Prayer

First, the good news:

Eli ate all of his dinner again! It was much the same as Monday night's meal, only there were chunks of strawberry instead of apple. Eli was fairly unhappy about this change. Strawberries are one of those foods that he used to eat and now he's afraid of.

I really wanted his second Dinner Winner meal to be a success, so I even cut the seeds off the strawberry chunks for him! After a lot of patience and encouraging him to just walk away and try again tomorrow, if this was too stressful, he finally mustered the courage to try a bite.

Then he said, quite casually, "Oh, I totally remember the taste of the strawberries. I like them."

I just kept my I-told-you-so to myself and let him know how very proud I was of him, for overcoming his fear!

Now, on to the bad news:

I got calls today, telling me that two different family members are in the hospital!

Grandma, Mary Priddy, had a double mastectomy a few weeks ago, and she's due to start chemotherapy next week. Today, she went in to have a CT scan and a body scan done. After the CT scan, they told her she had a blood clot(s) in her lung(s) and sent her to the ER.

Yikes! In the ER, they started her on medication to break up the clot(s) and then sent her back to finish her body scan. Now she's spending the night in the hospital, where they will do more tests and continue her medication.

My step-mother, Susan Priddy, is supposed to have a knee replacement surgery in mid-June. She had an ECG done at her surgeon's office, as part of the pre-operative testing, and he told her he didn't like the results. (What an annoying thing for a doctor to say.)

She was then referred to a cardiologist for further testing. I don't know whether or not she had seen him yet, but my dad came home from physical therapy yesterday (he's had recent back surgery) and found her barely able to talk.

The only words she could get out were, "Something's wrong." To say that he was scared would be the worst sort of understatement. They called the cardiologist, who got her into the hospital ASAP. After a number of tests, they determined that she has a constricted (obstructed?) vein (artery?) in her arm.

The obstruction is causing the blood to flow backward, into her brain. (If you know something about medical conditions, and this sounds totally made up... I'm doing my best to remember everything as it was told to me.)

On Friday morning, she will have an angiogram done, to verify that this is truly what's happening. If needed, she will also have an angioplasty, to open up the artery, and possibly have a stent put in. And she's mostly worried about whether this will keep her from getting her knee replaced!

What the heck, man? My Dallas peeps are falling apart!

After getting off the phone from the second round of news, I told the kids what was going on with Grandma (their great-grandmother) and Susan (their grandmother). In vexation, I said, "What is going on in Dallas?!?"

Lila's response...

"I don't know. . . They're just old."