Cold Spaghetti

Yesterday evening, around dinner time, my Mom was rushed to the Emergency Room with severe chest pain.

For a good hour, I assumed that she was having a heart attack.  It was not a good hour.  Partly because I was worried and anxious.  And partly because I wanted to I TOLD YOU SO over the 7,000 times I had begged her to go to the doctor in the past week and also because I was beating myself up for not begging her for that 7,001 time.  Because maybe that last ONE would have been THE ONE.

Don’t tell me not to feel guilty.  I’m the daughter, I’ve got to take the responsibility.  I knew it was coming but what I didn’t realize is that the parenting of my parents was going to start while they were still so young.

And then I realized I had one more area of parenting to excel in being bad at.  One more set of people who don’t listen to a word I say, complain at everything I cook for them, and ignore all that I do to make their lives better.  I feel like I need to curl up with a few seasons of thirtysomething and study them really, really hard.

——

Back to my Mom.

If a good EKG can be trusted, then her heart is fine. Her gallbladder?  Not to so much.

It’s filled with tiny stones.  Which explains the incredible pain she has been in nearly constantly for over a week.  The same pain that has come and gone in the past, when unbenounced to her, little stones were bouncing around her gallbladder in a little game of bile-flow roulette.

Then, sometime around Saturday, one of those little stones came to rest in a duct feeding into her pancreas.  Her body reacted to this particular turn of the roulette wheel by forcing her to vomit so violently that the capillary blood vessels around her eyes burst.  But no, this was still not enough to force her to the doctor.  So her pancreas got pissed off called a meeting of all internal organs and sometime Monday afternoon, they spontaneously twisted themselves so tightly in her chest that she had no other choice but to fall to her knees and beg for mercy.  Apparently the pancreas is the head of the Union for Internal Organs and quickly tires of negotiation.

But by this time, she was very sick.  Too sick, in fact, to have the operation (removal of her gallbladder) to address the gallstones that started it all.  She has pancreatitis, is in bed, can take nothing by mouth, and is (miserably) awaiting for her enzyme levels to stabilize enough to tolerate surgery.

I’d totally use her misery as that I TOLD YOU SO opportunity, but knowing how awful she feels and how sick she is, I just can’t bear it.  I just want her to get better soon… so that she can babysit her grandchildren for a weekend.  Because I need a break from parenting.