The Long Absence Explained

Hey there! if you're not in my Discord, following my Bluesky, or saw the post about it on Eka's, I figured I would give an update here, just in case, to explain the recent absence.

Last Monday, (Nov 2nd) I started experiencing pain from an abscess. Now, I don't get them very often at all, but I do know how to recognize and deal with them due to my experiences before. This abscess is in a -very sensitive- location , one that makes walking, sitting, and even laying a constant assault of incredible pain. There was no real position I could sit in where I wasn't constantly suffering pain, and even when laying only one singular position gave me any amount of momentary relief.

I went to urgent care to get my 10-day Antibiotic treatment (very standard). It's currently day 7. I've been giving updates mostly on Discord and Bluesky, due to the nature of them, on the progress popping, draining, and healing from this (avoiding gross details, don't worry, I'm not stupid).

It's been very difficult for me to sit down at my computer and give this update. Obvi on Bsky and Discord I can use my phone, so it was much better, but still it was nagging at me that there are people who may be wondering "What the heck, I paid to see the work and it suddenly stopped" without knowing why. So today, a day I feel good enough that I'm even finally getting laundry done (yay!), I figured I'd give a progress report.

Abscess' usually take around 2 weeks to fully process and heal. I'm in my second week now so it shouldn't be much longer. If you have no idea what dealing with an abscess is like, I'll say that today after changing my bandages a few times, I saw a lot of very red blood for the first time -which is a very good sign-. Medical stuff in the next paragraph if you want to skip:

An Abscess is basically a mass of rock hard infected material just under your skin. It grows, getting bigger and bigger, which is where the pain comes from. It's a constant pressure on all the surrounding nerves and it -does not- let up. Healing an abscess involves helping your immune system soften and break up the mass to be drained. This can look like a few different things, which I won't describe here, but the reason really red blood is good to see is because it is blood -not mixed with any of the infected material-. Meaning enough of it is drained that, basically, you're seeing clear bloodflow. This means I can probably stop the draining medication soon and focus entirely on healing. This also means a LOT of that pressure causing pain has let up. -The healing process is, generally, not very painful-. The hole that drains is naturally formed by your own body and while, yes, if you go poking around in there or introducing it to painful stuff, obviously it will cause a lot of pain. But it's not, like, a tear in the skin or something that needs patching up, it basically needs to just close and heal over.

All that to say I should be picking up work again very soon. I thank you all very much for your patience. I've been itching really, really badly to get back to drawing, and this comic. I know I still need to do October's char requests AND this month's. My backlog is growing but I will get through it. <3 I'm hoping it shouldn't interfere with the Advent Calender in December either.

Trust me, you all will know first thing the moment I have work to share!! Keep your eyes peeled on my socials and stuff for stream announcements.

-Aesir

https://bsky.app/profile/aesir.bsky.social