botb
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Last Active 02-24-20 4:51 pm
Joined 05-18-07

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 Lists
09.15.24 When it rains it pours, Sput. ♦06.01.24 Got the flu, send me recs
11.02.23 Check out my band’s new/final record01.16.23 Unloved & Weeded Out, Sputnik Metalcore
04.03.22 Definitive Meshuggah Ranking For Chads 12.30.21 Got that omicron shit AMA
07.16.21 Released some new jams today!04.11.20 FF7 Remake
02.23.20 2019: A Fight Riff Retrospective ♦12.09.18 2018 : A Fight Riff Retrospective ♦
10.23.18 Botb’s new demo12.30.17 Botb’s Top 25 of 2017
08.26.17 That new new10.10.16 Flint Water Crisis Benefit Comp ♦
02.15.16 NEW Venomspitter Song12.28.15 Spur of the moment grind/pv ep
10.22.15 New Venomspitter03.31.15 Just dropped an EP
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When it rains it pours, Sput.

Hey guys, seen a lot of posts about people going through hardships lately on here and just wanted to vent into the ether semi-anonymously about what has been maybe the most hellish 3 weeks of my life. Albums are things I’ve listened to thatve helped give me any kind of solace during this period. Also going to post gofundme links for a couple users to try and help signal boost.
1The Saddest Landscape
You Will Not Survive

Found out at 14 weeks that my unborn child was at extremely high risk for Down’s syndrome. There’s no history of it in either my wife’s family or mine, we just have absolute shit luck. We received this news via AN EMAIL we had been anxiously awaiting that would tell us the baby’s sex. No follow up call or anything. This made it feel all the more surreal and fucked up. Been trying to maintain a normal work life while trying to support my wife who is devastated and myself who barely feels like I have time or energy to be devastated. We make an appointment for an ultrasound and amniocentesis (which is when they stick an enormous needle into my wife’s stomach holy shit) and begin the week-long wait of panic attacks and tears waiting to confirm if our baby, (who is a girl by the way, we did get that info too) is sick.
2Envy
Insomniac Doze

Between appointments we have been hearing some bubbling coming from our toilet, but nothing of note to make us worry too much. No backflow or anything weird. We go to our appointment and right away the ultrasound detects several serious comorbidities with the fetus. Very small limbs, water pockets around the heart and lungs, a spot on the heart, and many more signs that confirm the original prognosis and more. They tell us that if the baby makes it through the pregnancy it will be a miracle, much less if she survives long thereafter. If there’s any silver lining it’s that we decide not to go on with the amniocentesis because it’s scary as shit and we already have enough information. We talk it over and come to the incredibly difficult consensus that to minimize the trauma and pain of both our unborn baby and my wife and I that we are going to terminate the pregnancy rather than go into enormous medical debt and/or deliver a stillborn or incredibly sick baby.
3Frail Body
Artificial Bouquet

We next day, our toilet in our single bathroom in our duplex apartment backs up and we are unable to use it for a couple hours. Nothing overflows, but it’s very clearly sewage from another source because we hadn’t used it. 3 more nearly sleepless nights and panic attacks about our next appointment go by. I wake up at 2 am to the child shifting in my wife’s belly against my back. I’m up for another hour and a half, heart pounding, wondering what else could possibly happen to make this more traumatic. Only a couple people know what’s going on at my job, they’re very supportive and kind, being around friendly faces makes it easier to bear when I’m not presented with the situation at hand directly in front of me. My wife however can feel the baby moving, she’s devastated. She is 4 months pregnant with a baby who realistically could just die at any moment. There’s no escaping the physical aspect of that, no compartmentalization you can do to make it feel better.
4Nilufer Yanya
My Method Actor

We see a therapist in this stretch. She is perfect for what we need and helps guide us through the grieving process. A few days before the procedure my wife gets a call from our insurance telling us it will not be covered because in our state if the mother’s life is not in danger it is an “elective procedure”. It is icing on the shit cake. My wife is a nurse at a hospital, how could this possibly have happened. We are able to secure funding from a local reproductive rights group to help pay, but are still out close to 1000$. Navigating the American healthcare system and playing phone tag with representatives who have no answers for us takes hours. It’s another kick while we’re down.
5Ulcerate
Cutting the Throat of God

The day finally comes, we get up and sleepily make our way to the clinic at 7 am. It is under lock and key with a call box due to the political nature of abortion in the states. Going in and out feels like a whole process. There are other women there, with their single escorts in tow. All of them look varying degrees of worn down and depressed. The staff is wonderful, very sensitive to our needs and gives us peace of mind through the process that we are in good hands. I run to go get breakfast as pre-op meds get passed out. I leave the clinic and am face to face with 3 college age boys holding pro-life signs. One of them turns and looks at me and asks if he can give me something to read. I politely decline, while wishing I could just beat him within an inch of his life there on the sidewalk and snap his friend’s signs in half. I get breakfast, on the way back in, they look at me but my body language and facial expression says “fuck off” and they don’t acknowledge me further.
6Nxworries
Why Lawd?

