To my Sherlock friends...
...I want to say thank you.
Thank you for saving my life.
Pretty much everybody here knows about what I've been through this last year, dealing with breast cancer and the surgery and chemotherapy it required, but I'm not sure how many people know about how I got here; and by here I mean to the fandom.
I resisted watching Sherlock when I first heard about it because I thought I was a purist; watching a modern-day Sherlock offended my stuffy sensibilities and I said I would do no such thing. Then, when I was stuck in hospital after my first surgery - the 9-hour surgery where they cut off my breasts, opened my abdomen, removed what had to be 5 pounds of fat, muscle, skin, and blood vessels, and reattached it to my chest in vaguely breast-shaped lumps - I had nothing to distract me from what had just happened to me except the 3-episode disc set of Sherlock that my mother left in my room. For anyone who's never been stuck in hospital for days, or had major surgery, it's really fucking hard to sleep once they take you off the harder drugs, what with your door having to stay open and the lights and the muffled noise of the night nurses and the pain you're constantly aware of even when it's drugged, so...I succumbed, and watched Sherlock on the laptop they'd left me. And fell MADLY in love.
Even this isn't what brought me to the community, though; I would've stayed ignorant except that the abdominal scar didn't heal. The blood vessels they'd moved to keep the reconstructed fat and muscle alive had fed that region, and too much tissue was too far removed from the blood supply. Over the space of a month, from a tiny, pencil-eraser sized hole, I developed a fist-sized, 2" deep cavity in the scar, just to the left of my relocated navel. This did not keep in line with the plan of starting chemotherapy in February, since my body wouldn't be able to heal such a wound while being pumped with death-chemicals, so they tried to speed the healing process along. The first weapon of choice was something called a vac-pac.
A vac-pac, for those of you playing the home game, is a machine roughly the size of a hardback book and twice as thick, with a hose attached to a suction cup on one end that feeds into a chamber for what it's going to pull out of you. What they do with this machine is stuff whatever cavity they're trying to close full of black foam they cut to shape, plaster a sticky version of cellophane over it and the surrounding skin, cut a small hole to place the suction cup over, and tape it down, with any luck making a complete seal. They then turn on the vacuum - which is slight, it would barely stick to your hand if you tried it, but when applied to your internal organs? It is a literally indescribable feeling, the tug of vacuum on an area that no outside force should be touching, much less SUCKING ON.
Oh, and the best part? You have to leave this on at least 23 hours a day. AT LEAST.
I wore this thing for TWO MONTHS.
After awhile you do get used to it; the human body can accommodate quite a bit. The first three days, though, I honestly thought I would go mad. Still in pain, still unable to walk upright (because when they remove the bottom two "cans" of your six-pack and sew it back up, it takes awhile to stretch back to the original length), and trying to cope with not just the loss of my breasts (because even if they replace them, you will never feel them again, so in a sense they will always be lost), but also this machine I could not ever take off sucking on my insides, I didn't know if I could cope. It was almost the last straw; I did not know if I could live with all these assaults to my body. It would have been very, very easy for me to take my own life at that point; I imagine the painkillers they were giving me would have taken me off if I'd swallowed a 30-day supply, especially in my weakened state. I was desperate, I had to find something that would take my attention completely away from my body, and regular books wouldn't do it.
I had been trying to find a quote from the Dresden Files, at first. I wanted the quote from Small Favor where Mab finally speaks, but I couldn't find my book, so I did a Google search. I found honest_illusion's journal, since she'd been doing quotes from each book in a very methodical fashion, a different post for each 1-3 books. Sadly, the quote I wanted wasn't there, but what she *did* have was a background on her journal based on the Dresden Files and drawn by dauntdraws. It was really, really beautifully drawn, and I wanted to see more, so I followed over to their deviantArt page...where I found Sherlock drawings. Quite a few of them. Some had stories attached, stories written by other people; I think my first dip into fandom was the picture titled "Just...Don't" and the attached story by alizarin_nyc blew my fucking mind (AND IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT GO NOW, DEAR GODS GO NOW AND DEVOUR IT!).
