My sister got run over; my mental health still sucks. · 2:48am Dec 3rd, 2019
Last Tuesday (so a week ago tomorrow) my sister got run over by her own truck. The short version is that her three year old put the truck in neutral. I don't have all the details of the long version.
[About to describe injuries. Not in any gory detail, or anything, but if you're squeamish you might want to steer clear anyway.]
Spinal cord is fine, spine itself has minor breaks that are on the outside and in no way threaten the cord being fine, ribs are broken, her butt is fucked up but (given my utter lack of interest in information about my sister's butt) I haven't asked for details, her arms and legs are unbroken, her lungs are filled with bloody gunk, and last I heard she couldn't eat or cough (she's supposed to cough to get the bloody gunk out) because of something wrong with her jaw or the teeth therein.
The last one I know the least about because it was only noticed after she got out of the neck brace they initially had her in, and after it was noticed they put off trying to figure out what was actually wrong for most of a day (or longer) and I never did get told the results of the tests they ran.
Possibly it's nerve damage to as a little as a single tooth, but the pain goes all the way from the center of her lower jaw, along the jawline (more or less) to a point behind her left ear (or thereabouts.) That pain, when it occurs, is stronger than the rest of her pain in spite of the broken ribs being agony.
At her request, I've been staying at her house since Wednesday. I haven't seen her in person since Wednesday, and only then because the hospital was on the way to her house. (Not near her house, mind you, just on the way.)
My sleep's been all fucked up since I saw her during her first night in the hospital on Tuesday. I need to go to bed absurdly early because I don't fall asleep until I've been laying awake in bed for hours and because daylight and sleep don't mix well for me. When things are going well, and I'm reasonably rested, I can't sleep in the light of day at all. When things aren't going well, as now, I will sleep in daylight, but I don't sleep as well as I would in decent darkness. I end up sleeping longer, but that doesn't make up for the quality of sleep being worse, and so I'm tired all day. Well, I'm tired all day anyway, but this is a "not getting enough sleep" kind of tired instead of a "depression sucks" kind of tired. I suppose it's both, actually.
Anyway, I'd estimate I'm sleeping two to four hours longer than usual right now, and when I am awake I'm less awake than usual.
Waking up late means taking my morning medications late, which makes it even harder to get to sleep on time that night, and the cycle perpetuates. (Skipping my meds in an attempt to break the cycle would be a bad idea.)
So, to recap, here's the situation:
-- My sister is badly hurt. Last I heard they were moving her back into the ICU after sending her to ordinary care when they really shouldn't have (she still needed intensive care.)
-- I'm not in my own home
-- I'm not sleeping well.
The first means that continuing my stories isn't exactly my first priority right now (even though I'd love to do so), the second and third mean that my ability to continue my stories is impaired. When I'm in someone else's home, I'm less at ease. When my sleep is screwed up, writing is that much harder.
On that last point, depression has a tendency to fuck with sleep in and of itself (also your ability to eat and drink the way you should) which really sucks because all three of those things have depression-like symptoms, and they stack. You can end up with a sort of 400% Depression.
Those are not the only things that exacerbate depression symptoms, of course, but the "Eat, drink, sleep" trifecta is really important and I have a lot of trouble staying on top of it under normal circumstances. These are not normal circumstances.
If you want to help my sister, I don't think there's anything you can do right now (unless you're a dog or pony trainer in the vicinity of Androscoggin County, Maine, which seems unlikely), so --if you're serious about wanting to help her-- hold on to that feeling and come back later.
If you want to help me, that's pretty straight forward: I need money. I also need clothes,* I could really use a Windows computer that works,** and if I thought about it a bit I'm sure I could come up with more things, but I doubt anyone reading this wants a shopping list and mostly I just need money.
I don't expect people who know me only as an internet fanfiction author, who never seems to update her stories, to give me money, but I've learned that people can surprise you, so I'll put this out there, even though it makes me feel slimy and sleazy:
This is my Paypal, for some reason recurring payments never seem to work, which means that in the unlikely event you want to pay me monthly, you should head over to Patreon. That page is an embarrassing mess that's needed a complete overhaul since before I started writing fanfic for MLP. It's also the case that I'm not exactly in a place where I'm churning out Patreon exclusive content.
Ok, sleaze over, let's end this thing.
The licence plate on my sister's truck is UNIQRN. She would like the world to know that she was run over by a unicorn.
* I'm cycling through the same three hole filled t-shirts in near perpetuity, with a couple threadbare t-shirt-esque shirts (with their own holes) occasionally thrown in to mix things up a bit, the soles of my shoes are getting pretty thin, I'm down to one usable pair of pants, and while I have a bunch of skirts, some of them are kind of falling apart.
** Why Windows? Because, while my earliest memories may be of Commodore 64 and TI 94/4A, mostly I grew up on Windows.
I know this was a little over 6 months ago but I hope she is doing alright and i hope that you are as well.
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She's recovered. I'm alive. That's about where things stand.
Thanks for your sympathy and hope.