{"id":13039,"date":"2020-11-09T18:40:55","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T23:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennytrout.com\/?p=13039"},"modified":"2020-11-09T18:40:55","modified_gmt":"2020-11-09T23:40:55","slug":"so-anything-happening-in-the-news-and-other-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/?p=13039","title":{"rendered":"So&#8230;anything happening in the news? And other updates."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>CW: This is an overall positive post but the word &#8220;suicide&#8221; does come up and IDK where everyone is around here, mentally. It&#8217;s not super heavy, just the grim, passing reflections of someone who&#8217;s been suicidal before. It&#8217;s not like,\u00a0<em>about<\/em> suicide.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As you know by now, President-Elect Joe Biden is a thing. I partied over the weekend, woke up this morning and was like, wow. This is what it feels like to not wake up disappointed that I didn&#8217;t die in my sleep. Wild.<\/p>\n<p>I was more or less holding off on making any, you know, plans or whatnot until after the election. It just didn&#8217;t make sense to me to be like, &#8220;Yeah, good news, I&#8217;ve got all this stuff happening and good content coming\u00a0<em>just as soon as I know that I&#8217;m not going to be sent to a re-education camp.<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Since it seems safe (for now) to make future plans, I am tentatively announcing a\u00a0<em>soft<\/em> release date for the final book in the Sophie Scaife series.\u00a0<em>The Daughter<\/em> will, by all accounts, unless I&#8217;m crushed by something heavy or there is a military coup that seizes control of the country, be out on January 21st, 2021.<\/p>\n<p>Because I&#8217;m going to be damned if I say goodbye to my imaginary friends and strand them in a Trump presidency. No way, no how.<\/p>\n<p>My first Jennifer Morningstar title,\u00a0<em>In The Blood<\/em>, will re-release in February 2021.<\/p>\n<p>Damn, it feels so good to be able to actually write again. You guys. seriously.<\/p>\n<p>Please don&#8217;t assume that it was\u00a0<em>just<\/em> the election that made me regret waking up in the mornings. Nay, nay! as my good friend Kris Norris is fond of saying. Nay, nay, I have had all sorts of other bullshit going on totally unrelated to politics, white supremacy, and all that other fun MAGA jazz. I have more health bullshit!<\/p>\n<p>As you may know, since I feel like I complain about it constantly, in 2009, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Shortly after the birth of my daughter, I injured my neck while nearly missing a head-on collision with another car. Within weeks, I was calling my doctor complaining of fatigue, the pain from my moderate whiplash turned severe. I was in pain all over, a pain I could hear like a low buzzing in my ears. It took months of insisting that this was not normal childbirth recovery, that I&#8217;d had a baby before and never felt so run down and in so much pain in so many non-birth related body parts. Finally, someone listened and sent me to a specialist, and I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia.<\/p>\n<p>Cut to September of last year, when I slipped and fell in the shower and broke my foot. I was prepared for my body to take a long time to stop hurting. In the years since my diagnosis, I&#8217;ve racked up a rather impressive number of accidents that have caused pain that never went away. And I don&#8217;t mean &#8220;aches and pains when the weather changes,&#8221; although I have those, too. Surgery to remove a tumor resulted in a scar that burns even when the evil wizard who put it there isn&#8217;t thinking of me. Sometimes, it feels like it&#8217;s coming open. The whiplash has never gone away; it, too, has morphed into constant burning.<\/p>\n<p>I thought this was all Fibromyalgia and continued with my life.<\/p>\n<p>Until one day back in September when I posted on Facebook asking if anyone else still had pain in their foot after breaking it. &#8220;It aches every time it rains,&#8221; seemed to be the most popular answer. When I tried to explain that it wasn&#8217;t an ache, that it hurts exactly the way it did the day after I broke it, someone suggested I look up Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome or CRPS. And I laughed. Because it&#8217;s a rare condition and I know someone who has it. What are the odds of that happening?<\/p>\n<p>I went to my friend, whom some of you know as St. Petra of Getting Peter Capaldi to Wish Jenny a Happy Birthday, who also has CRPS. I told her how funny it was that someone would coincidentally suggest I have the same rare condition she has. And since she and I had bonded over our mutual chronic pain and she knows my symptoms, she finally told me something she&#8217;d apparently thought for a while: that my symptoms are symptoms of CRPS.<\/p>\n<p>After my diagnosis, I stopped researching Fibromyalgia. What was the point? It&#8217;s incurable, I&#8217;m treating it the way that works for me, I don&#8217;t really need to obsess over it, right? I&#8217;d just been noodling along, thinking everything I was experiencing was Fibro. And then I compared and contrasted the symptoms of both and called my doctor because while I have a few symptoms of Fibro, they&#8217;re all symptoms in common with CRPS, which I check every single box on.<\/p>\n<p>I am not yet diagnosed, as it is a diagnosis of exclusion. There isn&#8217;t a test for it, you just have to test for everything around it. Just like with Fibro. And that process, dear readers, is exhausting. On the heels of a year where I had two mental breakdowns, it&#8217;s really been a lot.<\/p>\n<p>However, I&#8217;m positive and happy and cautiously optimistic about the future. It&#8217;s way, way better to worry about health issues when I know healthcare access will improve and that we&#8217;re not as close to plunging into full, unfettered fascism as we were last year.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t really have a way to end this post, so to recap:\u00a0<em>The Daughter<\/em> releases January 21, 2021,\u00a0<em>In The Blood<\/em> releases in February, it&#8217;s likely I have what&#8217;s known as the &#8220;suicide disease&#8221; (which is a stupid name for it because not only is that grim as fuck for people who have it but also there&#8217;s already a disease that causes suicide and that&#8217;s called mental illness), but I&#8217;m still chugging away and things are looking the fuck up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CW: This is an overall positive post but the word &#8220;suicide&#8221; does come up and IDK where everyone is around here, mentally. It&#8217;s not super&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/?p=13039\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">So&#8230;anything happening in the news? And other updates.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13040,"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13039\/revisions\/13040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}