Update #38 - What’s Going On (Patreon)

Good evening!

Sorry for format and errors. Posting from phone and it types slow without marking errors.

I’m not dead yet. The amount of people who were reaching out to me to give their well wishes have been overwhelming and incredibly humbling. At the same time I’ve had a lot of “please don’t die, get the surgery” etc and while I try to make a habit of keeping personal life stuff offline I realize in this case it’s making people needlessly worry. So I’m going to go over what’s happening medically in more detail.

I have a very high pain tolerance. It’s great for something like a small cut, stubbing a toe, tripping, etc. Problems come in when something more serious happens because it can take me a while to realize something is seriously wrong. The first few days of spinal disc dislodging I thought were a pulled muscle, and when I got it checked out at a clinic they came to the same conclusion. It turned out that something got mixed up and they brought me back (free of charge) a bit later and an X-Ray showed that my spine was warping on the bottom but not compensating on the top, which was a sign of a very bad pulled muscle. In fact they were so tight that it appeared it could be damaging my spine so they prescribed a steroid pack and muscle relaxants to take over 10 days. I also had some minor stretches to do, and was sometimes going to a hot tub pool to try and relax them more. Here’s why that was horrible.

When the steroids wore off the pain wasn’t better, in fact it might’ve been feeling worse. I called the original clinic to find out I hadn’t seen a doctor at all, but in fact a physician’s assistant who didn’t put that fact forward and explained the fuckup. I should’ve had an MRI, an X-Ray wouldn’t cover all the bases. I was floored since I’ve never had a medical experience that was handled so poorly so said fuck it and decided to go to a local highly rated chiropractor before committing to anything with regular hospitals. I usually associate chiropractor with scam so I was hesitant but it was incredibly enlightening.

After assessment he told me that I definitely had a herniated disc. To put it simply imagine a sandwich filled with jelly, and when you press down on it the jelly starts spewing out. That’s basically the result in my back of things being out of place, a bone sandwich with jelly spinal fluid. My muscles weren’t crushing my spine for shits and giggles, it was trying to stop more fluid from leaking and heal the damage. The relaxants had been making it worse. It’s something that’ll take months to recover fully, and he mentioned that surgery was also an option, though an unrecommended one at this stage. Here’s why that’s a bad idea.

Despite what some people were messaging about concerned about the Patreon pause it’s not money. I have a catastrophic plan for health insurance and I always have a fund that covers the maximum out of pocket so I can’t be fucked over by a medical condition. Surgery would be covered by it and I wouldn’t go bankrupt. However, the recovery time from surgery would be much longer and also has a high chance of something going wrong to make the condition worse, cause paralysis, or losing bowel control and becoming a professional Smash tournament fighter. So I’m not avoiding surgery for money. Physical therapy hurts but I can still move, and it won’t bite me back as hard when I’m older. If it’s 2 months later and nothing is better I’d do it, but I have been improving it’s just slow. A lot of hills and valleys with more to come.

Like the hit game Pathologic 2 my immunity was lowered by taking anti inflammatory steroids. Turns out that the hot tub caused an ear infection (opposite ear of the same time last year) which then spread to both ears. I’ve taken antibiotics and the pain is gone and it’s on the way out but it’s still hard to hear because the fluid isn’t drained from the middle ear yet. That’s preferable to the few days of absolute agony where I couldn’t sleep because either my ears were murdering me or my spine was so I couldn’t sleep. I honestly feel horrible I’m so late on the video because , spoiler, I adored Pathologic 2 and I hope it does so well.

So that’s why the video is still late. I can sit up better but I can’t edit audio because my hearing isn’t all there yet and I’m generally disoriented. I haven’t been playing anything on PC the past month for fun or videos so I’m also going to be behind on the Elite video as well. There’ll be another adventure game stream soon (from the cursed couch) but I have no clue when I can get back to work on videos properly since my editing has been a crawl and I can only do some writing planning right now with bath hearing ears. I haven’t been able to work on them or irl contract work so really it’s something to do besides rotting.

If my ears aren’t drained by the last day of July I’ll be pausing the Patreon again. Thank you again for all your support in what’s been a really trying time. Truly. It’s meant the world.

Also Fire Warrior is on GOG this is my legacy