Unthinkable Tragedy

I've been working full time on contract work for well over a month now, and I'd already run ahead of schedule on my current contract, so I was hoping I might have a bit of extra energy/time to give you folks some love in the form of some incremental feature builds right around now! Sadly, things have suddenly gone off the rails, and as I sit here continuing to lose what remains of my sanity tonight, I figured it's as good a time as any to formally let everyone know what's happening.

My daughter started having vision trouble a few weeks ago, and scored rather poorly (something like 20/100 on distance, as I recall) on a vision test. We all thought she needed glasses, until her vision rapidly deteriorated again last week, which prompted a trip the ER up here in Tucson. I found out on Monday that a brain tumor was behind the vision loss, and was causing a massive fluid build-up in her brain. Surgery was quickly performed to insert an EVD, and a partial excision of the tumor was performed on Friday. A fair amount of tissue was left behind, particularly near her eyes, because excising it was deemed too risky. The idea is that chemo will be used to deal with the remaining tissue, but we don't expect to know how viable that is for a couple of weeks, as analyzing the excised tissue will take some time. There is not a great deal of hope that she'll regain her sight even if everything goes very well from this point, and the neurosurgery team has refused to really help me explore the problem space as it pertains to vision, because they generally don't want people thinking that far ahead. It's understandable in terms of the common psychology, but is fairly annoying when trying to look at the whole picture with as much objectivity and information as possible.

I've been up here in a hotel near the hospital all week, and my wife and I are temporarily moving into charity-funded housing next to the hospital next week since we don't actually live here in Tucson. Fortunately, the client I'm working for has been very kind and understanding of my absence over the last week, but of course the money coming in from this contract work is all the more important in light of what's going on with my daughter. This situation is already eating tons of money, fortunate as we are to at least have access to free housing here in town starting next week, and I think we're just taking our first steps down a long, painful, and expensive road. So between dealing with all of this and making sure I stay on schedule in my work, I expect it'll be quite some time before I return to my actual Patreon/emulation work. I know that you'd all tell me I don't need to apologize, but I still feel the need, so I'm sorry. I do love this work more than anything I'm having to do to make money and I really am itching to return to the work I was doing on both KI and the PlayStation emulator, but life is a motherfucker to say the least.

I'm still in disbelief over how much shit my daughter has had to endure in her life so far. She's 7 years old, and this is really the sort of thing that I see as yet more evidence that there is no god (or that any god that does exist is wholly apathetic or sadistic) when I see it happening to other people. Now that it's happening to my daughter, if there is a god, I'm going to go ahead and formally vow to find a way to murder it. I'm expecting this will involve traveling through time and enlisting in the Roman army under the name of Longinus, please wish me luck.

But yeah, I would've happily elected to eat more cancer myself rather than endure this. Watching this happen to your child is easily one of the worst things in the entire palette of human suffering. I also know from talking about my own cancer that people are going to say a lot of well-meaning things. Some will suggest bullshit holistic remedies that they're totally convinced are legitimate, some will say they'll pray to some arbitrary deity, some will suggest special diets, some will accidentally spew propaganda for some (optionally faith-based) scam, and so on. Of course, most of the people who are going to say any of these well-meaning things will fail to recognize that they're actually saying any of the things I've just listed. I've heard it all and I've vetted everything that was worth vetting, so even though I know everyone means well and I am usually thankful for any associated positive sentiment, I'm generally going to ignore most of this stuff. People like to believe they have more control over their life and health than they really do, so they embrace whatever bullshit sounds right in order to derive some sense of safety/comfort, and that works just fine for most people because it never needs to be put to the test. However, whether you suffer a horrible fate in this world is really just a crapshoot of nature and nurture, and my genetic lineage appears to be fairly incompatible with a variety of the poisons our species is currently suffering as a result of stupidity and greed. Jesus, tea, and scorpion venom aren't going to change that.

If you do want to express support, though, please do; it does mean a lot, and I'll take all the love/support I can get, I'm just getting ahead of all the other shit. Please don't feel you need to even try in expressing that you care. There's nothing anyone can do or say to really make things better in a situation like this, and just letting me know you care is enough, there isn't really any sense or benefit to anything beyond that. My family is also very willfully godless, so while no one is going to prevent you from asking your imaginary friend to save us, we'd all prefer just being thought of and wished well.

I'm not really planning to keep providing updates on this situation, since it's not the same as having cancer myself. I imagine it will organically come up periodically, but it doesn't intersect my work in an ongoing manner in the way that my own illness does (other than contributing to the decline of my mental health), and providing reports of my daughter's suffering is something I generally have absolutely no desire to do. So now that it's upended my life, I'm just going to be trying to manage to cope while I finish out my current contract, which is going to be running well into next year.

Now that I've dropped the worst and most depressing news of my life on all of you, let me also say thank you again to all of you folks who have been supporting me through my own cancer and who are still here helping to keep the dream alive until I can get back to doing the work I really want to be doing. I'm probably going to be depressed as hell and in a questionable state of mind for quite some time now (with, I expect, periodic psychological breakdowns), so thank you also for bearing with me. Although the prayers are meaningless, the thoughts mean a lot. I'll also be around on Discord if anyone wants to offer a kind word or emoji.