Hello everyone, it's Ariel Goodbody.
About a month ago, I had an appendicectomy, which is a surgery where they remove your appendix.
The appendix is a small organ found at the base of the large intestine,
and you don't need it to live.
And one of the fun things it can do is get very seriously infected.
You can get appendicitis and then you have to get your appendix removed.
That's what happened to me.
I did that here in a Chinese hospital which was quite scary
because many of the staff did not speak English and to be honest...
Ever since the operation about a month ago, I've just been struggling a bit.
I have had very low energy.
I was slowly building back my strength, but then work has also been very stressful.
There's also been lots of small stresses like I got a cold
because there's a lot of viruses and bacteria spreading at this time of year.
It's also been very polluted in Ningbo where I live, actually very unusually polluted.
So all this is to say I don't have enough energy to record a completely new episode of the podcast.
I've actually decided to go back to the schedule of doing one episode every two weeks.
For most of this year,
I've been doing three episodes a month or like three episodes and then a week off and then three episodes,
but I'm going to go back to doing one episode every two weeks once a fortnight.