(being a condensation of some emails I’ve sent to Potter)
Mom says she’d seen it for about a week - no energy, confusion. I went for dinner with them on Mom’s birthday on Sunday and as I was leaving, he asked me about a dish he saw in a container. After a few minutes of my looking around, the “container” was a plastic bag. (The dish was a shoe, but he couldn’t see it anyway). It was a weird word to use in that sense, and the whole incident left me feeling very bizarre and depressed but I didn’t know why. I didn’t think much of his confusion because he had been hanging gyproc earlier that day, and I figured he might be tired owing to Daylight Saving Time or something.
Anyway, Mom took him in for scans at her hospital, and they admitted him. She called me this morning. I went to see him tonight in the hospital (by then he’d been transferred to the neurosurgery ward at the Jewish General, a major hospital).
He’s alert and oriented, but his speech is very strange. He speaks clearly in complete sentences, and he understands what’s said to him, but he continually forgets words for things and he is very slightly factually confused. It made conversation possible, but kind of disorienting and distressing for me. It’s especially strange and kind of morbid to be recognizing symptoms from the intro languages course I took at the beginning of my linguistics degree. Anyway, I told him some things that are happening in my life, and told him I love him.
Mom, as well as some friends of his we met for dinner, told us about how they’d been noticing the speech problems in the past week or two. The whole thing is so sudden, though, so strange to think about, so surreal. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around it.
In the meantime, he’s fairly cheerful, and eating heartily. He’ll have an MRI tomorrow and a biopsy on Friday. In the meantime they’ll be giving him drugs to reduce the swelling on the lesion, which should help his (mild but constant) headache and his speech problems. Mom told me about what it could be - an abscess (antibiotics), or a tumor (chemo or radiotherapy) or something else again. It really all depends not so much on what it is and more on how severe it is. We’ll see.
Of course we haven’t given him up, not by a long shot. But his condition is severe enough that it’s entering our thoughts. Dad told me he had been, well, preparing to die today, but that he expected to feel more optimistic tomorrow. It’s interesting how this makes you think about family in general. Mom was crying with me in the hospital, saying how lucky and grateful she was to have married him and had their long life together.
It’s sad, because they were planning a trip to Greece together for May, which Mom is now cancelling. Another fortunate thing, though, is that Dad’s work had been thinking of sending him somewhere, for example to Iraq, or else to Thailand to train journalists, and Mom doesn’t even want to think about the chaos that would have happened if he’d gotten sick in any of those places rather than at home.
His dad, my late Grandpa Bob, never spoke well of his father, who had been a hardass to him. In turn, Grandpa was a hardass to Dad, and Dad only reconciled with him during his (Bob’s) final illness. Whatever happens, I’m grateful that Dad and I have gotten along with each other better since I moved out. We used to be at each other’s throats, and I still think I was justified in that, but it’s good to know that we are essentially reconciled and not just because of this as with Grandpa. Even though I don’t want to have children, I’m glad anyway that particular family tradition already seems to be over with. I’ve noticed that we had reconciled before, but this is the first time I’ve felt particularly grateful therefor.
Anyway - prayers and kind thoughts are welcome. This month really seems to be kicking me and mine around.
Thanks, dopers.