Events Best Forgotten

I just got off the phone with Mom's brother, Gregory. He's always seemed to be "Old Farmer Stock" to me. Always quiet and reserved, seeming a little bit distant until you get to know him. Once you do get to know him, though, you realize how wrong that last part is. He simply was raised at a time when men didn't hold their emotions out for everyone to see. He's James Dean, Steve McQueen and John Wayne on the outside but he's probably kindest, most generous person I've ever met and he goes well beyond the call of duty for his family.

A few weeks ago, I was back home for Mom's consultation with Dr. Rendon, he was the one who drove Mom and her friend Janet over to Halifax and drove us all back to the Island. What's special about that is that was Friday. He drove them over (a little over three hours each way) and then actually went into the doctor's office with Mom (he didn't need to, Janet, his wife Zita and I were there too) to hear what Dr. Rendon had to say. This isn't just noteworthy, this is practically monumental for him because he's incapable of going into hospitals or doctor's offices or even talking about such things. Maybe I'll eventually go into the events around his brother Paul's death someday, but not today. The point is, neither mom nor Zita expected him to come into the office, but he did.

Okay, so then he drove all of us back to the Island Friday night. We had offered to have him drive mom over (he really wanted to) and Janet would take mom's car over and then the three of us would drive back to the Island Friday night because, and this is key, Gregory and Zita's son is living in Halifax now and his birthday was on Tuesday so they were spending the weekend with him to celebrate.

That's right, he drove more than six hours on Friday when he didn't have to and then first thing Saturday morning he got up and he and Zita drove another three back to Halifax so they could spend the weekend with my cousin. Then they drove back on Sunday night because he wanted to make sure I had a ride to the airport on Monday morning. I told him that he didn't have to, that I could find another ride but he really wanted to do it for me. That's just the way he is, if he can help at all, he will. But he never lets his emotions show, they never get away on him. Or I've never seen them get away on him.

Today he's in danger of losing his hold.

I was sitting here, feeling the itch to work on some code and as I was cleaning up the office yesterday I found a webcam that I'd bought a couple of years ago and never quite got working in Linux. I thought, what the hell, it's clearly not supported now, it'll be a small project and it'll give me something fun to tinker with for a few hours. So I've been scratching out a bit of code to get it working, learning more than I'd planned to about CCDs and how the human eye is more sensitive to green than red or blue, common encoding formats, and was about to start testing when the phone rang. Gregory's name came up on the display and I knew it wasn't going to be good.

This morning Mom woke up and was (to a greater or lesser degree, I'm not sure) incoherent and apparently confused. Janet managed to get her to the hospital where they're putting her on intravenous feeding (probably more than just food, but Gregory didn't have any more details than that) and they're undecided about whether they were going to keep her tonight or not.

He didn't have any more details than that, except the stuff I'd already known from the last time I was talking to her (Thursday night? Friday night? I don't think it was Friday I called her, but the calls kind of blur together now). That Tuesday she has her next appointment to discuss her brain scan results with Dr. Kahn and on Thursday they have her scheduled for the biopsy of the tumor on her kidney. Not Dr. Kahn's preferred ordering of things to happen, but this is the way things happen. I suspect the plan to go with chemo or not has already been made from his point of view anyway and the biopsy is just going to confirm what he already knows.

Circling back to the title and the earlier background on Gregory (finally!) he danced around the subject a couple of times before he found an angle he liked, but he eventually asked me if I could come home next weekend. Actually, he said he thought it would be good if I could make it home next weekend. That's when his voice broke and I started to feel ill. He's been in the hospital all day with Mom and he was just calling me while they were taking a couple of hours off to get something to eat, find my cousin (he came home to be with Mom too) and then they were going back to the hospital.

He's going to call me back later on tonight and tell me what's new, if anything, and whether they're keeping her overnight or not. In the meantime I'm going to do my best to not speculate about anything. It could be the cancer finally taking hold in her brain. It could be her blood sugar levels which we've known have been extremely high for a long time now. It could simply be a general lack of nutrition. I don't know if it tells me anything or not, but Gregory said they weren't going to do another transfusion, but I don't know if that rules out any of the possibilities I've considered or not.

Wait and see, I guess, and start checking out travel options again.