Fourth update: Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl

Ultimately, the choice of which story to update was about emotional tone.  There are readers who feel this story edges along the cliff for one of the worst tropes:  Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.  They believe that things are so bad for the main character as to make reading difficult, and it can reach the point where you don't care about what happens any more because it feels as if nothing can get any better.

I understand that, to some degree.  But protagonists can have hard roads to travel.  Cerea's is one of the roughest, and just because things are better for a moment doesn't mean they won't get worse later.  This chapter isn't the end of the journey, and there are more pitfalls and traps to come.  But it does signal a new phase.  In that sense, it could serve as an emotional uplift:  one which has taken a while to reach.  And that's the note I wanted to close July on.

Or maybe I wanted to make other people feel a little better about life because right now, my side is tilting towards the worse.

I haven't blogged about this on FIMFic yet, because I don't have real information to pass on:  not when it comes to what's actually happening.  But those who follow me on Twitter found out on Monday, and so it's time to say something here:  I had to take my mother into the emergency room.  Increased confusion and an elevated temperature.  The temperature has since apparently faded, the confusion has not, and the doctors found some fluid in her lungs, which led to her being admitted -- but no cause has been indicated.  There's no diagnosis.  

And I don't know how long they'll keep her, or keep looking for what's going on before they decide to turf her out because they need the bed.  I can't even talk to her doctors directly because they're only allowing visitors four hours per day -- well after rounds are complete.  Which means that when I finally got upstairs (six hours after arriving, because I didn't know about the restriction, and half of the newest 7800 words were written in their cafeteria) and saw how far off her normal mental baseline she was, all I could do was tell the nurses and hope it would be passed on.

Then I found out someone was trying to put her on a water pill again.  Double the dose of what she takes only once a week.  Plus the computer seems to keep deciding she's diabetic.  And she isn't eating much because the hospital changed their menu and she's 0-for-stay on tolerating entrees.

So my confidence in the medical system is not particularly high right now.

This is not a request for new pledges or increases to current ones. She has Medicaid.  Right now, my main expenses for her stay are fuel back and forth, plus the hospital's parking fee:  the costs exist, but they would only be severe over a long period.  (I will not decline a Ko-Fi tip, but it would still probably go towards the current goal of defraying cost on her next bladder treatment, which Medicaid has deemed as elective.  And I had to cancel the first session, because that?  Was on Monday.  The scheduled next appointment is tomorrow:  I'll cancel that if she isn't let out today.)  It's just that -- this was a chance to start telling a few more people what's been going on.  And she may be discharged today.  I just don't know if it'll be with a diagnosis and at-home treatment, or -- if they'll decide someone else needs the bed more.

Plus she's sitting in the center of a coronavirus hotspot.  Also known as a hospital.

*sigh*

I may blog about this on FIMFic tomorrow.  Hopefully I'll know more by then.

Sorry for venting.  It's just been a bad week.

Maybe the newest chapter will uplift someone else, just a little.  But for my part...

"But Doctor, I am Pagliacci."