Quintessence, by David Walton

  Buy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

Author’s website
Publication date – March 19, 2013

Summary: (Taken from GoodReads) Imagine an Age of Exploration full of alchemy, human dissection, sea monsters, betrayal, torture, religious controversy, and magic. In Europe, the magic is thin, but at the edge of the world, where the stars reach down close to the Earth, wonders abound. This drives the bravest explorers to the alluring Western Ocean. Christopher Sinclair is an alchemist who cares only about one thing: quintessence, a substance he believes will grant magical powers and immortality. And he has a ship.

Thoughts: Normally historical fantasy isn’t really my thing, but after reading Quintessence, I’m starting to think that it should be. Set initially in 16th century London, a time of religious and political turmoil, the book primarily follows the story of Dr. Parris, his daughter Catherine, and an alchemist with ambition named Sinclair. After a failed voyage to magical lands, something has followed the now-dead sailors back, throwing Parris and Catherine in with Sinclair as the family is exhiled and Sinclair launches his own voyage to the strange and wondrous lands across the ocean.

The voyage is far from an easy one, as the crew faces not only the typical dangers of the ocean but also, as they get closer to the magical land, the perils of sea monsters, fish that turn into iron, and the strange substance that ties them all together: quintessence, the stuff that God used to make the universe. And when they get there, they encounter the native inhabitants of the islands, whom they call the tamarins, as well as the strange flora and fauna that cannot survive when taken too far from the edge of the world.

And it really is the edge of the world. Beyond the island is a great waterfall into nothingness. It’s another elements that adds a sense of wonder to the story, a literal interpretation of what some believed in the past, and it fits in so well with the story that you don’t think to question it. It is. That’s all you need.

This novel, at its heart, is a story of exploration and discovery. Not just the discovery of new lands across the ocean, but of the experiments to explain magic and the impossible at a scientific level. The debate over whether or not matter is composed of tiny little things called atoms. How the bodies of humans and animals work on the inside. Catholicism or Protestantism, or whether it really matters at all. And the answer to what some consider the biggest question of all: what lies beyond death, and can people be brought back from it?

There are no heroes in this tale. Characters are stupid, arrogant, sometimes downright cruel and viscious, and while you can seperate groups into general “good guys” and “bad guys,” there’s definitely some overlap, and the divisions aren’t as clear-cut as they first appear. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things, everyone does things that make the reader facepalm now and again, and that’s what make these characters come across as real, not just lessons in a morality play. Modern sensitibilities are, happily, quite lacking in this story, which adds another sense of believability to the tale. Comparatively, I’ve found that many historical novels, especially historical fantasy, essentially transplant a modern person into old times, labeling them as morally and socially progressive for their period, which I suppose is designed to help the reader relate to a time and place in which they are generally unfamiliar. There may be a bit of progressive thinking here, but that comes from characters who are already known for it, such as Parris (trying to understand physiology through dissection) and Catherine (not really keen on being a good young woman and settling down to marry when there are adventures to be had).

This was my introduction to Walton’s writing, and I must say, if this is an example of what’s to come, then you can be assured that I’ll be checking out his other books. His style is smooth, his pacing a little rocky at times but I find that was made up for by the quality of detail and the interest generated for the characters and their setting. Walton has a wonderful streak of imagination and wonder that’s balanced by a healthy streak of historically-appropriate science, and that combination made for a winning story that I won’t soon forget. If you’re a fan of historical fantasy, or a fan of tales of massive discovery and speculation, then this is a book you won’t want to pass on reading.

(Received for review from the publisher via NetGalley.)

The 5th Wave, by Rick Yancey

  Buy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

Author’s website
Publication date – May 7, 2013

Summary: (Taken from GoodReads) After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

Thoughts: After seeing this book tear its way across the blogosphere, I had to take a look for myself and see what the big deal was.

Sad to say, I didn’t really find out. This seems to be another case where my opinion goes counter to popular opinion, because I found this book fairly inconsistent with the interest it was able to generate in me, a few fairly large plot holes, and a romantic aspect that alternatingly bored and annoyed me.

I warn you, this review does contain spoilers, because it’s the only way I can talk about the good and the bad of this book without coming across as hopelessly vague.

