What a long, strange and wild ride the past week has been. First off, my brother is awake and alert and it would appear that the very worst is over. I still don't have the whole story but that's a post for another day. More good news is that he's speaking to me again and I can't tell you how happy I am about that (we hadn't spoken for a month prior to all this). This whole getting-his-ass-kicked thing has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, in more ways than one. It's apparently snapped him out of his two year funk over our father's death, but that was probably helped by mom telling us the entire story about why the dude was never around. I think he needed to hear the whole story and now that he has, he realizes that not knowing the guy was no big loss. Oh yeah, and there's also the discovery of a non-cancerous brain tumor knocking around in his head. Yeah. That one was very unexpected (well, this entire situation was really). It is operable but they may not need to remove it right away. It's a slow growing tumor that's probably been there for years. The concern is that it may have already affected his behavior and it could produce seizures in the future. It explains so much of his erratic...ness (if that's a word) the past few years though.
This week has been one of the most exhausting and stressful weeks of my entire life. I feel drained both physically and emotionally. The one thing I keep coming back to is that I cannot imagine what it was like for my family to be at my bedside for two weeks and then some after my accident. I've always thought that experience was harder on them than it was on me and now I know for sure. It's crazy the places your mind goes when you're so stressed out and faced with so much uncertainty. The few times I actually got sleep, I had dreams about stuff that happened between my brother and me when we were kids. When my brother was 10 and the three of us had our first day of Catholic school. Some kid, the school bully, was picking on him and he told the kid that both his sister AND his brother would beat him down if he kept it up. He pointed us out across the gym and the kid harassed him even more saying there was no way we were related to him because my brother was lighter skinned than my sister and I (because everyone knows that's the determining factor in related-ness). My brother started crying because he was upset that someone told him we weren't his siblings. He was glued to my side for two months after that. And I, of course, found it annoying. But I never told him to go away. We never fought as kids. It's amazing how that's completely changed as adults.
This has been a learning experience for just about everyone involved in it. What I've learned is that I may be too hard on my brother. I'm not apologizing for saying I think he's making a huge mistake in pulling away from is family and I'm not condoning his decision to basically take two years off from the world. but I've realized that I've definitely played a part in our relationship ending up where it is now. I grew up in a household with six kids so I basically have two sisters and three brothers, two of those brothers younger than me. The way I treat them is very different though and I didn't catch on to that until the other day. There's something to that and I wanna figure out what it is and see what I can change. It's gonna be a two-way street and once he's up to it, we'll figure out what's next. I do not look forward to that conversation but that's a worry for another day.
I wanna say a HUGE thank you to anyone and everyone who has been a source of support the past week. If not for ya'll, I could've gone in a completely different direction in dealing with all this. I am extremely thankful for the people in my life. Not that it was all you. I mean, I was the one who chose not to go the bad way in coping. Perhaps this is what people refer to as....what's the word? Oh yeah, growth. ;p
