Hoping Hope Anne · 1:51am Apr 12th, 2013
My little niece just got out of surgery this evening. She's only two months old, but she hasn't been very lucky. Back at the start of the new year I posted about some personal stuff going on for me; this was one piece of news out of about a half dozen of equally bad or worse news - this has really been a doozy of a year for family matters.
Anyways, my sister had gone to get a scheduled ultrasound done, and the doctors discovered the baby had a large teratoma growing on her tailbone - and by large, I mean grapefruit size. It was putting too much strain on her heart, but they wanted to carry her as close to term as possible. Well, first week of February they couldn't put it off any longer and induced labor at only 26 weeks. At that point the tumor had grown necrotic and pretty much rotted off during birth, almost causing my niece to bleed to death, but they got her patched up and she's been up and down for the last couple months.
Unfortunately though, about two weeks ago they discovered the same type of teratoma in her eye which turned out to be cancerous. Given the type of tumor it is, removal of the eye was the only option, otherwise there was an almost certain chance it would return, and any other form of surgery would have left her blind anyways. And that isn't the end of it either. They still need to go in in a couple weeks to remove what's left of the tumor on her tail bone, which the doctors give a 50% chance of her being paralyzed from the waist down if something goes wrong.
All I know is when she comes out at the other end of this - aside from her being perfectly primed to dress the part of a pirate for Halloween, and the fact that I'm never going to Vegas with her - she'll be one tough little hell raiser! Don't mess with Hope!
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In other news, I may get my next chapter out yet. I'm 90~95% done writing it and 75%ish done editing - and it's long; roughly 7500-8000 words. I know, I've been making promises for a while now, and I wouldn't blame you for not having a lot of faith in what I'm saying. But if I could get a day off from work I might make some real progress. Seriously, I've worked every day since Christmas to include holidays and weekends, and I'm talking like 70 hour weeks. I had the Friday before Easter off, and that's been it so I've been feeling stretched pretty thin for a couple of months now. And in case you're wondering, yes I would take a vacation day if I could, but I was gone for 6 months with the Air Force last year and my employer screwed me because of some clause in the contract about working X hours/month to receive it. So thanks to that, instead of 15 days, I get a combined whopping 5 days between my vacation, personal, and sick days for the entire year.
Personal gripes aside, I'm curious - Seeing as I've kind of been out of the loop with the fandom for a while now, is there anything interesting that's been happening? Any good fics or big news? Anything I should know about? Just kinda looking to catch up with you all here.
Sigh*
Well I'm havering now, so I should probably wrap this up. Last thing to add; go check out this guy's Cynewulf music. No really. It's friggin catchy.
The force is strong in your niece.
This kid is gonna save or destroy the planet. Also, she clearly needs a pet bird. In lieu of a pet bird I humbly offer to make her a stuffed parrot.
1001356 Aye.
(No obvious pun here.)
1002256
I'm reminded of Dumb and Dumber when they give kid a dead bird, and Down Periscope when he's got a chicken strapped to his shoulder.