🏄‍♀️ State of the Eleanor 02

Hey friends,

First, my apologies for the Saturday email, I meant to send this on Wednesday but things got pretty out of hand this week and I was waiting for confirmation of a few finalized details from the newsletter merger.

First, if you were a financial supporter of the Iceberg before the merger, you will no longer be billed for that subscription. I've set you up with a year long complementary subscription to the "new" newsletter, which is mostly identical to the old one – all the old links should work – but the new "canonical" domain is just eleanorkonik.com instead of newsletter.eleanorkonik.com and the official name is the Obsidian Iceberg instead of Eleanor's Iceberg. This helps me reduce hosting costs substantially, and is logistically easier for a lot of reasons... not least of which is that about half of the Eleanor's Iceberg subscribers were also subscribed to my other newsletter, the Obsidian Roundup, and now they can manage all of their email preferences in one place.

If you're having any problems since the merger (one person reported getting duplicate emails and I'm still having trouble tracking down why), please reach out and let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.

That said, on a more personal note, long time subscribers might recall that after my first pregnancy I ran into some pretty severe problems walking and lifting my legs and was diagnosed with postpartum osteitis pubis, which took me close to a year to recover from and eventually required a cortisol shot. Given the location, the shot also entailed anesthesia and a specialty x-ray machine so the steroids could get to my pubic bones. Unfortunately, I'm experiencing the beginnings of a lot of the same problems, but much earlier in the pregnancy than last time. I'm already having trouble walking for more than like half an hour a day, and experiencing a lot of pain if I sit at my desk for more than an hour or so at a time.

On Wednesday I saw an orthopedic specialist and got diagnosed with chronic pubis symphysitis, which happens in about 10% of pregnancies and usually goes away on its own after the birth, but in my case almost definitely won't given my history. So for the next 8-12 months I'm going to be in regular physical therapy and frankly a fair amount of pain, because they are not going to anesthetize me, fill my abdomen full of x-rays and shove a needle into my pubic bones while I'm pregnant.

This is unavoidably going to impact my posting schedule; I'm going to do my best to maintain my regular posting habits, but the reality is that I am sleeping more, exercising more, going to more appointments, and spending more hours barely functional mentally. So please bear with me until next year 😅 and then we can see where things stand.

In the meantime, I'm hoping to get a Discord server set up for quicker sharing of neat research if people are interested, and I'm going to update my notes as soon as I get a chance. I had hoped to do it before I sent this update, but, whelp, my son has been puking all day and my power was out for most of yesterday morning (aka my productive time), so, this week was kind of a wash.