Two Weeks Turned Into Over Two Months

Well, I definitely wasn't expecting to take so much time away, but life has a way of knocking you for a loop—both good and bad—when you least expect it.

Let me give you a little backstory about why my eye strain was, and still is to a degree, so bad.

Back in 2023, I started the year off the way I usually did back then: by hiking on New Year's Day. I was finishing one of the loops at Buffalo Track Canyon Nature Trail when I came across a huge sheet of ice. Now, if I'd been smart, I would have turned around and found another route. But being stubborn, I decided to try skirting around the edge.

Huge mistake.

The moment I stepped onto the ice, my feet shot out from under me. Because I was wearing a small hiking backpack, all of my weight landed squarely on my lower back. You can tell from the picture below that I hit hard enough to crack the ice, and it took everything I had to keep more than my foot from sliding into the water.

I made it home and, for about a week, I was sore but otherwise okay. Then, one morning while bending over to turn on the shower, I heard a loud pop and was immediately in excruciating pain.

Within a few weeks, simply walking became difficult. But I still had to work, so I dug deep and kept going, taking baby steps even when all I wanted to do was sit down and cry.

For nearly three months, my doctor insisted it was just a muscle strain and that I'd get over it. Meanwhile, my mobility kept getting worse and the pain kept increasing. Eventually he ordered an MRI, which showed that the disc between L5 and S1 was completely pinching the two nerves exiting on my left side.

He referred me to pain management, and ever since, 1,600 mg of gabapentin has been my lifesaver, along with the occasional SI joint or epidural injection. I won't get into the early side effects of gabapentin—that's a story for another day.

Then, just as we started talking about surgery that fall, life threw me another curveball.

At 47, I had a heart attack caused by a 95% blockage in my right coronary artery.

Thankfully, I made it through with no permanent damage, but that immediately put any plans for back surgery on hold.

I won't go into what the blood thinner did to me over the following year because that's not really the point of this story. My eye issues are. But everything that came before is relevant—I promise.

Over the next several months, I started itching constantly without any visible rash. Within a year, I was literally digging furrows into my forearms and thighs from scratching so much. It appears everything my body went through in 2023 sent my immune system into overdrive, and I developed atopic dermatitis, better known as eczema.

Last year I started seeing a dermatologist, who put me on Dupixent, a biologic injection every two weeks.

And wow, did it work.

Within the first month, I was almost completely itch-free. It honestly felt amazing.

For a few months, I was finally enjoying life again.

Then my eyes started becoming a little less happy.

They became sore, constantly bloodshot, and just never felt right. After reading that Dupixent could cause eye inflammation, I scheduled an appointment with my dermatologist.

The morning of that appointment, I woke up with my left eye completely red and a pupil that wouldn't dilate.

My dermatologist's office happened to be on the first floor of a building with an ophthalmologist on the second floor, so I went upstairs hoping I could make an appointment.

Fortunately, they squeezed me in.

The ophthalmologist started me on a strong steroid eye drop, and when I returned three days later, she confirmed I had developed iritis.

That was the end of my Dupixent journey.

Over the next six months, I bounced on and off steroid drops and medications to control my eye pressure, but my eyes have never really been the same. They're much drier now, tire out quickly, and eye strain can take weeks to settle down once it flares up.

I'm trying to rest them more, but that's easier said than done when I manage a dental office and spend most of my day staring at computer screens.

I'm learning to adjust and build healthier habits...I'm just not very good at sticking to routines.

Which brings us to today.

Stopping Dupixent wasn't a problem at first. It took several months for the itching to gradually return, and until about two months ago it was manageable.

Then the hives started.

I've never dealt with hives before, but over the last month they've made my life miserable. They'd cover large sections of my body or appear in multiple places at once. They usually disappeared within a few hours, only to pop up somewhere else moments later. My skin would become hot, itchy, and if I scratched what looked like perfectly normal skin, within minutes I'd have raised welts.

I'm currently on day two of oral prednisone, and thankfully it seems to have almost completely stopped the hives. I'm also taking three cetirizine tablets a day, and I'm hoping that by the time I finish this two-week course of steroids, the antihistamines will have built up enough in my system to keep the worst of it from coming back.

Now I just have to figure out what my next step will be for controlling the eczema.

So that's been my last couple of months.

All of that has been happening while I was also promoted and moved into a brand-new dental office that has had more than its fair share of growing pains. And that's not even mentioning my fuel pump failing, followed just a couple of weeks later by my brakes deciding they no longer wanted to be part of the team.

Needless to say...life's been busy.

I haven't been reading much besides romance novels—mostly paranormal, urban fantasy, and mystery romances—most of which I probably won't review. I've watched a lot of TV, binged a few shows I'll eventually write about, and caught up on more movies than I care to admit.

