I'm baaa-ack! I think.

So, you may have noticed I've been away from blog-land for a while. It wasn't planned, at all, I assure you! What happened was, Mama went in for a one-day surgery to remove a couple of cancerous spots in her breast, and things went downhill from there.

This was a week ago Tuesday. All seemed to go well, and we took her home around 4:30 p.m. Around 7:30 she called Sis2 about some swelling and tightness in the breast. By 9:30 she was feeling very lightheaded, and fainted twice. My father called and said he needed help getting Mama to the hospital, so I came over. (I may have mentioned before that we live next door to each other.)

It seemed like we would be able to drive her to the emergency room ourselves, but when Mama passed out again we knew we were in trouble and called 9-1-1.

Our local emergency people are great, by the way.

Once at the hospital, we thought things were improving, with her receiving some IV fluid, and thought we would all come home. Then Mama's doctor decided she should stay overnight, and we waited for her to be moved to a room before we left.

Well, you know how this is going to go, don't you? Right.

We waited, but no room movement was forth-coming, and around 3:30 a.m. Mama suddenly turned to Sis1 and me and said she was starting to feel "woozy" again. We got a nurse in, and within moments Mama was having a seizure. Yikes! That was new.

As the two of us squeezed behind the door out of the way, we watched about eight people work on our mother, whose bed by that time was tilted head-down. She was pretty much out of it, though she could feel everything they were doing. The last reading on the monitor showed a blood pressure of 60/30, and the ER staff was having a hard time finding a vein they could use.

Anyway, to cut out a lot more crazy-making details, the doctors and nurses got her back, and she ended up spending what was left of the night in CCU, being moved to a regular room later. We brought her home on Friday the 13th! I guess thirteen really is her lucky number.

Things are going better--barring the other night, when Mama had a spell which Daddy described as "bleeding all over the place", which as you can imagine sent me over there in a panic (turned out to be normal but rather scary seepage from the surgery site).

After her visit to an oncologist, she found out she has a bad type of cancer and will need chemotherapy, which we had hoped we could avoid. But she's alive, and with any luck, I can start to sleep at night again.

It should come as no surprise that I haven't made much progress on editing the book, although I did get most of a short story down the other day. It's another one about zombies, which considering the last two weeks probably shouldn't surprise me.

So, Gentle Readers, this was my family's tale of woe, hope you weren't bored. Remember to kiss your loved ones, and make them get those mammograms!