Where have I been, you must ask yourself?
Well, it’s kind of a long story. No, not necessarily like that movie with Zach Galifianakis. But it’s pretty fucking unreal when enough time has passed between the onset of mysterious symptoms to what’s now being coined, incomplete quadriplegia. You see, the primary care doctor who oversaw my health back in early 2023 and 2024 completely failed to connect the dots she was by and large being paid to do in the first place. I’ll give her early 2023, when I had a series of “cardiac” events that turned out not to be heart-related in the slightest. But did anyone dare to do any other differential diagnostics besides labeling them all ‘gastroesophageal reflux disease?’ No, they didn’t.
You see, it was back during this time in 2023. If I remember correctly, I’d just started writing a bear shifter book about Dr. Dale Wright and Macon Ford in “Safe Keeping.” While that kept me occupied, it was the earlier inciting incident of that scene when I wrote into “Sands of Time”—particularly the moment Miles Langford has his heart attack on the balmy, desolate asphalt road down in Felton, Louisiana. Yes, in fact, later that night is when the chest pains began smacking themselves against my left ribs and my left arm went faint. This is because my condition compresses the functioning nerves in those specific areas which mimic a heart attack
Then only a mere few paragraphs before, did I write the unfathomable. Yes, I wrote Alex Wilkins punching through a hospital mirror out of anger, with a sort of dread that I was about to curse my immediate future for seven years. If I’ve been anything in this fucking life, it’s superstitious. Despite an author friend telling me at the time, “Oh just send the universe my way and I give permission for you to keep the broken mirror scene.” Well, Cassie, I hate to say it—”But I told ya so!”
Fast forward to the end of 2023 when I received bad news in the mail. I coped about as healthily as anyone else could have within the legal confines of the law—I drank a few glasses of bourbon and ate incredibly salty popcorn. My pharmacology brain was completely washing ashore at that point, I failed to remember that sodium makes ethanol metabolize far quicker in the liver than it can tolerate at once. So I fell, woke up in the emergency room with soggy sweatpants because I’d pissed myself, and a cranky-ass discharging ER doctor giving me an unsavory lecture about being a ‘drain on society’ and ‘waste of taxpayer dollars’ because God forbid I use a legal substance to calm my nerves than say, buy crack or heroin and shoot up in my back alley!
It was, however, that night which became the sentinel to the issues I’ve been dealing with as of the last 7 months, give or take a few days. So we can fast forward to Fall 2025 and get to the sticky. No, not that amazing Amazon Prime show with Margot Martindale. My actual sticky situation which keeps me down and spasming in pain for days on end.
To save time, I’m gonna put this in plain English so everyone without medical knowledge can follow along. Imagine my spine as a book. If you were to check out the story of my spine from the local library, you’d find a heavy, worn-out volume whose binding has been structurally failing from the very first page. In the opening chapters (say, December 23rd of 2023)—my cervical spine, or what I call the "attic"—there’s a massive printing error. At the C3-C4 level, a large bone spur and herniated disc are physically pushing into the main narrative, literally rotating my spinal cord and pinching off the nerves. This severe bottleneck stops my brain's signals from communicating clearly with the rest of my body, which is why my hands are losing their fine motor skills and an agonizing, burning fire radiates across my upper back. The pages right above this mess are also wearing out and fraying just from the effort of trying to hold the heavy cover of my head upright. After all, did you not know the human head weighs on average ten to twelve pounds? (That’s around 5kg for you metric folk.)
As you flip through to the middle and end of the book, the damage continues to compound. The middle chapters carry the weight of that upper-body stress, while the final chapters—my lumbar spine or lower back—have their own pages slipping out of alignment. Down there, bulging discs and arthritis are pinching the nerves that run into my legs. When you combine the massive traffic jam at the top of my neck with the pinched nerves at the bottom, these electrical signals from my brain get entirely scrambled before they ever reach my feet. This translates into a scissoring, imbalanced walk that makes navigating even a few steps of uneven gravel impossible without a cane, and has led to falls where the lights simply go out. Yes, all those weird falls at friends’ houses and my own tumbles in the middle of the night? These were yet more clues!
