Still Alive!

I'm still alive, but I did just spend a week in the hospital. Widespread inflammation from (as always) unknown causes, which culminated in a 10-day bout of acute pancreatitis. It went poorly, and hit pretty much all of my organs. They were concerned about necrosis and liver failure for a bit, and my heart stopped briefly, so I guess I've died now! I think it was only for about 10-15 seconds, I woke up to a group of extremely panicked nurses. They verified that the monitor was properly attached and such, it seems likely that it was in response to my bradycardia (cause also unknown) combined with all the morphine they were pumping into me. But yeah, it was exceptionally brutal, I think there's a good chance another one of those will actually finish me off.

That said, before this happened, I'd been working on some more interesting port goals for BigPEmu. I wrote a pure software video plugin and was doing some crazy optimization work to get the emulator running on some older and severely underpowered embedded devices. I figured that would at least make the port work a little bit interesting instead of the mindless slog that port work usually is. I'm going to have to leave that in a WIP state for a while now, because I'm still feeling horrible and have to focus as much as I can on my physical recovery. My friends are making the "ok, Rich might actually be dying pretty soon here" rounds (not that we can really know, but it's better to have no regrets) and I'm hoping to heal my body just enough to do one last round of traveling before this next flu season comes around. If that's still possible, I guess we'll see. In any case, I do still hope to get back to the WIP emulator stuff at some point before I kick the bucket! I might try to do an interim release with some of it too, depending on how quickly some of the platform targets come online.

Thank you all once again for continuing to support me through this, the Patreon income has made a huge difference in offsetting my financial burn rate. I would love to promise greater things in the future, but I think I'd have to be delusional to really expect an upswing in the health department at this point. This week in the hospital has really sounded the "time to enjoy life in one last burst before the grave" alarm. It's hard to enjoy life in this context when you still have to worry about every penny you're leaving to your daughter's trust, but I've given myself a budget of 5 grand or so to try to milk whatever I can out of what remains. If anyone is planning on being at any significant industry events this year, let me know, maybe I can try to incorporate something like that into the Final Round.

Also, I want to be clear, I don't have a terminal medical prognosis or anything here. My situation is just too ambiguous and there are too many serious problems that no one can seem to tie to an underlying cause. That means I've got to draw those lines for myself, unfortunately. For all I know, I could still be alive in an even more crippled state in 5 years. In a way, I really hope not. But I don't want anyone to react too dramatically or start broadcasting "Rich Whitehouse is going to die soon" to people as a result of this news. Sure, I have a much greater chance of being dead soon than your average person, and I've got good cause to treat this as my last functional year in light of how things have gone so far, but you never know what new depths of sweet suffering the future may bring. I have suffered dearly in the last 10 days, but I still hear a deep voice in my head telling me that it has such sights to show me.