Weekly Update - 8-8-2021 (Health update) (Patreon)

Hey guys, sorry I missed Saturday again - I swear my mental clock is stuck a full day off right now and I keep not realizing what day of the week it is. This will be an entirely personal update, pretty much; I don't really have anything to share on the development side of things. Orexius has been working on more xray animations, and I'm still trying to get my mojo back, so this will just be an update on me and my health.

So to start off, I had my appointment with my medication doc this week. My main concern was, of course, getting ADD medication, and after going through all my options, we ended up settling on one of the few non-stimulant medications available. While she was doing my checkup, she noticed I have a very high resting heart rate, around ~115, when the average adult should be between 60-100. I asked her if it was because of how out of shape I am, and she said that just being out of shape shouldn't be enough to make my resting heart rate that high, so there's probably some underlying cause there in addition to my poor health. She wants me to get an EKG, but she wasn't sure what the cost of that was, so she said she would find out how much it would cost me and let me know at our next appointment. I do plan on getting insurance once I start seeing a therapist, so I can find an insurance plan that works with both my doctor and my therapist, so worst case scenario I can wait until after I have that to get the EKG if it's too expensive out of pocket. In the meantime, because of the high heart rate, she's not comfortable putting me on any stimulant medications; combining a stimulant with the antidepressant I'm on can sometimes make people jittery, and she said it could be potentially dangerous before we know what's going on with my heart rate. Thus, the non-stimulant.

The unfortunate part is that the stimulants are the ones that tend to work immediately. The medication I started on, being a non-stimulant, is like the antidepressant in that it takes a while to start working - pretty much the exact same timeframe, too, 4-8 weeks for the full effects. I won't know for a few weeks if it's helping with my ADD or not, and until we figure out what's going on with my heart, I won't be able to try any of the stimulant varieties. I've been on this new pill for most of this week, and the good news is I'm not getting horrible side effects like I did with the antidepressant. I got really nauseous one afternoon, but that's about it, and laying down for a while thankfully shook it off.

The one piece of good news I can relay about Crisis Point is that, while I haven't been actively working on the game in-engine, I have been spending a lot more time thinking about/mentally planning the game lately. I can tell my mental state is getting considerably better, both because of the antidepressant and because I've been trying out some new hobbies lately to try and refresh myself. This was a REALLY busy and stressful week for me, but I find myself able to handle stress better than I used to, so I'm still feeling pretty okay despite that. I wish I had gotten myself to work on CPE this week, but my motivation feels like it's coming back slowly but surely, and I'm confident that whether or not this ADD medication works, the coming weeks will have me back at my work desk - maybe not at full speed yet, but I'm positive that I'm going to feel up to making progress again soon.

Seriously, everyone, thank you so much for putting up with this hiatus for such a long time. Even though we still have some content coming in from Orex, I'm the main workforce behind CPE, and I'm sure having the game stall for so long is just as frustrating for you as it is for me. I say this every week, but I really can't thank you all enough for allowing me to put myself above the game for a while. I've been pushing my mental health aside for years so I could focus on the game, and I'm sure that's part of how it got to a boiling point like this. I may not be fully back in action yet, but with my mental health steadily climbing back up again, I'm just grateful that my unhealthy mental habits didn't push me so far that there was no coming back. As far as I'm concerned, I've gotta have the best fans in the world, and I can't wait to get back to delivering you guys the content you all deserve.