A cold north wind.

Photo copyright Aji, 2025; all rights reserved.

A few clouds today, warmer according to the mercury, but with a cold north wind blowing steadily.

It was eight years ago today, just about this moment, that I almost died. The first time. And so I think of today as sort of my first rebirth, because at this moment 8 years ago? I honestly didn't think I was going to live to see the next sunrise.

No, it's not what they [very understandably] thought it was at the time. They still don't have any idea what it was, or why it's persisted, and why I almost died again two weeks later, with many,  many more episodes thereafter. I think I've finally put a name to it, but the acronym for it is absolutely a horror of irony: HA. No, there's nothing funny at all about it. Hypertensive anaphylaxis. A very rare form of it that kills people just as surely as the more ordinary kind. And I was having constant episodes of it. Me, the chick with the blood pressure always so low they would retake it over and over, unconvinced that anyone could have both BP and BG as consistently low as mine, coming from a family where literally everyone else was the opposite. But HA is different; it's a response to a specific type of trigger, and it's probably my autoimmune disease that twisted it into the hypertensive death zone.

Yes, I was scared, and the constant episodes meant that I stayed scared, for years — every single time one hit. It's a horrible sensation to feel your body literally shutting down around you, to know that this might be the one you don't come back from. I haven't had one in a while, but I don't have any illusions about them being over; the trigger that set it off [if I'm right, an aerosolized toxin that's not labeled as such in the U.S. but is in Europe, because of course] doesn't just stick in your system for a while, it runs around breaking things while it's there. And now other things can set it off, because the defense mechanisms are broken by the original trigger.

So this is a good day, but it's also a very sobering one, because I came so very close to dying, much more than the one time, and I now know very intimately just how tenuous that thread is. Being as tired as I am right now doesn't help. All the stresses of the last two weeks, trying to get folks their cards [and there are a bunch of folks who still need them] doesn't help. All the stresses of this year haven't helped, and those are not gone for us, not by a long shot.

Because after this god-awful year, we still need to make a sale a day now, on average, and we're nowhere near that. The last two years have all but killed us financially, and I need to get us caught up to make it through the end of the year. Whatever else, we [which means I] have got to change this trajectory, and fast. To that end, links are here:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here [rugs! finally trying to replace the ones damaged two winters ago when our leachfield collapsed, and these are inexpensive];
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

And we do still need to make those regular weekly [daily now, really] sales, so please share all of the links. We really do need this to be a better month than what we've had so far this year.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.