Life Update
It’s been a while since I’ve written because it has been a busy month for me. First off, I moved and secondly, I got shingles.
Let’s start with some background for those of you new to my blog or who need a refresher.
I’ve been living with my mother in her two-bedroom apartment since June of 2018. I moved to Ottawa to be closer to my sister and her family in 2016 and I struggled to make ends meet on my retail clerk salary.
I loved my independence, privacy and solitude but I knew I needed to either find a new job or a more affordable living situation. With my sex worker resumé, getting a new job has always been a challenge so I decided to move in with my mother. She had the space and I liked the idea of sharing a home with her and being of service to her in her seniors years. We didn’t give it an end date but the assumption was I’d save money and look for other work.
Little did we know then how much we both would benefit from living together and caring for one another over the next few years because:
- September 2019 I lost my job and I fell into a clinical depression
- January 2020 my mother had surgery for an abdominal aneurysm and a lengthy recovery
- March 2020 the Pandemic
- September 2020 my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer (successfully treated over a few months with an estrogen blocker)
- January 2021 my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and it had metastasized to her bones
- March and April 2021 my mother had chemotherapy (it was rough and she only did one series of treatments at a 50% dose) and then immunotherapy (which she still gets every 3 weeks)
- August 2021 I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer and my surgery was delayed 3 times because hospitals were overwhelmed by people with Covid-19
- December 2021 I had a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy
It was A LOT but as my tattoo on my right side says, “It came to pass. It did not come to stay”.
Right before the Pandemic, I decided to return to my sex worker roots and explore making porn as a mature woman versus the “girl-next-door” I once was. I was 49 and thought it would be fascinating, empowering, and yes, incredibly arousing to document my sexuality as a more experienced and self-actualized woman.
It took me a solid year to find my footing as an adult content creator and start earning a living that was above minimum wage. Then when I started camming with Treasure Cams on Streamate I was truly able to support myself once again.
I had to pause of course for 4-months as I waited for my surgery (I was in so much pain) but now I’m in complete remission and my mother, while her cancer is incurable it is stable because of the immunotherapy, is able to live on her own with some housekeeping help and a few visits a week by me and my sister for her personal care needs.
So in late February, I looked for a new apartment. The first one I applied for didn’t work out as they had the strictest financial hoops for me to jump through I’ve ever come across. The second one which actually was more affordable was much easier for me to secure. It’s a 1-bedroom in a smaller building that I'm excited to say is not undergoing any loud renovations or repairs like the previous building.
Now here is where my grit really comes into play. Also, my eccentricity. My move was last minute so it would have cost me a minimum of 2K to hire movers for my small bedroom of belongings. I couldn’t afford that. It was also Spring Break and my sister was not available to help me very much because the kids were at home. My nephew is Autistic and needs constant supervision. I only have three other friends in Ottawa. Two are teachers so they were out of town and the other is a nurse and well, she works 24-7.
So except for two trips by car for my mattress, bed base, and office furniture I moved by foot. I pulled my sturdy sturdy wagon filled with boxes and small furniture many times 4 km back and forth. It was rather exhilarating except for this very odd series of burning piercing headaches and eye pain I was experiencing.
Yes, I moved by foot while having a shingles outbreak.
So I had no clue what I was dealing with was shingles. My outbreak was mostly on my scalp so I couldn’t see what it looked like. I thought it was scalp irritation from my products and I thought the weird headaches were because of the effort of the move.
When I started to develop open sores around my left eye I knew something was really off and I made an appointment to see my doctor. Because of the pandemic, it was a telephone call appointment but the moment I told her my symptoms she told me to come in that day and she saw me for less than a minute and said it was shingles. She told me to go to the ER to get myself connected with the emergency eye clinic to see if it had spread to my eyeball.
That was March 22nd. After a 4-hour wait, I saw the emergency ophthalmologist who told me it didn’t look like it had spread but I do have spots of inflammation and he booked me into the Ottawa Emergency Eye Clinic for a follow-up.
That appointment happened on March 30th. The sores by then had closed up and were healing. I still had flashes of burning itchy pain but much less so (a few times a day versus every 2 hours). I saw three different ophthalmologists and all concluded it did not spread to my eye and I didn’t need any other follow-up care by them. I would likely still have nerve pain as is common with shingles but my family doctor would monitor that.
So that was March 2022 for me.