Important Update on Anansi’s
11 months ago
– Thu, May 01, 2025 at 01:46:54 AM
Content Warning: Hospitalization. Discussions of death.
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My hope was I would be writing to share of different news. You have all been incredibly patient and I wanted to wait to share good news that I was working on. I’ve just been waiting until I had something substantive enough and concrete enough that I could provide some real concrete information including dates, etc..
What this update should’ve read is that My mom’s health has dramatically improved, which has allowed me to start focusing on work again. I’ve started a new role and I picked up some additional consulting projects. I’ve really dove in and been working my ass off for the last few months in order to catch up, so I was in a position to pay for additional support to get everything physical completed and printed. Until yesterday we were in a great position to start moving the project forward, although, like many small gaming companies, we had major concerns with how the tariffs would impact printing costs. I was super hopeful.
That is not the update I’m sharing today. I’m going to let this post be public, because I may not be able to post again.
I’m writing from University Hospital in Cleveland. Unable to sleep. It appears that this week I had multiple heart attacks with my first one on Monday, the second one on Tuesday, and possibly four more today while I was in the ER. While most of my heart function is fine for now, I was rushed in for a heart catheterization to see if a stent needed to be put in. What they discovered is that I have pretty severe blockage in my main three arteries, including close to 90% blockage in the left interior descending artery that feeds my heart.
As soon as my body clears some of the blood thinners from my system, and they can schedule it, I will be having triple bypass surgery. This is a pretty major surgery. Most people survive it. But it’s not a guarantee. There’s some good signs for me, primarily because my heart seems healthy other than not getting enough blood and oxygen. But I don’t have super high hopes.
Even if the surgery goes swimmingly, they recovery is a hard one. It’s a lot to. process. I teach martial arts on the side, and last Thursday, some of my Kung Fu students had belt testing. Part of that testing included sparring, and I was sparring healthy athletic 20-year-olds and not feeling half as winded as they were. Today I am in the hospital with multiple IVs and a heparin drip waiting to find out when they’ll be cracking my chest open and grafting arteries and veins from other parts of my body to bypass the blockages and feed my heart.
Anyway. You’ve all been incredibly gracious and incredibly kind. And I am incredibly grateful for that. I don’t mean to be doom and gloom. I also wanted to just share the cold hard reality that this may be my last post because I might not be here in a few days. I hope that’s not the case, but I thought you should know.
I know this isn’t the most important thing and it’s a trivial consolation, but I have shared with the team to be sure to send to everyone who had ordered physical things that they didn’t get yet a bunch of new art and other stuff that we’re working on in the background as time permitted. I also got someone to help with the app and resolve whatever the weird login issue were having. You should’ve had something in your junk mail inviting you to. VoxStoria.app, if you had the VO rewards. I’ll b reaching out to him tomorrow with a heads up to try and send new invitations or what not.
Since I’m just waiting around in the hospital, I will try to get that resolved. Yes, I know I should be focusing on me and my family, blah blah blah. but it sucks sitting here in the hospital just waiting for surgery and any kind of work that doesn’t relate to my health, or lack thereof, is a welcome distraction.
So, in closing - hug your loved ones, tell someone you love them today. And take care of yourselves and each other.
If I don’t make it, someone will either post or comment.
If there’s a lot of typos… well, you should be used to that by now, and also I apologize. While I had the energy and wherewithal to write this update, I’m hitting a bit of an emotional and physical wall.
I do appreciate you. I am sorry for the delays and problems. I wish I had better news to share.
Jamie Van Doren
Ps after hitting send I came in and fixed the typos I noticed. Oof. There were a LOT.
A Very Important Update on Anansi's
about 2 years ago
– Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 07:35:17 PM
In the good news column, Tales of Adventure is 99% finalized. We’re missing a couple of stat blocks, and the proofing/edits I provided haven’t been implemented by layout yet, but once those are done this week, we’ll share through DriveThruRPG. Tales of Adventure has about 140 pages of content. It’s big.
When I upload Tales of Adventure to DriveThru I’ll also be uploading print friendly versions of Gifts of Magic and Journal of Common Places.
A couple? (few?) weeks ago I missed sharing that we uploaded 15 more voices to VoxStoria, bringing the total to 65, I believe. I have 27 that need some light editing/EQ and about 4 that need more love for one reason or another. I have to recast about 14 voices because the VO actors never turned in their files.
That said, more progress on Anansi's and the physical rewards will be delayed as I provide end of life care for my mom. More details below.