The story starts off with Cassie, who is on a mission that isn’t revealed until flashbacks. After the vast majority of humanity has been wiped out by alien invasion, she and her brother have been separated and she’s trying to find her way back to him. You slowly get the idea that this is all being written down in the journals she carries with her, but that makes for an inconsistent tone whereby it’s hard to tell sometimes if she’s just very good at writing from the present tense while describing past events, or it’s half thought and half writing.  I do have this much positive to say, though: the way Yancey writes characters is very realistic, complete with half-finished thoughts and odd trains of thought and description. Rather than see every character’s thoughts be polished and perfect at exposition and reflection, we instead find that they’re more rough and raw, closer to the way people actually think than the way people often write people thinking.

The perspective in the book shifts every once in a while, going from Cassie to a guy who remains unnamed for a while and then gets the codename Zombie, to brief mentions of another unnamed guy who shot Cassie in the leg, later confirmed to be Evan. Who nurses Cassie back to health. And becomes her love interest.

And starts off very boring sections of the book. Cassie’s interest in Evan is almost understandable, because in high-stress situations, people often seek out comfort with another, and I can understand that. But that doesn’t mean that reading repeated passages about Evan’s eyes or hair or perfect cuticles is interesting, and it really throws off the high-tension tone of the rest of the novel, seeming very out of place. Like a false calm to the storm.

As for Evan’s interest, well, I couldn’t even begin to fathom him. Going from shooting Cassie in the leg to nursing her back to health, is a stretch for a character in his position, and it’s revealed later that he couldn’t kill her because he fell in love with her. Which means that it was love at first sight. Which overthrows all of Evan’s training and survival instincts and forces him into an awkward and dangerous situation just to rescue and heal the girl he was supposed to kill. His motivations were flimsy and suspect, and it sounded less like actual affection and love than a half-assed attempt to shoehorn some romance into the story for the sake of female characters (because protagonist females have to fall in love, doncha know?)

The most interesting sections of the book were told from Zombie’s perspective, undergoing boot camp and brainwashing and trying to survive a cruel would by becoming crueller. Personally, I would have been quite happy had the entire book been told from his perspective. Every time I broke away from his story to refocus on Cassie and Evan, I spent most of those pages looking forward to shifting back to Zombie again. Ought to tell you something about how the romance was carried out…

I mentioned plotholes, and here’s where I really have to get into the spoilers to talk about what bothered me. The aliens that are wiping out humanity have no physical bodies. They downloaded their consciousness into a giant ship’s computer so they could travel to a new and viable planet, where they proceed to wipe out the dominant species (humanity) in order to recolonize Earth. Part of the plan involved planting sleeper agents, downloading themselves into human brains (via owls, which made me think of nothing so much as the terrible movie that was The Fourth Kind) to await the day they awoke and could start wiping people out. But… why? The aliens didn’t like the idea of living within human bodies and so wanted to remove them from the picture, but what were the disembodied aliens going to do after that? Come to earth and float around in the air, like ghosts? Why destroy all human life for that? Were they planning on inhabiting other animals? Doubtful, since they found the concept of living in lower life forms like humans so abhorrent. Were they going to build awesome cyborg bodies for themselves? Maybe, but no sign of this is ever given. It created a giant plothole where it looked like the aliens had gone through all the effort to destroy humanity for absolutely no reason, except to create a book for someone to write.

This book had so much potential. The book starts off so well, provides a fascinating and chilling backdrop for a story of survival and recovery, and just goes downhill the more it goes on. Had it stayed as intriguing as it began, then I could totally agree with the hype that it generated. As it was, the romance and the plotholes just proved to be too much, and really lowered the book in my eyes. Yancey’s writing is a delight to read, but even that couldn’t save the story from itself. In the end, while I can’t say I completely regret spending time reading this, I wouldn’t want to read it again, and I can’t really recommend it to others. it had its moments, but too few of them to make it worth it. If you must read this one, do what I did and borrow a copy instead of buying one.

Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman

  Buy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

Author’s website
Publication date – July 10, 2012

Summary: (Taken from GoodReads) Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty’s anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high.

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen’s Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life.

Thoughts: It isn’t too often that I come across a YA novel that’s far more traditional fantasy than urban fantasy these days, so the fact that Seraphina was exactly this intrigued me. Even if this novel hadn’t turned out to have an interesting premise, good characterization, and skilled worldbuilding, I figured that just reading it would give me a nice break from standard speculative YA fare.

