I did a little voice acting work from my studio this weekend, the first creative work I’ve done since all this emergency eye surgery started up. It’s a new field for me; I’ve done a little stage acting, but no voice acting ever before. It’s very exciting! I did two character voices, all for elements of five short scenes, and gave two readings – a primary and and alternate interpretation – for each scene in each voice.

I got back mail about it today:

This is BEAUTIFUL work. I’m elated with these takes! Thank you!

I don’t know how much of it they’ll use, but they like it! I’m so excited. 😀 The production in question will be coming out next year sometime; I don’t know when. Of course, I’ll point at it when it comes out if they use my work.

Similarly, I’ll eventually point at Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love, when that comes out. I talked to Shanti about it recently about why it’s not out yet – I mean, it’s finished, why not? But basically, she really wants to do a proper release show, which is kind of difficult now that her fiddler lives in Wisconsin. So she’s trying to figure out if she has any way of making that happen.

Oh, about that eye thing, an update: still recovering, and more quickly than after the last surgery, even if it feels longer – that’s just because I never finished recovery the last time. Less pain now, but not zero; sleeping badly, but not all the time; listening to Night Vale, a little too often. Anna’s also recovering on schedule; she’s going to try to work part of the day this week, from home. Good night, dear readers. Good night!

I’m allowed to look up again, by which I mean horizontally and not at the ground.

It’s makin’ me dizzy

woah

One thing that happens in eye surgery is something called “positioning,” where there is literally a bubble in your eyeball that you keep in a correct spot by controlled angling of your head.

Which is why I’ve been staring at the ground since Friday, and why I’ve been movement-restricted since the first, unsuccessful go at this.

I knew this would be boring. I did not realise how painful it becomes over time. I have vicodin to take the edge off, but fuck, this hurts. Crying-from-the-whole-body-pain hurts, without the vicodin. Not so bad, with.

The good news is that tomorrow should be the last day, for the most part. There’s still phase-out and no lying on my back for another week and I won’t have full vision for a few more weeks, but…

yeah. Painful. Hell, Anna is in way less pain than I’ve been, and she had an organ out! At least so far. She’s still surfing the percoset wave at the moment.

I’ve ordered that ribbon microphone kit I’ve been wanting, as a bit of retail and DIY therapy. With some luck, next post can go back to talking about things like that instead.

But, of course, I’m mostly terrified of having to go back in for round three. Right now I don’t know how I’d do it.

OH: if you got any geekgirlcon pics of the show, send them in? Several people took photos and I handed out cards, but so far, no joy. I found one hall shot (sadly, angled and blurry, and really late, I look as exhausted as I was) on the Flickr stream, but that’s all. Thanks!

Day three of recovery from round two of emergency eye surgery. The eye feels okay. The back and neck, not so much. Being positioned appropriately – face straight down as closely to full-time as possible for days on end – hurts quite a bit after a while.

Meanwhile, Anna is finishing up a few things, getting ready to go to hospital; she has to have surgery too, today, for cancer avoidance. This isn’t a surprise; it’s been planned a couple of months, unlike mine.

Hers will suck more than mine. Mine’s just injury, albeit old; hers is round five of tumour adventures, otherwise known as the worst kind of adventures. I can’t even be there, I have to stay home useless and in pain mostly face-down until at least Wednesday, with whatever happens being relayed out through someone else’s Facebook wall.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful Dejah can do that, but I’ve had a lot of reasons to feel pretty upset and horrible about things which have happened over the last ten years, but this one is downright special. I can handle a lot of shit except helplessness and dependence. Those are, for me, the real mind-killers. They’ve always led to horrors in my experience, for real, and I’ve spent lots of my existence working hard to avoid any shread of either of them. But right now, here we are, innundated.

I should probably have something lighter and braver to say about all this, but right now honestly, I just don’t. Hopefully in a few hours, or tomorrow. But not right now.

As a few of you may notice today: I am not at Orycon as planned. I am instead getting ready for another around of emergency eye surgery.

Basically, Dr. Saperstein said there was about 10% chance they’d have to go back in and do more work. Last weekend, I noticed an effect much like a meteor going across the sky, in the upper visual range of my right eye, the one they operated on two and a half weeks ago. I called in and got the on-call doctor, who said these things happen all the time from a million different reasons, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

I called in again on Monday, and was promised a return call by the surgeon’s assistant, but that didn’t happen; then I was too busy on Tuesday and Wednesday due to insurance company insanity (not medical; business and home, and they have also failed to call me back) and then some other day job things which also were kind of crazymaking.

