My, my, how time flies. Doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but damn if it hasn’t been MONTHS since I last posted anything at all. There’s definitely been some big events since I last updated everyone, and some big changes I’ve had to undertake, but I would like to think I’m finally starting to get myself back on track properly.
So, let’s start with a quick(ish) rundown of what all has been going on with me since July of last year when I last posted a story.
2022 Flooding in Eastern Kentucky
Right around the end of July, my area of eastern Kentucky was hit by some of the worst flooding we’ve seen in my lifetime. Some have called the event a ‘500 Year Flood’, and it was pretty damn scary for a lot of people. While I was safe at my home during the rainfall, my family personally experienced it. My mother and sister were visiting my mother’s boyfriend and his family and had to evacuate his home at about 3AM. At the time, I was located a couple counties over, and had to receive updates via Facebook messenger from my mother that morning as the waters continued to rise, starting about 6AM. They had moved their vehicles to the road, but still the waters continued to rise, and the roadway was blocked in both directions by trees and debris. The water started getting up higher, and rose to within a few inches of the running boards of their trucks before thankfully it began to recede and they were not forced to try to climb up the hillside to get away from it. It was about 10AM that our home lost power, so my communication was cut due to extremely poor cell service. I ventured out after it was obvious that the power wasn’t coming back immediately.
It was then that my mother and sister decided to return home, though my sister wanted to stay at my aunt’s place, which was well out of the flood zone and still with power. By the time I had come out of the holler, my mom was almost back home, so we decided to meet up at the local bank and take one vehicle to survey the damage. We had originally intended to drive around and see some of the harder hit areas, but decided to head home first, but saw that the water was coming up far too quickly at that point. By the time we tried to get back up the holler, the road was blocked near the entrance (the only spot that regularly gets impacted by flooding), so we had to turn around. Within the few minutes it took us to try and get up the holler, the water was already rising into the streets of the small town at the mouth of it, which I had never seen before. So, we returned to my aunt’s place, where I wound up spending about three nights, though we could return to our home the following day, it took multiple days for power to be restored. I just kept the refrigerator and freezer running with a borrowed generator throughout those days.
I’m extremely grateful that my family remained safe and made it through, though her boyfriend and his family lost much of their belongings in this event, and are still trying to recover from it to this day. To say it was a nightmare would be putting it mildly.
Deaths in the Family
Our family suffered a couple deaths during the second half of the year as well. First was my uncle’s wife, who had long been suffering from various issues relating to lupus and other conditions, in mid-October. She had been forced to spend several days/weeks in the UK Medical Center in Lexington over the last few months, and did not make it out the last time she went there; initially it seemed like she would pull through, but then things took a turn for the worse and she never recovered.
Second was my mother’s boyfriend’s son-in-law; this one came out of nowhere in early November. He had been dealing with diabetes, but seemed to have things mostly under control at this point. He worked for the city, and had been working long hours trying to clean up the flood damage, driving a dump truck. He suffered a bad wreck in late September or early October, which caused him to suffer ongoing pain. However, unbeknownst to everyone, he would also become infected with flesh-eating bacteria, likely having come from all the filth that had come to be in and on the truck when he crashed. He was suddenly unable to get up off the toilet one evening, and within a handful of days, he was dead.
Ongoing Vision Problems and Diabetes Complications
Even at the time of the flooding, I was having minor issues with my vision, as I had for some time, even before I quit my job in April of last year. I had been suffering retinal bleeding, diabetic retinopathy, on and off for some time, even though I had (supposedly) been keeping my diabetes under control. I tended to have one eye or the other cloudy due to this bleeding, so my vision was rarely great, and had received several injections into the eye to clear the buildup of blood, though throughout the spring and summer, I was mostly clear.
