I woulda made this journal yesterday, but I could barely lift my right arm lmao

Just a quick comprehensive update on what's been going on and deets for the month!

My birthday is on November 16th and I'm turning 30!
Honestly I'm surprised I made it this far. I won't be doing a ton of stuff for the bday, mostly because we cannot afford it. Having to use what money I would have used for that day to get me a new phone, cause mine's on its last legs. Orignally the birthday plan was to go a bowling alley that also has a baller arcade and indoor mini golf course, grab some dinner and then go see The Running Man in theaters. We're just pivoting the plan to staying here at home, ordering some pizza (or making it if we really dont have the money) and just playing games, watching movies and doing crafts.
I do have a wishlist set up for some stuff I would find neat to have. Most of it is under 60 USD, hovering around the 30 dollar range. There's a few big guys in there though.
Wishlist: https://tinyurl.com/26cjhfhf

Mom's cancer removal surgery is going to be either November 19th or the 25th
The surgeon is hella nice. He went over pretty much everything about the plan for removing the tongue cancer with us, gave us a play by play about what's going to happen. It's gonna be a 3hr surgery, with a few days of recovery in the hospital. She'll have a feeding tube in for a week or two while the tongue heals. No chemotherapy and a very small chance of needing radiation therapy (less than 20%). She'll have to have speech therapy to re-learn how to talk with 25% less tongue. She was offered reconstruction, but declined it cause it would not only turn that 3 hr surgery into 10 hours, and a 2 day recovery stay to 10 days minimum. The surgeon told us outright that she'd only see a 10-15% increase in speech ability if the reconstruction was done, so she opted to just do the normal surgery. She wants as little of a hospital stay as possible, which I don't blame her

At the time of writing this, Mom has two more appointments this week that require driving down to the Detroit Metro. Tuesday and Friday. These long ass driving sessions are taking a toll on my body, especially my right arm (the dominant one). It's 3+hours of driving back and forth from here and Detroit, and Jesus fuck, some people do not know how to drive. Saturday's appt showed me that clearly as we nearly got hit by 3 separate vehicles either trying to change lanes in general, or in one idiots case, going from the far left lane all the way to an exit. No turn signal and they were about 5 feet in front of my bumper.
BAD DRIVERS NEVER MISS THEIR EXITS

And for the general chaos...
Cats are doing cat things. Just in the past week, two of our 7 month olds, Pinto and Copper, decided each that they wanted to get wet. Copper was playing with his brother, Ash, when he jumped OVER the cat tree, flew head first into the food storage and landed squarely in the water dish. Poor guy was soaked. Wrapped him up in the towel and dried him off and he protested very loudly. He is an idiot baby. Pinto a day later tried to hide in the tub (which is a shower combo) from Copper and the shower was on. She only got her feet and a little bit of her sides wet, but she also complained loudly.

Raven's immediate family situation is also a disaster situation (I do have permission from Raven to relay this). Brother A's GF is preg again, but they have their own issues with drug addiction and already dealing with a special needs toddler. Brother B is in jail for the SECOND time in the past 4 months cause he got blackout drunk and broke into someone's house. He just got OUT of jail two weeks ago for that issue, so he's not getting back out anytime soon. And we just found out last night that her father is in the hospital for a suspected heart attack, and something about new stint implants was mentioned. When we go down towards Detroit on Tuesday, we're gonna swing down to where he's at so Raven can see him.

House issues are their own can of worms, but I think that one'll be a little easier to manage. Our natural gas blue flame space heater that is in our laundry room (that we use to prevent the pipes from freezing) died about a week ago. I'm 90% sure that its the pilot light starter that went out, and while that's fairly cheap to fix, I don't have any expertise in heating/cooling and I don't wanna fuck it up. We're waiting on hearing back from my brother about some financing that he's handling before we can get that fixed. We should have some kind of answer by Friday. If that doesn't come in time, I'll have to emergency stream to raise funds to get that fixed before the hard freezes start setting in up here.

And my mental health has been an experience as of late. I've been doing a ton of meditation and potentially not the healthiest self medicating (Weed) to keep my brain in check some days. I have no health insurance currently (got denied AGAIN) and I haven't been on any of my needed medications. I just need to get some financial documents together and go to my normal dr's office to get set up with their sliding scale. It'll still cost me to see my doctor and get my medications, but it'll at least be better than going without entirely. Along with that mess, I have come to the realization that I am a system! I got two headmates, an Astral Dragon named Benjamin Ven'Astrus and my long-time OC turned headmate, Norman Michael Bearcline III. All three of us use He/Him pronouns. I (Norm) take the helm and mental controls about 85% of the time, where Ben and Norman will take over physically when I get overstimulated. We're still all figuring out how to go about this, and we sat on the realization for a few days before making any kind of announcement. Mostly because I didn't want to make it seem that I was just fishing for attention by saying I was a system. I LIVE WITH SOMEONE WHO IS A SYSTEM (Raven), so her experiences and explanations have helped my two headmates finally make themselves known. I'm not alone, and my support system here at home, between Raven and her 'apartment complex' and Mom are incredibly supportive and understanding. I definetly need to get back to my dr and psychologist to talk about all of these updates, but that'll come in time (and when I have the money to do so)

and that's really about it for now. I've been posting various updates and feelies on my bluesky, so follow me over there to see me ramble occasionally about dumb shit that bothers me or dumb shit that is funny and doesnt matter in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for reading this wall of text, thank you everyone who's been helping emotionally, physically and monetarily, and for being incredibly patient with me as I try to pick up the pieces of my life.
We love you all here~

-Norm