But I am back, even if I'm easing into things.

Missed y'all.

Two Week Hiatus

 I’ve been dealing with eye strain and general tiredness for a few months now, which is part of the reason my posting has slowed down a bit lately.

So I’m taking a two-week break from screens. Unfortunately, I can’t avoid them at work, but outside of that I’m putting the tablet down completely. No social media, no games, no email, nothing that tempts me to pick it up.

Because of that, I won’t be doing any blogging during those two weeks.

I’ll see y’all in a couple of weeks.

Favorite Fictional Character --- Philippa Georgiou

 

Since I’m almost finished with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, tonight felt like the perfect time to post about my favorite character from the show that came before it, Star Trek: Discovery.

I knew exactly who I wanted to feature. I even started typing her name in the title — then I changed my mind. Not because I didn’t want to write about her. I did. Promise. But someone else kept whispering that she should be the one instead. Smarter. Stronger. More interesting than anyone else on the show. She also insisted on being given the deference and respect her status as a former Emperor of the Terran Empire allows.

Honestly, it’s probably for the best. Even though Discovery isn’t my favorite — that honor still belongs to Star Trek: Enterprise — it has a lot of characters I really enjoyed. Given that, I think April might be the month I focus entirely on my favorite members of the Discovery crew.

So, before she decides to take me out, may I present Philippa Georgiou: Starfleet captain, Terran Emperor, Section 31 agent, time traveler, and one of the most complicated characters I’ve come across in science fiction — or any genre, for that matter.

When viewers first meet her, she’s the wise, compassionate captain of the USS Shenzhou. We don’t get nearly enough time with her before she’s killed by the Klingons.

The second meeting doesn’t go as well.

This time, she’s the despotic Emperor of the Terran Empire in a mirror universe defined by cruelty and violence — a world where a daughter might kill her mother for not being bloodthirsty enough. When she’s pulled into our reality, that’s when things really get interesting.

She is not a nice person. She’s arrogant, vain, selfish, and lethal, with the empathy of the devil himself. She’s probably responsible for more deaths than any other main character in Star Trek. And yet, I can’t help but love her.

As the series progresses, those edges soften — just slightly. She begins to experience doubt and uncertainty, maybe for the first time in her life. There are flashes of regret. Moments — brief, almost imperceptible — where something like compassion slips through. And if anyone notices, the sharp tongue comes right back out to put them in their place.

Philippa is all of those things. But she’s also someone capable of loving one person so fiercely that she allows herself to change just enough not to lose them. It may be selfish, but it’s also nuanced — and, in its own way, self-sacrificing.

And the fact that Michelle Yeoh was never nominated for an Emmy for this role is a travesty.

What I'm Currently Reading

 

A Plague on Both Your Houses by Susanna Gregory is a historical mystery set in 1348 Cambridge, at the start of the Black Death. I’ve been trying to remember what put this book on my radar, as it’s not something I would normally pick up, but I am enjoying it so far.

Toddler Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono is a collection of short stories she wrote between 1961 and 1971. I picked this up because a character in another book I was reading was reading it. Don’t ask me which book, because I truly don’t remember. I’m enjoying it, but I do feel like I’m missing something by not being able to read it in the original Japanese.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is one I’m still reading, as I’m deliberately taking my time with it because I want to relish every moment.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is the other one I’m taking my time with — mostly because every time I pick it up, I read a page or two, lose interest, and put it right back down. Maybe I’ll finish it by December.

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

 

Synopsis From Dust Jacket:

In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapists in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynette's worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart, piece by piece. 

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up. 

The very first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Dawn of the Dead. My mom loved it, so when it was rereleased years later, she took me along. I saw Creepshow at the drive-in, but had to turn around and watch The Sword in the Stone on another screen during one particular scene that will remain unspoken.

I grew up on horror: Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. These weren’t just movies, they were lessons in survival, in what it means to be the one who makes it out. One of the first movies I saw on my own was Bad Dreams, and that giant fan scene has lived rent-free in my brain ever since, a moment I still haven’t quite shaken.

I’m laying all of this out so you understand exactly where I’m coming from. I loved The Final Girl Support Group.

This book reads like the twisted sequel to every slasher I’ve ever seen — not the movies themselves, but what happens after the credits roll. The five women at its center survived everything the genre throws at you: summer camp massacres, sorority house bloodbaths, a home invasion that wiped out an entire family, miles of road turned into a moving nightmare. And then there’s Lynette — the book’s version of Laurie Strode — a woman shaped by a killer who tore through her town and left her to live in the aftermath. If you’ve seen the recent Halloween trilogy, you already understand what that kind of survival does to a person.

