Well, just when I thought my holidays had been screwed up enough, after being sick and hurt and all, things got worse. Geez, what is going on?

About a week ago I was going to post about how boring my life was during the holidays and how I had been slaving away over a two thousand piece puzzle for days, when Thursday, my grandfather had to be rushed to the hospital with stomach complications. Now, papa (as my family calls him) is 80 years old and had already had major surgery only a few years ago to correct an aortic anurism (sp?) as well as having to deal with pulmonary fibrosis, a degernerative lung condition.
As it turned out, he had gall stones, had to have his gall bladder removed, and on top of that, had a hernia in his diaphraghm which allowed his stomach and a foot of his colon to migrate into his chest cavity, nearly stopping his lung functions.
On Friday night he underwent major surgery to fix everthying up and I am happy to report he pulled through and is expected to make a full recovery. However, I certainly did not plan on the emotional strain that staying at the hospital for a few days would exact on me or my family. I guess you just can’t ever really be prepared for these types of things. They just happen.
On top of those stressful events, Katie and I decided to “take a break” in our relationship, just when I thought I could take a sigh of relief after the surgery was over successfully. I’ve never been one to broadcast personal information so I’m not going to start now, but I will say that although it was nobody’s fault and there are no bad feelings running between us, this couldn’t have come at a worse time. I know its better this way for both of us, but I just wasn’t prepared for this. Any of this.
It’s strange. One day you’re a happy-go-luck 21 year old with a strong relationship and a healthy family, the next day you’re in the hospital for 8 hours, single, and wondering what the heck could possibly happen next. Just like that.

Of course, I’m resilient. I know about hospitals and surgeries and breakups, I’ve been through all that before. Sure, they are stressful now, but no condition is permanent, and soon they’ll be long passed. Alot of it is fear: fear of change, fear of death (for others and myself), fear of being alone. These are fears we all have, our collective “existiental fear” of things we don’t understand and cannot control. But fear is only a knee-jerk reaction, the very first hit to get the system in gear; once you are in gear you get to fight and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
This semester I am digging my heels in. I may be down but I’m not staying there.

I know there is some old saying about these situations, about oysters and grits of sand which get turned into pearls or some silly shit like that. I’m neither an oyster nor am I a pearl but I know I’m going to make the best out of this holiday, even if there are only two days left to do it in.

This entry was posted by jon on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 8:33 pm and is filed under journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.