The Final Frontier~

Lately I'm not feeling exactly stellar. I seem to be having something like a flu for at least a month or so and the past few days it's really getting apparent. Three days of a continuous headache, feeling nauseous, coughing, loss of appetite and being short of breath, not to mention feeling really tired. Today I went to my physician to see what she'd say about it. She of course thought that the stress I'm under plays a role in this sickness. Tomorrow I've got a blood test (for allergies and such) waiting and I have to make three appointments with medical specialists. One of them is for my lungs. The others...

Last week Wednesday I decided to send an email to the UZ Gent, a big hospital in Belgium. Today I got an email back from one of the specialists there, who asked me to make an appointment with him and a colleague. They're an endocrinologist and an urologist respectively. I'll try to make these appointments on the same day, so that there's no unnecessary traveling involved. Pieter will be taking a day off to go with me, for which I'm truly grateful :)

So does this mean that I have abandoned the Dutch hospitals? I wouldn't go that far, but I would be lying if I were to say that I really trust them. It's taken them well over three and half years already to grudgingly beginning to accept that I might possibly be right. But I don't care about proving that I'm right to them. I just want it all to be over, not having to fight a dozen battles every day, battles with not only hospitals, but also with myself. It's time to end this lunatic struggle.

Naturally, going to a Belgian hospital confronts me with another one of my big problems, namely the financial side. The appointments I'll be making tomorrow won't be paid for by my insurance company. Nor will they pay for any tests or surgery. Not unless through some miracle they approve of me receiving treatment in a foreign country, a miracle which might take one of the Dutch hospitals to not only confirm that I was right, but also approve of me getting a treatment in Belgium.

At any rate it doesn't appear that I will be able to make it financially on my own, not even if I were to work every day like crazy on web development projects for paying customers. Medical specialists are expensive. Surgery is even more expensive. I could be looking at a bill of a few thousand Euro the coming months, the money for which I'd have to cough up myself. Hopefully I can either borrow some money for it, or the aforementioned miracle takes place. The former seems more likely at this point.

And before you point at the donation buttons all over this blog and my main site, I have received less than 50 Euro since last year through them, so you can imagine that I won't rely on donations as a means of saving my precious behind in these taxing times :)

This morning I also burdened my credit card with over 150 Euro by ordering new hormones for another 3 months. I've now got a supply of 4 months. Hopefully this is the last time I ever have to order these medicines myself, not to mention cough up the money for it.

In other news, my esteemed Canadian colleague Trevor and I have decided to concentrate our game development efforts on a single game to finish it ASAP. The game in question is called 'The Pink Particle' and is a kind of platformer/adventure/puzzle game. Imagine something like Mario Galaxy combined with Mario Party with of course multi-player options. I'll add the listing for the game to the Nyanko.ws site this week. Expected release date is in a few months (so before the end of the year at least :P ).

Not so nice is that a friend who has provided me with a lot of web development work in the past has vanished from the face of the earth, leaving me without the money he still owed me, and also without a reliable source of new projects. This means I'll have to look for new sources of such projects. Perhaps I could start focusing more on desktop/server programming now as well, since that's what I enjoy doing more.


Maya