QUICK AUTHOR'S NOTE (Not Part of Story)

Hi All. So, this is a weird break here but I didn't know a better way to do this and I wanted to explain the recent silence as I feel like I've made a commitment to my readers and I feel badly I haven't been able to honor that.

Anyway, I think many of you know at this point that 2024 has been a tough year for me for a variety of reasons, and while it was looking like it might be getting better, things have pretty much been hell since my last chapter. The below might be a little too much information (it just kind of helped to write it all out) and it's not a happy story, so I'll put it behind a spoiler shield just in case.

Content warning: cancer, death, grief.

My father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma a while back; he fought it with chemo at first but ended up undergoing a stem cell transplant (similar to a bone marrow transplant). He was deemed “in remission” back in May, shortly after we lost my grandmother. With Dad's remission news, followed by some positive medical news on my side in July, my family thought maybe we were entering an easier phase, and we had even started planning an Autumn trip back to the UK.

The day after my last posting, though, he went to the emergency room because of debilitating pain and nausea. They ran a bunch of tests, including a PET scan, where they discovered cancer had metastasized throughout his body: bones, lungs, liver, and pancreas.

Multiple Myeloma doesn’t typically metastasize like that, but it does significantly damage the immune system, and it seems like that opened the doors for pancreatic cancer to grab hold without a challenge. As a result, no one, including his own body, realized he was sick until it was too late, and an already insidious fast-moving cancer took over faster than his oncologist has seen in thirty years of practice.

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In less than two weeks my father went from playing dinosaurs on the floor with his granddaughter to being barely able to get around with a walker, to being unable to even eat or drink. He went back into the hospital briefly to stabilize things, but his condition was deemed untreatable. He didn’t want to die there and so entered hospice at home.

I went to help my elderly (and more frail than she wants to admit) mother care for him in his last couple of weeks. It was a full time job, especially in the end (and I so admire and appreciate the hospice and elderly care workers who do this work). In his final days he had a stroke, which robbed him of his ability to speak, and we watched him deteriorate faster and faster before he took his last breath three weeks ago.

My kind, nerdy, funny, and massively supportive father and I have always been very close, I kinda won the dad lottery with him, and seeing him in that situation was beyond hard. Losing him has been even more difficult than I imagined despite the fact that -I’ve had nightmares that feel more real than the last several weeks have. I’ve honestly been struggling more than I want to admit to process and pull life back into some kind of coherent order. My mental health isn't exactly Grade A in the best of times, and this has definitely taken a toll mentally and physically. I'm trying, though, and it is slowly starting to get better.

Anyway. I'm sorry about that ramble... what it all comes down to is that finding Keira’s voice and headspace has been a struggle lately and I really, really don’t want my current emotional and spiritual place to end up pushing her story into a different tone and direction.

I’m doing my best to get back on track with everything in my life, really, but especially Elf Girl as I love Keira’s story and the journey of sharing it with all of you. There’s good stuff coming (I think, anyway) that I’m really looking forward to getting out to you, but I don't want it to be shitty, nonsensical, or unintentionally depressing.

And I know I've said it before, but I really do want to apologize for how rough and extremely inconsistent my posting and writing has been all year, and how in-and-out I’ve been as I’ve been shunted from one crisis point to another. It's not at all what I wanted and I know it is frustrating--it is for me, anyway. Please believe that I'm doing everything I can, and I hope to be in a better place with everything in the next couple weeks (and hopefully this horrible year gives me a bit of a break from here).