Content Warning: Death
This has been a challenging 6 months, and these next few or several weeks will be more so. In spite of our best efforts, or resulting from some poor decisions by her healthcare team, my mom is has developed progressive liver failure, which has led to kidney failure.
If you’ve followed my updates, she’s experienced multiple hospitalizations since the end of July, with November being the beginning of things really going catastrophically downhill. Because she's intellectually disabled, I’ve had to be on top of her care as her advocate. In spite of this, we’ve had issues too numerous to detail – from them not getting her fed, to missing medications, to not running certain tests, to “forgetting” to order pre-medications before blood transfusions.
Most recently she went into the hospital on Feb 8 for C. Diff. While there her kidneys began failing. Her number one repeated request to me the last couple of weeks in the hospital was that she wanted to come home to die. So, my mom was discharged Feb 29 for home hospice. I’m committed to providing her the best comfort and care I can during these last few weeks of her life.
If you want more specifics, I’ve given some more detailed information on her GoFundMe page - https://www.gofundme.com/f/candace-fritz. That’s where I’ll be posting updates. I recommend checking it out just for the couple of cute videos of my mom from when she was healthier.
Thursday evening was my mom's first evening home with me. Since then I’ve gotten maybe 4 hours of sleep per night. She’s incontinent now and has extremely limited mobility (basically bed bound), and so she calls me to be change, or sometimes just because she’s confused, or had a bad dream. It’s been less than a week since she's been at my home, and I’m already exhausted.
Hospice provides only about 3 – 4 hours of nursing/nurses aid support per week. It’s not enough. My mom can only stomach 2 – 4 ounces of food at a time, so I have to feed her every 1 to 2 hours. She’s lost over 40 pounds since November 1, and now weight less than 80 pounds. I want to give her the best chance she has of feeling as comfortable as possible, and having as much life as she wants to have, so making sure she gets good nutrition is important. I’m also managing her various pain, nausea, and other medications, along with changing her, and everything else. It leaves me very little time to work (or sleep). Thus the GoFundMe to help pay for private nursing care, so I have time to try and bring in enough of a paycheck to keep a roof over her head. Mine too, I guess.
I also have to stay on top of the hospice nurses/doctors. Example: today the doctor attempted to prescribe her Keflex to treat a possible infection she has at her drain site (she has ascites (fluid buildup in the abdomen) and a drain has been permanently placed). Keflex is cleared by the kidneys and is high risk for patients with renal failure, like my mom. After they told me what was prescribed, I had to remind the doctor she has kidney failure and request a different antibiotic. Anyway, I’m grateful for the hard work of the doctors and nurses, but these failures of the med system are too prevalent and require constant vigilance. I’m hopeful I can get some nursing help soon. I’ve reached out to some services, and am waiting for eval meetings to get setup.
The TL/DR of this is that my mom has to have all my time right now, and I can’t promise to provide much in the way of updates here, until she dies. I just don’t have the bandwidth.
I'll still be working on your rewards as I can, and I am going to continue my Patreon until at least April (because, frankly, I need the money), but if no one is interested in the content, I won’t keep doing it. For March in the Patreon I'm releasing 2 NPCs, Sylvia Heathrow (a lady of the court) and Old Man Bartholomew (older gentleman about town). Neither NPC is as helpful as they appear, so they have stat blocks in case players catch on. There’s also 4 magic items (Ring of Poison, Ring of Sleep, Wolf Lord’s Cane, and Magic Missile Dagger), as well as two locations (the Garden Veranda and The Gentleman’s Club). We're also offering art commissions through the Patreon, so you can get art of your characters or as gifts for players.
As I said, I will still work on Anansi’s and move the book forward as much as I can. You will get all the physical rewards you are owed – that hasn’t changed (and won’t). I just wanted to let you know that, for the time being, I’ve pretty much hit my limit, while I provide end of life care for my mom. I’m the only child, and I don’t have other family here. We’re expecting 3 – 6 weeks. We’ll see what happens. She has really amazing days, where I almost feel like she can (impossibly) recover. Then there are days like today, when she’s more confused, in pain, and feels like she can’t breathe regardless of how much oxygen she’s getting. Days like today, her diagnosis is self-evident.
I will read any words of support you share, and I’m grateful for them. I will try to respond, but if I’m not timely, it doesn’t mean I didn’t see what you wrote and that I’m not appreciative. It just means I ran out of hours.
This sucks. I’m sorry. Just bear with me.
Jamie
