Health, Writing, On Deck

Catching you up on my personal journey the last few months

Hi all. It's been a tough few months. I finally got the operations I needed to treat a rare fungal infection on my chest wall. Because I'm an immunosuppressed heart transplant survivor I am more susceptible to such things.

I ended up having six operations over the course of December. They started with the removal of a soft tissue mass on my chest wall and two ribs, which the infection had eaten into. The last operation was by the plastic surgeons to flip a muscle from my back over to my chest to fill the gap. I was in a lot of pain after that, but it was healing pain, not like the deep chronic pain I was in for many months before the operations. I have massive empathy for late stage cancer patients when the cancer spreads into their bone. It is a pain like no other.

I spent Christmas and New Year in hospital and finally came out on the 5th January.

A new year with new challenges and opportunities. Much of January and February was me in deep recuperative mode, hardly being able to walk very far. But thanks to my fantastic team I was able to keep up a cadence with my writing.

Conked.io has come out continuously every week and I am making headway on the family crime drama and memoir. Time is not my friend, however, as I do get fatigued quickly, often have waves of nausea from the medications and still have a lot of pain.

I really enjoyed being involved with the inaugural On Deck Writer Fellowship, but had to ease off towards the end. And so I decided to be a part of the second cohort, ODW2. It has given me new perspective on On Deck and allowed me to create an Early Reading Team for the family crime drama from which I receive invaluable insights.

My author website should be up shortly. We are finalising the pointing between domain and host. You can find it at randleebdutoit.com.

Lastly, here is a link to an article featuring me by the good people at Clind.