What Now

Wow, I'm tired.

As you can see below, yesterday was the day Ms. Rhonda had her surgery and Steve and I wanted to make it down to Birmingham to see her before she went in. We had to get up at roughly 3:45 to get ready, and leave at about 4:30 to make it there on time. We got to see her for a few minutes before they pumped her full of "I Don't Care Juice." It was supposed to be a 7 hour surgery. We got a seat in the waiting room and, well, waited. Along with Steve, his dad and I, Ms. Rhonda's sister and her husband were there, too. Our pastor also showed up just as the surgery had begun. About 2 1/2 hours in, the surgeon asked if he could speak with the family. That, I can say with complete honesty, was a tense moment. He didn't come out himself, but he asked to speak with us in his office. Since we all had a lot of stuff with us, and we didn't want to leave it there unsupervised, I offered to stay with it while the pastor went into the waiting room with everyone else. I figured he might be of more help to Mr. Lee, depending on what the surgeon wanted to say. They were in there a long time, and I had just about gone into panic mode when everyone came back out. It wasn't as bad as all of us had thought. In fact, it was probably better knews than we could have hoped for under the circumstances. They couldn't finish the surgery that they wanted to do because the radiation treatments that Ms. Rhonda had been under had, of course, damaged the tissues surrounding the site of her cancer. From what they could see, the tumor was gone and was replaced by scar tissue, but because the area was so weak, they didn't want to do any cutting there because of the fear that they would do unfixable damage. They also found an abcess in her lower abdomen that was pretty severe, and they had to fix that. As I have said many times, Ms. Rhonda had been sick and weak, and the doctor thinks that it was because of that infection. They decided to finish what they could and put her into ICU where she could be monitered more closely for that night, but they were pretty sure that as soon as they were able to get her fluid levels corrected and made sure she was in thre process of healing, she would get better much faster than she would have if they had finished the surgery. The only real dark spot in the whole thing is that they weren't able to remove the remains of her tumor, and that can make it more possible to have more cancer growth if it wasn't completely dead. However, they seemed optimistic about her recovery, and even though things didn't go as planned, we're hoping it might have a happy outcome after all. Thanks for all of your prayers, but please keep her and the family in your thoughts until we get more information.

While we were waiting, I had brought my crochet bag and was making another hat. Idle hands and all that. Apparently, seeing a (relatively) young woman crochet is an amazing thing, because I had several people comment about it. I mean, why is it so unusual? Of course, I think some of it came down to the time when I apparently got tangled in about 30 yards of fuzzy blue yarn and had to hack my way out of it, that people got interested. Eh...

We left Birmingham at about 4;45 that afternoon and started home. I was tired and cranky. I was an ill tempered sea bass with a frikin' laser-beam attached to my forehead. I ended up beening ill-tempered to Steve and that made me feel bad. At any rate, and even though I didn't deserve it, he tried to salvage what he could of my birthday and Valentine's Day and we went to El Camino Real for Mexican food and he bought me ice cream afterwards. While it didn't change my mind about those 2 most evil of events, it was definately not a bad try. : )