Much of the story was easy to see coming, and very little surprised me at its reveal. I’m not counting that against this novel, though, because it made for rather comfortable reading, and at the time I read it that’s exactly what I needed. But even had I found that a fault in the book, the strong characterization would have more than made up for it. Characters have a depth to them that makes them very realistic, flawed and with quirks and rarely are they merely the face that they present to the world. Sometimes very literally, as is seen in the inhabitants of Seraphina’s mental garden.

Running through he whole story is the theme of prejudice. Some of it was blatant and very out in the open, such as the human hatred for dragons, and other bits that dipped far more into grey area, like the hatred of the Quigutl, where there was open hostility and stereotyping and segregation, but some of the stereotyping was presented as justified. Though in fairness, there was more than a hint of suggestion that the quigutl were partly the way they were because of the situation they had been forced into, making the prejudice far less clear-cut than it first appears. As prejudice often is.

As for the ever-present romantic aspects in YA novels, I was pleasantly surprised by the relationship presented in Seraphina. The object of her affection wasn’t hard to spot (again, some things in this book were less than subtle), but their interactions were wonderful! Seraphina’s blunt and sarcastic attitude made for some difficult scenes, but that just added interest for me, and it was fun to see their relationship develop not because of undeniable attraction, but because they were actually getting to know each other. And unlike relationships in many YA novels, they were capable of thinking about things other than each other when more important things came up (like murders and dragons and mysteries). They complemented each other rather than subsuming, and it was a treat to see because all too often, the kind of powerful romance that authors try to convey falls flat with me. I would rather see complicated characters slowly develop affection than I would see two people who fall in passionate love at first sight and spend a novel doing little but thinking of how the other relates to whatever situation is at hand. Kudos, Rachel Hartman, for creating a relationship that I can really get behind!

Ultimately I have to say that I came away from this book quite happy with it, and excited to see how the story progresses in future installments. Hartman did some great world-building, and knows how to string a reader along with hints of the bigger picture without revealing too much, and even if nothing is a surprise, it’s still fun to follow along as the characters try to grasp the mystery of the events. Recommended for those who enjoy YA but who want a change from the standard fare that’s on the shelves right now, and for those who want a good way to hook their young teens on more traditional fantasy.

Note – The Kindle edition of this book is currently only $4.99 for Canadians, which is a good price for a good book.

<small)(Book provided for review by the publisher via NetGalley.)

Tropes as simulated character development

Tropes. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re just about everywhere we see, and there are more than a heaping shovelful in fantasy and science fiction. The farmboy saves the world, the long-lost prince, the “always chaotic-evil” bad guys, and dozens of others. They’re the old standbys, the tales that readers go back to time and again, even the very same ones who often think those tropes (by virtue of being tropes at this point) are overdone.

I can’t scoff at the idea of loving the same old story done up in a new costume. Just look at how many of the Valdemar books I’ve read, and I will tell you unabashedly that they’re all very similar stories, sometimes practically the very same story with different names and circumstances. And I love them because they’re comfortable, because they’re hopeful and inspiring and don’t give rise to any awkward feelings of grey morality or bad “good guys” or any of the stuff that requires moral judgments. You know they’re right because they’re right.

Those aren’t the only kinds of books I will read, of course, and there are plenty of arguments for or against such stories all over the Internet, so I won’t bore you by trying to defend the fact that I likes me some comfort reading now and again. That isn’t what I’m here to talk about.

It occurred to me recently that tropes in writing can be used to simulate character development where there is none. This isn’t always the case, happily, and in the hands of a good writer, even the most overdone trope can turn into a story that people won’t want to put down. But using tropes is a good way to make it seem like the character s moving when they’re actually standing as still as they were on Page 1.

Take the “farmboy saves the world” trope as an example. You start off with a guy who lives in Backwatersville at the edge of the Kingdom of Somewhere.  Adventure comes along in the form of tragedy, and he has to leave home in the care of those wiser than he. Along the way he discovers that he has a Destiny, and that he’s the one who needs to defeat some great oppressive evil and save the world.

Are you seeing reflections of many classic fantasy characters here?

Specifically, are you seeing Rand al’Thor?

Rand is probably the best example of what I’m talking about. I confess that it’s been a while since I read the series and that I hadn’t read all of it, but I think that by the time I get to book 7, I’ve got a fairly decent grasp of the characters.

