"and no resident will say: 'I am sick.'" Isaiah 33:24

My mother's surgery has been moved up to next Thursday. I don't know if I should be glad or scared. On the one hand, if someone else had to re-schedule their surgery, leaving an opening my my mother-that's a good thing. On the other hand, if they shuffled things to get my mom in sooner, it's more urgent-bad thing.
My mother is taking all this really well. She's gone through every grieving stage: denial, acceptance, anger, frustration, acquiescense. Sometimes she reverts, but then she moves on. Now with this new development, all the plans she'd made have been pushed up.
We're going to visit family this weekend. She's not sure how long it will take her to recover enough to visit them, so off we go. It's a little disconcerting to her to think it may be six months before she's recovered enough to visit her grandson. He'll be two in May.
On a selfish note, I'm struggling. It's very scary for me to think something may happen to my mom. I try very hard to dwell on the positive, but for the first time in my life, it's hard to do. I think I'll try something my mom was doing for a while. Pretend. In the meantime, I will await the time when the prophecy in Isaiah, quoted in the title, will come true. How grand it will be to not have to deal with this kind of thing, along with its implications.
Thanks for being a soundboard....

"faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld." hebrews 1:1

So yesterday I went with my mother to her Neurology appointment. You see, my mother has a brain tumor. It's actually caused by "schwann" fibers surrounding the nerves lead from the brain to the ear and face over-producing themselves. There's no known cause why my mom's particular type happens in one person but not another. It was scary to hear the doctor talk about all the ins and outs of her tumor. My mother had, of course, told me about her tumor, which is why I took off work yesterday for her appointment. But the seriousness of it really sobered me. You see, my family's first reaction to bad news tends to be laughter. It's a good mechanism, but this time, I only knew enough from my parents to think it wasn't a big deal. Now, within the next two months, my mom will be going in for brain surgery. The doctor pulled up her MRI results and showed us her brain ("See! I do have a brain!", my mother says.) along with the tumor. The tumor is about the size of pen cap. The doctor likened it to an ice cream cone. I like her doctor. He's apparently a pretty good brain surgeon. Who'd have thought my mother would be having brain surgery?!
It's amazing, the further we get along in this old icky system of things, the further we get from healthy. What makes all this so much easier to cope with is my faith. I have faith that Jehovah will resurrect my mother if she were to die from this or from complications in the surgery. I know she would be resurrected being able to hear (the tumor has taken her hearing on one side) along with perfect health.
For now, however, I pray she comes through the surgery. We humans are certainly not designed to accept death as normal. And losing one's mother, no matter how old you are, is always traumatic. Especially when she's your best friend....
Have a good day!

"i like boring things." andy worhol

So the new changes took effect here at work on January 1. Our digital files were wiped in preparation for the new database on Friday. The whole weekend was a mess. Although, I did enjoy drinking a beer while working on Saturday. Together with the owners, we put in about 350 accounts over the weekend. Usually we put in about 30 per day, so this was monumental. Now we're caught up. These last couple of weeks have been madness!
My place is still adorable. My roommate and I have purchased a couple of things to make it better. We got a floor lamp with paper shades and a "Cote d'Azur" travel poster It's lovely. We're painting this weekend and going to Ikea for some goodies to finish off the living room.
I've been so busy with work, not much else has been going on. We did have company on Saturday night. We played games and ate Chicken Kafka and naan. So good. We also made basmati rice, but the naan certainly took center stage. It was a good evening.
I'm afraid this is it for today. Ciao.