Yes, this September I resumed my degree. My university was mostly back running again after the longest strike on record, aside from the fact that some poor fucks were still doing exams for their winter term classes in September. I had four classes this term, but they are not the ones I listed before. Oh no, they had to fucking cancel Intermediate Metal Fabrication, the one studio course I'd been looking forward to for months. Imagine my absolute glee at finding that email in my inbox the day before camp counsellor training week was supposed to start!!!!!!! My courses got jigged around a bit so this past term I had Figurative Sculpture, Comics and Social Justice, Health Psychology and Developmental Psychology. I enjoyed Comics and Social Justice a lot, and my two psychology classes were pretty interesting! Holy shit, babies, man. There is so fucking much happening in that tiny little head, and so quickly.
My Figurative Sculpture course was a bit of a dud, which really fucking sucks because that's the last sculpture course I'll be taking for my degree. I learned some interesting techniques for body casting and I really love one of my pieces, but the other one...... :/ I had an idea I was interested in but I had to change it a week before the due date because a lupus flare made my hands too sore and swollen to work with the material I chose (chicken wire fencing, very sturdy). I was able to use a piece of the previous project in the next one, but I didn't connect with the concept as much and it just felt like a huge waste of time and money. The circumstances as well as the subject matter I chose for it make it so that I can't even think about the project without getting anxious, so I know I'll never use it again.
The project was about how people grow apart. The inspiring subject was, of-fucking-course, none other than Rose and I's ended relationship and growth as people. The prompt for this was that a couple weeks before I had to change my idea, Rose and I met up for coffee to get some closure on the rather abrupt ending of our relationship in May. We had not spoken to each other since.
The conversation went as I should have expected it to, the same as they always do. Part of why we stayed together so long after shit started hitting the fan was because on a surface level, we still got along wonderfully, able to converse for hours without stop on a variety of subjects, laughing and joking all the way. After a brief discussion of the fallout in both of our lives after the break up (and many apologies from me for the shitty way I ended things), we got onto catching up about life and discussing our interests same as always. After a couple hours though, things turned sour.
I don't remember quite how we got onto it, but they got to talking about how they think that this kind of experience would change someone a lot, that they'd learn from it. They said that they know they've changed a lot, but that they could tell that I hadn't really, that I was just more of the same. Basically, they went off with this holier-than-thou bullshit, and when I reactively prickled and defended myself against the accusations, they just kept giving me these condescending looks like "this poor fool," and told me that they didn't know why I was saying any of this stuff, I don't have to justify myself to them.
At the time, I blamed myself, cursing myself for still caring about what they think. Upon reflection, fuck them, actually. The went on and on with all this posturing like they're so much better than me, talked shit at me to my face, and then expected me not to defend myself? They fucking goaded me on, period. They didn't immediately cut me off when I started defending myself, they sat smugly and soaked it all in, only saying I don't have to justify myself to them when I started questioning myself out loud. At the core, I really do not care what they think of me any more, but if they're sitting right in front of me spitting passive aggressive insults of course I'm going to rear up.
We ended the evening with plans to keep in touch and maybe meet up again, but after reflection I'm not so sure if I want to any more. I can't deny that while I no longer have romantic feelings for them, there's something very nice about having such an extended history with someone, that familiarity of not having to explain yourself all the time. I missed talking with them like that, I really did. At the end of the evening, I was mostly enjoying that ache being dulled.
However, that itch being scratched cannot come at the cost of having to play these mind games with them still. Aside from the games, there were a few times when I mentioned interests of mine offhand as they were relevant, and without the pretense of a romantic relationship, they used no filter in expressing their hatred and disgust of these things that are very important me. They were also incredibly judgmental of a series of past decisions which, at the time, they had been supportive through.
For weeks after, their mind games had me reeling, examining and reexamining their responses and my responses and where I should have done something different and I just don't want to deal with that shit any more. I did it for the latter years we were together and I will not do it again.
Their meanness at my interests and past decisions in particular had me thinking about just how much we both changed, hence the art. The project makes me think of that conversation, our relationship, and the stress of having to put the sculpture together in under a week, hence the anxiety. I just want to put all that shit behind me, hence the never using it again.
