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Health and General News Update
Oct. 23rd, 2017 11:25 amLut was running a fever on Friday, and by Saturday it was over 100.5, the threshold his oncologist had set where he was supposed to go to the ER. He resisted going in the morning, so I gave him an acetaminophen and turned off the mattress pad heater and it dropped below 100 for several hours. But by evening it was over 101 again. So at 8PM on Saturday night, we finally went to the ER. His fever had broken again by the time we got to the ER: Lut suggested I take his temperature in the car and if it was normal we could go home. But I figured we were there and we might as well go in. We didn't have as long a wait this time as when we went for his accelerated heart rate in September. This time, he was in an examining room with twenty or thirty minutes.
Because he's a chemotherapy patient with bone marrow cancer, his white blood cell count is terrible and his immune system is pretty much trashed. So they are SUPER AGGRESSIVE about treating possible infection. They took blood samples, chest x-rays, a flu swab (even though he's had a flu shot) and started treating him with anitbiotics and tamiflu within an hour or so. "We don't even know if he has the flu or pneumonia yet but we're going to throw every thing at him anyway. JUST IN CASE." They told me they were going to admit him to the hospital just as soon as they had a room to move him to.
At 11:30PM, I went home alone, then came back Sunday morning. They still didn't know what was wrong with him, and it's possible the fever wasn't the result of any specific infection, more a general reaction to his low white blood count. I spent the day with him; he seems back to normal-for-cancer, really.
This morning, they took him for a bone marrow biopsy. The oncology nurse had mentioned last week that they'd want one in six weeks or so, but I guess they decided to move up the timetable on that. His oncologist may be worried that he's not responding well enough to the chemotherapy.
The hospital took blood cultures on Saturday night, and those results are supposed to come back sometime today. If those also don't show anything, we hopefully get to go home today. He usually gets a chemo injection on Mondays, and the hospital will do that in his room instead of us going to the cancer center.
In the meantime, I am trying to keep myself distracted from fretting and to get some stuff done. I posted my interview of Kyell Gold, one of my fellow Storybundle authors! That was fun. The SFWA Fantasy Storybundle only runs another ten days, so if you want it, now's the time! Twelve fantasy books for $15 -- it's a good deal!
I mentioned this over on Twitter, but forgot to say anything here: Janine Southard interviewed me on her blog a few days, so that was also cool.
I added 1600 words or so to The Sun Etherium, fleshing out various bits per first-reader suggestions. That was surprisingly fun. People had good suggestions (which they usually do) and I enjoyed adding to it (which is not as common.) I still need to do a read-through of all the first reader comments and make other little adjustments, but most of the big stuff is done now.
Work proceeds apace on the layout of Silver Scales. Alinsa got an early draft of the epub back to me, and I am dutifully reading the book again. This is ostensibly to catch any conversion errors introduced by making Google doc into epub. I have caught a few of those! In practice, it also means that I catch some more typos and editing artifacts that I and my first readers all missed on the first 20+ read-throughs. And, inevitably, I fiddle with the wording on a few things. I try to keep "fiddling" down to a minimum. At this point, the text is the book I want to print.
I am planning to do Nanowrimo this year, assuming 4thewords.com gives a big discount coupon as one of the Nano prizes like they have the last couple of years. Yes, that is my biggest motivator for doing Nanowrimo: a discount on my writing motivational tool/game. I haven't decided what I'm going to write for Nano, though. I've been thinking about Fellwater again: that's the ridiculous fantasy BDSM extremely-dubious dubcon erotica I started last November and got bored of in February or so. I might write that. I might start the sequel to Demon's Lure. I might work on a new story set in the Etherium multiverse, but using mortal characters and set in one of the worlds the fey shard passes through. It'd only tangentially feature the fey. Those are the top contenders right now.
If I don't end up doing Nano, or if I lose Nano this year, I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I am also going to count myself as winning Nano if I write 50k of fiction, even if it's not 50k on the same book. (In particular, Fellwater probably doesn't need 50k more to finish it.)
