Opening My Heart
Hello Everyone!
It's been a little while since I posted last, but I do have an excellent excuse; five weeks ago, I had open heart surgery!
My Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy became significantly worse in March, and after years of talk and medication, it was suddenly time to cut me open and deal with it once and for all.
My Dad dropped me off at 6am on the 29th of March to Harefield hospital. My body hair was unceremoniously shaved off by a nurse, I showered, and was then taken to the operating theatre where the anesthetist sent me off to oblivion.
The operation would involve cutting through my sternum to reach my heart, then cutting away the hypertrophied muscle in my heart that was causing all the chaos, as well as repairing my mitral valve. I believe it lasted around 3 hours.
Simple.
I didn’t really start to regain my senses until three days later. On Tuesday I’d partially woken with a case of Postoperative Delirium, which happens to about 1 in 10 people. I experienced it as a sort of dream or nightmare. I’d been having vivid dreams, which then became indistinguishable from reality, except for a feeling of coldness. As such, when I woke I thought I was still dreaming.
I couldn’t remember that I’d come into the hospital for surgery. I wanted to wake up, and started pulling out the various cables and wires attached to me like I was the lead in an action movie, however I expect I looked more like a fish out of water than Wolverine. It turns out in real life one does not simply get up after having a major surgery. I was having a blood transfusion and pulled out a cable from my arm that resulted in blood going everywhere. I was too weak to get up, though I struggled anyway. It was pretty scary, and in the end the nurses had to sedate me and keep me that way for several days. My lasting impression is a reminder of how fragile our perception of reality can be. Don’t do drugs, kids!
(left: A day after surgery, apparently I managed to take a selfie on Tuesday, thought I have no memory of this. middle: A few days later, no longer completely off my face and coming back to reality. right: Taken just now! I don't look undead anymore!)
After that excitement and a lot of morphine, I started to slowly recover in hospital. I was there for two weeks of boredom, bad food, kind nurses and an overwhelming craving for red grapes. Eventually I was let out and went home, and I spent the rest of April ‘taking it easy’, A.K.A. watching Netflix and playing Persona 5.
I’m feeling stronger every day, and now that May has come around it’s time to resume work on my game. I’m so close to the end now I can taste it! It’s funny how sometimes endings come all at once. My illness & the process of making my game seem to be coming to a climax together.
It might be too soon to congratulate myself, but with the end in sight for Sentenced I've started looking back on the last three years with a sense of some pride.
I taught myself how to make games using online tutorials, self funded it by working in VFX and moved countries three times to make my finances last. I battled with fatigue during that time from a heart disease I didn’t know I had, then had open heart surgery which I'm now recovering from. And I won't even mention my love life, which has been as beautiful as it was disastrous.
So you know what, fuck it. You did good, Sam.
I’m currently looking at late June as the final release date for Sentenced. As you can see from the spreadsheet below, I’m almost done with animating all executions and implementing all of the core features for the game. After those last few boxes are ticked, it’ll be a case of polishing and bug fixes in preparation for release.
The Sentenced Demo has been getting a good reception as well as good feedback, so here’s a reminder that you can play that now on Steam and Itch.io!
I’ll try and get around to another video diary soon, and I’m also open to other suggestions for the kind of content people might want to see here on Patreon.
Many thanks again for all your love and support.
Keep it weird,
Samuel