It’s been a wild year

It’s been a wild year

Dragancaor

November 7, 2025

Almost a full year away – from stream, from home, from life.

Entirely unplanned, unprovoked, & unexpected.

Unless you’re in my Discord server, or follow my Bluesky, it probably seemed like I just entirely dropped off the map. While I did put up notices across various socials about my absence, there were many folks who noticed the absence but never saw the reason.

Jump to:

Long story short
Slightly longer version
What to expect for future content
TL;DR:

Long story short

I was in hospital for almost an entire year. I suffered a spinal cord injury in mid-December & was an inpatient for spinal trauma rehabilitation since. Now I’m finally home & my world is entirely changed by a progressive, incurable, autoimmune disease.

Slightly longer version

The year has been medical trauma hell (a mix of negligence & malpractice, on top of the gravity of the permanent disability), & getting home after almost a year away feels like I’ve stepped into an alternate reality. Things look the same & then you realise milk has doubled in price, meat is triple, & your favourite Tim Tams have been discontinued.

But… how did it happen?

I literally woke up like this.

Typical me, I ignored the niggly discomfort & went to work… where it progressed to significant over the course of 8 hours. Let me tell you, the looks on the doctors’ faces when they heard they could watch the progression of the injury & its effects was glorious; from horror, to incredulity, to absolute-bordering-on-morbid fascination.

Back in my teens/twenties if you’d asked anyone I knew how they thought I’d permanently injure my spinal cord they’d tell you falling out of a tree, falling down a cliff face, falling off a roof, or iceskating, or a motorbike/car crash. Something active. Not, “sleeping in a comfortable bed.”

When you hear/read/watch stories about spinal cord injuries, especially in first aid training, it normally occurs because the spine (bones down the centre of your back) has been fractured & they really instil in you this importance to not move the patient for fear of damaging the cord (the central nerve running down from your brain that controls your body). They panic about it because bones heal but nerves don’t.

My spine is intact. The issue is the cord.

I woke up with a lesion on my spinal cord that ran from C2 – C4 (right at the top in my neck). Where there’s injury there’s inflammation, & my spinal cord did not disappoint; swelling up so much that it started choking itself in the enclosed protective channel within the spinal vertebrae, & started fraying like a rope rubbing over the edge of a limestone retainer wall. Wildly painful, & entirely debilitating, within a week of the initial injury I was fully paralysed in three limbs & mostly paralysed in my left arm & torso too.

But how?! Why?! Because instead of being the well-trained guard dog it should have been, my immune system was acting like a teething puppy with access to the back of the tv cabinet, chewing through the cables. My immune system decided that my own body was the enemy & attacked my nerves.

Instead of getting better from the initial, acute treatment for the inflammation, I continued to struggle with symptoms. A second MRI a couple of months later showed more lesions & suddenly I had a new diagnosis & an additional treatment to undergo.

The reason I suddenly had these injuries & why my immune system was being a brat is an autoimmune disease called Multiple Sclerosis.

MS is progressive & there’s no cure, but there are treatments that slow the progression. The treatment & explainer is similar to how you explain radiation therapies for cancer – you aim for remission & hope that remission lasts a decent amount of time before you have to deal with worsening disease & more acute treatments, then rinse & repeat. I have never been as grateful to live where I do as when I got this diagnosis, because Australia is the best country in the world for access to treatment. (Many thanks to Bob Hawke’s Labor government in the 1980s for Medicare, & John Curtain’s & Ben Chifley’s Labor governments in the 1940s for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.)

There are lots of folks with MS who live & work relatively normal lives & have their disease well managed. One of my nurses was one of them. However, my medical team keep telling me to manage my expectations as most folks with MS don’t see this level of damage so early. I’m hopeful that I can get as close to my normal as possible, but the reality is that there is a lot of damage to the top of my spinal cord. On top of that, MS has a bonus symptom of “MS Fatigue” which sounds far less problematic than it actually is; this can hit suddenly, with zero warning, & it is debilitating & crippling.

Universe apparently really said “Hold my beer.” & upped the ante.

What to expect for future content

For the next little while I’m going to be trialling different content & schedules. I’ll be trying to keep things as close as possible to pre-injury, but the reality is that I physically cannot for some of them.

For now:

Streaming!

Twitch streams will now be 3-4 hours long.

While they are shorter than they used to be, they won’t be short, as they’ll be 3-4 hours long, but they’ll be shorter than the 8-10 hours I used to do (my OT literally stomped her foot & told me “Don’t you dare go for 8 hours.”).

Streams will start out being only one or two a week while I readjust.

Content changes are:

Games will be set based on capacity (this is dynamic & game options will be subject to change).
Just Chatting will remain, & we’ll likely see more guest appearances!
No mini painting or crochet, due to the injury’s effect on my hands. Hopefully I’ll get enough dexterity back, & find adaptive tools to help, but for now I can’t.
TTRPGs are hopeful, but we’re still yet to test energy drain for this.

Short form content!

I’m going to create some shorter reels for YouTube, TikTok, & Insta. It won’t be stream content, this will be fresh film made specifically for non-live watching.

Some of this was mapped out back in January & now that I’m out of hospital I’m looking forward to getting that series started.

I plan to record more than one in a “sitting” & build up a folder of content so there’s always something new to share with you, even when I’m too broken for stream. I’ve not wanted to do it previously because my AuDHD butt is often terrible at sitting down to do non-live footage (editing is like homework/assignments & my executive dysfunction is beastly) but I’m setting a schedule to work within, have a couple of folks who I body double well with (Ko-Fi subscribers may also find some of their discord streams include sneak peeks while I edit), & I can ask my support team to help with set layouts/changes & camera setups.

Writing!

I’ve been pushing myself to write again. It’s been a hot minute since the LiveJournal days but let’s see about getting a blog going. The one I had planned to start with my trip to the US has been shelved along with the trip, but I have a couple of ideas to work with instead.

You may even find I share a bit of fiction writing occasionally!

Photomode!

There’s going to be some blog posts on here that are few words & mostly photomode imagery. Some will be from my archives, others will be recent. I’ll make sure to tag genre as well as game titles, in case folks are using RSS feeds. This way you get more imagery from your favourite games than just what I put in my display pages on the main site.

TL;DR:

Spinal cord injuries are complex, MS is horrid, but I’m back!

Please follow this website on your RSS feed, &/or my YouTube, BlueSky, TikTok, & Instagram to keep up with new & different content across multiple platforms! You’re also welcome to join the Lair Discord server if you’d like a more social experience.

Thanks massively for supporting me through such a difficult year.

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Dragancaor