My wife is nauseous from her pre-op meds, other women are starting to throw up. She tells me when they call her name to go home and she will tell me when to come back. I leave to feed our dog his breakfast and go home to rest. At 4 PM, a whopping 9 hours since we arrived, i get a text telling me to come back that she is coming to from sedation. I rush back to the clinic and sit in the waiting room. There’s a woman howling and crying in pain as she gets her procedure performed. You can hear it throughout the entire clinic over the lofi beats radio and the rushing water sounds they have in the waiting room. I text my wife frantically, praying it’s not her. I get no response for close to 20 minutes, so just a feeling of unease and nausea seeps in as I hear muffled sounds of this woman go through a traumatic event in her life, hoping that it’s not my wife. She finally gets back to me, loopy from the meds. Everything is ok, we are free to go. The staff hugs us and wishes us well.
7Westside Gunn and Conway
Hall & Nash 2

We get home, slowly settling into the finality of it all. The political aspect isn’t lost on us, we had to sit and wait through a mandatory “guilt tax” courtesy of Congress in the state of Virginia. If anything we are both more now than ever supportive of reproductive rights. There are no people using this system as a means of birth control. The fact that second and third term abortions are seen as ways of people late stage birth controlling is laughable at best. The entire process is traumatic and I promise you no one goes through this unscathed. Of course we have lingering feelings of guilt, the what-ifs ring through our minds when there are moments of pause, but we are still confident we did the right thing for both us and our baby girl. That doesn’t make it any easier to process, mind you, because this is a child we were excited for and really looking forward to meeting. And now she’s gone.
8Spectral Wound
Songs of Blood and Mire

3 days go by after the procedure. My wife is bleeding still periodically, her body begins producing milk as if she has just given birth. She hurts, aches, and is generally miserable. Friday afternoon our toilet erupts sewage all over the bathroom floor. We clean it up and call a plumber. He comes that night, the toilet flushes normally, and he says “seems fine, call me if you need anything” and makes a hasty exit before I can get in touch with the landlord or the property manager at all. The property manager tells us to coordinate with our upstairs neighbor about water usage (showering, washing clothes, etc) until Monday when the plumber comes back out. We do our best. This morning I wake to our apartment being flooded with sewage from the bathroom all the way through the living room into the kitchen. Upstairs neighbors ran a single load of clothes through the washer.
9Primitive Blast
Animalistic

We get in touch with our property manager who is an old fogey next door who’s mostly very friendly. He provides us with a large vaccuum and between that and a carpet cleaner that we have we clean everything up and put our furniture that was affected on blocks. Property manager and upstairs neighbor get into a screaming match about culpability on the front porch, I go get my wife and I coffee. Now we’re stuck between a feud with our upstairs neighbors and the property manager and we just kind of want to be left alone to continue our grieving process. This has all been too much.
10Arcade Fire
Neon Bible

I say all this to hopefully give someone somewhere other than just me the relief of knowing that you are not the only one going through the absolute shitgutters of life. This experience has reaffirmed our beliefs tenfold. The idea that people are out here using abortions as birth control when the process is this traumatic and fucked up is laughable at best and absolutely insulting at worst. Our state has fairly liberal laws but there’s still a mandatory wait period before you can have the procedure as a “guilt tax” of sorts. The thought of having to travel across state lines to get the healthcare that we needed is fucking scary and we are endlessly thankful we didn’t have to do that.
11Silverchair
Frogstomp

My wife and I are in a good place financially so despite this costing us thousands of dollars we are still stable. My coworkers are even donating some PTO to me to help cover the cost of me being out of work (which in and of itself is a nightmare band-aid fix) but some of the sput community isn’t so lucky. I will be posting a few links of gofundme’s I’ve seen around for some of the sput homies that are going through their own trials and tribulations below. Please donate if you can, and be kind. If nothing else, this reminds me that I never know what a person is going through in life behind the scenes, and I should really try to put good energy out there to help us all collectively get through this thing called life that none of us asked for. much love to anyone who read this.
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