At the time, the idea of Sherlock/John hadn't crossed my tiny mind. This, this concept of the two of them together, was just mind-bending enough to keep my thoughts off the vac-pac, and plausible enough - well-written enough - that I could read it, even if I had to take breaks to wrap my head around it. I found Happy Christmas and sam_storyteller's story "It's Not The Violin" that inspired it (and the YouTube video attached has an AMAZING violinist doing "Alejandro", and I watched pretty much everything he posted). I looked at "Let Me Out", which was inspired by etothepii's fic "I Used To Live Alone Before I Knew You", and oh, was THAT the start of a mad fic!crush and a decent IRL friendship, to boot. This rather awesome Sherlock/HP crossover pic inspired hbomb90's Incantations and Deductions, which is still something I check in on to see if there's more.
Again through "Just...Don't" I found irisbleufic, the poem she wrote in response, and HER lovely fic, and more importantly to this story, her fic recommendations, which led me, inevitably, wonderfully, to the sherlockbbc-fic kinkmeme, and through there to all of you.
You people - your fic, your kindness, just you being you - got me through that horrible adjustment period. You helped me stay sane long enough to not do anything stupid (which I am NOT prone to, so believe me when I say how terrifying that was), and you entertained me through the hyperbaric oxygen treatment days, and the chemotherapy; some of you comforted me when I thought I would never get through this (etothepii, I am forever in your debt for your thoughtful, in-depth reply to my 4AM despair about dealing with my body, and woe_in_a_hoodie, you got me laughing when I just wanted to cry, you wonderful, wonderful man), or donated when the bills got overwhelming (archea2, I'm finally planning to start repaying you in fic this week; I hope it'll be worth the wait), and all of you have become incredibly dear to me. I honestly don't know if I would be here today without you, ALL of you; I don't know if I could have done it.
So thank you: thank you for the gift of my life, and my sanity. I only hope what I will do with the rest of it will be worthy.
Thank you for saving my life.
Pretty much everybody here knows about what I've been through this last year, dealing with breast cancer and the surgery and chemotherapy it required, but I'm not sure how many people know about how I got here; and by here I mean to the fandom.
I resisted watching Sherlock when I first heard about it because I thought I was a purist; watching a modern-day Sherlock offended my stuffy sensibilities and I said I would do no such thing. Then, when I was stuck in hospital after my first surgery - the 9-hour surgery where they cut off my breasts, opened my abdomen, removed what had to be 5 pounds of fat, muscle, skin, and blood vessels, and reattached it to my chest in vaguely breast-shaped lumps - I had nothing to distract me from what had just happened to me except the 3-episode disc set of Sherlock that my mother left in my room. For anyone who's never been stuck in hospital for days, or had major surgery, it's really fucking hard to sleep once they take you off the harder drugs, what with your door having to stay open and the lights and the muffled noise of the night nurses and the pain you're constantly aware of even when it's drugged, so...I succumbed, and watched Sherlock on the laptop they'd left me. And fell MADLY in love.
Even this isn't what brought me to the community, though; I would've stayed ignorant except that the abdominal scar didn't heal. The blood vessels they'd moved to keep the reconstructed fat and muscle alive had fed that region, and too much tissue was too far removed from the blood supply. Over the space of a month, from a tiny, pencil-eraser sized hole, I developed a fist-sized, 2" deep cavity in the scar, just to the left of my relocated navel. This did not keep in line with the plan of starting chemotherapy in February, since my body wouldn't be able to heal such a wound while being pumped with death-chemicals, so they tried to speed the healing process along. The first weapon of choice was something called a vac-pac.