So I finally called back on Thursday and said, “Look, this thing is happening, I don’t like my peripheral vision in my upper right eye, I’m about to go out of town for three days and then my partner has cancer-related surgery, I need it looked at.” And it took a couple of tries, but I got to see the on-call in Bellevue, all the external tests were really apparently quite good, but they dilated my eye and the on-call looked in said “Yep, this looks fine, this looks…” and started dictating numbers.

Pro tip: when the retinal surgeon stops saying fine and starts throwing numbers to the nurse assistant? That’s when something’s not right.

It’s not the previous retinal tear, either. It’s one of the two other areas of latticing (also from physical trauma) which Dr. Saperstien said would eventually fail, so he was going to go ahead and fix them now. Maybe he should’ve left well enough alone there. Or maybe it would’ve failed with the other work. No way for me to know.

Regardless, now another around of emergency surgery. Basically, the last three weeks get re-run. I really wish the on-call had taken me seriously last weekend and/or the office had called me back on Monday like they were supposed to; maybe we could’ve got this patched up on Tuesday, and I’d still have a shot of a reduced schedule at Orycon before Anna’s surgery, and at very least, maybe I wouldn’t be looking at not being able to be with Anna at the hospital during her surgery on Monday.

(This is a real possibility; it depends upon the post-surgical reaction. I just don’t know right now.)

So. This was kind of horrible the first time, but I made the best of it, I think. Honestly, that’s a little harder to do this time around. Hopefully I won’t have to be in a weird head position for weeks. I won’t know until Saturday. Wish me luck; at this point, we really appear to be needing it.

My eye bubble keeps getting smaller but has split into three bubbles. One large bubble, and two smaller, matching bubbles. Disney is filing a lawsuit against my eye for illegal use of trademark in bubbles.

Yeah, that’s all I got. Is it Monday already? I am kinda filled with the spirit of NOPE right now. I hate DST changes.

Pretty neat watching all these folks who weren’t going to go see Ender’s Game because of OSC’s queers-must-be-kept-illegal NOM-board-membership Russian-anti-gay-law history posting their Ender’s Game reactions tonight. Not all of them, but… many.

Peter David is leading a charge already to get it a Hugo, and says if it doesn’t it’ll be proof that fandom doesn’t “have the balls” to defy the dreaded Political Correctness that apparently rules it.

I’ve been blocking a lot of Facebook posts this evening. I’m expecting I’ll have to unfollow some Tumblr people for a bit, too, ’till the 65% it’s getting on Rotten Tomatoes catches up to it and it fades away.

Maybe I should just stay off the net a while. Because here’s the thing: I realise that, for most of fandom, a couple of hours of entertainment outranks not supporting a writer who actively works to make law against me, and who believes I should be illegal, who has a history of being onboard with the queers==pedophiles newtype blood libel, whose organisation lobbied in Russia for their anti-gay crackdown laws, and all that.

I get that. I have for a long time. This is not a new realisation. I don’t much like it, but I get it. This has just been a reminder.

I’m not even that upset; disappointment requires expectations that I don’t have. I mean, obviously, I’m displeased, but this isn’t exactly shaking my world. I know better.

But being reminded of it every time I check my web browser? That, I really don’t like.

So I’m just gonna say: if you go see this thing? I don’t want to hear about it. His politics and his political friends and allies and his organisation and the organisations they support have been trying to destroy me my entire life. His side has assaulted me, sent me to hospital, waged newtype blood libel campaigns against me, run sometimes-successful initiative campaigns against me, forced me into a political life out of sheer self-preservation – they have quite literally cost me blood and treasure – and I’ve got one hell of a lot of trench warfare I can go off about if I have to.

And I don’t fuckin’ want to.

So if you’re gonna go see this thing – okay, whatever. Me, I’ll just hang over here, mostly offline for a few days; I’ve got a lot of shit to catch up with anyway. But you? Do me this much of a favour: don’t fuckin’ come telling me about it. Don’t fuckin’ come rationalising it to me. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear about what donations you’re pledging to make to “counterbalance” it, I don’t care if you “separate the art from the artist,” I don’t care about your reasons: I don’t want to hear them.

Just. Don’t.

And once the novelty wears off, we can hopefully just forget about this whole thing.

Comments disabled. Because leaving them open… that’d just be a little too tempting, wouldn’t it? Yeah.

Yesterday was mostly doctor’s appointments and sleep deprivation. Good news: no second round of surgery and I should have all my vision back in my right eye! Bad news: …in about two weeks. Well, beats the hell out of going blind. Yay, the healing power of lasers!