That was my final sculpture assignment, handed in two weeks ago. I had two exams on the 13th and 14th respectively, so I am presently done with school until January 3rd (only fucking school in the area to start on the 3rd instead of the 7th, mumble grumble). For now I am on holiday with much free time for completing personal projects and lazing about, because I am unfortunately still unemployed. I have given my resume to multiple local retailers and only gotten an interview with one of them; two interviews precisely, which both seemed to go very well, and then they didn't call me back. Fuck you too anonymous children's clothing retailer, I would be a fantastic employee (and yes I understand the irony of telling a company how good you would be for them while aggressively swearing at them).
A great portion of my time has been filled with playing on my new Switch. In September, when Nintendo fucking finally announced Animal Crossing for Switch in 2019, I started hunting for a good deal. I found a great one on boxing day and ordered it online. It somehow arrived promptly despite the Canada Post strike (I think it was sent expedited?) and from then there's hardly been a day without it in my hands.
When I got it set up the first game I bought was Stardew Valley! I wouldn't have guessed I'd be so obsessively into it, seeing as I've never clicked with games like Harvest Moon or Rune Factory, but I tried it on my cousin's Switch when I stayed with him for a few days over fall reading week and I was hooked (it was a very pleasant four-day visit, I got to snuggle his rats and explore the town where he lives with him and his boyfriend). I've been playing 2-4 hours a day every day since I got it. It's the only game I've found besides Sims 3 that can get me into such a trance that hours pass without me realizing! Yesterday I started Spring of Year 2. I am romancing Emily and I'm at ten hearts now!! I need to find that mermaid pendant but I'm also trying to avoid googling things as much as possible because I'm really enjoying exploring the game's features without obsessing over getting things perfect (although I will admit that I did google the mermaid pendant and scan the Wiki page just long enough to see that I need to get it from the Old Mariner).
Speaking of days blurring together, holy fuck it's almost Christmas, but it certainly doesn't feel that way to me. My household feels less than spirited at the moment. My nannu's health has gotten progressively worse over the course of this year, and at this point it's likely that he's developed dementia, along with the physical health issues he already had and the depression that hasn't faltered since my nanna passed away.
Over the last eight-or-so months, my mom's visits to help him went from once or twice a week, to three days a week, to all day every single weekday because he couldn't take care of himself alone at all any more. My aunt is helping too, but she's working full time and in university part-time studying social work. She's nowhere near as available as my retired mother, who therefore was saddled with the majority of the care, with my aunt only able to assist on weekends. A few months ago they applied for assistance through a government program (can't remember the name) and thankfully they were able to get extra aid from that, such as a person to come help him shower once a week and coverage for mobility aids. That aid alone isn't enough though, and he needs far more care than can be provided through daily visits. He calls us all the time. He needs 'round the clock care, and we can't give him that, especially because it takes forty minutes to an hour-and-a-half to get to his house depending on the time of day.
Yesterday he was discharged from a two-week inpatient program where they assessed his needs and tried to figure out some of the health issues that his piece of shit physician has been blowing off for months. They made some headway, which is good! They had him doing physio and relearning how to walk with his walker. One of the issues is that he has constant discomfort in his legs, and from that he decided that he would never walk again. He still sometimes says that he's done for, it's over, that kinda thing. Part of getting him up and running again is combating the nasty combination of his depression and the fact that he has always been a very, very stubborn person. Once his depression had him convinced that he was done and his legs would never work again, he absolutely refused to listen to any of the doctors telling him that they could see the strength was still there, he just had to keep using his legs to keep it that way. From what my mom said after visits it sounded like they were doing great work with him though, so hopefully seeing himself doing all these things he said he could never do again gives him at least a little more hope for the future, and helps him keep up with things now that he's discharged.
He will still need more care that we can give him though, because of the dementia setting in (he doesn't remember what day it is any more, and often forgets a lot of what we tell him). My parents have gone to a bunch of tours for retirement residences and long-term care facilities in the past month. Long-term care facility is the goal, but the wait lists are so long for those that my parents are looking at the retirement residences with the hope of finding one that can accommodate him until we can get him into that long-term care. A friend of my mom's said it took two years for her to get her mom into a long-term care facility, and my mom can't keep up this routine forever. It's totally exhausting her, not to mention how the whole debacle of watching her father's fading health and trying to get him the care he needs is taking its toll as well.
