About My Wife’s Situation (Patreon)

Some of you have asked me how my wife is doing (thanks for asking), so here’s this post while one of the compilations is being put together.

She’s stable and receiving treatment. They won’t run any more tests for the cancer until after the fourth cycle of immunotherapy, and she completed her third cycle this week, so now we have to wait three weeks for the fourth cycle and to start the tests to see how the cancer has progressed.

Her main issue right now is the side effects. They’re a bit of a lottery. With each cycle, she might experience a different one, which may or may not build up over time and accumulate with the previous ones. Luckily, they’re milder than the side effects of chemotherapy would be.

During the first cycle, she experienced mouth sores (she still has them, but they’re healing), a continuous headache, and extreme drowsiness. We joked that she was turning into a cat, since she was sleeping between 12 and 15 hours a day.

In the second cycle, the headache went away and the drowsiness has eased a bit (she “only” sleeps 10–12 hours a day) but she began to experience two complicated side effects.

The first one we noticed was inflammation in her lungs. It was easy to detect, since she’s on oxygen 24 hours a day due to her COPD and began to have more trouble breathing than usual. We increased her oxygen flow for a couple of weeks, and little by little her body adapted, and the inflammation seems to have gone away. She’s back to her usual flow of 4 LPM this week.

The second side effect was more complicated (and we don’t know if it occurred during the first or second cycle; we only know when it was detected). She has developed Type 1 diabetes. The doctors detected it during a routine checkup a few days before starting the third cycle, last Friday. Her blood sugar was 579 (the normal range is around 120). We were sent to the ER and spent 34 hours there undergoing a series of tests.  She’s been put on insulin treatment, and this week we’ve had to go to the hospital three times (one of those visits coinciding with the start of the third cycle of immunotherapy, on Tuesday) to adjust her insulin dose. Little by little, thanks to the insulin, her blood sugar levels are returning to normal. The doctors don’t know if this will go away with the next cycle or not.

We don’t know what new side effects she might develop from the immunotherapy dose she received on Tuesday, if she’ll develop any at all, or if any of the ones she already has will go away. So far, we haven’t noticed anything. And that’s all the news we have about her situation.

How am I coping with all this? Better than I expected. As you know, I’ve had to quit my day job, so I have all the time I need to take her to the hospital for her appointments, make sure she takes her medication (or inject it), do the housework (I used to enjoy cooking when I only did it a couple of times a week and could cook whatever I wanted. I’m starting to hate it), and… develop the game.

As for developing the game, I’ve found a rhythm that fits our new needs.

For example, before all this, I couldn’t start writing a scene if I was going to have less than an hour straight to write. The breaks killed my writing flow, and getting back into it in the middle of a scene made me waste a lot of time, having to reread the whole scene before continuing.

Now I write whenever I can. I know I’ll have a break to give her her medication at 8 AM, breakfast time (checking her blood sugar, giving her insulin, preparing breakfast), 11 AM, 2 PM, lunch time (same as breakfast), 4 PM,  8 PM, dinner time (same as at lunch), 11 PM, and 11:30 PM. Sometimes it’s a five-minute break; sometimes it’s an hour or more. Add to that when I brew a couple of coffees, the pauses to check if she’s hydrated, and the hospital visits.

I’ve learned to keep part of my mind on the scene I was writing when the alarm went off (except during meal times or hospital visits), which makes getting back to work much easier. You’ve seen this in the progress reports. In the first few reports since this situation began, I felt like I wasn’t making enough progress, whereas the most recent ones have been at a pace even faster than my pace before all this happened (the scenes were also easier to both write and render, since the environments and new characters were already designed). It’s the only upside to being “unemployed.”

I'm taking care of myself, too. Don't worry. I eat, I drink (no alcohol), I sleep (not much, as usual), I walk (often pushing a wheelchair while my wife sits comfortably... she's getting lazy... just kidding), and I try to laugh as much as I can and at everything I can.

Oh, and she doesn't hate me yet for giving her injections and checking her blood sugar levels. That's nine needle pricks a day (between tests and medication), and she hates needles.

And that’s all. Thanks for asking!