Emotional Blockage Part One

For purposes that you understand who I am talking about, my mother is referred to as "Mom" and Shawn's mother will be referred to as "Ma".  This title came about as a result of Ma's house becoming the hub for all area teenagers when Shawn was in Louisiana.  Early on, she told me to call her this, as everyone else did, and I always have except where it might confuse people.


I went on to work and Shawn went to catch his eldest brother, Tim before he went to work.  Shawn called me occasionally on my cell with bad information.  I don't mean just bad news, but more along the lines of misinformation confused by emotions.  Kidney disease, cirrhosis of the liver, a possible heart attack....  It was like Shawn was the last man in a game of telephone and this is where my information was being fed from.

When Dad was in with his weird, brain thing that only 100 people out of 7 billion have had (at least since medical science has advanced) I learned to take everything with a grain of salt.  I really don't understand that phrase but for me, on Wednesday, it meant don't take anything too seriously, at least if it came from a doctor's mouth.  Or Shawn's mouth, for that matter.

With Dad, they told us it looks like brain cancer, it looks like an aneurysm, it looks like every possible worse thing you can imagine that would possibly kill your daddy.  In the end, it would have been much better and easier on everyone if the folks in the lab coats would have just said, "We don't know what it is."  And so was the case now. 

Every possibility made Shawn an even bigger wreck.  Down in the room within the emergency room, we clustered together and hugged the walls as nurses bustled back and forth, getting ready to send Ma to the floor where she'd await surgery.  The CAT scan was no good.  The area of her stomach was so swollen that nothing could be seen clearly.  The EKG read oddly and the cardiologist arrived to tell us that he was pretty confident the EKG was picking up noises going on the stomach and wasn't concerned at all about it.  Ma made jokes with every nurse and doctor and her humor was appreciated.  "It usually isn't," she replied to the cardiologist after he told her so.  Laughter followed.

While waiting to change floors, rooms, and scenery, the typical family silliness continued.  Bob and Tim told the story of feeding their two large Dobermans hamburgers and one had basically exploded (massive diarrhea) all over the backseat of the car.  These stories went on until my stomach hurt so badly from laughing.  My stomach hadn't hurt from laughing in so very long and I didn't realize until that moment how much I needed that.  For a few days, my stomach had been hurting, but not in a good way by any means.

We waited in a room that had curtains for walls for more hours.  Hours and hours and more hours seemed to go by as we waited.  We waited in chairs, we waited standing up, we waited over here, over there.  Ma's blood sugar was checked, checked again, drugs given, check this, check that.  She's diabetic so there was concern over her overly high blood sugar.  Normal for you and me is 120.  Her's was 425.  For most, that might mean eventually slipping into a coma.  "It always runs high," Ma simply said. 

Ma was scared and nervous but didn't let on too much about that.  I got as close to her as I could; my short body could not reach over the bed rungs.  "I know you're going to be just fine," I told her.  "I know because I can't take any more this week.  God only gives you what you can handle and He knows I can't handle any more!  I think you're going be OK." 

Not that I can explain it, but I had felt early into all of this that everything would work out really OK.  Ma is not religious, but she does believe in God.  I tried to comfort her with that as much as I could.  I also tried to use it to comfort myself because deep down, I really didn't think I handle anything else.