Recap Attempt Three – 2024 Edition

Hi. Hello. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve quite thoroughly neglected my own site for the last two three years (oh god) FOUR years. (I’m now finally getting back to writing again, so the third time’s the charm, right?) Is it because I kept growing weaker by the day and was unable to go out and about to take pictures? Yeah, kind of. Is it because I’ve been anxious about writing in general because I get the feeling that I should be working on my BA thesis instead? That too, definitely. It has been a rough couple of years.

The Physical

Peter Griffin in pain, holding his knee

A bit more on growing weaker. Aside from the usual vulnerability to infections due to my medication, GVHD has been kicking my ass by giving me sclerodermatous skin. An autoimmune disease to match an immunosuppressed individual. It, thankfully, is not the regular kind and it just applies to my skin. Some parts of my skin where it applies can’t grow hair and have abnormal skin pigmentation. Oh, and the main thing is the hardening and tightening of the skin. It started in my neck and kept creeping elsewhere for a good while before it was noticed. My neck kept tiring increasingly fast and I started having trouble walking longer distances. The movement of my arms and legs is rather inflexible nowadays. I stayed at a rehabilitation ward for a couple of weeks to regain some walking ability, but I still could not walk more than a hundred metres or so. Still can’t – I have to use a mobility aid to move any real distance when I’m not home. Still better than how things were until two years ago. At least now I don’t need to have a wheelchair to commit to a longer distance. All this has been treated via various methods with some success. Recovery is a very slow process, but there is improvement nonetheless. And whenever there’s been improvement, it’s been followed by setbacks undoing the progress gained in walking ability. Repeatedly. For years. I’m doing very well this year though, as I’ve been given asthma medication to help with the pitiful state of my lungs (which then makes exercise easier). Will have to see what the rest of the summer brings.

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What Have I Been Doing?

It’s been another while since I last wrote anything on the site. This is mainly due to me having bitten more than I could chew workload wise and I’ve desperately been trying to catch up with university stuff, but not much has come from that. Why? Well, there’s a few reasons for that, but it’s mostly due to me moving apartments back in February.

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Some Splainin’ To Do – Part 3 (up till the current day)

Finally we reach the conclusion of this series summarising the events I’ve gone through over the past two or so years. It has seen many delays over the course of the last half a year which I will go into at parts in here. There isn’t much else to note before going in, so I’ll just move on to actually continuing on from where the last part ended, around Christmas.

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Some Splainin’ To Do – Part 2 (mid 2016 till late mid December)

It should be noted that some of the information given in this post may be “gross” or “too much information” (more embarrassing for me than anything else), so you should keep that in mind going in. Other than that, I’ve done all the prefacing I feel I need to do in the first part, so let’s get right into continuing on with the story, shall we?

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Some Splainin’ To Do – Part 1 (mid 2015 to mid 2016)

Hi.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything on this blog. It’s been closer to a year and a half, hasn’t it? My inaction is quite shameful, but I do have some excuses for that.

It should be noted that I have decided on two things here: 1) I will not include any pictures here due to none of them feeling relevant; 2) The amount of explaining that I am going to be doing is so lengthy that it has to be split into two separate parts. The first part (this one) will concern my first university year. The second one will be about everything from there on until the current day.

With all that out of the way, assuming you haven’t been scared off by the threat of a lengthy post, let’s get to it.

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A Tragedy Struck Tyrrelstown – How it affected me

Earlier this morning, in the small park area behind Tyrrelstown, a small boy of the age of five drowned.

The pond that I so adore has claimed a life of a little boy, and it would seem that there are talks of increasing security due to the frequency of these events; another drowning happened recently at another manmade pond in the north western area of Dublin.

I heard of this tragedy as I had finished my morn… noon jog, at around 13:30; I met a journalist who asked if I had heard of a drowning earlier in the morning. I expressed my surprise to this event, and after having said that I had no idea, he moved on to someone else. So I went on to continue my post-run walk until I reached the pond itself.

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