In the wrong hands, this could have been a straightforward slasher novel, something predictable, something easy to put down. In the hands of Grady Hendrix, it becomes something sharper and more deliberate. He shifts the focus from the violence itself to what lingers after it, memory, damage, and the way the past refuses to stay buried.

Because if horror teaches you anything, it’s that the past is never really dead.

Challenges: Cloak and Dagger 

Favorite Fictional Character --- Lexington

 

It may be telling that so many of the fictional characters I've been featuring over the last several months come from cartoons. After books, cartoons were where I could get lost in storytelling, forgetting everything else going on in my life — think safety blanket, or blankie for short. As I got older, that dependency shifted into something else. Cartoons became a source of enjoyment first, escapism second. So yeah, I was still watching cartoons in high school.

And while I’m not going through a ton right now, there are a lot of changes at work, and I’m having to challenge myself and what I want moving forward, which is causing a little more stress than usual. That’s probably what’s led me back to revisiting the cartoons from my youth.

Today’s character is from a cartoon that debuted in 1994, the same year I graduated from high school, and I adored him from the beginning. For those of you unfamiliar with Gargoyles, the show follows a Scottish clan of gargoyles who find themselves magically transported from the tenth century to modern-day New York, or at least what was modern day three decades ago. They’re charged with protecting the city from threats, both old and new.

Lexington, the tiny green one, grabbed onto this new opportunity with gusto. He was fascinated by modern technology and dove into it headfirst. He taught himself so well he became a hacker extraordinaire, able to break into almost any security system. He also enjoys the fun side of tech, especially video games. If you need a new motorcycle, he can build one for you — just don’t let him test drive it.

Of all the clan, Lexington adapted to his new reality the quickest, and I think I loved him so much because I hoped some of his openness to new environments would rub off on me, especially as I was preparing to move out of state for college. I’m not sure it did, but I appreciated the inspiration all the same.

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

 

Synopsis From Dust Jacket:

After the terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine, and sunshine, but instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themselves heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia. 

In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns, but when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell something is not quite right in their home...or in their dreams. 

Let me tell you a story, and if it gets too long, you can skip it. Promise. One of the few places my mom stopped long enough, as we moved more times than I can count — pre-carnival years — was Salem, OR. We lived there for at least a full year before moving further north, but that’s not the story. The house we lived in is.

It was a yellowish beige house on the corner of State St. and some random street I don’t remember the name of. It dead-ended at a railroad track, if that helps anyone place it. Salem wasn’t the safest area to live in the mid-1980s, and our neighborhood was pretty rough… but that’s not really the point.

This little, unassuming house was odd from the start. I had never sleepwalked before, but I started within the first week of living there. The attic opened into the garage, and if you threw a rock up there, it came back down a few minutes later. My mom kept our dog in the garage — not the attic — and it would go absolutely insane, barking up at the attic like its soul was in jeopardy.

One night, some kids from the neighborhood were spending the night, camped out in the living room, when we all heard what sounded like a power saw starting up in the attic. There wasn’t a kid there who didn’t bolt for home. Then there’s the time I watched a crutch travel across a wall in my mom’s bedroom. That one stuck with me.

Needless to say, my mom did a little digging, and while I won’t go into the details, that house had every right to be haunted.

I’m not here to convince you that ghosts are real or that haunted houses exist. I’m just telling you all of that so you understand why I love haunted house stories as much as I do. You’d think an experience like that would’ve sent me running in the opposite direction, but it did the exact opposite. I can’t get enough of them — especially when they lean more Gothic, like What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher.

When I realized the sequel to What Moves the Dead was set in a haunted hunting lodge, I was basically screaming in delight like a six-year-old at a My Little Pony birthday party.

I loved What Moves the Dead so much that, despite all that excitement, I was a little hesitant going into this one. I was worried a second outing with Alex — which still somehow doesn’t involve us sitting down for tea — wouldn’t live up to my probably overinflated expectations.

Thankfully, Kingfisher didn’t let me down. I enjoyed the hell out of this.

I tore through this in one sitting, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get under my skin a little. There’s a slow, suffocating dread here that just keeps building until you realize you’ve been holding your breath right along with Alex. That dread comes through most in how the haunting itself plays out.

The way she crafts this haunting genuinely got under my skin. Alex is attacked by a vengeful spirit that literally steals their breath as they sleep, slowly wearing down their already fever-racked body. And as if that isn’t bad enough, they’re trapped in a nightmarish dreamscape that forces them to relive the worst atrocities they experienced during the war — along with all the guilt and regret that comes with it. To fight back, Alex has to work through those memories head-on instead of avoiding them, which makes this feel more personal.

Maybe that’s why this worked so well for me. That house in Salem never really left me — that feeling that something is there, just out of sight, but very real. This book taps into that same kind of quiet, creeping dread.

Some haunted houses try to scare you.

This one feels a little too much like home.