Some of you may have heard by now that I got hit with a serious case of necrotising fasciitis (more luridly known as “flesh-eating disease”) late last week. I’m told I was a few hours away from being dead. Now, several morphine drips and debridements and blood-pressure crashes and pulmonary edemas later, I have a crater the approximate size and shape of Australia carved out of my right calf. I can also sit up for short periods and type brief notes like this one. I am, however, still in the hospital, and will not be leaving this place any time soon — and the hospital does not have internet connectivity (because after all, why would any of us trapped in the institutional confines of East General ever want to catch a glimpse of the outside world?). So I can’t actually interact with any of you in real time. I am writing this from my hospital bed; Caitlin will take the laptop back home and post via the home network. This is the extent of my connectivity.

The good news is, I’m not dead, and the necrotising bugs have been scraped out of me as far as anyone can tell. The bad news is I’m stuck here in the e-boons for at least another week, and even after that I’m going to be functionally immobile for months while physio, skin grafts, and a nifty little variant of the Shop-Vac used to suck together the edges of gaping wounds work their magic. (That’s all assuming the biopsy itself doesn’t turn up anything nasty; we still haven’t got those results back.) So to those I owe e-mails, my apologies; I am going to fall somewhat behind. To those with whom I have social or professional appointments in the near future, I’m afraid I’ll be flat on my back. Please spread the word; I’ve posted a note on facebook as well, but I know that not everyone connected to me follows either of these feeds.

About the only good thing I can say about this is: if there was ever a disease fit for a science fiction writer, flesh-eating disease has got to be it. This fucker spread across my leg as fast as a Star Trek space disease in time-lapse.

Glad to still be here talking about it, though. More later.