An Update of Sorts...

Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash

It’s been quite awhile since I put out a newsletter.

If I am being completely honest, I have been sick for the better part of two years and I have tried to power through all of it. It started out with COVID in Summer 2023, followed by some sort of Flu that I never really recovered from in 2023.

In early 2024, I noticed I was losing my voice for no apparent reason following that extended illness, or cold, or whatever. Ultimately, I went to urgent care and they sent me to an Ear, Nose & Throat guy, who found a small growth on my voice box, which turned out to be cancerous. After two surgeries to remove it and a little recovery time, I started cancer treatment—five days a week for nearly eight weeks at the end of 2024.

During all this time, I never took time off The Esports Advocate, and I guess it finally caught up with me; in late May (about two weeks ago) I had a mild stroke. I was sitting down to write a story for the website when I noticed that the right side of my body was going numb. I took a couple of baby aspirin as a precaution—because I had an inkling of what was happening—and called 911. By the time I got to the hospital the symptoms of the stroke were gone, but my blood pressure was through the roof and I ended up staying there for four days.

I’m going to spare you details of what the doctors found for now, but at least I didn’t have any permanent damage occur. Because of what happened, I missed the final PET scan for the cancer last month, but my voice is not back to normal and I fear the worst there too.

All of this is to say that the reason this newsletter fell off over the last several months is because I was trying to recover, but something new came along and kicked me in the face. We’ll see where things go healthwise, but there are other considerations that are having an impact behind the scenes that I a super uncomfortable talking about.

I’m not here crying about this situation or anything; I just felt like people who have an interest in what I do in this newsletter and on TEA have at least some right to know what’s going on. So there it is. I would love nothing better than to get back to work and have things return to normal, but I need to take things slow for a little bit.

Thanks for reading all this. - James.