A vac-pac, for those of you playing the home game, is a machine roughly the size of a hardback book and twice as thick, with a hose attached to a suction cup on one end that feeds into a chamber for what it's going to pull out of you. What they do with this machine is stuff whatever cavity they're trying to close full of black foam they cut to shape, plaster a sticky version of cellophane over it and the surrounding skin, cut a small hole to place the suction cup over, and tape it down, with any luck making a complete seal. They then turn on the vacuum - which is slight, it would barely stick to your hand if you tried it, but when applied to your internal organs? It is a literally indescribable feeling, the tug of vacuum on an area that no outside force should be touching, much less SUCKING ON.
Oh, and the best part? You have to leave this on at least 23 hours a day. AT LEAST.
I wore this thing for TWO MONTHS.
After awhile you do get used to it; the human body can accommodate quite a bit. The first three days, though, I honestly thought I would go mad. Still in pain, still unable to walk upright (because when they remove the bottom two "cans" of your six-pack and sew it back up, it takes awhile to stretch back to the original length), and trying to cope with not just the loss of my breasts (because even if they replace them, you will never feel them again, so in a sense they will always be lost), but also this machine I could not ever take off sucking on my insides, I didn't know if I could cope. It was almost the last straw; I did not know if I could live with all these assaults to my body. It would have been very, very easy for me to take my own life at that point; I imagine the painkillers they were giving me would have taken me off if I'd swallowed a 30-day supply, especially in my weakened state. I was desperate, I had to find something that would take my attention completely away from my body, and regular books wouldn't do it.
I had been trying to find a quote from the Dresden Files, at first. I wanted the quote from Small Favor where Mab finally speaks, but I couldn't find my book, so I did a Google search. I found honest_illusion's journal, since she'd been doing quotes from each book in a very methodical fashion, a different post for each 1-3 books. Sadly, the quote I wanted wasn't there, but what she *did* have was a background on her journal based on the Dresden Files and drawn by dauntdraws. It was really, really beautifully drawn, and I wanted to see more, so I followed over to their deviantArt page...where I found Sherlock drawings. Quite a few of them. Some had stories attached, stories written by other people; I think my first dip into fandom was the picture titled "Just...Don't" and the attached story by alizarin_nyc blew my fucking mind (AND IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT GO NOW, DEAR GODS GO NOW AND DEVOUR IT!).
At the time, the idea of Sherlock/John hadn't crossed my tiny mind. This, this concept of the two of them together, was just mind-bending enough to keep my thoughts off the vac-pac, and plausible enough - well-written enough - that I could read it, even if I had to take breaks to wrap my head around it. I found Happy Christmas and sam_storyteller's story "It's Not The Violin" that inspired it (and the YouTube video attached has an AMAZING violinist doing "Alejandro", and I watched pretty much everything he posted). I looked at "Let Me Out", which was inspired by etothepii's fic "I Used To Live Alone Before I Knew You", and oh, was THAT the start of a mad fic!crush and a decent IRL friendship, to boot. This rather awesome Sherlock/HP crossover pic inspired hbomb90's Incantations and Deductions, which is still something I check in on to see if there's more.
Again through "Just...Don't" I found irisbleufic, the poem she wrote in response, and HER lovely fic, and more importantly to this story, her fic recommendations, which led me, inevitably, wonderfully, to the sherlockbbc-fic kinkmeme, and through there to all of you.
You people - your fic, your kindness, just you being you - got me through that horrible adjustment period. You helped me stay sane long enough to not do anything stupid (which I am NOT prone to, so believe me when I say how terrifying that was), and you entertained me through the hyperbaric oxygen treatment days, and the chemotherapy; some of you comforted me when I thought I would never get through this (etothepii, I am forever in your debt for your thoughtful, in-depth reply to my 4AM despair about dealing with my body, and woe_in_a_hoodie, you got me laughing when I just wanted to cry, you wonderful, wonderful man), or donated when the bills got overwhelming (archea2, I'm finally planning to start repaying you in fic this week; I hope it'll be worth the wait), and all of you have become incredibly dear to me. I honestly don't know if I would be here today without you, ALL of you; I don't know if I could have done it.
So thank you: thank you for the gift of my life, and my sanity. I only hope what I will do with the rest of it will be worthy.