This changed in late September, when I suffered a bleed in my left eye that quickly became one of the worst I had experienced. My sister and I had gone out to grab lunch, a sandwich and fries from Arby’s, and stopped at Walmart to pick up a few things before heading back home. As I waited in line, several factors came together to cause the bleed: 1) they apparently had their AC off, because it was warm in the store, and warmer at the checkouts, 2) even though my sugar was okay that morning, I had foolishly decided to eat the bun and fries at Arby’s, which raised it to higher levels, though I thought I would be okay, and 3) my blood pressure spiked due to stupidity at the checkout (it took about fifteen minutes for the people in front of us to finish checking out because the Walmart staff couldn’t figure out how a coupon worked; it took FOUR people to finally figure it out). So, when I crouched to pick up the cartons of soda we had stopped for, my left eye spurted, and it continued to get cloudier the rest of the day.
At first I didn’t think much of it, but after several days it hadn’t really begun to clear, and I had to see my retina specialist, where I received another series of injections to clear the blood. However, unlike before, my eye would remain cloudy for several months, and I was basically operating with one eye through October and November.
It was in November, when we were attending a birthday party that I suffered a minor bleed in my right eye, which, thankfully didn’t remain long, but did get me understandably worried. I couldn’t understand why it had happened, as I had been keeping my sugar under control (again, so I thought). I was okay after a couple days, and did alright throughout the rest of November, but then I suffered another bleed in my right eye in early-mid December, while the left remained cloudy from the bleed in September. This one was more severe, and I was unable to see much other than vague shapes at the time. I was a bit scared, to say the least.
It was during the visit with my retina specialist over the latest bleed that the decision was made to perform surgery on my left eye to clear it out, while I received an injection in my right eye. So, on December 15th, I underwent surgery to clear my left eye.
This was, to use an apt saying, an eye-opening experience.
I began to monitor my blood sugar levels more closely in the days following the surgery, while continuing my renewed research on what I could do to keep it under control. I had discovered a channel on Youtube that seemed to offer the best advice that would work for me (it’s called Beat Diabetes, btw, and I highly recommend looking into what he has to say), but made some rather surprising discoveries about how my own body worked. I began following the dietary guidelines (basically keto / low card with strict fasting, two meals a day only), but it was a rocky start.
As I would discover during this period, I am an atypical diabetic. For most, coffee (black or with cream, no added sugars of course) and beans are safe and won’t spike blood sugar, with beans being considered a diabetic super food. In my case, however, I discovered that BOTH of these actually spike my sugar! At the time, I was checking my sugar five times daily, and at first couldn’t understand why it would be so high either several hours after dinner (mom had fixed chili right after my surgery, with plenty of beans in it) or by lunch time, when I had been on an 18 hour fast (aside from two cups of coffee in the morning). Coffee in particular would spike my sugar 50+ points per cup! Even caffeinated drinks would cause it to spike up. Thinking back to my days in the office, I would have a couple of cups in the morning, after checking my sugar, and would then have another cup or two at work, plus a caffeinated beverage at lunch time, so it was no wonder my health was declining and I couldn’t get a handle on my sugar.
It was a difficult period in which I basically dropped coffee and caffeine pretty much cold turkey, but my blood sugar tests showed the changes immediately. As the days went on, and throughout the holidays, my sugar levels would steadily decline. I could handle teas fairly well as far as sugar spikes, and it would give me a little bit of a boost in the mornings. After cutting out beans and pretty much all carbs, I actually began to experience low blood sugar for the first time, going low to the point I had to eat something sweet to get it back up, and had to cut back on my insulin injections.
As it stands right now, since I started in mid-December, I have lost about ten pounds at least (I had lost five within a month, between doctors visits, with almost no exercise), and my blood sugar is staying fairly steady in the 110-130 range most days, with it being slightly higher on days when I have vegetation (salads or some other kind of veggies). Even on days when I have allowed myself to stray a bit (like having some of the refried beans with dinner at the Mexican restaurant), it is coming down faster, and isn’t staying high nearly as long as it used to. I have only been taking insulin if it is over 150 at night, and even then have reduced my dosages. I am still mystified as to why it will sometimes rise overnight through my fasting period, but thus far it hasn’t been a major issue.
