Estoy Nueces

I keep wanting to write emails to someone, anyone, because I'm bored and not ready to go to bed, but I guess I should write about it all here for posterity. I drove up to Mom and Dad's yesterday after work. I was able to get everything done before I was through with my airshift, so I got out of town at seven and dashed on up and was there soon after eleven. Daddy seemed less goofy than he had been on the phone the night before, which was good. His tumors were really bad. Today my sister said they had grown since she saw them on Wednesday. There were a couple of lumps right on his jaw bone, one like a big marble and one more like an egg. Down under the jaw was also lumpy, and his "double chin" in front was solid, not like droopy skin. I have no way of knowing what was cancer and what wasn't, so we'll see in time how much of all of that they took out. Last night Dad was just ready to get this over with. He didn't seem particularly grumpy. This morning we all got up early and got ready to go. He was a little grumpy because his mouth was so dry and he couldn't even have water. We got the car loaded and we headed toward Dallas. Just as I got to the highway, Mother realized she didn't have her watch, so we turned around and went back to get it. That probably lost us 15 minutes and made us late, but as a I said to them, they probably wouldn't turn him away if we were a little bit late. On the the drive down, my aunt from Austin called and they were at the hospital, which surprised us because they are notoriously late. She was confused about where she needed to be. I told her to call my sister, because I had no idea myself. After many calls back and forth and then my sister getting to the hospital and not finding any sign of them, they discover that my aunt has gone to the wrong hospital. She didn't hear us say "Medical City" she heard "Medical Center" and the only medical center that came up when she googled was the UT hospital. Not where we were going to be. They scrambled and drove and had difficulty conceptualizing how big this town really is, but they finally made it, just as Dad was rolling into surgery. He wasn't dopey or sedated at all at that point, but we know from experience that sedation wipes out some of your memory even before you have it so who knows if he'll remember that she was there. We had WAY too many people there for the surgery. I want to remember if I ever feel compelled to go for someone's surgery that I should just drop in and then drop back by. Or go sit in another waiting room somewhere else and check in. It was us three, my aunt and cousin, the pastor (who we love and he is welcome anytime) and another man from the church and a couple for the church. I really liked them more than my aunt and cousin, truth be told, but, still, we weren't able to just read our books and magazines and eat my Halloween candy and "be" for the eight hours we were there. And I'm sure we were too loud for the others in the room. After the first surgery, the pastor and the other man left and a little later the couple left. The couple was very sweet and stayed with our stuff in the waiting room while we went down to eat. I had to suggest we go eat and lead the troops downstairs. I didn't want to wait all day stoically with absolutely no food. Dad's first surgery took over three hours. I had heard from Mom and my sister that the doctor was very blunt and had told my mother "Hold on, I'm not through" at one point, which seemed to make sense to me at the time. They also said when they met with the second doctor that he said the first doctor didn't have much bedside manner. All that was fine, of course, but he irritated me today. He came to tell us about the surgery. I had not met the man before and hadn't had some of my questions answered about the surgery. So he tells us that he removed half of Dad's lower jawbone. I ask if all of his teeth came out with this surgery. He looked at me with a look and just almost said the word "Duh." He said, That would be like amputating the leg and leaving the foot, of course the teeth came out. I told him not to give me that look, I needed my question answered. He said they wouldn't know some answers until they got the pathology back on the removed tissue. He didn't seem very positive, but that was okay. I don't want him to paint a rosy picture if there isn't one. He didn't paint a negative picture necessarily either. He sort of bitched at us about Daddy having had radiation. He said that they had had a professor say "if you offer people radiation or surgery, they will always take radiation first" as if we should have taken surgery instead of radiation. We told him "We did have surgery!" and he said, "Yes, and it wasn't done well" or something like that. I wish I could remember his exact words. He didn's say it was "botched" but it was close. He said the worry on the healing of this surgery was that the tissues had been killed by the radiation so we wouldn't know if it would be able to heal or not. He left and we waited another couple of hours for the next surgery to be over. This doctor was young and cute and much nicer. He went into great detail how he took muscle from Dad's chest and snaked it up under the skin of the chest to create the tissue on the jaw and chin and cheek. He said the first doctor that implanted the metal plate to replace the jaw had covered the metal on the inside of the mouth wi