Whew.

Mike's dad is out of surgery now and home. Yay! Only a few inches of colon short! Not bad for a cancer free diagnoses. It has been rather tense around here while playing the waiting game. The collective sigh of relief could probably be heard all the way on the other coast. In this small victory for my ever- shrinking circle, a glimmer of hope. Yes, my son took the term "terrible twos", as a jumping off point for pushing limits. Yes, it is now in concrete that Mike is a horrible communicator on a regular basis, let alone when he is scared. Yes, I am still "forgetting" to make another appointment to find out about my own medical shortcomings. Mom's still at her wits end, dad's still pushing her buttons, and my brother is still dying. But Joe came out okay. And that is something to be celebrated. Those doctors were all but sure he was cancer ridden. Turns out it was just an insanely dense pocket of pre-cancerous polyps. Good thing we didn't let him put off that pesky colonoscopy this time around. Next year might have been a different story, but it wasn't. And because it wasn't, it gives me a faint hope. Not that all of the things that are bad in life are going to get better; but that some of them might. And if some of these life hiccups do get better, than I'll be more than capable of trudging through the rest.