Recalling some early successes in a progressive disease

I was commmenting on a vasculitis support group post a little while ago, and it reminded me of some of the early symptoms I had from my brain form of vasculitis that did respond well to treatment. I fell ill in autumn 1994, and wasn’t diagnosed properly till late 1997. So I couldn’t start life saving treatment for years. Fortunately when I did start that treatment some symptoms responded well to it. For example I had significant visual and hearing symptoms early on, caused by problems in my brain, not in the eyes or ear. I was battling with slowed-down tunnel vision, and constantly seeing black spiders and wavy lines. Strip lighting gave me headaches. I also constantly saw smoke and often thought our Cupar flat was on fire! With hearing I was very overwhelmed with any noise, and would get extremely tired listening, and need everything quiet. Using the phone was extremely difficult, and also chatting in any room with other conversations around, even quiet ones. Fortunately once I started strong chemo and immunosuppression treatment the hearing and vision problems improved, though never went away entirely, but became more manageable. Sadly other symptoms didn’t respond so well, and my disease has been slowly progressive. But it’s nice to recall some things that did improve.

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Post-mortem for my Spring Thing IF parser game “Napier’s Cache” set in 1590s Scotland

In the 1590s my 12xg-grandfather Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig hired mathematician and occult practitioner John “Logarithms” Napier to hunt for hidden treasure in Fast Castle in Berwickshire.

I wrote a text adventure based on this true story, filling in the gaps in the record creatively, and entered it into the Spring Thing 2020 interactive fiction competition.

Today I wrote up some thoughts about the development of the game.

The game is freely available online to play via browser or download.

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