I sincerely appreciate both your patience and words of understanding and support as I’ve blogged my way through personal problems this week. I owe you all thanks and some positive info.
I spoke with my niece yesterday, and am thrilled to report that she sounded fine–normal, and cheerful, and even up to some of my sarcastic hole-in-the-head jokes. Though they’re still awaiting further pathology and scan results, the outlook is good, and I’ll be able to move along to other things on Spinning. A note of surprise, that while the surgery was on Monday, by Thursday she was home. Seems amazing, since while it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, it was surgery to remove a tumor on the brain. But the reason is just as uplifting and faith restoring as the excellence of care she received at Washington Hospital Center in D.C.: they acknowledge that the danger of infection is greater in a hospital than the care she could take at home to avoid it. This isn’t bureaucratic cover-up; this is honest assessment of facts and offering the patient the best care.
I’m awaiting other news on my friend, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to write about that at all.
But one thing among several that I’ve learned about myself and others through just this past week: I think that maybe it’s because I still have my dad and just two years ago lost my mom, that this death thing is starting to stir up such feelings. Maybe I’m not used to the fact that I’m part of the older generation, still mentally giving way to folks in their eighties and above as the ones in control. I’ve called my nieces and nephews “the kids” when in fact they are in their late twenties and early thirties on my side of the family. When my sisters and myself were kids, we were referred to as “the girls.” I suppose this happens in all families, and I suppose I have to start seeing myself differently.
But I won’t stop wearing jeans and flannel shirts.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology