Hoooooo Boy. Been a While, eh?

We have got to stop meeting like this.

Fair warning, some unpleasant things coming up as I cover where I’ve been, including talk of pregnancy, miscarriage, and canine cancer. Things turn out fine in the end, I promise.

So yea – last you really heard from me here was February of 2022. With a post talking about how looking back on my last posts after a couple years of quiet felt like looking at the work of a different person, living an entirely different life, talking about an entirely different world. But despite that, saying that I was gonna get back to posting here more often.

Oh, sweet summer child was I.

The last three years have been doozies.

I had all the best intentions. Still do. But I’m not even sure how to begin to even begin starting.

Lets see. When was even last time I was posting more than once a year? End of 2018? Beginning of 2019?

Idk, a lot has happened since then.

Jim and I got married. That was pretty awesome.

The pandemic happened. That was pretty not.

Work has been overwhelmingly challenging to juggle for years now. And it’s only getting worse as I age, life becomes more demanding, and the multiple-gig-with-low-pay life takes its toll. I still largely love what I do, and the fact that Jim is has a good reliable regular person job bought me a few more years doing it… but the question of the long-term sustainability of this lifestyle is really getting impossible to ignore now as I age and as we start a family. I’ve set some hard deadlines for myself to get out of the gig economy, and honestly, I’m really struggling emotionally with the reality that the writing is on the wall for this particular phase of my career.

So that also hasn’t really been awesome.

In May of 2022, our second dog Hatsumi was finally born. We had been on the waiting list for a while, but litter after litter just kept being boys boys boys and we specifically wanted a girl.*

That was pretty awesome.

But then two weeks before she was set to come home, we found out that Haruka had a pretty aggressive cancerous mast cell tumor on her ear despite only being barely 4 years old. No history of anything like that in her line, no rhyme or reason as to why – just a freak random thing.

So that was beyond not awesome.

What followed was a whirlwind of hasty vet consultations, x-rays, ultrasounds, advanced biopsy reports, and appointments with veterinary oncologists. All of which ended up culminating in a full amputation of her ear flap, and a plan for about 7 total months of chemo and 2 years of scans and monitoring.

And then smack dab in the midst of that chaos, two days after her pinnectomy, we brought home this 8 week old puppy.

So yea, that was all very very very very very very (have I written enough verys?) very hard.

For months.

I’ll probably write about it in detail someday. For the catharsis. And also because we learned a lot about managing vet care and canine surgical recovery.

Oh, and I’d say puppy management when there’s only one of you, since they both had to be completely separated and constantly monitored for months, but two years out Hatsumi is still an absolute hoodlum, so maybe not.

Oh, then, just as dog health and puppy problem things felt like they were FINALLY lightening up? Haruka over the hump of urgent treatment, nicely settled on the at-home chemo pill and doing well, the two dogs finally able to be together in the house because Haruka was healed enough, Hatsumi was fully vaxxed (our Onco shared a waiting room with an ER Vet), and they were finally getting to know each other and starting to get along?

We got COVID in October. After successfully avoiding it since 2020.

Jim recovered quickly (thank god), but I ended up with months of long term effects. Fatigue, brain fog, prolonged coughing… the works. Didn’t really start feeling fully like myself again until like, March of 2023.

So that sucked.

Then I got COVID again as a late birthday present in May. Lucky me. Once more, I had long-term symptoms, and once more, it took me months to feel like myself again.

So that sucked. Again.

By the end of August, I finally felt like I was starting to catch a break… but then what followed was probably the hardest, busiest, most physically taxing semester of teaching I’ve ever worked. During which I found out that I was finally pregnant. So then I also had to deal with morning sickness and whatnot on top of it all.**

So much for that break.

But we had been trying for a kid for a couple years at that point, to no avail, so at least good news about finally being able to get pregnant, right?

Wrong.

We ended 2023 by finding out that oh, actually, despite my continued symptoms, there’s no baby. Blighted ovum.

Damn.

Which means we brought 2024 in with a miscarriage. And what we’re pretty sure was pretty severe RSV that we caught over Christmas. At the same time. Both starting on New Years Day. ***

Lucky, lucky me.

(This post is really starting to feel like a trauma dump. Sorry about that. Things do get better, I promise.)

Oh, and in the midst of all that chaos over the holidays, we found two new lumps on Haruka. One of which was on what was left of the ear that had the cancer. So… kind of a five-alarm fire. The onco recommended treating them as if they were confirmed mast cell tumors – meaning, take margins instead of just doing a punch biopsy or waiting until they were big enough to aspirate. Just in case. More surgery followed.

So now Haruka’s got more of a notch in the missing ear and a lower lip scar that any MMC in a romantasy would envy.

Luckily, our break from the powers that be finally came through on this one, though, because the biopsies came back as benign. Just normal Labrador-over-the-age-of-five lumps, and not Return-of-the-aggressive-mutated-mast-cell-cancer lumps.

Thank God.

Things lightened up from there.

Spent a few months after that still coughing from the damage whatever we had over New Years did, and then the rest of 2024 was kinder in a lot of ways. Not in ways that made the stress levels drop all that much, to be honest, but still.

Kinder.

