fast update

Just got back home tonight. And firstly, thanks for all the encouraging notes! Secondly my father came through the surgery fine. He’s STILL in Intensive Care, waiting for what they call "bowel sounds" before they put him in a regular room and let him start eating again. Apparently it’s not uncommon for it to take this long, though. My brother talked to the doctor last night, and the doctor said he’s doing very well. And could go home Tuesday or Wednesday. Baker B and I went by to see him before heading home and he looked and sounded the best he has yet. They’re supposed to get him up and walking around tonight – or have already, I guess – which ought to help. He hasn’t had anything to eat in a week so he is pretty lacking in energy. They haven’t gotten the pathology report back but the surgeon said it didn’t look like it had spread. It was a kind of big tumor but had clean edges.

My mother is another story and one reason this will be short and probably incoherent is that I’ve gotten, oh, ten minutes or so sleep in the past three nights. She has to have constant reassurance that we’re not leaving her alone. CONSTANT. And by constant, I mean she would literally ask me every thirty seconds how long I was going to be staying, and then would say, "I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave – I’ll be all alone!" And I would say, "No, you won’t be alone, J and B will be staying with you." And she would say, "Well, I don’t know if they will or not." And I would say, "YES, they WILL. Nobody’s going to leave you alone." And she would say, "When are you leaving?" Every.Thirty.Seconds.For.Four.Days.

I really really really thought I would lose my own mind more than once. I would think, if she asks me ONE MORE TIME when I’m leaving, I am GOING TO SCREAM. Hysterically. And then she’d ask me ten million more times when I was leaving. And she’d ask if I’d talked to my brother and did they know when I was leaving and maybe I should call him and had anyone told him Daddy was in the hospital? And when was I leaving?

I could sometimes distract her by getting her on another subject, but she’d always go back to that one. It went on the entire time I was there. She’d also ask when Daddy would get to come home. And how long he’d be there. And when they were letting him come home. And how long had he been there. And when would they let him come home. Over and over and over and over.

She would go on and on about hating to stay by herself and how it’s terrible to have to stay by yourself and several times she asked if I didn’t just hate being by myself. And I’d think, "I would gladly sell my soul to Satan himself right now, for half an hour alone. Okay, TWENTY MINUTES alone!!!! We could probably make a deal for TEN MINUTES ALONE!!!!"

Of course I did not say that and I tried very very hard not to be impatient and not to be curt and to be pleasant to my poor mother because I KNOW she can’t help it and I KNOW it’s not her fault and I feel SO sorry for her. But after four days the unkind things I was thinking were REAL close to coming out of my mouth more than once.

I do not know how Daddy stands it. Of course, she’s not so bad with him there, since this is largely a result of him being gone and her being totally out of her routine. But still he has to put up with the repeato questions. And the not eating.

She of course did this to my brother and his wife too. And we’re looking into things like adult day care, which she WILL pitch a fit about, but we can’t keep doing this. I’m going to take off Friday and go back for the weekend, and I already dread it. HOPEFULLY Daddy will be back home by then so at least I won’t have to be with her every waking minute – which are most minutes in the day and the night because she also wanders around the house and I can’t sleep for worrying about what she’s doing. And she wakes me up if I DO manage to go to sleep because she’s worrying about who is in the house with her. And in a very disturbing incident night before last, she woke me up at four in the morning VERY upset because she’d looked all over house for my brother, and couldn’t find him. "John’s not here!" she said. I said, "Ummmmm….. he’s at HIS house."

She said, "NO, little John! He’s not here!"

I think she thought my brother was a child, and he wasn’t in his room. I kept telling her he was at his own house, and she said, "Well he should have TOLD us he wasn’t staying here tonight! It really scared me when I couldn’t find him!"

She finally was convinced that he was fine, and at HIS house, but I sure couldn’t go back to sleep after that. Maybe she’d been dreaming – that was very bizarre. And very upsetting.

ANYHOW, my father is currently much less of a worry than my mother is, and now I’m going to bed as I’m pretty certain I’m making VERY little sense at this point. But at least Daddy is doing well, so things sure could be WAY worse.