Whew!

The surgery went as planned.  I went down to be with my cousin, as did 3 of her friends, one of her brothers, and her sister and brother-in-law, who drove 10 hours to be here.  It just happened to be the weekend of her b-i-l's fraternity reunion here in TN.  (They only have them about every 10 years, so the fact that it was THIS weekend is, uh..........a real suspicious circumstance, huh?).  It was "a fluke" that my cousin was coming to spend the night with us the night before my mother died, too, hum?????????????
I don't claim to have any answers to these circumstances, but it seems that "fate" was at work in both instances,  to me anyway!
Back to my cousin's husband's surgery.  After cutting an incision from behind his ear to above his eye, they then removed a piece of his skull that was about the size of the palm of a man's hand!  The clot was on the surface of the brain, so there was no probing into the brain, thank God!!!!  The whole process only took about an hour.  He will be in icu for a couple of days so they can keep a close watch on him.  He does seem to be doing well, though. The doctors never have acted concerned.  Of course, it wasn't their, or their loved one's, brains on which they were operating!
While we sat and talked as we waited we remembered events from our childhoods.  We talked about my mom and my aunt, who died at 53 years old.  When she died, my cousin whose husband had the surgery, was a sophomore at UT.  She called the icu waiting room from her dorm room to check on her mother, who had surgery a few days before.  A family member of another patient answered the phone.  When my cousin asked for someone from her family, this "idiot" person told her that they had all left because their loved one had died!  Can you believe that's how my cousin learned of her mother's death!!!!!  Thank goodness for her friends who were with her at the dorm.  Another of  my cousin's was in the Navy at the time.  He was stationed in Iceland, but because his mother was so gravely ill, they let him come home.  Afterwards he was transferred to Georgia.  I was at home with our grandmother.  Our other aunt drove very fast to get home to tell her mother!  There were no cell phones then.  I knew when I saw how quickly she drove into the driveway and jumped out of the car and ran into the house, what had happened.  This was the week that my mom's life really changed.  That's when she moved into her sister's house to be with my two cousins who were still home.  One was 16, the other had just had his 12th birthday.  I can still visualize my 5 cousins standing in the yard between our houses, in a circle, discussing what was to happen with the two youngest siblings.  My oldest cousin lived in PA and had a two year old.  She could have taken the boys, but their lives would have been turned upside down even more than it was already.  My cousin who was in the Navy, could have taken them, but he was only about 22 or 23 at the time.  He wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility.  My cousin who was in college, was, of course, not able to take them.  My grandmother was really too old, she actually died the next year.  My other aunt was considered, I'm sure, but she had never married, didn't have children, and just wasn't the best choice.  So, they decided to ask my mother, who didn't hesitate to agree to move into their house.
I didn't mean to get off on this story when I started this post, but it just came out...................