Monday, January 25, 2010

Did it really matter?

I got mad today! Boy oh Boy were my feelings ever hurt. Someone so close had said something I thought was so selfish. And I spent my day ruminating on that anger. Stewing in it and carrying it like a torch. Here was a fight that needed to be fought.

REALLY?

You see over the last month I have found myself spending many hours at the hospital. My mom is still in there and I went there to help both her and Dad deal with the different doctors and nurses.

The first week my mom was there they gave her a room in the "Cancer" ward. Mom, who was a bit loopi from an infection that got to her brain, thought she herself had Cancer. I kept telling her she didn't but she would just smile and look at me like she knew better. I remembered the look she gave because it was the same one she gave me when I was a teenager. She would smile and say "I know what you are doing, you can't fool me". And I would laugh because she never did know what I was doing. The truth was that she didn't have Cancer. She would learn this as her head cleared.

That week though, I was around some very sick people. Many had a hard time doing the simple stuff that we take for granted. Most of them were fighting for their lives. You could imagine the pain they would go through during that time. I knew that some would eventually lose that fight.

Although my mom was also sick, she was probably the healthiest person on that ward. Explaining to her that she only had an infection it kind of felt as if the other patients would envy us. We were not one of them, and our fight while very real to us, it was only a fraction of what everyone else on that floor would face. Sometimes when Dad would get impatient at the doctors, I wanted him to just quiet down because I felt that the other patients really needed the doctors much more than we did.

After a week mom was moved up to the Acute Geriatrics ward. In the bed next to her was an elderly lady who would scream morning, noon, and night. It was very irritating and I think everyone not just in the room but on the whole floor wished she would stop. We came to learn however that she had been in the "Concentration Camps" in Germany. And her screaming was the result of nightmares. And suddenly you could just imagine the fight she had in her life and the horrors that she faced every time she closed her eyes.

So why am I telling you this? Well I guess tonight as I was thinking about why I was mad, the main thing that I kept thinking was ....Did it really matter?

Is that really the fight I need to fight?

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