Bob, my mother's kidney and her divorce.

This is Bob.

Bob, a kidney. I don't know why I've decided to call it Bob.

Bob, is my mother's kidney. Bob is sick and needs to be removed. Actually this is just a representation of Bob. It's not a picture of her actual kidney. Although I do have the CT scan if anyone is interested or is that a violation of HIPAA? Okay, on second thought just imagine that this is a representation of a representation of my mother's kidney that needs to be removed from her body.

Remember when she spent the week in the hospital a few weeks ago? This was why. Apparently her kidney is 'blown' and needs to be removed. Fortunately it's a relatively quick and easy procedure that can be done laparoscopically greatly reducing the recovery time.

Since I'm not going to England now (Thanks for that. I'm still bitter and less hurt than yesterday but still considerably bummed.) we can schedule her nephrectomy for the near future. I guess this is the upside of me remaining in the country; I can attend to my mother's semi-urgent medical needs. Don't get me wrong, we had moved all of the procedures back so that I could have went to England for that week. I even had made arrangements with her on which friend of mine to call in case of medical emergency and my roommate was going to call her several times throughout the week while I was gone to check on her. Luckily for them fate intervened and they're saved the joy of having to deal with my mother and her irrefutable stubbornness where her health is concerned. It's just one more example of how I uprooted my entire life to have a vacation which I'm clearly not allowed to have. All I wanted was one week, just one week where I didn't have to fret over her physiological homeostasis and whether or not she was taking of herself and which doctor I was supposed to call and who I was waiting on return calls from. It was going to be a glorious week because to be frank, it was going to be someone else's problem. Now I'll get to spend that week arguing with my mother over whether or not Bob will be removed.  Because goodness knows we haven't covered every aspect of the surgery etc. over the last 2 weeks. I'm being sarcastic. If I have to say 'There is a giant bag of urine just sitting in your gut!' one more time I may puke.  (Sorry about that.)

I now understand why she stayed in a dysfunctional marriage for so long. I thought I was stubborn; she is a god-bless-ed stone wall. She will not give. She is also wily and nimble and can come up with an excuse for ANYTHING. Her latest excuse: 'If I do the surgery I won't be able to buy a car.' Nevermind that the woman could finance a small house on her credit card alone, I don't believe that it is requirement to have two kidneys to purchase a car in the US. I could be wrong about that but I'm reasonably sure that I'm not. Her willingness to hang onto sick, necrotic things is mind-numbing. You can make the connection about my father. I love him but he's a mess too.

The point of all this being is that I am currently not in the proper state of mind to deal with my mother and argue with her for the 42nd time about whether or not she wants/needs her kidney to be removed.  I just want to scream 'FINE KEEP THE FUCKING THING! SEE IF I CARE! IT'S NOT MY KIDNEY.' but instead I just say 'Let's go over the details again. What don't you understand?' At least if I'm talking her down off the kidney ledge I'm not thinking about the utter futility of my life.