Dear Diary: Sort of mini hiatus?

Sorry I've been sort of AWOL, friends. It's been a crazy month for me. Toward the end of July I started having weird blind spots in the center of my field of vision that would come and go for about an hour or so at a time. After having my vision basically crap out on my every day for a week, I finally went to the eye doctor, who said my optic nerve in both eyes was elevated and slightly tilted. Boy, did I learn a lot about eyes and the optic nerve! He referred me to another eye doctor to get some photos of the backs of my eyes, and he basically said that pressure in my skull/brain was causing me optic nerves to become elevated (or basically sort of pop out into the ball of my eye, rather than just chilling back behind it like they usually do).

That eye doctor then referred me for an MRI to rule out the possibility of an actual tumor in my brain or any blood clots, and when my MRI came back clean I got my diagnosis of Pseudotumor Cerebri, or Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension. Basically, there's too much cerebrospinal fluid in my brainbox (either because my body is making too much of it, or not absorbing it back into itself correctly) and it's causing pressure on my brain.

Dr. Eyeballman put me on a drug normally used for Glaucoma and, weirdly, altitude sickness that's supposed to help reduce the amount of fluid in my head. It made me pretty sick for the first week or so, and I still can't drink soda because of a weird side effect where the bitter sensors in my tongue are extra sensitive to the carbonation and make it taste like rancid armpit (GROSS), as well as having weird tingling in my heads, feet, and lips that comes and goes. I've also been just really TIRED, and have had an almost constant low-grade headache as well as a lot of blurring in my vision, as well as being hypersensitive to light and sound... BUT, I haven't had any blind spots since I started the medication, so we think it's working! And I go see a neurologist today to talk about next steps, so I'll know more about what the next month or so will be like for me then.

With dealing with all this eyes/brain stuff this past month, it's been taking most of my energy getting through my workday. What little energy I have left is used up with my family (it takes a LOT of energy mothering a 2- and 4-year old!) Anyway, I've been doing about the bare minimum to keep my blog up and running, keeping my tour commitments and trying to get reviews posted for ARC's I've committed to. I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things in September, and get some discussion posts up. I'm a little disheartened because I think most of the traffic through here tends to be when I'm hosting a giveaway, so when I didn't have a New Release Giveaway Hop for August my traffic died WAY down. On top of already struggling with depression, it's been tough to make myself keep going with my blog... I've also fallen behind on reading other bookish blogs and keeping up with commenting and the like...

But you know what? I really LIKE blogging, and I do it for me. And I've connected with a few other book bloggers that I'd like to think of as friends. So I'm going to stick around. I'm starting to ramp up some of my crafting projects for the fall, so I might share about some of those here. One of these weekends soon I hope to experiment with some new candle scents, colors, and GLITTER I recently acquired, so I'll post about that a bit. If you've got some fun fandom candle recs, I'd love to hear them. :)