Hi guys, Poe’s wife Hilary here, posting an update for you. Here’s what’s going on…

At the start of January, Poe started getting really sick. At first, we thought it was the same wretched bug I had gotten, but I got better after about a week of misery, while Poe never really did, and instead he just kept getting worse. He hates going to the doctor, though, because he had cancer as a kid, and he doesn’t have insurance, so it took until this Monday to finally get him to go to the doctor. The doctor ran some tests, and then Friday we got a call saying, “Go to the emergency room immediately.” Poe finally went, and after a day of standard emergency room limbo, they admitted him to the hospital for acute renal failure. As of the time I’m writing this, I don’t know much more than that, but I trust this hospital. They’re the ones who saved me back in 2011, and if it is possible to do it at all, they will find and fix the problem for Michael.

Now, back to the part about no insurance. I know that the first instinct any time this kind of terrible bad luck hits someone is to try to donate to help them with their medical bills. The thought is appreciated, but pleaseā€¦ DO NOT GIVE US DONATIONS. Donations are very unlikely to cover the bill, but they are guaranteed to make Michael ineligible for the existing financial aid options. Instead, if you really want to pitch in, please go to either our Etsy shop or our online store and buy the original Errant Story comic pages. Those purchases will put money into the business, and won’t affect Michael’s eligibility for financial aid. No matter how this turns out in the long run, they’re beautiful pieces and a good investment for you, and the money going into the business will give us options to figure out what on earth we’re going to do when this is over. So that’s the best way to help. Well, unless you’re a comic artist. Then you could maybe give us fan art or fan comics to run on the site for a while. Either Does Not Play Well With Others or Errant Story fan comics would be awesome, and hell, if you’ve got pent up Exploitation Now fandom bubbling away inside you, we’ll gladly run with that, too.

As always, your thoughts and prayers are welcome, and I’ll try to keep you updated as I learn more. Now it’s time for me to sleep, because I only got two hours last night and I have to be up in about four to go back to the hospital. Whee.

- Hilary

P.S. Oh, but for those keeping track, I actually came through my thyroidectomy last week just fine, and I’m breathing a lot better now. But I am getting really tired of all this bad health luck, guys. Seriously, the never-ending sickness and death that we’ve been dealing with since 2010 is well past the stage of becoming farce, except that it really isn’t at all funny to live through. More like terrifying, exhausting, and traumatic. We’re spending all this time and energy on real life problems, without getting any breathers to enjoy real life, let alone spend time on our webcomic lives, or for that matter sleep, and every time it starts looking like we’ll finally be done with one problem so we can resume our regular programming, something else comes along and screws it all up again. I just want things to stop going wrong and get better so we can go back to getting some fucking work done, you know?