On November 24, 2010 I finally opened up a store in the Second Life Marketplace! It’s called Artsy Pixels and it’s where you will find the goods and services I’ve been working on to make it easy for my friends to join me on my adventures in the virtual world. What I didn’t see coming at the time was the challenge of facing and beating colon cancer. During December 2010 I worked away at stocking the store, creating promotional materials and letting SL friends know about my new venture. Then, on January 13 while I was outside walking my precious corgi at the resort, I experienced excruciating pain in my lower abdomen. Grabbing a tree, I held on for dear life while working through the pain. It was at that point a voice inside my head said to me, “You have cancer.” Seriously. Of course, from that moment I went into denial. The periodic, stabbing pains that followed for the next four months were easily ignored by focusing on what I learned later were much less important.
Dare I digress. About my store in SL. I was able to get only two of my gowns packaged for sale but I did manage to get over 90 hairstyle options published. Fortunately, the hairstyles started selling right away and while the earnings were in Linden dollars, they could be converted to U.S. dollars if I wanted to take the revenue out of Second Life. Slick. The short story. While I fought my battle with cancer, Jewle Rae’s Second Life store was generating sales. Cha-ching! During my recovery I researched the revenue potential further and learned of Second Life landowners making millions leasing virtual real estate. Unbelievable but true!
Back in the real world my daily life was nothing less than challenging. Diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer, my only choice was surgery. At least I had that choice to take. Surgery to remove the tumor was lengthy and left me with a suture line running from my crotch to directly under my bust, right up the center of my body. I looked like I had been zipped together! The recovery from that experience took several months but the upside to it all was that the cancer had not spread beyond the tumor. After multiple tests, I was assured there were no other signs of cancer in my body. The doctor recommended that I NOT go through chemotherapy. What we hadn’t counted on, though, is that more surgery would be needed to deal with the damage done from the cancerous tumor removed on April 29, 2011. For three years, Artsy Pixels in SL continued to generate revenue on “auto-pilot”. When mesh was introduced, sales began to slide. Fast forward to 2017. Artsy Pixels is still in the Second Life Marketplace but sales are minimal . You can get there by clicking on this link.