And So It Goes

sunset from the hospital parking deck
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, my mother is still in the hospital and, actually, she's going to have surgery this afternoon at 3. Which is to say, in two hours. I'll be over there soon enough; it's one of those weird situations where while I feel like I ought to be there in her room, I also feel like I shouldn't be there, since it's painful for her to talk and when I'm there she wants to talk. Last night and this morning when I was visiting her I tried to keep a monologue going but, surprisingly, even for me, this effort gets difficult after about 15 minutes. I mean, I mine the web for Mom-suitable anecdotes (thank you, Metafilter!) and I can rattle on about the garden for a remarkable length of time considering that it's really only 10 feet by 10 feet of mostly drought ridden weeds, but eventually even I fall silent and then my mother, queen of the social graces that she is, feels the need to fill the conversational gap. Then I feel guilty at the sound of her rasping voice. This through the nose to the stomach tube is really, really bad. I mean it's really bad and I can't even crack a joke about it.

Anyway. That's about it. As seems to be the case with hospitalizations in the family, it tends to take up your entire brain. I think I'm very grateful indeed that this kind of thing is so far from routine that it does throw me this out of whack - it makes me somehow totally exhausted on a bone deep level. I'm one of the lucky ones, I guess - being at the hospital is a shock to the system and not a routine.