The best part, though, is that I have (knock on wood) suffered no further bleeding in my eyes. My left eye remains clear, and my right eye has only a few remnants floating about in my vision (basically just regular floaters at this point). As March approaches (and my 40th birthday with it), I’m hopeful that I will continue to improve and may even reach the point where I can drop some of my medications completely.
The Rocky Road Ahead
This year has already been crazier than last year, and I’m not even going to get into the state of national and international politics. For those of you who may not have heard, there was a pretty massive shakeup in the tabletop RPG space in January when Wizards of the Coast decided to pull some serious bullshit regarding the Open Game License 1.0a. The quick version is: the OGL has been in place since WotC released D&D 3rd edition back in 2000, and has been the standard license practically everyone in the TTRPG scene has used since then to publish their games. This license is what allowed so many games to come out using the d20 system, for example, and why the Old-School Renaissance became such a big part of the TTRPG space in recent years, and is why D&D 5e has exploded in popularity the last few years, with tons of third-party creators making content for it. So, Hasbro/WotC decided that since they weren’t getting practically all the money, D&D was under-monetized and that needed to stop. They tried to pull some shady business to revoke the OGL, a document which, according to the guy who was primarily responsible for creating it, was, by its nature, irrevocable, and force creators to use a new restrictive license that would give WotC the right to take your content for their own use, require you to report your earnings to WotC, and if you made enough money, give them 25% of what you earned.
Needless to say, this caused an uproar in the TTRPG space, and its aftershocks are still ongoing. WotC is still making stupid decisions and cannot seem to just stop with their stupidity, and many of the bigger creators, such as Paizo and Kobold Press, are fighting back, either making a new OGL-like license that will be as ironclad as possible (and given over to a third party to control, so they can’t change it in the future) or creating their own game systems.
As it stands, my gaming group are finally diving into Pathfinder 2nd edition, and are dropping D&D 5e (a change that I have wanted for years; I disliked 5e even before it was the popular thing to do), and I’ve been delving into other systems and games as well, like Cyberpunk 2020/RED, Castles and Crusades, and different flavors of OSR games.
This has caused me some issues lately in terms of my writing progress, as I have been torn between wanting to develop my own gaming content (something I’ve done plenty of times before, only this time I’m feeling more invigorated to do it) and continuing to develop my UrbanVerse, which has multiple settings within it and thus my brain sometimes has trouble focusing in one area. So, I’m going to try to find a balance to both, combining my RPG creation with my writing and worldbuilding efforts to some extent. Before the OGL debacle, I had been trying to develop my own homebrew system based on the old Star Wars Saga Edition RPG, and that may continue, though it’s on hold for the moment due to learning Pathfinder 2e (I’m going to run the Abomination Vaults AP, starting with the Beginners Box adventure and mixing in Troubles in Otari as sidequests). I’ve already got an idea in mind for a homebrew adventure/campaign setting that I’m probably going to be using for our eventual Castles & Crusades tryout as well that I’ve started working on.
I do, however have several stories, a couple fairly lengthy ones, that are done and ready to post, as well as some that are fairly close to being finished, if I can keep my brain focused on them. I will say that some of my tastes have evolved over the last year, and I have tended to want to focus less on kink and more on serious fiction, though the kink still seems to find its way in there regularly.
Look for some new content coming up soon; I’m likely going to shoot for a post a week again, and may try to do a second post, gaming related, weekly as well, though we’ll see how this goes. Though I’m not working at the moment, I’m likely going to be trying to find another job soon (eye surgery ain’t cheap!), and have also continued to try and develop my photography skills. Plus, I’ve taken to ghost hunting again since last year, and have already been on three hunts, with several more already scheduled for the coming months. I’ll probably be posting some details on those soonish as well, likely some video and audio evidence too. It’s going to be a busy year, but I’m hopeful for good things!
Urban out!
Hit me up over on DeviantArt or Discord if you wanna chat!
