A brighter week

Many thanks to those of you who left the kind thoughts in comments or elsewhere. Since I broached it, the full story is that my father had his bladder and prostate removed (my oldest sister keeps calling it a prostrate, but I've given up trying to correct her) after they found and removed and orange-sized tumor off of the bladder late last year. Not to get too graphic, but they had to remove the tumor through the penis bit by bit, which, well, I've probably lost all male readers at this point.

At any rate, he made it through the surgery fine last week, but as Sophia Petrillo said, "No one looks good after surgery." Like many older patients after surgery, there were some delusion problems, which is a difficult thing to see. At one point in time, he was convinced he was in Louisiana at an LSU game. When I called to check in last night, however, I got the good news that he was passing gas. Yes, that's good news, because it means the intestines are active again and that he can eat again. And with food back in him, he's doing much, much better, and with the morphine cut down, the delusional spells are pretty much gone. And he might be able to go home sometime this week. So things are looking good at this point.

Honestly, though, I've been in so many conversations about bodily functions in the past few weeks that I feel like I'm in a Rob Schneider film. My three sisters and I were in the Best Western near St. Luke's in Houston, eating breakfast and talking loudly about urostomy bags and all sorts of other unseemly things that we barely even noticed the lone, horrified other woman trying to eat in the breakfast room. Hope she enjoyed her biscuits and gravy.