sick parents

Today was fairly stressful for me.

My dad just had abdominal surgery about 10 days ago, and is still very much in a recovery mode. Although he's up and about, he's not moving super fast or lifting much of anything. And he's finding it difficult to adjust his eating and insulin levels so as to maintain his blood sugar in the proper range.

My mother, who was supposed to start radiation on Monday for a cancerous growth in her abdomen, had terrible cramping and vomiting all weekend. Today she went to Valley General Hospital in Monroe, which isn't exactly super inspiring to start with since I'm used to big Seattle Hospitals like UW Medical Center which are national leaders in everything. (I mean who am I to complain? There are at least a billion people on the planet who couldn't dream of having the level of medical care available at valley general.) They did a scan and decided to do emergent surgery because her intestine/bowel was blocked.

As it turns out, it was just scar tissue from her previous surgery. They were able to fix it and I'm told she should be able to recover. But it's still frightening, right in the middle of dealing with the cancer. And my dad finds it *really* hard not to be able to take care of her in the way he'd like since he's still recovering from his own surgery.

Anyway, the whole thing is yucky and frightening. So i spent the afternoon evening hanging out over there with my mega brilliant sister Kat and my dad's good friend Lloyd, who is an absolute gem. Don't know how we'd be coping without this without all his help. He rocks.

So that was my day. I'm thinking I should (there, I've digressed to shoulding on myself. See that?) focus on just sitting with this thing, instead of complaining about it, avoiding it, or what have you.