It's been a while since I've blogged on here, but that's my own fault. It's not for lack of wanting to do it or keeping this site updated more, but I've just been extremely busy.
I guess I should go in order?
After traveling last fall and working basically two full time jobs, I cut back to my real job after the beginning of the year. I worked on a new book, which has been published - "Ultimate Boy Band Trivia" - and focused on opening my own merch shop in addition to having my Etsy store. I became interested in working with resin and have been making jewelry. Also, AJ McLean from the Backstreet Boys wore a custom Taylor Swift T-Shirt design I made him on stage during a show.
And, I started graduate school. I'm going for my Masters of Science in Marketing and hope to get my doctorate after that. It's something that I've always wanted to do, but never had the chance to when my Mom was alive because a lot of my free time and energy went towards her and her needs. So far, not counting the course I just finished, I have a 3.85 grade point average and it should be higher after I get my grade from my most recent class, Global Marketing.
For this class, I created an international marketing plan for my book, "How to be an Adult Fangirl (And Not Ruin Your Life)," and also published hardcover and paperback copies of the book on Amazon. It almost made me really want to get back to trying to get something fictional published. I'm hoping to have another non-fiction book to write soon, but that's under wraps right now.
I'm taking October off because I'm doing some traveling again (yes, going to concerts) and it will be the second anniversary of losing my Mom. I just recently went back home to bury part of her ashes. It was the first time I was there since way before COVID-19 and looking around at places, leaving was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't think I could ever live there again.
My goal is to keep this website updated more, with a lot of my work and maybe even some of my school work. I also want to publish articles about marketing and creative writing, because, besides pop culture and boy bands, that's what I'm an expert on.
Hello, dear readers! It's been a while, hasn't it? You might have noticed the silence on the blog lately, but there's a good reason for it. Life has been a rollercoaster of exciting changes, and I can't wait to catch you up on everything that's been happening.
Redesigning and Reimagining
First things first, the website. If you've been a long-time reader, you might have noticed that the blog went into maintenance mode not too long ago. That's because it was time for a makeover! I've been hard at work redesigning the site to create a more engaging and user-friendly experience for you.
Redesigning a website is like renovating a cherished space; it takes time and a lot of love. I hope you'll enjoy the fresh new look and feel as much as I do. Stay tuned for more exciting changes as we continue to fine-tune the design.
Busy, Busy Life
Life has been a whirlwind of activity, both personally and professionally. As you may have noticed, I've been a little MIA on BSBFangirls. Balancing the demands of work and the surprises life throws our way can be challenging, and I needed to take a step back from blogging to focus on other aspects of my life.
But sometimes, stepping back is a way of stepping forward. It's during these times that we gather our thoughts, recharge, and return with even more passion and enthusiasm for the things we love.
One of the fun things I got to experience was my first Braves game for my birthday, which included meeting Blooper!
From Marietta to Atlanta: A New Beginning
In the midst of all these changes, one of the biggest ones was my move from Marietta to the vibrant city of Atlanta just a few miles away. The city's lively atmosphere, diverse culture, and incredible music scene have been both inspiring and invigorating. After everything I went through last year with my Mom passing away, I needed a change.
As a newcomer to living in Atlanta, I've been exploring every nook and cranny, discovering hidden gems, and immersing myself in the local culture. I can't wait to share my experiences and insights as I continue to explore this exciting new chapter.
Exciting Plans on the Horizon
Now, here's the part you've been waiting for – what's coming up! I've got a calendar filled to the brim with plans that I'm bursting to share with you. From conventions celebrating pop culture to a jam-packed lineup of concerts, there's no shortage of adventures on the horizon.
Speaking of adventures, just yesterday, my friend Kelly and I took a road trip to Athens. Our mission? To promote Nick Carter's upcoming concert at the Classic Center. We went old school with our marketing approach, posting flyers all around downtown Athens and the University of Georgia campus. It was a fantastic experience, and I can't wait to tell you more about it.
Back to Blogging: Let the Adventures Begin
So, what's next for the blog? It's time to dust off the keyboard, reignite the creative spark, and get back to what I love most – sharing stories and experiences with all of you. I'm thrilled to reconnect with my readers and embark on this exciting journey together.
Stay tuned for captivating stories, event reviews, and fresh content that captures the essence of my newfound passion for Atlanta. There are also some exciting collaborations and surprises in the works, including a brand new book deal - and yes, it involves boy bands!
Thank you for your patience during this brief hiatus. Your support and enthusiasm mean the world to me, and I can't wait to share all the exciting adventures and stories that lie ahead.
Here's to new beginnings, incredible adventures, and the stories we'll create together. Atlanta, I'm here and ready for the ride. Let's make some memories!
