I finally had it in me to actually draw something today. It’s been weeks. So I decided to make something that is both comic and blog post, about how things have been lately, because it certainly has been a wild and nonstop ride.
I’ve recently been diagnosed with POTS, which is a thing where your body can’t push your blood where it needs to be, so you get really dizzy standing up, have a hard time standing for a long time, and other “fun” and “exciting” things like being intolerant of heat. It makes your heart rate spike really, really high which can be terrifying, although mostly harmless. It makes it really hard to function! I have moments where I need to sit down, or I’m gonna fall down. This is depicted mostly in the last couple of panels. Still, I’ve got some things I’m working on with my doctors, which are already paying dividends in this department. It’s just one of those things where sometimes even if you do everything right, you’ll still get knocked flat. With the summer heat, that’s been happening a lot, unfortunately.
I’m also mid-diagnostic-process for finding out whether I’ve got Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which is a lot more complex, but is looking more and more likely. This is a disorder where the collagen in your connective tissue doesn’t work quite right, so it’s very easy to hyperextend a joint (painful!) and easy to get injured, and I find myself dealing with a lot of hand pain because my fingers flex a lot more than a normal person’s and get sore very fast. My knees also hyperextend backwards, which is the purpose behind the knee braces *ahem* robot legs in the first panel. There are 13 different types of EDS that affect the body in different ways, and I’ll be working with a geneticist in the near future (after waiting an entire year) to find out the specifics of my particular case.
In any case, I just want to say thanks for reading and keeping up with my work. It’s been really difficult, physically, to make anything in the past year. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle problems like this in the future, because I absolutely do not want to quit making comics and art. But I have to find a way to balance it with my incredibly unreliable body, which is something I haven’t figured out just yet.
If you want to find out more about POTS and EDS, I recommend these links, and thank you for reading them! A lot of people don’t know much about these conditions, even doctors, so if I can teach even one person a little more about them, I feel like I’ve done some good.
Dysautonomia International: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome