User Profile

You can skip down to the fun stuff below if you don't care to read about RL and what it's done to me in the last several years. So scroll down a page or two (depending on your font size) to get to the fannish stuff.

First: Friend away! I am totally flattered. But please, please, understand:
Since 2000, RSI (repetitive strain injuries) have left me crippled and erratic and sporadic in posting on LJ and communicating and fangirlish things. It is a (understatement of decade) a very, very great bummer for me. Lack of communication from me is NOT personal, it is just physically limited sometimes, and I'm often forced to choose between writing fic and LJ-ing, which is a sucky choice, but the fic usually wins. Ice and rest is pretty much required if I'm beating up my hands/wrists/arms with writing fic. If you feel you must de-friend, that's okay. I won't take it personally. Much. *sigh*

Second: I'm a depressive. I've been on meds since 1990. I love the meds. Despite the shitty side effects, they have let me have a life I doubt I would otherwise have had. In fact, I think if I had not found antidepressants, I think I would probably be dead now, either from suicide or from some slow, passive self-destructive form of suicide involving substance abuse and self-medicating. So. That's good.

Third: RL has taken a huge toll on me in the last several years. Here's' the run down:
2000: first diagnosed with "overuse syndrome". Given splints and 800mg ibuprofen 3 x day.
2001: Diagnosed with RSI (repetitive strain injuries) and put on Vioxx, which is a wonderful drug. Go to Germany & Swizterland with family. Get stuck there during 9/11 when all the incoming flights to the US are grounded.
2002: RSIs progressively worsen. All fic writing stops. Visited Greece. Visited S. Dakota. Awesome.
2003: I become unable to turn keys or doorknobs, let alone type or mouse. Since I work in IT all day, every day, I go on medical leave for my 12 weeks of unpaid Family Medical Leave. I get taken off Vioxx when they discover it can cause heart attacks (boo, loved that drug). A physiatrist (not psych, but sports medicine doc) diagnoses me with Myofascial Pain Syndrome; he tells me I am 'a textbook case.' It is similar to Fibromyalgia but not the same. In June, my father (who lives 2 blocks away) is hit by a car and both his legs broken. I go back to work in May and immediately suffer a back spasm which takes me off work another 3 days. I begin mousing with my left hand even though I'm a righty. In August, knowing I am losing my job, I start taking two classes at the local jr. college. In September, I am laid off from my job. This gives me more time to take care of my father. But he is deteriorating. In When I do my 2003 taxes, I discover my income went down by half due to my 12 weeks unpaid medical leave and my lay off.
2004: I go back to school, taking nursing prereqs. My father has dementia and goes into a nursing home for skilled 24 hour care. I go to Amsterdam and check out of reality for an entire week, except for when I see the paintings of the Dutch masters. Both are awesome. I start trying to write a little fanfic again. I try to freelance IT suppport and network setups. I get unemployment compensation, but it is less than half what I made working. Fortunately when I was laid off, I had no debts at all. My COBRA payments (to continue my insurance, which I need, for my meds) are over $500/month. I can't pay my rent and COBRA. My mother tells me she'll skip the rent, and I should just pay my COBRA. I tell her I will pay her back the unpaid months of rent. I scrape by financially and otherwise do not work a real job. My sister and my mother lend me the money to take 5 classes in summer 2004, all prerequisites for nursing school.
2005: My father dies on hospice care, and refuses a priest. Considering he subscribed to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's newsletter, this does not surprise us, although he was baptized and confirmed Catholic. My stepdad (who lives downstairs from me with my mother) is diagnosed with prostate cancer, but he and his docs adopt a "watch and wait" approach (wtf??). I start nursing school. It kicks my ass much harder than my BA ever did. I start more seriously attempting fanfic again, needing the escapism. I still am not working a real job. My unemployment had run out and so had my COBRA. My father's estate left me enough money to buy a car (Toyota Echo), to live on, and also pay my nursing school tuition, which he wanted to do for me anyway, but which I would not take while he was in a nursing home for which we had to pay private funds. I also have enough money to pay my mother back for the months I didn't pay rent in 2004. She refuses to take the money. She and my sister accept, however, the money to pay back what they lent me for school the summer of 2004.