Since he's home for Christmas, it means that my mom and aunt need to take turns caring for him over the holidays. On the 26th, we're all going to meet at my nannu's and have Christmas dinner there. His health issues aside, it still won't be anywhere the same as all the other years. For one thing, the house won't be decorated; no nativity scene in the front room, no strings of beads wrapped around the railing, no tree the living room upstairs. The largest difference will be that there will be no big dinner. My nanna used to love doing these huge buffet-style dinners for holidays, with a big fuckin' turkey and the whole bit. After she passed away, my mom and aunt took over dinner duties and shared the cooking between the two of them. This year though, even if they had the time to do all that cooking, we'd have nowhere to eat it. There is no dining room any more because some time in November my parents moved my nannu's bed to the first floor so he wouldn't have to do stairs any more, and they put the dining room table away. My dad said we'll probably end up ordering pizza or something, since well be eating without a table, sitting either on the couch or the floor.
The time-consuming, energy-draining process of taking care of my nannu and navigating the medical system has reflected in my house in that we still do not have a single Christmas decoration up. My mother also did not send any Christmas cards this year, electing instead to call anyone who sent us one to thank them, but I digress. We typically have our Christmas decorations up during the first week of December, but here we are two days to Christmas (holy shit) and there is not a single holly jolly thing in this house. My dad's been cleaning the house the past couple days in preparation to haul all that stuff out of the basement and finally set it up. He's setting up the decorations as I type, which I usually love to help with, but it feels like a waste of time at this point. I reiterate, it's two days to Christmas. We'll just be taking the stuff down in a week or so anyway, so I don't really see the point.
We're not putting the tree up anyway, that much was decided a week ago. It's not for lack of wanting necessarily, but as a safety concern so the dog doesn't accidentally knock it over. My dear sweet puppy has aged a lot in the last year, and she's not so steady on her feet any more. She's eleven years old now, pretty up-there for a large dog. She's already been having joint issues for the past two years and has been losing hair from the tips of her nose and tail, as well as having some incontinence issues that we're medicating. Now her eyesight and hearing are both fading too. She also seems to be walking the same path as my nannu. She's showing pretty much all the textbook signs of doggy dementia. She gets confused pretty easily and we keep having to move furniture to stop her from getting stuck in the small spaces she likes to shove herself into. She's also been forgetting some of the routines we've had in place for her for just about her whole life.
The cherry on top is the blood test results we got back from the vet last week. We'd noticed that more so than her joint problems, she was having more and more issues with muscle weakness. Alongside this she was rapidly losing weight and some days she wouldn't eat anything at all. The final straw to take her to the vets were two sores on her sides, one over each shoulder on her front legs. Because of her muscle weakness, she lacks the fine motor control to ease herself down when she wants to lye on her side, resulting in her frequently slamming herself into the floor hard enough for us to feel the shake if we're sitting on the couch. The sores formed from her repeatedly slamming her bony frame and thin layer of muscle into our hardwood floor. My brother was taking good care of them but they weren't healing very quickly so my brother and dad took her to the vet to see about antibiotics and about her rapid weight loss.
The resulting bloodwork came back clean! One may believe like I did that a clean test is a good thing, but it is not. In this case, it means that there is no easily treatable health issue causing her weight loss. The vet said that because of these test results, what's causing the rapid weight loss is likely a cancer that's consuming all of the proteins in her body. We don't know exactly how long she has left, but she's gotten pretty small, 40 lbs. compared to her average healthy weight of 70 lbs. All we can do is make her as comfortable as possible and take loving care of her.
As you can imagine this has also put a damper on my Christmas spirit. I'm trying not to linger on it too long because it's pretty well out of my control, and it was only a matter of time in the first place, of course. It's just upsetting for it to seem so soon.
I may not be dying but I've been having health issues of my own as well. In October, I had an appointment with my lupus specialist where they finally fucking listened to me about some issues I was having, and about finally dropping the dose on a steroid-based medication. The old adage "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind. As much as I wanted this dose to drop because of the potential long-term effects of the drug, it was a bit of a hellish transition. I've been on a much higher dose of this med before and it's never given me issues like this in transitioning down, but the lower the dose the trickier it is of course. My dumb fuck specialist cut my dose in half all at once, which was way too fucking large and fast of a drop, and I went through some nasty withdrawal symptoms that I've never experienced with a drop before.