Read cover to cover, this book tells a story of a systemic, full-body electrical failure that the medical world calls cervical myelopathy and incomplete quadriplegia. It means my structural framework is collapsing inward, turning everyday realities—like standing at a kitchen sink for five minutes or reaching for a carton of eggs on the bottom fridge shelf—into impossible, agonizing tasks. The entire volume is currently sitting in the restoration department, waiting for neurosurgeons to bolt in some much-needed titanium hardware before the spine of the book gives out completely and the story comes to an abrupt halt. And of course, the bulging discs or “fraying book spine glue” have clobbered together.
My presence in the MM genre has been interesting, if not eye opening. Most of you would know of at least my primary releases that I’m most proud of—”Distance Between Him” and “Sands of Time”—all of which are now free to download here on Harperville. But what have I been doing since I primarily pressed ‘pause’ on my writing? Well, I got super healthy.
We’re talking about a massive lifestyle change and exercise routines that added up to a 130 pounds of weight being lost between June 2024 and August of 2025. (That’s 59kg for you metric folk!) And I waltzed into my doctor’s office sometime in July last year, having just legally changed my name to Jack Aspen Harper, celebrating my victorious weight loss and gloated that “I felt like I was the poster child for perfect health!”
September came and fate had other intentions. That shattered mirror in “Sands of Time” turns out to be the curse that’s led me astray and betrayed by my local medical system out of sheer neglect. My doctor in January 2024 read the words “C3/C4 spinal stenosis and narrowing of the spinal canal” and told me with shrugged shoulders, “it’s just normal wear and tear.”
Ummm. Excuse a moi?
Normal wear and tear shouldn’t be a word a 35 year old human has to hear from a doctor’s deceitful lips for at least 10 or 15 more years. She didn’t follow through, and I’ve been left to suffer the consequences of her shitty medical oversight.
So, that should give you guys a good freshening up of what I’ve been up to since I sort of disappeared in the MM genre. Now, I’m tinkering around with a nonbinary twunk Unicorn Shifter and their online text-pal “Daddy” who just so happens to be their boss, and a Tiger Shifter himself. In between paragraphs, some days I get exactly ten words typed before I go numb or require laying down. But I’ve been shuffling with a fucking cane at 38 goddamn years old (which I bought from a craftsman in London because I refuse to look like a geriatric millennial in public spaces), heading from this scan to that, this doctor and that specialist to this, being passed around like a hot potato and tossed like a fucking salad at The Olive Garden.
And now, I’m dealing with the need to plan an aftercare recovery period with zero local support or anyone to lift the littlest thing I’ll need immediately after my first surgery. The procedure should be taking place in Denver. And hopefully, if the universe is willing, I’m anticipating a recovery period being held at a world-renowned spinal rehabilitation center just a few minutes down the road from the surgery. My second neurosurgery consultation in Denver is on April 13th, for which I should have a procedure date marked on my chart.
I’m going to publish “The Twunk Under Twilight” here on Harperville for FREE out of good faith and general interest if anyone’s wanting to read it. But in return, I have an easy favor for each of you. I am, for all intents and purposes, dealing with a situation I shouldn’t be in because my doctor failed to act accordingly when the going got tough.
Since I am legally disabled, I have established a tax-advantaged ABLE (Achieving a Better Living Experience) bank account that allows third party donations through their website, www.ugiftable.com and all you have to do is type in my unique identifying code: R73-34K then it’ll pop up my name (Jack Harper) and you can choose a secure ACH transaction or printing out a stub to mail in with a check.
Any dollar contribution is welcome, and most appreciated. I’m running out of my own personal resources and thanks to this ABLE account, it’s people like you that may spare a few bucks and pass along the word by sharing this post with others, that keeps my benefits active because they cannot even look at this account due to the nature our congress has set it up specifically for Americans with disabilities.
I appreciate everyone in the MM fiction sphere and your support throughout the years by simply reading my books. And if that's all you were able to contribute, I'm still fond of you. Keep following me here on Harperville, because I'm gonna open a portal soon that allows you to download "The Twunk Under Twilight" chapter by chapter, as if it's a shifter-telenovella so to speak. In the meantime, stay young. Stay healthy. And watch your back, because our crappy doctors sure as hell aren't!