After a day of CT scan and a bone scan, I took mom home yesterday. She was pretty exhausted from all the back and forth and then the drive home. I decided to take the Golden Gate Bridge and 101 home so we could enjoy the beautiful views of Mt. Tam and the wine country on such a gorgeous day.
She returns the 16th for a biopsy and will stay with us for the weekend. Her outpatient bladder surgery is on Tuesday the 20th. It still amazes me what is now an outpatient procedure. My aunt was among the early bone marrow transplant patients at UCSF and it was horrible (the good news is that she lived another ten years). She was in the hospital for six weeks — with my mother by her side the entire time, because my aunt spoke no English (this was before I lived here, so mom slept on a cot in the room). Now, while a bone marrow transplant is no picnic, it’s largely an outpatient procedure in an infusion center.
On my drive back, I was mentally going over my checklist of stuff I had to do. And suddenly I started mentally putting them into two distinct buckets — the stuff that would get done, and the stuff that would not. The latter is a foreign concept for me. To go through the “to do” list and make a conscious decision that some things simply won’t get done was quite a revelation. Typically those things get “put on the back burner” but they never leave the list. Now, rather than deferring I was simply red-lining.
It was an important lesson for me.