2006: My mother is diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in March. Her lower right lobe is removed end of April and she starts her 1st chemo in June. My stepfather deteriorates and loses twenty pounds over the summer. I take summer school and the LPN exam in case I have to drop out of nursing school to take care of them. I go to lots of doctor's appointments and now that I'm in nursing school, I am the medical terminology translater for all my siblings and my parents. My stepdad starts hormonal chemo. My mother starts radiation in September. Progression of my stepdad's tumor stops. In December, my mother finishes radiation. She can barely get out of bed. She does not celebrate xmas with us. We go to my sister's for xmas. It sucks. I have seriously thrown myself into some fanfic. Not nearly as prolifically as I once did or as others, certainly, but with as much of my spare time as I can, which is not much. It helps keep me sane and gives me another world to take me away from this one. I haven't been working at all because school is kicking my ass and everyone I know who has tried to work and go to nursing school has failed out of the program. My mother, to whom I was paying rent for my 2nd floor apartment in her 3 flat, stopped charging me rent. She said I went to so many doctor's appointments with her and my stepdad, and did so much of their errands and shopping, it seemed stupid to charge me rent when they would have had to pay someone just as much as they were charging me to do the stuff I was doing for them. I tell her -- as I have from day one -- that I would certainly never have been able to survive my medical leave, layoff, and return to school on the wrong side of 35 if I had not had her love and support.
2007: My stepdad's tumor starts growing again. In May I graduate from nursing school. My stepdad's cancer metastasizes to his ribs, liver, spine, and jaw bone. In June my mom's 2nd chemo starts. It is cut short when she gets pneumonia. My money from my dad's estate runs out and I get a shitty hourly wage job working as a camp nurse in a forest for the Girl Scouts. Deer walk past my window in the morning. I put bills on my credit cards after I start bouncing checks. I July I pass the NCLEX and get my RN license. We all go on a family vacation in Wisconsin. It is the last family gathering with my stepfather. In August I start a new job as an RN on the day shift; it's overwhelming; but the day shift nurses are really nice and supportive. I start paying off my debts. In September, my stepfather's liver fails. I go on the night shift as planned, which begins a year of near-permanent hazing; the night shift nurses eat their young. October 11, my stepfather dies in a hospital bed in my mother's living room. My mother is devastated. November my baby nephew is born and doesn't breathe. He's put in the NICU on a ventilator. In December he comes off the ventilator and comes home. Mom goes to stay with my sister. I have all my credit cards paid off and can really buy people xmas presents for the first time in four years. Fanfic still provides me an escape from the shit of RL -- reading it, writing it. The lawsuit against the 89 year old man who hit my father while my dad was walking across the street, and broke both my dad's legs, is settled finally. We get $500,000 but of course the lawyer gets 33% of that. I get 1/5 (I have 4 siblings) of what is left. With that, I pay off some debts, and put the rest in the bank in case some other disaster befalls me/us.
2008: In May we all go on a family vacation to Mexico to a resort. It is short because we're all pretty broke but we have a really nice time. We breathe and await the next catastrophe. In June, my mother is informed her cancer markers are rising again, and she goes on her 3rd chemo. It's an oral drug, a pill she can take every day. It works, but it gives her constant diarrhea. Her cancer markers go down and her tumors have not returned or shown up on any CTs since the surgery in 2006. We are shocked that she has (1) outlived my stepdad and (2) outlived the average life expectancy for Stage 4 lung cancer patients, which is 6-18 months. She is now at 26 months post Stage 4 diagnosis and still does most of her own shopping and banking and all her own self-care, even though she is 68 and technically a Stage 4 cancer patient. She uses oxygen sometimes during the day, and every night to sleep. In September, Mom gets sick and is hospitalized for septic shock and a blood infection. December: We have the most normal xmas we've had in years now with my mother, but without my stepfather. Mom is doing well. Oral chemo seems to be working. Fanfic is still one of the things I have to look forward to, although I still have to seriously limit the amount of time I spend writing it or reading it or LJ-ing. Sigh.
2009: My mom continues to do well. Work sucks less in terms of the work itself, but the cool ER director who hired me got fired, and the interim director is a bitch who used to be a night charge nurse we all hated. A mass exodus of good nurses begins. We now work nearly every shift with 2-5 agency nurses (temporary RNs). This is a bad sign. I continue to try at writing and reading more fanfic. This results sometimes in overusing and having to ice and rest my hands/wrists for days or a week or more. But. Kind of worth it.

