4010 Followup from the south

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Well, Ex#2's lab results came back, and he does have (did have?) Stage 1 colon cancer.  Apparently no big deal.

Mentally he's not doing so well.  In the ICU he apparently kept trying to get dressed and leave, so they finally had to strap him to the bed.  Daughter has been talking with him on the phone, and he thinks he's in a hotel. "I don't know the name of it.  The cleaning ladies are nice, but they won't  let me out of bed."

Daughter had a nice long heart-to-heart with a case manager, and the plan now is not for him to go directly home, but to spend some recovery time at a skilled nursing facility, where maybe? they can evaluate? his ability to care for himself.  "The family", his sister and all those other family members down there, have a very strong prejudice against admitting any kind of mental problems, they see it as some kind of unacceptable weakness, a character flaw, so Daughter has to work against them, too.  She's been choosing her words carefully, and that's a strain itself.

In the meantime, Hercules's maternal grandmother, who pretty much raised him, died on Tuesday.  Not unexpected, she's well into her nineties.  The funeral is tomorrow.  Hercules's mother is just plain nuts, certifiably, seriously, the only way she avoided incarceration in North Carolina was by agreeing to psychiatric counseling, whereupon she promptly moved across the country, well anyway she is currently at nasty odds with everyone else, including Hercules, and she will be there.  Daughter and Nugget were supposed to go to the funeral, too, but Nugget suddenly developed an abdominal malady while visiting me yesterday, and she was throwing up last night, and lethargic today (but a bit more chipper this evening), so Hercules left for Pennsylvania today alone.  Poor guy.  Daughter is, I suspect, guiltily happy she doesn't have to deal with her mother-in-law.

The MIL hasn't seen the Nugget in --- gee, maybe more than a year, not since she moved to Arizona or wherever the hell she is now, and I'm worried that since Nugget isn't there, she's going to change her flight plans and insist on coming back here with Hercules.  That may be more than Daughter can handle right now.  Probably more than Hercules can handle.  Likely more than their marriage can handle.  I hope he has the strength to say no if she demands it.

Well, things have been very tense across the street for a while now.  I hope things will loosen up over the next few weeks.
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