I made my last post almost two months ago. I was uncomfortable and in pain and was distracting myself with migrating to a new forge. In the time since then, I've pretty much done the same thing: been in a lot of pain and migrating stuff.

Migration

Over the last month, I managed to get all of my stories and novels migrated over to my Git repository, switched to a private CI, and create EPUB/PDFs of every single story. That has been a relief, thought there is one blank page that annoys me. I'll fix it sooner or later, but it does mean in addition to my website, I will have EPUB and PDF versions of every story I wrote.

It also gets me about 80% off GitLab. The others will take longer, but it will happen sooner or later.

Flight of the Scions

I'm still on track with publishing Flight of the Scions on November 8th. I have a review request out, a guest post written and submitted, and it posted almost everywhere.

But… the Fedran page has a problem and I can't fix it without spending a lot of hours fixing it. So my current goal is to get Fedran updated to use Nitride and let me post links to various stores. I was able to disable the later chapters, so if you didn't get a beta copy, it will be an indeterminate amount of time before I release the chapters again.

Naturally, I'm nervous about publishing this book. It has taken me a lot of gets to get to this point and I really want folks to love it. I just really don't know how to get the word out about it, other than to be excited and try to promote myself.

Warning

The last section is about the complications from my surgery. No graphic details, but somewhat negative.

Surgery

At this point, I can safely say, the surgery did not go well like the rest of my luck. It started well and things seem to be right on track. Right before I ended up in the emergency room for excruciating pain for six to ten hours every day. Actually, went to the emergency room twice because when the nurse asked if I wanted to be hospitalized, there was a pressure to go home and “push through it” when I should have said yes.

Ray, when someone asks if you're a god, say “yes!”

Little would I know that it was only the early stages of a series of cascading failures when it came to my surgery. I did end up being hospitalized overnight, which was a terrible experience of doctor's ignoring everything I said including when they would ask if I wanted something for the pain: I said yes, then they gave me nothing. Three times.

I think much of it was that I also had asymptotic Covid. As things are when overworked people are only looking at paper, they focused purely on that and shoved me out the door as soon as I was able to walk around. It took another week or so before I recovered from that.

As a lovely bit of foreshadowing, during the first emergency room visit, I had a CAT scan and they said there was a small fluid pocket from the surgery but “it probably wasn't going to be a problem.”

It did end up being a problem, including more frantic doctor visits. My original surgeon went on a medical leave so I was tossed over to a second doctor who had no clue what had happened. It took a week of agony for him to get the baselines. Then more days until I could get a drain tube put in for a week, to have it go wrong, then back into the doctor's office.

The second doctor decided the drain tube was enough and pulled it out. This ended up being premature, so then I had to get it lanced when it came back with a vengeance. Now, I'm going to the hospital for wound packing for a week now and probably will be going for few more weeks; but there are already signs that I will need another procedure because there are some additional complications beyond the weekend nurses not packing it correctly.

Overall, there are were at least seven points where someone made a decision, with hindsight, was the wrong one. One thing I could handle, but this has been problem after problem after problem.

Currently, the best part is that I'm only slightly uncomfortable (but always exhausted) as opposed to the days of agony that dominated my September.