And I grasped that Rand did not develop very much at all.

He’s still the very same person who left Backwatersville in the first book. He’s seen most of the world, he’s done amazing things, his Grand Destiny is creeping up on him… and he’s still full of the same prejudices he always was, seems to have gained some knowledge but no wisdom from his experiences, and the biggest way he actually changed is that he grew more arrogant.

But how could he not be? He’s traveled the world! He’s done so many things! He’s fought battles and saved people and had women throw themselves at him and learned so much and had to cope with so many difficulties! How could he not have grown?

Beats me. He had plenty of opportunities. But the author relied on the use of a trope as a cheap way of making it look like he grew when he didn’t. To an uncritical reader, it looks like Rand has become a much more awesome person, dedicated and strong and open-minded as he encounters new cultures and ways of living.

His circumstances may have changed, but I didn’t see any real character growth. The guy had 7 books in which to grow (at least, that’s how far I read before losing interest with the series), and he really didn’t. Kind of sad, that. You can give a farmboy a sword, but that doesn’t make him a hero.

This trope isn’t the only one that can be abused for simulated character growth, but it’s an awfully easy one to do it with. The long-lost prince nearly always has to fight for his rightful place on the throne and automatically becomes a great and benevolent ruler, dispensing wisdom and fairness to all, never making mistakes that will affect his people on a grand scale, even though he spent his life having no training in law or judgment or even what ruling a kingdom may involve. But giving him some trials and then having him sit on that throne and be all kingly makes it seem like he’s earned that wisdom when really, he hasn’t.

It’s not inherent to the trope that these things will happen. But it’s a path riddled with traps and pitfalls, and ones that are so easy to fall into if one is lazy and lets the trope do all the storytelling for them. Of course the farmboy will be awesome and save the world, because that’s his destiny. Of course the rightful heir will be good and just, because how could he be any other way? But it’s cheap and lazy to just let it lie like that, to not even be aware of the pitfalls you’re falling into. A skilled writer will be aware of the traps and avoid them, perhaps even turn them to an advantage in the end rather than just letting lazy storytelling advance the novel.

A character doesn’t grow just because they end up in a different physical place than where they started, or because they encountered something new. it takes more than a journey of the body to make a journey of the soul, and there are a lot of people who easily confuse one for the other. Sometimes it works and you get something familiar and comfortable out of it, something that’s fun to read even if it doesn’t get great points for originality — let’s face it, sometimes that’s exactly what we want to read! Other times, you can see the poor storytelling from miles away.

And there’s no excuse for that kind of poor storytelling.

Non Audiam – Why I REALLY Avoid Audiobooks

I’m sure I’ve talked before about audiobooks, and how I don’t like them. Most of that centred around the old standards for why people don’t like audiobooks: not hearing the same voices in my head as when I read, too easy to get distracted or lose focus, it’s better to read at my own pace, blah blah blah. To me, while audiobooks deliver the story, they don’t feel like reading, exactly, and reading’s what I like to do.

But there’s a deeper reason for me not liking audiobooks, one that I haven’t talked about before because, well, I don’t always like talking about my weird deficiencies all over the Internet. But if there’s one thing that my recent health problems have taught me, it’s how to have no shame when it comes to my health, and maybe talking about this will be a little bit cathartic for me.

The biggest reason I avoid audiobooks is because I can’t hear for beans.

My hearing has technically tested fine, though I have some minor loss of range in one ear compared to the other. And I have never been officially diagnosed with a problem because of that. But a lot of the time, when I hear words, I don’t exactly hear the words someone has said to me. Somewhere between my ear and my brain, the sounds  hear stop connecting to words and meaning. Sometimes they reconnect properly and I get things right. Other times, they connect to a similar sound but thus not the right meaning. Still other times they connect to nothing at all, and I hear gibberish.

Sometimes this ends up funny, like when my roommate once said, “Vending machines hate me,” and I heard, “Venetians hit me.” But most of the time, it’s disruptive and annoying. Not so much that it makes my life unliveable, but enough that it frustrates me and everyone around me. They have to repeat themselves often and that’s annoying. Sometimes I stand there, looking like an idiot as I try to puzzle out what was just said without having to ask for repetition, and I either get it or I don’t, and that’s annoying. It’s easier if I can look at your lips when you talk (I’ve gotten much better at lip-reading because of this), but on bad anxiety days when I can’t lift my eyes from the floor, that’s not an option. The garbled language is worse when I’m experiencing stress.