Last year when the clock struck midnight and it became 2022, I didn't realize this was going to be the year that changed my life. All I could think about was "finally, I get concerts back!"
Honestly, the concerts are really the best thing that came out of this year besides my book deal with Emilia. I finally got to see Mandy Moore after being a fan for over 20 years. I got to see my favorite boys, the Backstreet Boys, again. First in Las Vegas in April, then several more times over the summer with some of my best friends.
Then just as I had my last concert, my world changed. My Mom got sick and died just over a month later. To say the least, things have been weird since then. It's not so much that I'm alone, because honestly, I prefer to be alone sometimes. It's just not having her call me. It's not having her tell me to get something from the store. It's all the little things that I used to complain about that I miss.
On top of all of this, there were things at work that I won't talk about on here. And my Etsy shop. And all of my work I do for the fandom and fan club.
And honestly, I've let those things that make me who I am slip a little since she passed away.
While I wasn't going to make a list of things I want to accomplish in 2023, I decided to after thinking about something today.
Things I want to do in 2023:
Get Published Again: While my book with Emilia is being published in April about the Backstreet Boys, I want something fictional published. I need to get back to writing. I need to get back into having fun writing again. That's one thing I really miss. Besides, getting "How to be an Adult Fangirl (And Not Ruin Your Life)" will likely never get really published since I self-published, but my next story, I'm going all in to get it published - for real.
Step Up My Brand's Game: There's a few things I want to do with this. For one, finish setting up my Etsy shop on WordPress with WooCommerce. That way I have control and do not have to pay each much like Shopify. I also want to be more consistent with posting on BSBFangirls and social media. Thankfully Emilia, Amber, and Melly are awesome and help out, too.
Master's Degree: Whether it's taking classes or getting my Master's Degree, I want to do one or the other. I have an idea for something I'd like to do eventually, business wise, and I want to get that background. Don't ask me what the idea is, only a few people know.
I know they aren't huge drastic things, but I feel like with where I am right now, I need to take things slowly. My life turned upside down this year and I have to get used to my new normal.
This might be one of the last personal posts that I post on my blog. At least deeply personal posts.
It's been over 2 months since my Mom died and a lot of things have changed around here. I'm still in the midst of reorganizing the apartment. I got a new desk and sat up my "office" in the living room. I've turned my old office into my "craft" room. I got a new sofa while my best friend from high school Amanda was here visiting the weekend after my Mom died. I've cleaned out all of her things, mostly and donated what I could. I kept a lot of things and hope to have her T-shirts turned into a blanket.
I realized why I hated cooking and that's because it was with her cookware, so I bought my own.
My Mom was a pack rat, so I've had a lot to go through. Of course, so am I. Not with stupid things, but with VHS tapes from the 90s and early 00s. I have two big tubs full of them. They are not going anywhere. I still have a VCR. I've transferred a lot and put on YouTube, but I'm not nearly done. One day, I'll finish.
Right after my Mom died, there was a leak in my closet so almost all of my clothes are in my living room on a rack, so may goal today is to finally get them back in my closet and organize that. And my bedroom is a hot mess because it became the catch-all room while reorganizing. That's my goal tomorrow.
Plus I need to make room for new things like my LiteBoxer thing I won from the Kelly Clarkson show. I need that to punch out my frustrations.
But how am I doing? It's a mix. Emotionally, I'm a mess, but I can still do my job and things I need to do. I've been burying myself in work and my "fun work" with Backstreet Boys. I've tried writing a new story, but I haven't gotten much done on it.
Last night I had my first grief therapy session and she suggested I start a journal of my feelings. That's why I think this will be my last personal post here. I do want to make this more professional, but it's better to write this type of things here than over at BSBFangirls.com.
Melanie C., better known as Sporty Spice from Spice Girls, wrote the foreword for my and Emilia's book. We will be starting press on that soon.
Hopefully getting my title change at work soon even though I've been doing the job for over a year.
My Etsy shop is back up and running.
I was in the virtual audience of The Kelly Clarkson Show and won some stuff, which was fun.
I bought cake decorating and baking items because I'm going to try to see if I can decorate cakes after watching all these baking shows on Netflix.
I'm also #TeamMeganAndHarry. (I need to make a longer post on my feelings on King Charles.)
I'm getting back into the swing of life, sort of. I'm trying to do what's best for me. Because of that, I'm not going home for Christmas. I was going to have a celebration and bury half of my Mom's ashes in our family plot on her birthday weekend in January, but I've called that off. I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready to face that yet. I know I can't put it off forever, but right now, yeah. Not ready.
A lot has changed since my last blog post - my Mom died.
