A comment that came in reminded me that I have been entirely absent from my author site for a couple of months.
I have not been writing.
On the 8th of November, my youngest son had a hemorrhagic stroke. The strokes with which I’m most familiar are ischemic — blood clots. Hemorrahgic strokes differ by cause and by how damage to the brain is done.
The cause was unidentified high blood pressure, as opposed to an aneurysm, and it took some time to figure out what had caused this, although they now feel reasonably certain they know (hyper-aldesteronism). Of the four people in our family, he’s the one who’s in the best physical shape — or he was, before the stroke. The stroke took left-side functionality from him, which meant he could not use his left leg, arm, hand.
Brains are funny things. No one can tell you how long stroke recovery will take — if it happens at all.
I have spent every day in the hospital since the 8th of November. I come home at 4:30, and I do laundry, housework (admittedly not a lot of that >.<) and leftover cooking — which is to say, I make food so that my oldest son and my husband have dinner they can take in with them when they go to the hospital for the evening shift. I then wake up way earlier than I ever used to to make breakfast and lunch for younger son, and I head to the hospital for the 9 – 4 shift. My oldest son and my husband work and then head to the hospital together for the 4 – 10 shift.
My writing has been on hold during the time of crisis — eleven days in ICU, and then in acute normal hospital ward, and then in stroke ward in a different hospital. And now… in rehab hospital.
When he first arrived in the stroke ward, a very sympathetic older nurse said, “you realize he’s going to be here for months, right?”
He wasn’t. He was there for weeks, and the Physiotherapist and Occupational Therapist recommended him for in-patient rehab.
I’m sorry for my absence, but I expect that absence to continue for at least a month. I have been writing about things on Patreon, in part because the Patreon exists to support my writing, and… I haven’t been able to do any =/. But my Patreon people are and have been very understanding. My boss that the bookstore, and my manager, have both been great. They expect that I will come back to work as soon as it is safe and reasonable to do so — because of course I haven’t been working at the bookstore either.
If things work out to rehab plan we can bring him home at the end of January. For stroke recovery, we are told this is very fast, but he’s 27, which is young for a stroke. We have possibly a lot of accommodations to figure out before then (possibly in that we don’t actually know what he’ll be able to do by the end of the month; yesterday he was kept standing for thirty minutes, working on standing posture and balance; when he first got to the stroke ward of the previous hospital, he could not stand at all), but: I hope to be back to writing actual words — which is the only reason I have an author site — in February of 2026.
At that point, we’ll know what the new normal for our household is, and I think I will be able to breathe again. When I can finally breathe again, I will be able to actually focus on creative words and actually be a writer again. But for now, my brain is in full-on mother mode.
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Sending my best wishes to you all from Australia.