At this point, I remembered something. When my previous specialists dropped my dose, the wonderful doctors at the children's hospital (that's how fucking long these assholes have been putting off transitioning me off this, three fucking years), they left a transition period of alternating days rather than a flat drop, so for example with this situation I regulated my own dose to be alternating 5mg and 2.5mg every other day to smooth the transition. This took care of the withdrawal and brought me to a more comfortable spot but unfortunately this dose change is the one that finally has me showing other symptoms.
Previous drops had little to no affect on my overall condition but I've noticed a definite change with this one. In mid-November, I had the worst flare-up I've had since 2014, before I was properly medicated. This is the aforementioned flare-up that made me need to change the material of my sculpture assignment. My hands were all swollen, my hips and knees were sore and weak, and I lost a chunk of motion range in my right elbow. Aside from that, I just generally haven't been able to push myself as hard since it dropped, and it's been getting in the way of my life.
Before going to my next appointment a few days ago, I finally sat down to do my own research about the long-term effects of this medication, since all I knew was what doctors had told me. Upon further research, I was angered to find that the dose I was on before was fine. Doses of 5mg/day have been found to be mostly safe for long-term use. Why the actual fuck did my doctor not just tell me this so I would stop stressing about it? Why would no one actually fucking listen to me and actually fully inform me of this?? They knew this, I even verified this information with them when I went to my appointment on Wednesday. I was pushing so hard because all of the information I'd been given by medical professionals was that it was very bad in the long-term. If I'd known it was okay I wouldn't have pushed so hard to lower the dose.
Going into this appointment, I thought that they would see how horribly it was affecting me and put the dose back, and I was okay with that. I was sure to emphasize to the doctor just how much this has been affecting my daily functioning, and especially how the flare up was my worst since before I was medicated.
They did nothing. They did not put the dose back, and they did not give me anything to help deal with these symptoms popping back up. They. Did. Nothing. "See how this goes and come back in four months." Fucking. Nothing.
The specialist had the fucking gall to tell me, "You need to be very careful with dropping the dose when it gets this low." How fucking dare you think you have the right to say that to me when I had to fix your fuck up myself, you fucking piece of work? When I had to fix my own dose using knowledge from past treatment with other doctors because you dropped it too fucking fast? Fuck of you shitheel. I am experiencing pain and discomfort in a way I haven't in years and your response is to make that kind of flip remark and leave me in the dust for four months to 'just deal with it.' I would absolutely just put the dose back on my own but the scripts they gave me are for the lower dose so I'd run out early and wouldn't be able to refill them.
Through all this I'm losing a coping mechanism as well, if you can call it that. I've been a long-time Tumblr user and have had my blog for almost exactly seven years. Because of their recent policy changes, as well as the fact that a lot of people I follow are leaving, I have officially left as well. I'm not going to delete my account, though. I still have the app on my phone to get notifications for blogs where I have those turned on, and I feel very strange about the idea of destroying seven years of personal history with the click of a button.
I have now migrated to Twitter, where you can find me at @chamomileGothic. I'm still adjusting to the way Twitter functions but I think I'm getting used to it. I have also changed my Twitch channel to the same username if you're interested in following my streams. I'm still actively streaming there every weekend! The Homestuck stream was finished exactly one year after it was started, in late October. Since then I've streamed Hiveswap Act 1, the Paradox Space comics, and I am currently streaming Undertale, with plans to follow it with Delta Rune and Problem Sleuth. For mid-week bonus streams I streamed the Hiveswap Friendsim games as they came out. Mid-week streams are currently cancelled until the New Year, partially because of the holidays and partially because the Hiveswap Friendsims have officially completed and I have streamed all of them. The archives of those streams are available on my YouTube channel of the same name if you'd like a taste of my streaming style but don't have time to stop by for a stream!
That pretty well brings things up to date, as I made that transition just last week. The coming weeks leading into the new year will likely be more of the same, pissing around in my room and generally not completing any of the many goals I set out for myself for this break. What can I say, winter's a fucker. My everything always hits the fucking deck this time of year. I usually have the excitement of Christmas and New Year's Eve to bolster me but both of those occasions have been rather dulled this year. Once again we are having no family over on New Year's and I'm not so sure what I'm going to do with myself. At least I'm having friends over on the 30th, so that'll be nice. I miss my friends from high school. I wish we got to see each other more. Maybe I'll see if anyone is free to see Into the Spider-Verse in theatres. I've heard it's pretty good.
Until next time,
~Booky~
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