All family, all the time

So since I didn't have to go see my dad, I went ahead & went to my mom's like I usually do on Saturdays, and it turned out my mom had my dad on her mind, oddly enough. She had decided that we needed to tell him about Paula's divorce. Of course it was me who got to actually do the telling. When we got home from lunch (which was at Ninfa's, if you really want to know) I called and left a message and he called me back an hour or so later and I told him. He didn't seem terribly upset by it. I really think Paula could probably have told him herself without a major blowup, although he did do a little lecturing about how it wasn't too late to patch things up, blah blah blah. -- This from a man who's on marriage #3, himself. -- Personally I think it probably is too late to patch things up, since they both seem to think the other one is stone crazy (and I'm not saying that either one of them is wrong about that), besides the fact that they also don't seem to like each other very much any more. But it's not like I have any say in any of this anyway. I haven't even talked to Paula directly. I left a message on her cell phone earlier this week, but she hasn't called me back so far.

The radiation is really wearing on my mom so I'm very very glad it's almost over. (Last treatment on Monday. I gather that they will have some sort of little "graduation" ceremony at MDAnderson, which is sort of cute.) She has pretty much lost all of her hair on top and on one side now, but the hair in front and back and the other side seems unaffected. It looks very odd. Of course she wears hats everywhere outside the house anyway. She's not willing to consider a wig at all, she says they're hot.

She's telling me a slightly different story than she was before about what the doctor said, she says now that they probably will do the chemo, they just are going to wait a month or so and do an MRI first to see what's going on. I don't know if Dr Colman has changed his mind or what. (For those of you who haven't been following this saga from the beginning, she has astrocytoma, which is a form of brain cancer, but they caught it relatively early and the prognosis is pretty good.) Sometimes I feel like I ought to be going to appointments with her more often. I went to the one in December when she got diagnosed, but I haven't been since. Of course Art has been going to all of them, but since he can't hear too well, he's of limited help in remembering what it was that the doctor said.


Oh, one more little thing - my aunt and uncle from Idaho were here this week, very briefly. I didn't get to see them but they went to see Daddy and Barbara one day and the next day they met Mom up at the hospital and had lunch. Apparently they really liked Barbara and so now that she has been given the Nelda and George Seal of Approval, my mother has suddenly developed a certain curiosity about Barbara that wasn't there before. She was quizzing me today about things like how many grandchildren she has and how old they are, and I of course had no earthly idea. I've only met Barbara twice and the first time was a year ago. I think she told us some of that stuff then but I certainly don't remember all of it. I know that she has a bunch of sons (four? five? something like that) and that some of them have children but I have no idea how many. I'm pretty sure at least one grandchild is a girl, and that's about the limit of my knowledge. I'm going to have to get Barbara to draw me a chart or something on Wednesday.

(Maybe I ought to amend this to explain the relationships here, since it's slightly unusual, I think, that my aunt and uncle went to see both of my divorced parents. Nelda is my dad's younger sister, but she and my mom lived in the same dorm in college and she actually introduced my parents to each other. I often think Nelda likes my mom considerably better than she likes her own brother.)

(Didn't my grandmother have awful taste in names? Her five children are Clyde, Nelda, Earlene, Ellen and Cecil. Ellen is the only one who got a decent name out of the five. Of course my dad, as the oldest, is a Junior, so I guess you really can't blame my grandmother for that one.)