I will be halting my Patreon (Patreon)

I talked about this in my server last night a little bit but I hadn't talked about this publicly because it's been so hard for me and my family.

I'm probably going to be taking a break from recording. I don't know if a lot of you know this but my brother has a kidney transplant and he was feeling really sick. We just got word he has to start dialysis again because he lost his kidney again and I am absolutely devastated.

Let me just give some backstory and what exactly is going on.

A few years back, I was living in California while starting my masters and my younger brother went to a dentist appointment and had his BP taken and it was like 240/160. He was 15 years old at the time. He ended up going to the ER where he was admitted and wasn’t allowed to go home for weeks. It turned out his kidneys were failing. He was end stage kidney failure and we had no idea. I dropped out of school and resigned from my job and moved home to take care of him. While most people start dialysis and do it once every week, we had to train to learn how to nurse him and hook him up to the dialysis machine because he had to do dialysis every single night from 8pm to 6am before he left to school every morning. 

My brother getting sick was literally the hardest thing I've ever gone through in my entire life. My parents were both largely absent when we were growing up so I, from an early age, took over raising and taking care of him. My parents both admit he is more my kid than he is theirs. I’ve spent a life trying to push myself to be better and accomplish all my goals because I’ve always maintained that I would never give my brother the opportunity to say “the world broke my sister and she gave up, so I’m going to too." To this day, it still hurts so much that I spend my life making sure my parents and the world never broke him the way they broke me and his kidneys failing was the one thing I couldn’t save him from.

Him being sick was, by far, the darkest period of my life. Knowing I couldn't do anything to fix him literally devastated my life. He went on to eventually receive a kidney, graduate from high school and it seemed like the whole nightmare was behind us.

For the last 3 weeks my brother had been really really sick. He hadn't been able to eat because he threw everything up. He had body aches, fatigue, nausea and felt low energy. He lost 21 pounds in 3 weeks. He tested negative for COVID but went to the urgent care and was prescribed an antibiotic, which he took but it hadn’t helped so he reached out to his nephrologist (kidney specialist) and they did blood work and he told my brother if it didn’t come back okay, they’ll probably have to admit him to the hospital and he’d be put on an IV. It came back today and the doctor told us we have to take him to the ER as soon as possible because my brother needs to start dialysis again as he thinks my brother lost his kidney again.

I'm heartbroken and so devastated that we have to do this all over again. I don't know what to do. Everything I've ever done in my life has been for him. Our hospitals are at capacity and we've made national news because of my counties handling of COVID cases. He's going to be exposed to it in the hospital and there's nothing we can do about it. Whats worse is he doesn't have insurance so the realization that all of our resources are going to go into this is just really fucking me up as my mom and I have been helping with his medication and expenses for the last few months as it is.

I hadn't talked about any of this on here or publicly because I was trying to hope for the best. I still have a bunch of work due for this month and last month and I'm not sure if I'll be able to record for the rest of the month. I will most likely be halting my Patreon if I have to go back to nursing him and while I get all of the work I'm backed up on all caught up.

I know all of you have been patient with me and I appreciate it so much. I'm really sorry I haven't been around these last few weeks. I've been a ball of nerves for almost a month, hardly sleeping or eating and was just trying to deal with all of this privately. 

If any of y'all have any questions or want refunds or anything, you know where to find me.

I'm really sorry again.

-M