All my research tells me that this is called an auditory processing disorder. And that many people don’t even believe it exists. ”You’re just tired.” “You need to pay better attention.” “There’s nothing wrong with your ears.” “You heard me.”

No, I didn’t. Not exactly.

Sometimes if I’m not looking at you, I don’t know that you’re calling my name. The sounds you make get lost in the background because my brain doesn’t tell me that what I’m hearing is something to pay attention to, is something meaningful.

Hearing aids don’t often help, because all they do is raise the volume, and volume isn’t my problem. And you can’t get subtitles for life.

Much of the time, when I’m watching something on TV that I haven’t seen before, I use subtitles. It helps prompt my brain to get the right meaning from the sound I hear. If I don’t do this, dialogue has been known to come across as garbled nonsense and I have to ask my roommate to tell me again what was just said. Or if I don’t, if I try to sit there and puzzle out what might have just been said from context, I may get it right and have missed more dialogue in the process, or I may not get it at all and miss out on the original thing I was trying to comprehend.

So it is with audiobooks. Unless I already know the story, and am paying rapt attention, I miss things. And having to struggle just to make out words doesn’t make for the most enjoyable experience. So I don’t bother with them. It’s far easier for me to stick with the printed word, because that requires the use of something that actually works (my eyes, at least when I’m wearing my glasses) instead of something that doesn’t.

All the reasons I previously gave for disliking audiobooks is true. Audiobooks give someone else’s version of the story, not mine, and I prefer mine. But what it comes down to is that even if those things were not a factor, nothing I considered worthy of consideration, I still wouldn’t be able to make use of them because of my hearing comprehension.

So if I ever meet you and am staring at your mouth, please don’t take offense. If  ask you to repeat yourself, please have patience; I’m not doing it to be annoying, I promise. If we watch a movie, don’t be surprised if I ask for the subtitles to be turned on. And please, don’t tell me that I just need to give audiobooks another try. It ain’t happening!

If you want to learn more about auditory processing disorders, Wikipedia actually has quite a comprehensive article on the subject.

Birthday giveaway! M L Brennan’s “Generation V.”

Today, I turn 29. It’s my birthday, and that can only mean one thing. Presents!

No, not presents for me, silly. Presents for you! In honour of my birthday, it’s time for a giveaway!

   Fortitude Scott’s life is a mess. A degree in film theory has left him with zero marketable skills, his job revolves around pouring coffee, his roommate hasn’t paid rent in four months, and he’s also a vampire. Well, sort of. He’s still mostly human.

But when a new vampire comes into his family’s territory and young girls start going missing, Fort can’t ignore his heritage anymore. His mother and his older, stronger siblings think he’s crazy for wanting to get involved. So it’s up to Fort to take action, with the assistance of Suzume Hollis, a dangerous and sexy shape-shifter. Fort is determined to find a way to outsmart the deadly vamp, even if he isn’t quite sure how.

But without having matured into full vampirehood and with Suzume ready to split if things get too risky, Fort’s rescue mission might just kill him…

Author M L Brennan has kindly offered a signed copy of her latest, Generation V, for this contest.

Rules
~ Open to residents of the US and Canada (apologies to everyone else).
~ Contest runs until 11:59 PM AST (GMT -4) on June 13.
~ Winner has 48 hours to respond to my email or else another winner will be chosen
~ Mailing address will be sent to the author in order to send the winner their prize. Information will not be kept or used for any other purpose.
~ Following on Twitter or Facebook is not mandatory, but is always appreciated.

How to Enter
~ To enter, send an email to bibliotropic.reviews@gmail.com with your name and mailing address.
~ For an additional entry, leave a blog post comment telling me who your favourite vampire is, and why.

“Regularly Scheduled Program” my butt!

Okay, I confess. I meant to start blogging again this week. I have more than a dozen reviews to catch up on, and about half a dozen other things I want to talk about, and I meant to get back to that all this past Monday.

Look how well that worked out.

The biggest problem is the weather. I was doing pretty well, my incision’s healing more neatly and with a smaller scar than I expected it would, and my energy level is coming back, but then lousy weather hits and I’m shut down with pain. Rain and humidity were bad enough, but when there’s fog, I feel like I spend the entire day practically out of comission. Which is what happened on Monday.

