#mctc

SKIN COLOR EDITS BABYYYY

I’m participating in this weekend’s Pride Month edition of the Minecraft Tower Challenge! Super excited to play with everyone! :D

I lost my dad when I was fourteen years old. He was very mentally ill and in the last six months of his life he suffered from schizophrenia. He worked as a roofer and lost his job because he was paranoid and jumped off a roof with no ladder. He was found upside down in a lake in Wisconsin. I never got to see the toxicology report. Still haven’t seen a death certificate. Family was his main thing and I was the biggest element in his life.

I enlisted in the Minnesota Army National Guard as a junior at Brainerd High School. My dad’s mom was in the military, so I figured I would keep up the tradition. Also, my mom is a veteran’s services secretary, so I grew up volunteering at the VFW and Military Order of the Purple Heart, USA. But it was mainly because I love being an American. I’m super proud to be one. 

I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for basic training. I was scared out of my mind. Being away from home for the first time was the hardest part. I was really out of my element. It’s humbling having everything taken away from you and looking ridiculous during drills alongside everybody else. But it made me grateful for the things I have and I met people who will always be my friends.

I left for Advanced Individual Training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri after I graduated high school. But I struggled with the physical parts of training and I could never figure out why. I’d always been super athletic and I knew it wasn’t lack of motivation. 

When I graduated I moved back to Brainerd, but realized it was not going to work for me. I needed to get out. I didn’t want to live in the same town my whole life. I enrolled at Minneapolis Community and Technical College for personal training and yoga instruction and moved to Minneapolis. 

Two weeks into my first semester, I went to see a doctor for birth control. I told her about some other issues I was having. I was really tired. Whenever I got a day off of work, I would sleep for eighteen hours. I felt like I had a cold I couldn’t shake; I was always blowing my nose. And I had a knot in my neck. She said, “Do you have night sweats?” I told her “yes,” and she said, “We need to get you in for a PET scan tomorrow.”

I went to my PET scan the next morning, disgruntled because it was 7am and you can’t eat anything. The doctor called me with the results the next day. I wish I could have videotaped myself the moment she told me I had lymphoma. It was crazy. I thought she was joking at first. I didn’t know anything about it, but I knew it was cancer.

I was scheduled for a fine point needle biopsy and a bone marrow biopsy. The biopsy from my bone marrow showed I had cancer cells there. I was diagnosed with Stage 4B Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which is the most advanced. I was like, “No. That can’t happen to me. I’m 19, this is stuff that happens to older people…”

Happy Thanksgiving, and glad to have the blog up and running again.

The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.— Chinese Proverb Creativity at Work October 11, 2022, 7:57 pm, Digitally Enhanced Photo, Hendricks ©2022 Yes, I am beginning again. Roughly a year and a half ago, my blog of 12 years was shut down by Blue Host because it was infected with malware. I mourned. It had over two thousand images taken or created by me. Hundreds…