I won’t be posting anything tomorrow. My wife found out Monday during her annual physical that she is going to have to have gall bladder surgery, and she’s supposed to go visit the surgeon tomorrow and get thoroughly checked and get scheduled. I don’t know how long it’s going to be, so I decided to take the whole day off. If we get our early, I’m going to insist that we play hooky. Which will probably mean getting a truck bed full of stuff to plant and herniate myself with.

She was really upset when she found out, and called me on her cell phone from the doctor’s office. Of course, not being able to be there and hug her was pure torture, so I did the next best thing—“Sweetie, it will be okay. I promise. Do you think they’ll let you keep ‘em?” She started snickering through the tears. “We could have them made into a nice necklace or something…” She told me to quit, and I said “Or we could give them to the kids to use as marbles…” She sniffed and laughed and said she didn’t think the doctor would let us keep them. “Well, let’s just be sure to ask, okay?” Okay.

I finally got to see her at lunch Monday and she had calmed down a bit. We tried to figure out whether to tell her mom and dad then or wait until we found out something definitive. It’s hard to tell how her mom was going to take it—sometimes she’s fine about such things, and then sometimes she exhibits that tendency among some of our kinfolks of beginning a recitation of friends and relatives who have had similar operations and the outcomes of each. Which then gets around to a discussion of someone who had something else and died. And then gets around to everyone else who died. My wife called her that night and told her, and luckily got the more helpful of the two responses.

The kids seem awfully interested in what’s going to happen. We showed them in one of our anatomy books where the gall bladder was, and I told them the scientific name of it was the gallus bladderus, and then tried to explain laparoscopy. You ever tried to explain laparoscopic cholecystectomy to a kid? “Wellll, the take this little hose pipe, and it has all kinds of tools that they run up through it, and they make a little tiny hole near Mama’s bellybutton, and they run it up to her gallus bladderus and snatch it and them rocks out.”

“Do they let you keep the rocks?”
“I don’t think so, son, but I told Mama we would be sure to ask.”

“Does it hurt?”
“Yeah, it’s going to hurt some.”
“We’ll make you a get-well card Mama!”

“How long do we get to stay at Grandmama and Grandpapa’s house?”
“Not long—maybe only a day.”
“Awwwww. Can’t we stay longer?”

On and on. We thought we had it pretty well explained until the youngest one piped up last night—“At school today, when I was outside, and I was playing on the monkey bars, and I lost my shoe, I was playin’ with Amanda, even though I’m not sposed to, and I tol’ Amanda that Mama’s goin’ to have a baby!”

“NO! Mama’s NOT having a baby—tell Amanda Mama has rocks, not a baby!”

Oh well. So, tomorrow, no blogitude. Friday, on the other hand…
posted by Terry at 2:54:00 PM