On Tuesday I felt better and so I took my first non-hospital-related trip out, on the bus to pick up some snacks because dammit, I wanted snacks! The first ride was okay. I started feeling it about halfway through shopping in a single store. The ride back wore me right out.

And I was still feeling it yeserday, and had a hard time getting out of bed again, and while I could function, I was the opposite of comfortable. It’s all internal pain, in the hard areas caused by large numbers of sutures holding together a cut-open organ, and when I move, everything inside me moves and hurts.

And this morning, one of my cats decided that the proper way to get me out of bed was by jumping on my stomach. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it was going to, but believe me, that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt!

So that pretty much put paid to me summoning the brainpower to write up reviews. I’ll try again next week.

One thing I can guarantee, though, is that there’ll be a post tomorrow. Tomorrow I turn 29, and in celebration, I’m going to be running a giveaway for a recently-released novel! Stay tuned for more details!

Returning to your regularly scheduled program

Sorry about the last of, well, anything here this past week. This is just a quick note to say that the blog will resume its normal schedule starting next Monday. I’m reaching the point where sitting up and using my laptop isn’t so daunting, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t start writing up reviews and such again.

So as of next week, I’ll be returning with more reviews, more posts, and even a giveaway! Exciting!

Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge

  I’m taking the challenge. Will you?

The Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge has a simple enough premise. 12 months. 12 books. 12 reviews. Picking female genre authors whose work you haven’t read before.

That’s the hardest part for me, actually. Picking ones I haven’t read before. That isn’t to say that I read a vast number of books by female authors, but more that there are plenty of female authors whose books I’m just not that interested in, for one reason or another. Or I’ve already read one or more of their books, so reading a sequel wouldn’t count for the challenge. I could cheat, I suppose, but where’s the fun in that?

I’m looking forward to this challenge, really. It will give me the prodding to pick up a couple of books that I’ve had lying around for a while but for one reason or another have gotten passed over in favour of other books. Books by Stina Leicht, Elspeth Cooper, Freda Warrington, and more. I always love a good challenge, and I think this one’s going to be quite interesting.

Anyone else signed up for this, or will be signing up? There are even prizes to be won, in the form of Amazon gift cards! But more important is the chance to spread the word about awesome authors who, as awesome and talented and well-loved as they are, still don’t tend to get the pbulicity that some male authors will get.

Not quite a medical miracle, but good enough.

I’m ba~ack!

I was discharged from the hospital on Saturday, as those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may have heard, and all things considered, I’m doing pretty well.

The surgery itself was more complicated than my doctor expected. Turns out the tumour was more invasive than she’d thought, and instead of having to just cut it from the top of my uterus, she also had to cut into the uterus itself to remove it all. And she had a hard time stopping the bleeding despite “a ton of sutures.” I could rant at length on why this bothers me (in fact, I did, if anyone cares to have a read of the complete account on my personal journal – be warned, I go into a fair bit of detail recounting my experiences, both the good and the bad parts), but this isn’t the place.

Anyway, I was discharged on Saturday, and went for a trip back to the hospital to have my staples removed this morning. Of the 11 staples, only 2 hurt to be removed. Small infection near the incision for which she gave me a presciption for some antibiotics, but nothing she’s too concerned about.

If truth be told, I think I’m doing amazingly. My hemoglobin’s almost as low as it’s ever been, and last time it was this low, I was napping every day for 3 weeks and getting short of breath just walking from my bedroom to the kitchen. Now I’m pretty much in the same boat, only healing from having multiple body parts sliced open, and yet I’m still doing well enough to actually impress some doctors.

So now I begin the rest of my recovery. I have to walk every day, keep my incision clean, take plenty of painkillers, and try to get my body back into a shape that’s actually able to carry me through the rest of my life. Hopefully the tumour doesn’t regrow, and if it does,  hope that my doctor will actually take me seriously enough to avoid yet another surgery. Hopefully I should be back to work in late June or early July, if all goes well. And in the meantime, I’m taking it easy, watching a bunch of random stuff of Netflix, and catching up on some reading.

Thanks to everyone for all the well-wishes and hope you sent my way during this ordeal. I know it sounds cheesy, but it makes me smile each time I see signs that so many people are rooting for me. It means a lot.