Rumours of my demise have been (for the most part) greatly exaggerated

Hiya! I am still alive. Three and a half surgeries later.. with another one sometime in the next month.. Life is kind of crazy at the moment, and I'm still recovering and not on the computer much at all. Luckily, I have the good drugs.

When we last saw our heroine, she was recouperating from what was supposed to be a minor ulcer surgery. Because fate hates me, that turned into a perforated intestine and subsequent systemic infection. It did not, thank god, go septic. It required surgery #2, though. I went home, spent a lot of time in bed and drugged, and then one day I tried to get out of bed.. and couldn't feel my right leg. This got me an immediate trip to the imaging lab, with words like 'stroke' and 'lingering anesthesia effect' and 'permanent damage' lurking in the air. On the up side, it was none of those. On the down side, it was iliac nerve compression that required.. you guessed it.. surgery to fix. Immediate surgery. While poking around in my hip / lower back, they found an heretofore unknown bulging disk, which granted me another half surgery. It's patched, not totally fixed. The fix comes sometime next month.

Thankfully, I have a supportive SO who's been staying with me, carting me to and fro, keeping the hordes of my family at bay, reassuring people that I'm not dead, taking in the mail, changing the cat box, and taking care of cats and birds for me. He smuggled Ninja and Ebony into the hospital twice for me. I wasn't really aware the first time. The second time, I yelled at him for exposing my baby Seramas to icky hospital germs

The birds are all doing well. T'Oliver's feathers are finally behaving. Tennyson's neck feathers are super curly. Peaches hatched an egg.. I have no idea what the baby is. It was an egg from some my friend gave me. She and Tennyson are good parents. Tenny's not aggro with the munchkin at all. The masses of quail are well. They got a break from egg laying, because the lights in the house have been mostly off - they get natural sunlight but not much more. I lost two button quail - one went eggbound, the other got out and got lost in the basement. One of the male Ivory babies from the December swap turned out to be a female, which was a nice surprise. The eggs that were in the incubator hatched with absolutely no help from anyone and complete neglect for over half the incubation period. I was drugged and forgot about them, The Guy didn't know they were there until he went to feed the cats and heard frantic peeping. Um. Oops. They've gone to live with my landlord. The incubators are, for the first time since November, off. I sadly won't have time for babies for awhile.

I owe some people eggs - I /WILL/ send the eggs out, or reimburse them for the shipping on the eggs they sent to other people as they were swap eggs. There was apparently some sort of horrible FUBAR in my office's shipping department and everything I sent out in a two week period was returned.. and of course, this happened while I was in hospital. I have seed packets that will be going out this week. There's also a mealworm kit to go out. The eggs will take a bit, like I said, birds are off duty right now and will be for awhile. It's still hard for me to stand up, sit for more than 40 minutes at a time, or move much. If it's not the abdominal scars aching, it's my back and hip. I can't get comfortable unless I take the narcotics, and when I take them, I sleep. I'm still on heavy painkillers, so I have limited awake hours as it is.

Just wanted people to know I'm alive. I'm not available by phone and am only very limitedly available via email or on here. I haven't read the forums or anything in .. forever.. and have so much email to get through that, if you emailed me, it may be awhile. I have over 1200 messages in my inbox. I not only have to get to them, I have to figure out which ones the boy got to and answered for me. Right now, my life is kind of on hold until I recover, and that's going to take some time. I'll be back around as soon as I can, but that's still going to be a little while yet.
-Spooky