It’s been a while since my last post, while I have at least been trying my best to keep the pages updated behind the scenes I haven’t made an actual post since, I think April? This has been a rough year both on a global scale with the pandemic and as well as on a personal level as I had a medical issue that took far too long to properly diagnosis and a rough recovery following surgery (further details on this are in the post if you care to read, possible too much medical information for some so trying to keep it vague here). I have been both been looking forward to and dreading making this post but I think it’s finally reached the point where I can focus on this and enjoy my dolls again.

I wanted to make this post not for sympathy but to apologize for my absence and say that I want to get started on posting reviews of dolls again! The arrival of Pullip Keres finally motivated me to go outside and take pictures this past week, I regret not posting more reviews earlier in the year when I was more active with taking doll photos so I’m hoping to maybe go back and post reviews for Pullips Claudia and Veverka at least.


I will say that as trying as the last few months have been it hasn’t all been grim, in June we unexpectedly had the opportunity to adopt a kitten who we have named Reese Pieces (daughter picked out the name because she has peanut butter and chocolate coloring). Reese has been a constant source of joy and been my cuddle buddy throughout my recovery, we nicknamed her nurse floof foot because she is extremely floofy feet and she was more or less glued to my side since I got home from the hospital. We had her for about a month when the above photo was taken, I can’t believe she is almost six pounds now the below photo was taken within the last week. Her hobbies include bird watching out the window, zoomies, the killing of moths (I swear kiddo intentionally lets them in the house for her) and climbing on her kitty tower.




Now would be a good place to stop reading if you are squeaming or just don’t feel you need to know the details beyond my having an abdominal surgery and a rough recovery.

I had been experiencing on and off abdominal pain for months, I have endometrisis and PCOS different doctors told me different things basically boiled down to “suck it up, buttercup” or “take midol”! Finally after a particularly brutal onslaught of pain (post-hurricane while we still didn’t have lights which was the extra cherry on the misery sundae) I went to the ER and they did an ultrasound, they found an extremely large cyst over 20cm in length that fully encapsulated my left ovary. Due to the pandemic and reduced surgery schedules here, it took me over a month from diagnosis to being able to get this damned thing out of me all the while I was arguing with my insurance company to make sure this would be covered which is a good thing because total costs would have been over $20k just for surgery not counting the presurgical work-ups and postsurgical follow-ups.

Two days before the operation the head surgeon decided that they wouldn’t be able to take the cyst out laproscopically and would basically need to give me a vertical cesaration section. I ended up having my left ovary and left fallopian tube completely removed, the cyst had grown so large that it had started to fuse with my abdominal wall and intenstines. They found another cyst in my fallopian tube that turned out to be not so much of a cyst but the remnants of an eptopic pregnancy I had and apparently lost at some point that we didn’t know about. Recovery has been rough, incision opened up a few times even with my not really doing anything physical and I devoloped allergies to nearly every means they tried to bandage the wound with leading to half dollar sized blisters. I have a new fairly gnarly scar that basically starts just under my rib cage goes all the way down through and down past my belly button. The surgery was on September 11th, an auspicious date to be sure and just in the last couple of weeks do I feel like I am more or less fully recovered.

I did try to keep my sense of humor through all this, we nicknamed the cyst Pedro after a former coworker that had a habit of popping up, being super annoying and basically would just get in the way and proceed to stay there. I had initially wanted to see photos of Pedro out of morbid curioisity and requested to do so but while my surgeon had been okay with this pre-op, post-operation she advised against it though apparently photos of Pedro will be used in medical texts because of how abnormal it was.