Hey all.... I figure I should probably post some sort of update on how my life is going, for those folks who have started filing me under the heading of "Hey, whatever happened to...?"

So here's what's been going on.

December was a disaster for me.

As you may or may not know, my parents have had a number of medical conditions which meant they needed help around the house. So, I moved home to Delaware to look after them, and I've been doing that for at least the past ten years. At first this consisted of things like lifting heavy objects, or reaching things on high shelves.

Eventually, my dad started to lose his eyesight, and his ability to drive. So, my mom became the family driver. That was status quo for a good while. If my dad needed to go anywhere, either myself or my mom would drive him.

Over the course of 2023, my mother slowly started to lose the ability to walk. And suddenly she couldn't drive anymore either. So now I was also handling the family grocery shopping, and became the family driver.

It kept getting worse and worse. There is something wrong with one of her legs. her foot no longer points forward. And right around the time I finally got her doctor to get her scheduled for some x-rays to look at it, the disaster, or rather a string of disasters kicked in.

In the first week of December, my mom woke up with a pain in her abdomen so sharp it woke her up. And we called an ambulance on the spot. She was driven off to the local Hospital and after a couple days of examination from various doctors, they told us that she had suffered a "perforated ulcer."

That's essentially a hole in the stomach, through which things were leaking that shouldn’t have leaked, into places they shouldn’t have leaked into. And this seems to have been building for some time. She required surgery, and a lot of recovery time.

She spent most of December in the hospital recovering. Christmas got cancelled. (The whole family still have gifts we bought for each other that we haven't exchanged yet) And just after the 25th, my mother was moved from the hospital (which was five minutes away) to a recovery ward downstate (which was approximately half an hour away).

My father and I spent most of december driving back and forth every day to visit her.

And just as we were getting used to this new "normal".... we both got Covid. He caught it from someone at the hospital, and I caught it from him. We got test kits, we both tested positive.

Thankfully, we both managed to get prescriptions for Paxlovid, which eventually knocked the symptoms out of us.

But, we spent New Years' being sick.

People with Covid are onlly really contagious for the first three or four days after symptoms show up. And with our symptoms dying down, and almost another week gone by, the recovery ward announced my Mother was being discharged and sent home.

She is now home, but having spent a month flat on her back in various sick beds, her legs have become weak enough that she can no longer stand up on her own. She can walk, with a walker. And even tho we have those robot chair lift things on the stairs, she has spent the past few days in the downstairs level, because she's worried about trying to get out of the chair once it reaches the top of the stairs.

To compound matters, my father is suffering from memory loss. He can't remember things minute to minute. So he is basically useless in helping to look after my mom.

I am now doing 24 hour nurse care for two aging, broken senior citizens.

And although we are still having visits from various healthcare people, and my brother has stopped in for a few days to pitch in and handle a few things of a financial nature, I am basically carrying the bulk of the load of keeping this family functioning. Preparing pill doses. Making sure food gets prepared. Doing grocery shopping. Making medical appointments, Driving them to and from those medical appointments. Constantly reminding my father of the things he needs to do to help look after mom because he can't remember anything.

I am also therefore being run ragged. My nerves are shot. I am getting little to no sleep.

So... I don't exactly have the time or inclination to draw anything right now, and don't know how long it's going to be before I have time again.

The family have discussed selling the house and moving my parents into assisted living, which my father objects to because he feels he spent too many years paying this house off to just throw it away. They'd also likely be unable to take many of their possessions with them, or the cats.

...and of course I would become instantly homeless if it that happened.

My dad has said he doesn't want to do that to me. But my brother has suggested that if I can't handle this load and the situation falls apart, they'll likely have to do that whether they want to or not. They'll need the money from selling the house to afford the assisted living home.

We're looking into in-home care specialists, but it looks like twice a week is all we can afford. Their agent will be arriving in a few minutes to assess our situation. I have no idea how that's going to go.

So I have all that hanging over me as well.

Loads of stress, loads of doom and gloom. I am in a really rotten mental place right now.

So, that's how my life is going at the moment. And that's why you haven't seen much of me recently.

My world has basically been shot all to hell.