Sorry to hear about the medical challenges.

I feel you on the upvoting issues... When I don't do bots it seems no matter how much I try to make a good post I don't go above $0.30 and that's usually only that high if I'm posting on Engrave and Engrave folk upvoted me.

That's the real challenge for Steem, its just not functioning as intended. Bots are profitable for bots and sometimes content producers, but hardly profitable for content producers. Content consumers have far too few incentives for upvoting people.

Ultimately, I think Steem's upvote system doesn't match for long-form content as much as we want it to, but for twitter-style micro-posts it could work. Its no problem to get $0.11 for a quick 160 character comment, but if you put your heart and soul into an article/video and get $0.30... Yeah, not going to work.