Haruka finished up her cancer treatment officially in June – she got the 2 year all clear from the oncologist and now no longer has to go for regular scans. I really can’t speak highly enough of our veterinary oncologist and the whole team there. She and everyone else were SO wonderful through the whole ordeal, but it was such a relief to have that final appointment. We both shared a laugh as we bid goodbye for the last time saying “hope to never see you again!”

We’ve had a few more health scares with Haru since then – found a few more lumps and bumps. Which we do still have to be more proactive about than we usually would in a (now) middle-aged dog because of her history. But now the proactive just means “be sure to needle aspirate anything you find” instead of “five alarm fire treat every lump as a confirmed tumor just in case.” And thankfully, each needle aspiration we’ve done has come back clear of any potential cancer cells.

Then, in the beginning of June, right after deciding to throw in the towel and stop trying for a while as I attempted to come to terms with having to make career shifts, we found out that I was pregnant again. And this time it stuck. So while the rest of 2024 was filled with pregnancy symptoms again (this time much more severe, tbh) – after having experienced all the hope and disappointment that came with the first loss, they overall felt little bit easier to weather as we continued to have healthy, normal checkup after healthy, normal checkup (and fingers crossed it stays this way).

And that brings us to now.

Jan of 2025.

(2025!)

I’m 8.5 months pregnant, and symptoms related to that aside, both Jim and I are healthy (knock on wood). Both Haruka and Hatsumi are also healthy (again, knock on wood). We are rapidly preparing for baby’s arrival (SO MUCH TO DO!), and finally starting to attempt to tackle some of Hatsumi’s behavioral issues that came from us not being able to focus on her early training as much as we should have thanks to everything that was going on.

And once again, here I am, back on the blog talking about omg, how it’s been so long and oops, didn’t mean to be gone that long.

So I don’t know.

I don’t really know where to go from here.

I am desperate for a creative outlet again. And I know I’m going to need one more than ever in order to feel like myself and avoid feeling like my identity has been entirely supplanted by this entity of “mommy” once baby comes. Especially since over the last few years, I already feel like I’m losing sight of “me” after spending so long functioning in just basic survival mode.

I have been reading, and I have been doing some knitting here and there through it all… But I miss taking pictures. I miss writing. I miss… I miss a lot of things about being creative online. And so coming back to this seems the obvious answer.

But on the other hand, coming back to it now? The online landscape has changed so drastically. It seems to have outpaced me.

I can’t seem to get the hang of producing short video formats (nor do I particularly enjoy it), and my previously beloved instagram is pushing what seems like that and only that now. I’ve toyed with the idea of Youtube for book reviews in the past, but that seems largely to be a young person’s game unless you’re already established. And I am very much uncomfortable in front of a camera. A lot of the crafting, fandom, and history communities that I once frequented and felt a part of seem to have dissolved and scattered across a thousand new platforms that I just do not have the energy for thanks to Twitter’s implosion and the increasing unusability of so much social media thanks to ads and algorithms and AI.

And blogging in this more traditional format… is it even really a thing anymore? Do people actually still do this? Or is everything just substacks and podcasts and vlogging and reels and tiktok now?

And so I don’t know where to go or what to do. I have this little place on the internet that I continue to pay for and that my husband has been so good to continue doing the technical management for despite the fact that I’ve largely let it rot the last few years. And I still don’t want to part with it. But also I don’t really know why I have it if I am not using it for something? And I don’t really know what that something should be anymore, as the world of online creatives has shifted so drastically.

Just keeping on keeping on doing what I used to feels… antiquated. And I am very much struggling to find where I fit in in this new online frontier, and how to manage that presence.

But I guess I *am* still here. And I guess that’s something.

So yea. Maybe we’ll stop meeting like this soon.

<3 Maggie

* Yes, we went with a breeder – specifically the same breeder we got Haruka from. While I am a big proponent of adoption, I am also a big proponent of *ethical* breeding, and adoption is just not a good fit for our wants and needs as a family right now. Rest assured we did our research to make sure our breeder was an ethical one and not a backyard operation or puppy mill.

**Morning sickness wasn’t super bad – but the nausea was definitely there, and persistent enough to make functioning difficult given my schedule and the expectations of my jobs. Being even vaguely nauseous is a problem when you have to be making sound come out of your mouth hole consistently and constantly for 9+ hours every day. Especially when we were trying to keep it a secret, a) because we knew there was a pretty high risk of miscarriage, and b) because we wanted to be able to surprise our families if we made it through the first trimester. And the HEARTBURN holy god, the HEARTBURN.

***We are really honestly fine re: the miscarriage. We were disappointed, absolutely, but we were well prepared for the possibility due to my age and history. The physical part SUCKED though, and the whole experience of not just the miscarriage, but also the weeks of pregnancy symptoms I experienced beforehand left me even more blisteringly angry about the way our society treats women and expects them to just, keep calm and carry on quietly and without complaint. I mean… I guess I was already blisteringly angry about it to begin with, and have been for a long time, but it FOR SURE reinforced those feelings. My current pregnancy has only amplified all that. So the version of me that’s coming back here is probably a much angrier one than those of you who may have been here in the past may know. Heads up, I guess.