrong and, when taking the fifth sample, they perforated the lung, immediately filling the cavity between the lungs and the ribs with an air bubble that was pressing down on his lungs and risking their collapse. Which would’ve meant his immediate death.

He was sedated and put into as near an artificial coma as you can go without crossing that line. The doctor told my mother and me that the situation “was very dire,” and, apparently unsatisfied with the reception the line got, he kept using it as a fucking comma for the rest of his explanation.

Every three words: “The situation is very dire.”

May as well have been yelling that my father was about to die.

Which he was.

Until he wasn’t.

See, one of the things you do when treating a pneumothorax is to insert a tube to drain the trapped air so that the lungs can go back to working unimpeded.

They inserted a bent tube, and that quite obviously didn’t do much to better the situation.

So, after a couple of days of everything getting steadily worse, they put another tube.

And he recovered.

Up to a point.

He was woken up, haunted by hallucinations brought by a bad interaction with the anesthesia that, according to yet another doctor, would have killed him if they had lasted just a few more hours than they did, as they were stressing him, taxing him after a near-death experience, and keeping him from falling asleep.

Yay.

This all coincided, because of course it did, with me having to write Armsmaster falling into a coma and Lisa reacting to that, an arc I’d planned for about two years ago that suddenly felt like past me stabbing me in the liver.

And twisting the knife.

Repeatedly.

Particularly because things kept going on. They hadn’t found any signs of infection, of rejection, or any other cause for his drop in lung capacity. As it turns out, when there are no signs of anything, that means it isorgan rejection.

In this particular case, chronic rejection.

I… didn’t take the news well. Living with a transplant is always a countdown to things going badly, but it had barely been a year since the surgery, and we were suddenly facing a worst-case scenario. The doctors lied and told us that they had changed his immunosuppressants months ago, which really hinted at them quickly covering their asses right before… Well, you can guess what I was thinking.

Then he took the changed meds, and…

Well, my father is the kind of person who would rather not discuss any problems, either his or those of other people. I don’t think he realizes just how badly that works when maintaining what should be a close bond, but it is what it is.

My mother?

Let’s just say I get my oversharing from somewhere.

So my father was all empty smiles and angry admonitions not to bother him with the same conversation yet again, while my mother kept me up to date with the news.

The actual terrible news of my father quickly losing what remained of his lung capacity.

And the radiotherapy, about the only thing other than the change in meds that could slow, stop, or even revert part of the loss, still hadn’t started.

(Still hasn’t to this day.)

So I was facing the very real possibility of him dying before the year was over, with all that entails on all levels, including me losing my current living arrangements because my widowed mother would need to start getting actual rent from my apartment, and I cannot afford to give her more than I do at the moment.

At the same time, I was beating myself up for every single missed chance at improving my economic situation, for being powerless, for only being able to give some emotional support, and not even much of that in my father’s case.

And then came today.

And the doctor has confirmed that my father is stable and my mother (who, as a gentle reminder, is deaf) had greatly misunderstood the situation.

So, things still aren’t ideal. He’s back to using an electric wheelchair and to needing oxygen just to go around his own house, but he isn’t about to die in a few months—or, if he is, it will be because of an unpredictable complication rather than something inexorable.

And I’m… I’m flooded with far too many things to properly name them.

So, yeah. This is what’s been going on. I’ve only told you now because the situation is more manageable, and I hope to get back to my best moments as soon as my hands stop shaking.

With any luck? That means you’ll get Haruno’s chapter today and the next Tales over the weekend.

Without any luck?

Well, I can’t say that, can I? Not with everything else in my life still going right.

Of which writing for you all is a great part.

So let’s see if I get to make the best of it.

For now? See you in, hopefully, a few hours with somebody else’s more entertaining trauma.