Briefly, it's all turned upside down

So I was going to write a long, thoughtful post about search and research and discovery, about possibility and risk and hope - but I'm stressed and anxious and exhausted, and I've spent the day doing scary bureaucratic shit, and that's just not going to happen. I'll hope to come back to it later.

Meantime, here's the tl;dr:

Karen is booked to go to Mexico in early October, for a chemotherapy/stem cell transplant procedure that should reboot her immune system and stop it eating her. Yes, Victoria, there is a cure for MS. The chemo's really nasty and of course nothing is guaranteed, but. We're doing this.

I say "we" because of course I'm going with her, though my citizenship interview might well fall into that window, and though my passport is expiring at exactly the wrong time so I have to try to get it renewed from five thousand miles away before we go, and yadda yadda.

The totally unsurprising thing about this procedure? It's horrendously expensive, as well as being life-threatening and in another country. And of course we have no money, because hullo.

So: there's a crowdfunding appeal up for the cost of the actual treatment, and you will find that here.

But it's hard to ask for something for nothing, and there are expenses above and beyond the treatment, and Karen has always been the breadwinner in this marriage and we have no idea what the state of her health will be afterwards - so I've rebooted my Patreon project as a fundraiser too. Subscribe to that - for as little as three bucks a month - and not only do you get stories about English schoolgirls on Mars, and recipes and more, but you also get to help cure Karen. Isn't that worth a cup of coffee a month? You'll find the Patreon right here.

If you can't contribute financially, spreading the word is still a contribution, and we'll still be amazingly grateful.