Also, I don’t have to sleep exclusively on my right side anymore. Still can’t sleep on my back, which is fine, I never do that, except of course I woke up last night on my back for some reason. awesome. And I still have a lot of restrictions (driving, heavy lifting, jarring workout – tho’ I can do smooth-motion exercise again.).

I had some other thing to say but damned if I remember what. Oh well, happy Halloween. I may not understand your weird candy-hostage holiday (tho’ the Venture Brothers Halloween Special made it make a lot more sense), but I do like candy.

ARHM NOM NOM NOM NOM

…particularly the attitudinal kind.

Right about now last Tuesday is when they rolled me in for emergency eye surgery.

I can see over half my field of view in my right eye at this point. That’s actually pretty good, since it means we’re on an accelerating curve again – the maximum horizontal diameter of the bubble is shrinking now, rather than static. From top of eye down to focus centre, it’s pretty normal for me – nearsighted as all hell, but that’s normal. Then I have a band which moves around all the time because it’s the edge of the bubble, and then the bubble area.

If I look down I can see all the edges of the bubble in peripheral vision.

My eye still looks pretty damn scary tho’! It’s been one week…

…since I looked at you

…but if you compare it to two days after surgery, you can see it’s quite a bit less bloody overall.

Sadly, I have lost most of the macrovision. But I did use it a lot while I had it!

Follow-up appointment tomorrow; I don’t think that’ll change much. I am hoping they’ll let me stop sleeping only on my right side, tho’. I’m not sleeping well being immobile like that, and it’s catching up with me – I look kinda terrible. On the other hand, Anna and I got into a Scary Eye Fight on Tumblr last night. Everybody wins! Or loses. Depending. XD

“Emergency eye surgery.” Those are not happy words.

About a week and a half ago, I got a big floater in my right eye. I get floaters more often than most, but it’s never been a big thing, and it seemed to be breaking up on its own, like they do, so I ignored it through the GeekGirlCon show with the intent of going in to make sure it’s not the 3% of time that posterior vitreous detachment (harmless) leads to retina detachment (problematic) or tears (extremely problematic and can lead to blindness).

Monday morning it seemed to have got worse, and that was new, but I was making the appointment anyway, so I went in. Dr. Khan agreed from the symptoms that it was probably just ordinary stuff, but of course, the whole point of going down there is to get a look.

And yeah, it’s not. Dr. Khan transferred me immediately to a retinal specialist, who said it is PVD, but with an outright retinal rip, and I have two other spots in the same eye that are damaged, and very likely to lead to retinal rips. The damage in all cases is very old, and the sort caused by multiple head trauma events.

So I have emergency surgery tomorrow morning. They’d’ve done it today, but it wasn’t an option unless we moved to overnight at Swedish, and that’s actually pretty bad because they don’t have the specialised eye crews overnight, and we’re better off waiting ’till the morning. If all goes well, I’ll be fine – tho’ down a lot of money, despite coverage.

And that gets me to something I don’t talk about much. I don’t remember most of my childhood, mostly because of my broad-spectrum abuse history. Psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, multiple abusers. It’s all kinds of fun.

In the extremely unlikely event that you know anything about my past, which almost none of you do, I want to make a point here of exempting my last guardian, whose initials were E.E.. E.E. was the closest to a decent parental figure I ever had, and none of this, none of it, is on him. This was all before his time.

The others, tho’… yeah. I’m not going to name names, because hi, lawyers. There’s one in particular here – I’ll call him Mr. B.

Mr. B was fond of academic rigour, in particularly through pain, in more particular through punches to the head. I have a bunch of healed but fortunately minor skull fractures from his particular breed of rigour.

I hadn’t heard from Mr. B in decades, until – now that he’s old and sick – he started cyberstalking me a couple of years ago. I blocked his accounts but he made new ones, until went so far as to reply to one of his over-the-transom missives from a donated, throwaway account, saying that okay, I know what he wants; I want to know who my birth parents were and how Mr. B and his associate Ms. A got ahold of me. His price was being “welcomed back into my life,” which is happening never, thanks.

So I can keep that out of my life just fine, thanks. And with the help of a therapist, I’ve managed to keep Mr. B and Ms. A out of my head, a lot of the time. (Ms. A has had the decency to disown me outright. Not fond of the queer, you see. Simplifies things, sometimes, doesn’t it?)

But apparently old blows can still cause physical harm, even today. I thought Mr. B had had his last shot at me, but apparently not. One more blast from the past, eh, Mr. B?

We’re going to fix that, tomorrow. With lasers.

It’ll leave me with limited vision for a couple of weeks, but hopefully will only really knock me down for a couple of days. So maybe I won’t be around for a bit.

Or maybe I’ll liveblog from the operating room. Who can tell?