This week's update

Well, let's see.

1) met with the thoracic surgeon and have surgery scheduled for mom on 5/15.
2) Mom immediately said she wanted to purchase burial plots & plan funerals.
3) Learned that Dad is (understandably) upset about mom's diagnosis and in her efforts to calm him
4) Learned that mom has told Dad if she dies first, Dad can still live at home alone and I'll take care of him.

Well, well, well....I arranged #1. Was cool with that. Dismayed but could understand #2 & #3. Horrified to learn that my mom has been making promises to my dad about what I will do for him without talking it over with me first.

So...we move to surgery.

My brother was informed of OUR mom's upcoming surgery. His response "He'd try to get off work."

I called him today on the way to get OUR parents to go burial plot shopping. I wanted him to pray that we'd find what we needed and to ask him if he'd found out if he could get off work. He said he could come for the day of surgery and the day after. Then he'd need to go back home to work his other job. I asked if he'd asked off from that job and was told that "if you don't give them 30 days notice, you don't get off." To which I replied, "Well, if you explain that it's for cancer surgery, they might find a way to let you take the next 4 days off."

His response was "I'm not coming for a week. Why should I?"

To which I said "They are your parents too and I need help!"

"With what?" he said.

At that point, I thought well...what IS the point?

Another reason he gave for not wanting to stay longer was that his son has a baseball tournament that weekend. God forbid that his kid go without my brother's presence at a stupid baseball tournament.

You'd think that our parents would rate higer than a s#$%^& baseball tournament.

On the upside of things, we did find burial plots for my parents. Expensive, but very nice. The funeral home here will honor the pre-needs funeral contracts my parents purchased in their previous hometown. So now mom and dad just have to pay for the plots and the stuff that goes with that.

Now we just need to move on to the rest of the stuff on Mom's list that she wants to do prior to surgery.