Reflecting on 2022 and a Happier 2023

Last year was NUTS. I had these big grandiose plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Lyles Movie Files.

I was gonna look back at the Top 10 films of 2012 — a breakthrough year for the movie industry with the rise of The Avengers — and how that prompted me to start doing figure reviews.

TV became another staple of the site and I was gonna break down how that kicked off. It was going to a celebration worthy of a big milestone for my site.

But those plans went all kinds of haywire. My original hosting service was up for renewal, and I couldn’t justify throwing out thousands of dollars for it.

Switching servers created all new headaches though including the far more frequent server crashes, which was super annoying.

Even further behind the scenes, my health was getting shakier. In 2020, I’d been diagnosed with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC). PSC is a degenerative liver disease that slowly breaks the liver down making it vulnerable to various infections and cancer. The only treatment for PSC is a liver transplant.

PSC can take a significant amount of time to progress. Some people might not deal with too many bad issues until 10 to 15 years from diagnosis. That wasn’t the case with me. Christmas 2021 was spent in the ER with another flare-up and more times than I’d like to count in 2022 I was getting blood tests, antibiotics for flare-ups I caught in time or heading off to another doctor’s appointment. 

Naturally, this ate into review time of movies, figures and TV shows although I stayed current with the comic book reviews. Two weeks ago, I was hospitalized again and this was one of the longer stints. At first, I was just getting a procedure done a few days earlier to relieve some of the stress to my bile duct and then that went to a very unexpected offer for a liver transplant. 

I’d gone through multiple periods where I was the backup for a liver so I had reached the point where I stopped getting too excited/nervous about it. I believed God had a new liver for me, but I’d stopped trying to determine if this was the one or not. This time it was the one and I don’t think for a second it was a coincidence that this one was the healthiest I’d been offered. Even cooler was I didn’t need the entire liver so the docs were able to split it and give the other portion to a baby so two of us got the best possible Christmas present. 

I’m back home now and will be on the mend for at least two to three months. The good news is that gives me more time to watch movies and shows and hopefully make more of a dent on my figure reviews. I’m not gonna push too hard though so there might be some days where I’m absent. I had a great streak going where I didn’t miss posting something daily for the first decade of the site. That’s probably not going to be the case for a while, but I kinda appreciate having a forced break for a bit. 

Hopefully 2023 will be a lot smoother and I’ll be back to my normal self by June or July. Either way thanks for sticking with me for this decade plus. Happy New Year!