I'm not even really sure how to write this blog post. Writing her obituary was a piece of cake. I used to write obituaries and edit them when I worked in journalism. But it hasn't really hit me that's she's gone yet.
She died last Saturday, October 15th and 9:11pm (ironic number). One of my best friends, Julia, was with me when she left me. Oddly enough, and I felt a little comforted by it, the nurse's name was Kevin and the doctor's name was Howie. I cracked up laughing when he said his name while I was crying.
Last week they came and got her hospital bed and I cleaned up the living room, where she had been sleeping. My best friend from high school, Amanda, who I hadn't really hung out with in a long, long time came to stay a few days and it was as if no time had passed. We went and got a small, cheap, but comfy small sofa for the living room and I set up my desk so that I could make the sunroom into my craft room for my shops. That's still a hot mess right now, but the living room is pretty set up. I've kept some of her clothes and donated the others to Goodwill, along with one of her wheelchairs.
Yesterday, Amanda and I met up with Julia to pick up my Mama's ashes. She's in two boxes - one for more and one to bury back home in our family plot so that she can be with her parents again.
Amanda left this morning and now I've been sitting here staring at the bag that box boxes are in. It's on top of the thing that I'm going to put my stereo/record player when I get the nerve to actually pick the bag up and do something with them.
I sat on the sofa and watched "House of the Dragon" and "Grey's Anatomy" while staring at the bag. Now I've ate lunch sitting at my desk checking on work things and stared at the bags. I can't stick them in my closet because there's been a leak that's being fixed in there.
Since she's died, people have told me how proud she was of me but I don't know if I can really do this. I'm sitting here crying as I write this because I think it might be finally hitting me now. I cried last week when I got flowers from friends and people that I look up to and admire. I've had people that I don't even know donate to a gofundme and I cried. I cried a little when we got her ashes. Everytime I talk to a family member on the phone I start to cry.
But it still just feels like I'm on a trip or that she's at dialysis or at the hospital, like she was in 2020 when I couldn't go see her because of COVID-19. It's like I'm going to here "Chances" by the Backstreet Boys play on my phone and I'm going to pick it up and she's going to yell at me about why I haven't answered the damn phone.
I keep thinking about all the free time I'm going to have now and I don't really want any of it. I don't want more free time to write or do a podcast. I don't want more free time to go out and meet new people. I've spent my entire adult life taking care of her and now she's gone. I just want to go pick up my mama, lug her wheelchair in the trunk of my car, and have her bitch to me about NASCAR.
Since my Granny died when I was 16 and my aunt died when I was 18, it's just been us. And I know I'm not alone and I have people, but it's not the same.
I hope by some miracle that the title of this post doesn't happen, but it probably is.
I promised myself I wouldn't get too personal on this website. It was about my work and writing. And I apologize if there are any typos in this. I've been a ball of anxiety for the past week. I'm also exhausted. But the last month and a half has been some of the most stressful weeks of my life.
My Mom went into the hospital on September 2nd because she was feeling weak and they were going to be running test. Just to figure out what was going on, right? She wanted to me to go see the Backstreet Boys on September 6 in Lexington. I didn't get to see my birthday show because it was postponed due to weather, so I was gone overnight with one of my best friends. I put my cat Maddie in a lush pet hotel, and I talked to my Mom just before the concert started.
The next morning, I couldn't get a hold of her - she was in dialysis. When she got back to the room, something was off. She was becoming delirious. What happened next resulted in her blood platelets dropping down to 3 (Supposed to be 150-450) and she had to be ventilated. The platelet issue is why she was having crazy bleeding a few weeks before.
She ended up in ICU on a ventilator for two weeks. My best friends were with me at the hospital. They got over 40 pounds of fluid off of her through dialysis. She hadn't missed any days, but had that much fluid on her. She got off the ventilator. Her blood pressure was doing good.
Then she had five mini-strokes. After not speaking for a day and a half, she began talking against and everything looked okay.
She got sent to a regular room. She had some wounds that had started develop, but it seemed under control. She got better and was released last Friday to go to a nursing home / rehab facility with all intentions of coming home.
This rehab facility is not one I wanted her to go to, but because of long COVID, places like that are full so she had no choice. She couldn't come home. She wasn't ready. I thought this place was going to be okay even though the reviews were horrible.
The second night, a nurse smarted off at her and left her in a dirty diaper all night. She had wounds and did not need to stay in a dirty diaper like that (because she didn't have the energy to get up and use the bathroom). The same nurse did it again the next night and I emailed in and spoke to an administrator. They said they would investigate it.
The next day I couldn't get her on the phone so I drove down and her speech was slurred. I was worried maybe she had another mini-stroke. She seemed like parts of her were weak but I was reassured everything was fine. Her vitals were fine. (Vitals do not matter when you have a stroke and I knew that.)