June 26th, 2009: Went out for gelato with my mother & sister around 9pm. We went our 3 separate ways at 10:30pm. I return home from the 24 hr drugstore at 11:10pm to find 2 ambulances and a cop car in front of my house. I come in the house and find my mother, still conscious, just sitting down after calling 911, trying desperately to breathe on her oxygen, lips blue, and I know from my ER nursing experience that, the way she looks, she needs to be intubated or she will die. I also know she has a DNR (do not resuscitate). This means they will *not* intubate her and she *will* die. I give the paramedics the DNR. They ask me twice if I want to abide by it. A very nice police officer also at the scene reminds me that this is not my decision to make, that it was already made by my mother, and all I have to do is carry out her decision. I tell the paramedics and then, shortly, the ER doc, that, yes, I want to abide by the DNR. At 11:48pm my mother is pronounced dead at the local ER, cause of death a suspected pulmonary embolism. She is lucky. She had a top 3 ways to die: #1, in her sleep with no pain and unaware. #2, fast. #3, on hospice, in her own home, with as much morphine as she wanted (like my stepdad) and in no pain. She got #3 which is a mercy for us all, although it does not seem like it for a long time after she died.

I am the executor of the estate. In clearing out her stuff I find that she has saved almost *everything*. Including all the cards for Mother's Day and her birthday and holidays where I told her how much her love and support meant to me and how indebted I knew I was to her and how I knew I would never have made it through all the crap that's happened to me without her. And I find all the other cards from my other siblings that say similar things which she also saved. And so. much. else.

Through it all, I've been on/off with my bf since April 2003. He hasn't exactly been a rock or an angel, but then neither have I. Neither one of us is a bad person. We just don't each have our shit together and have had a lot of stresses in the last few years. So together, we kind of really don't have our shit together.

So. That's the story of the last 9 years of my life. And why I am the way I am right now. And why I'm not on LJ as much as a lot of other fangirls. But. See. Germany. Switzerland. Amsterdam. Greece. South Dakota. Wisconsin family vaca. Mexico family vaca. It wasn't all bad. I have to keep reminding myself of that. I just need... time.

Now, to the fun stuff. I like:
writing fic:
mostly slash (mostly angst) -- some gen/het -- some kink/bdsm/girls-on-boys/multi/threesome/etc

I apire:
to finish a plot bunny WIP of DC Mike/Nathalie erotic/doomed love fic. Um, yay?
to write more DC/DS Mike Sweeney/Ray Kowalski fic, preferably kinky, yay!
to finish my huge-ass Joe Dick/Jerry Bines HCL/FTWHTWD xover fic (WIP) -- ALMOST DONE! 1st draftish!
to finish my Another Life DS dom!Fraser/sub!Ray kink series with a HAPPY ending for them! -- ALMOST to a 1st draft! I recommend ficfinishing which is how I got the Joe Dick/Jerry Bines done and this one to a doable level.
to write believable threesome fic of Mick/Beth/Josef (Moonlight; WIP) -- backburnered
to write Mick/Josef slash (even though Moonlight was cancelled, wahhhhh!) -- backburnered
to continue writing DS & HCL slash (because F/K and Joe/Billy is just so frakking hot) -- ONGOING
to branch out into maybe Veronica Mars -- backburnered

reading fic:
anything, but mostly slash. Fetishes include:
angst (more=better) -- 1st times -- h/c (goes with the angst) -- d/s (as in bdsm) -- F->M pegfic (as in, strap-ons)

Friends (48):

Mutual Friends (36):

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