(I sound British again.)

That’s what it is. The surgeon, after doing the scope on Sunday morning, came out and talked to us and showed us 4 color photos of the leaf-shaped indentation in my dad’s stomach. They didn’t have to do a biopsy, no further operation, this can be controlled by medication for a few months until it heals, he explained.

The surgeon was a character. First he looked at me and asked my mom, “This is your daughter? I can see why he has an ulcer, worrying about his pretty daughter all day long.” And then later he fished out a fresh plumeria flower from his pocket and handed it to me, and then fished another one out and gave it to my mom. My mom told me that the day before, when he told my parents he suspected an ulcer, he explained it’s commonly stress-related. My mom said that my dad hasn’t shown stress, so he must’ve been trying to hide it and pretend to be a man about it. The surgeon’d declared, “What do you mean, be a MAN? He IS a man. Are you saying he’s normally a woman?”, making my parents laugh.

Thanks to everyone’s karmic good vibes, my dad is okay and should be discharged sometime today.

Here’s my public service announcement. If your stomach isn’t feeling right, don’t wait. The doctor said that in a bad internal bleeding situation, a person could die within 2 hours. My dad had lost so much blood that his first day in the hospital, they had to tranfuse 2 pints of blood, but he was lucky. He said he hadn’t been feeling well for 2 weeks, the major problem came Thursday night when he felt weak (I questioned him about 2 scars on the insides of both elbows, and he finally admitted that it wasn’t just weakness, he’d fallen over), he was in the hospital Saturday.