Introduction to the Author - please read to the end.

Hey everyone, I know I haven't been very active on here and I'll be honest, that might not improve, so I think the least I owe you is a proper introduction. To start, the last couple weeks have been full of problems and unwelcome changes; family members were sick and KiKi was having a rough week because of added stress in his environment, which led to me having more important things than posting lol.

Now here's the backstory; my name is ZJ, and I'm a 20 year old burnt out kid who's trying to balance a few too many things. I take care of my little brother KiKi while my parents are at work (he's 16 but mentally a toddler, which leads to some fun situations), and am trying to write and advertise a story in down time between life, chores, and self-schooling. My mental health is not the best, and on top of that my body is being a pain (a common occurrence tbh).

I dealt with chronic pain for most of my pre and early teens, and had trouble getting proper medical attention towards it (shocker, I know). Finally when I was 16 the pain got bad enough that I ended up in the ER, which - thanks to one person willing to listen - led to a fortunately quick process through MRIs and doctors appointments. We found what's called a 'labral tear'; torn cartilage in the hip joint, causing inflammation. At 17, I went through two surgeries, one on each side, hopefully fixing them.

Over the last month or so, I've been experiencing mild bursts of pain and/or weakness that I attributed to stress or moving wrong, etc. Then, yesterday I was in the middle of washing dishes and suddenly found myself struggling to stand. I realized at that point that something was seriously wrong.

I have an appointment on Tuesday with the specialist that did my surgeries, and while I'm hoping he says I'm overreacting or that it's all in my head, I know that's probably not what I'm going to hear. From my current understanding, the initial surgeries were more or less a one-shot attempt due to the severity of damage, so I have no idea what the current plan is if I'm right and there is something wrong.

This is in no way a pity party; I don't want attention, in fact I'd rather be doing anything than typing this post and dealing with this bs. But this means that I'm going to be dealing with even more stress and possible appointments, which will cut down on my mental and physical capacity to post on here, and probably to work on my story as well. I don't know how long this will be affecting me, so I figured better to fess up now and have it (smh, hopefully) be a fluke, than to have to write this later.

Prayers, good vibes... whatever your thing is, whoever it goes out to, anything would be appreciated. I'll keep ya'll updated if you want, and try to post when I can. Thank you for the support for my story, and I'm sorry.