Ideally, I'd like to finish proofing Scales, and get both The Sun Etherium and Birthright to Alinsa's hands before November started. In practice, I'll be happy if I just get Scales finished and declare Birthright done. All I need to do with Birthright is proofread a couple of new scenes that I added, so that'll be easy. I should also do some promotional stuff for Scales. Like writing the launch post and doing some graphics. For now, I will get back to proofreading.
Because he's a chemotherapy patient with bone marrow cancer, his white blood cell count is terrible and his immune system is pretty much trashed. So they are SUPER AGGRESSIVE about treating possible infection. They took blood samples, chest x-rays, a flu swab (even though he's had a flu shot) and started treating him with anitbiotics and tamiflu within an hour or so. "We don't even know if he has the flu or pneumonia yet but we're going to throw every thing at him anyway. JUST IN CASE." They told me they were going to admit him to the hospital just as soon as they had a room to move him to.
At 11:30PM, I went home alone, then came back Sunday morning. They still didn't know what was wrong with him, and it's possible the fever wasn't the result of any specific infection, more a general reaction to his low white blood count. I spent the day with him; he seems back to normal-for-cancer, really.
This morning, they took him for a bone marrow biopsy. The oncology nurse had mentioned last week that they'd want one in six weeks or so, but I guess they decided to move up the timetable on that. His oncologist may be worried that he's not responding well enough to the chemotherapy.
The hospital took blood cultures on Saturday night, and those results are supposed to come back sometime today. If those also don't show anything, we hopefully get to go home today. He usually gets a chemo injection on Mondays, and the hospital will do that in his room instead of us going to the cancer center.
In the meantime, I am trying to keep myself distracted from fretting and to get some stuff done. I posted my interview of Kyell Gold, one of my fellow Storybundle authors! That was fun. The SFWA Fantasy Storybundle only runs another ten days, so if you want it, now's the time! Twelve fantasy books for $15 -- it's a good deal!
I mentioned this over on Twitter, but forgot to say anything here: Janine Southard interviewed me on her blog a few days, so that was also cool.
I added 1600 words or so to The Sun Etherium, fleshing out various bits per first-reader suggestions. That was surprisingly fun. People had good suggestions (which they usually do) and I enjoyed adding to it (which is not as common.) I still need to do a read-through of all the first reader comments and make other little adjustments, but most of the big stuff is done now.
Work proceeds apace on the layout of Silver Scales. Alinsa got an early draft of the epub back to me, and I am dutifully reading the book again. This is ostensibly to catch any conversion errors introduced by making Google doc into epub. I have caught a few of those! In practice, it also means that I catch some more typos and editing artifacts that I and my first readers all missed on the first 20+ read-throughs. And, inevitably, I fiddle with the wording on a few things. I try to keep "fiddling" down to a minimum. At this point, the text is the book I want to print.
I am planning to do Nanowrimo this year, assuming 4thewords.com gives a big discount coupon as one of the Nano prizes like they have the last couple of years. Yes, that is my biggest motivator for doing Nanowrimo: a discount on my writing motivational tool/game. I haven't decided what I'm going to write for Nano, though. I've been thinking about Fellwater again: that's the ridiculous fantasy BDSM extremely-dubious dubcon erotica I started last November and got bored of in February or so. I might write that. I might start the sequel to Demon's Lure. I might work on a new story set in the Etherium multiverse, but using mortal characters and set in one of the worlds the fey shard passes through. It'd only tangentially feature the fey. Those are the top contenders right now.
If I don't end up doing Nano, or if I lose Nano this year, I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I am also going to count myself as winning Nano if I write 50k of fiction, even if it's not 50k on the same book. (In particular, Fellwater probably doesn't need 50k more to finish it.)
Ideally, I'd like to finish proofing Scales, and get both The Sun Etherium and Birthright to Alinsa's hands before November started. In practice, I'll be happy if I just get Scales finished and declare Birthright done. All I need to do with Birthright is proofread a couple of new scenes that I added, so that'll be easy. I should also do some promotional stuff for Scales. Like writing the launch post and doing some graphics. For now, I will get back to proofreading.
