Mojo Grannie is doing well; thanks for your suppport

My Mom's surgery was last Friday and she's done amazingly well with her recovery. She was up and about the next day, spent most of the weekend at our house, and then went back home. I am helping her with grocery shopping for a while just so she doesn't have to lift heavy bags, but she is quite self-sufficent.

We are not out of the woods, as we await follow-up test results, but I suppose the truth is that none of us is ever really out of the woods. It's just a matter of whether or not we have the luxury of choosing to live in denial of our mortality. The good news is that every day together is a gift.

I have managed to take pretty good care of myself over the Christmas break. The day of surgery was a full day at the hospital, 7:30 am to 9:00 pm. The surgery itself was about 3 hours long, but we had to do a test at 8 am and then wait until 1 pm to get called in for the surgery itself. And afterward it took several hours to move from the recovery room to the overnight "brief stay" suite. Mom was resting comfortably the whole time so I didn't worry too much about the delay, but I was eager to see her get settled so that I could get home before my daughter's bedtime.

I mention all this so that if you are ever the supporting family member or friend in this situation, you know to be prepared to wait all day if necessary, and arrange backup for yourself at home. While waiting I read a novel cover to cover, which I almost never do!

The next day I was bone-crushingly tired, feeling like I was coming off a hangover of stress hormones and cramped from sitting all day. We'd arranged a long playdate for our daughter so that we could get Grannie settled in, and that invitation from our friends turned out to be the best Christmas gift we could have gotten from anybody. Our daughter needed to play; the rest of us needed to rest.

Now we're on the post-Christmas recovery as well, chilling out at home on a cold, rainy day. "Chillaxing," as our daughter would say, a saying she thinks she made up, but when you Google it, it's out there in slang dictionaries.

It's strange to be here, waiting for life-altering test results yet to come down the pipeline, yet I am still worried about incredibly mundane issues like, are we watching too much TV over the school break? Do I really need to clean the house again? Why bother when it will just be totally messed up again in a few hours with all of us at home?

I am feeling a mixture of a little relief, a little melancholy, and part of me that is bracing against future developments. But I am here at the blog which I think is a good sign. I hope to get a 2007 Books with Mojo list posted by the end of the week.

Hope you all had good holidays and that you're not suffering from too much cabin fever yet!