Wednesday evening she called me upset because nobody would bring her some ice (she was on a puree diet b/c of the mini-strokes) and her mouth was dry. She could have small pieces of ice. She called the nurses station with her buzzer for over two hours. She dropped her phone while talking to me and I could not get anybody at the nurses station when I called.
I wanted to go down there, but you are not allowed in after 7:30pm.
I called and let the phones ring for over 20 minutes until I called another section and got a hold of a nice lady who walked over there. What did she see? Nurses/RNs sitting there, not answering the phones or calls from my Mom's room which was right across the hall. My Mom had been screaming.
When the lady called me from my Mom's phone to tell me that, I called the administrator at 10:00pm at night. That same night, the dietician ordered them to remove all the food and snacks I had brought my Mom from her room. It was things like pudding, jello, microwavable mash potatoes - things she could have.
When I found that out, I was furious. I had a work meeting at Noon so after that, I asked my Director if I could take the afternoon off to spend it with my Mom and put some people in their place. I went down there and went off. I was angry and I let every single person know it. I got her stuff back and thankfully, my Mom had passed her Speech Therapy swallowing test - she could have food!
I ordered Zaxby's for us and we ate. She was happy to have real food (even if it was fast food - at least it wasn't McDonalds). Her occupational therapy came in and she was so limp - way more than she was before when she did therapy in the hospital.
And as they moved her, all I saw was blood. LOTS OF BLOOD. I freaked out because of her platelet issue, so I went to tell the nurse. Her response: "I'll be there soon."
No, you are not. I went back and called 9-1-1. As soon as they heard what I was doing, they rushed in before I could take photos and changed her to remove all the blood before the EMTs came. When the EMTs did come, the lady EMT told me that the charge nurse said that the doctor had just been in and she was fine.
No doctor had seen her. They had just told me an hour earlier that the doctor would not be there until the next day in the morning. I packed her things and we left to go to another hospital - not the one she was at last time because it was full with COVID and Flu patients.
As she got into ICU, her blood pressure was really low - too low. They began her on medicine and giving her blood because she had lost so much. It was then that they saw how bad the wounds were. They had asked me to leave the room so I didn't see them until today.
She was admitted and sent back to ICU and after seeing the doctors this morning and wound care, the doctor came back to talk to me - her body was failing. The wounds were too bad and had become calcified, meaning that there had been localized deposits of calcium in dead or degenerated tissues. It's very common in dialysis patients.
And she was septic.
Basically, they told me I had to make some decisions because my Mom wasn't going to live much longer. What the hell do you do when you get told that? Me? I have panic attacks. I took three of my anxiety pills (they aren't strong at all) and tried to breathe.
I was just telling one of my best friends the other night that I was worried she would never come home and wondered if I was selfish in the hospital when I wanted them to do everything to save her.
And now I feel more guilty of being selfish because she's in pain.
I don't like to make decisions. I don't handle big ordeals like this well. It goes back to my Granny dying just before I turned sixteen. She helped raise me and I found her dead one morning before I went to school. It was the real start of my battle with depression and anxiety.
The doctors said it wouldn't be tonight or tomorrow, but that she would never leave the hospital. I saw pictures of the wounds today and almost threw up. I contacted the State offices to report the facility and there is an investigation going on - a real investigation. I may contact a lawyer because that place does not need to be in business. If I didn't call 9-1-1, she would have died last night and I would have never gotten to say goodbye.
Right now, I'm sitting at home in my PJs on my computer after being in the ICU all day with her. I had to come home to feed my cat and I can't look at her bed knowing she probably won't ever come back. What do I do with all of her stuff? Her hats (she loves baseball hats). Her clothes. Her things. What do I do with all of this cookware? I don't cook. I hate to cook.
Being an only child sucks. It's all placed on me and I can't handle the pressure. I can handle work pressure, sure. I just can't handle this.
If you're in the Marietta/Powder Springs area and want to know the facility so that you and your loved ones can avoid it, please contact me. I will not name them here for fear of a defamation lawsuit (Oh, I know big words!).
I didn't write this for attention or sympathy. I did it as a form of therapy. Writing has always been my therapy to get past situations in my life. Writing fan fiction helped me overcome something that happened to me when I was younger. It's what I've always gravitated to. I may not be the most eloquent speaker in front of people, but I can write.
So tonight, I had to write.
About Me
Professional Fangirl. Grad School Student '25. Digital Marketing Manager. Published Author. Boy Band Expert. Original Taylor Swift fan.
Professional Fangirl. Grad School Student '25. Digital Marketing Manager. Published Author. Boy Band Expert. Original Taylor Swift fan.
