Long time, no see ...

“Hello there!” to the lovely person reading this!
If you are actually reading this, you might be wondering what happened in the past few years.
It’s been a … bumpy ride. But I think I might be back.

I wanted to go into more detail at some point, but for now there will be only a quick summary of events:
I have been studying quite successfully until around late 2020. That’s when I got hit by “something” … might have been COVID … might have been EBV … might have been something completely different. No one really knows. Not even my doctors. Since then, my health has been rapidly declining. In early 2021 I was still able to finish an internship with Vodafone Germany but after that I had to take a health break.

That’s pretty much the same point where I stopped doing things (here and on GitHub). I’ve been on an “odysee of doctors”, where no one was taking me seriously. After a few years I got slightly better again and co-incidentally also very bored. That’s the time where I started to research my own condition. After just a few months I had a pretty solid diagnosis, but no doctor to confirm it.

It has taken now close to 5 years of suffering severely under this condition until I finally found a doctor who would confirm or deny my theories. My health insurance of course wouldn’t cover them, so I even had to pay for them to hear their professional opinion. Turns out that I was right though! I do have “ME/CFS” (will go deeper into this in another post …). But that wasn’t everything yet! I also suddenly had a, until recently, rare mast cell illness (MCAS). Aaaannndd… a few other issues. All in all: A lot. More than what I was expecting.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really any cure or even treatment for those conditions yet. At this point of writing this, I am still very much suffering under this condition and am far from ideal. Yet, I have learned how to deal with this illness at least somewhat. I have actually “improved” (* nothing really changed health-vise … it is rather that I am better able to understand my condition and work “with” it, rather than “against” it) so much, that I wanted to try picking up my study again.
After 5 years! What a long time.

I have actually been positively surprised by how much I am actually able to do. I spend a whole semester and did pretty well … of course with a much reduced time window and some adjustments being made. Unfortunately, I have also learned how many people want to see the world burn apparently.

Over and over, I have been hit by one roadblock after the next. Not only from my University, but also my local government & state, health insurance, doctors, and many other related offices. However, the University one was actually one of the biggest:
My University would rather throw me out, than make a few adjustments and “”“risk”“” their reputation.

I actually believe that throwing out disabled and chronically sick people would ruin an institutions reputation more, compared to changing a few rules slightly to allow people like myself to continue.

Well … and that brings us to right now.
I was forced to leave my current study program.
I am not giving up though! I have applied to another University that seems to fit my needs exactly.
I do be worried about the “new”, but I am confidently approaching the whole “new” situation :)

However, while being on my health break I didn’t just stop coding. I have actually fully “revived” my game engine Orbital. It is in a better place than ever!

I am not sure how much I can continue coding on this, given joining a potentially new University, finally graduating hopefully and a lot of issues with my health condition, but I am planing on working on it in smaller increments. It might take a while for a new update or feature to be released, but it’ll be there eventually.

If you are interested in helping out, please reach out! I am more than happy to collaborate :)

There are probably also some updates to this very website & blog planned. Yet again … I seem to completely change everything up every couple of years. Gotta keep true to that “tradition”!

With that I just wanted to say thank you for reading … if anyone even reads this. This was a very “messy” blog post. I just wanted to give an update.

Have a wonderful day or night, wherever you are! 🌸